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You've got reason to have a panic attack now. Al Sharpton and the rest of the negro community are outraged by the Sean Bell verdict. Stay away from Lennox Avenue and any other similar type places.



Actually, for all of Sharpton's demagoguary, "many black New Yorkers reacted not with outrage but with a muted reserve, saying that the city felt like a less polarized place in 2008, nearly a decade after the Diallo shooting and with a different mayor and police commissioner. Some also said that after a seven-week trial, the picture of what really happened the night Mr. Bell was killed was still murky, and so they left the public outcry to a relatively small group of black activists who had been closely monitoring the case."


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In Harlem, Willie Rainey, 60, a Vietnam veteran and retired airport worker, said on Friday that he believed the detectives should have been found guilty, but that he saw the case through a prism not of race, but of police conduct. “It’s a lack of police training,” Mr. Rainey said. “It’s not about race when you have black killing black. We overplay the black card as an issue.”


Ayana Fobbs, 28, a pharmacy worker who is black and lives a block away from the Community Church of Christ, where Mr. Bell’s funeral was held, said she could identify with people on both sides of the Bell shooting. One of her cousins was killed by the police in a shooting in the Bronx in the early 1990s, she said, but she also has close friends who are police officers.


“I feel what the community is going through,” said Ms. Fobbs, speaking as she waited for a bus Thursday on Merrick Boulevard. “I feel what the police are going through. I would never say all cops are terrible. I’m a female, and I have walked down a dark street at night praying to see a cop...”

Among the dozens of black men and women interviewed in recent days, many said they sympathized with Mr. Bell’s family, but also with police officers who must make life-and-death decisions in tense, uncertain moments. “A cop is a human being just like anyone else,” said Kenneth Outlaw, 52, who was walking on Friday by the memorial on Liverpool Street that marks the place where Mr. Bell was killed. “If I had to be out here, facing the same dangers the cops face, I’d be scared to death.”


Others said that had they been on a jury during the trial, they would have found the officers not guilty based on what they felt was the flawed case prosecutors put forward. Still others said that they did not know what to think, after weeks of following at-times contradictory testimony in the news. “If I was the judge, I wouldn’t know what to do,” said Paul Randall, 22, a college student, on Thursday. “From following the case, it’s kind of hard to say one way or the other.”


Some of this uncertainty and ambivalence was on display on Liverpool Street on Friday morning, immediately after Justice Arthur J. Cooperman found the three detectives not guilty on all the charges against them. One hour after the verdict, no crowd had gathered at the tattered memorial. Someone had placed a blue votive candle on the sidewalk, and there was one old, brittle bouquet of flowers and one fresh one. The water-cooler jug someone had placed there for donations contained just a few bills...


Dorothy Omega, 70, a retired drug counselor, sat in the audience at Mr. Sharpton’s headquarters on Friday, waiting for him to speak about the verdict. Even here, in the Harlem building known as the House of Justice, Ms. Omega sought the middle ground. She said she understood the anger expressed by Mr. Sharpton, but at the same time, she said, “The Police Department needs our support, too.”


Her thoughts turned to Mr. Bell, and then back again to the police. “The police have families, too,” she said. “They have to live with this.”






This is a much different city from when Rudy was mayor.