N.Y. Mayor Calls Shooting 'Inexplicable'

Maki Haberfeld, a John Jay College of Criminal Justice professor and specialist in the use of deadly force, said she was not inclined to second-guess officers operating under stress at night. "There are distorted perceptions of time and motion, and fear and adrenaline, and it takes 20 seconds to fire 50 shots," she said. "I'm taken aback by how the mayor indicted these officers. How could he know?"

But such arguments and statistics soothed few nerves, particularly for those who live in neighborhoods with a history of frayed relations with the police. Sunday's shooting called to mind the fatal shooting of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed African immigrant, in 1999. Diallo, a peddler and student, was returning home when undercover police officers told him to stop. He panicked and officers fired 41 shots, 19 of them hitting Diallo. His death came to symbolize the unsightly underbelly of then-Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's war on crime.

That history was very much alive in the minds of residents on the streets of Jamaica on Monday. Theirs is a prosperous lower-middle-class neighborhood with vibrant shops, the crack-fueled crime of 10 years ago a fading memory. Yet many said police officers still pat down young men for guns and stop cars with little reason.

"The demeanor when they talk to people -- they have a nasty attitude," said Wayne Johnson, 43, a car-service driver. "They'll come and see us talking on the corner and say: 'What you doing here?' They think everyone is a drug dealer."

Monique Holley, 23, attends the nearby Queensboro Community College and has passed her exam to become a police officer. Monday, she found herself struggling with second thoughts. "If I become a cop, how would people look at me? That's what I am debating today."

Bloomberg enjoys far better relations with the city's black leaders than Giuliani did. There was no more visible evidence of this Monday than the presence at the news conference of the rhetorically flammable Sharpton, who was persona non grata at City Hall throughout the Giuliani era.

African Americans, Sharpton said on a radio show after the news conference, appreciate that the city's crime drop means that their neighborhoods are safer and that many young men are alive who might otherwise have died in violent crime. But he said that peace carries an unacceptably high price tag.

"I told the mayor, 'Yes, we want crime down. Yes, crime is higher in many of our communities than elsewhere,' " Sharpton said. "But it's worse to have to live in these neighborhoods and be afraid of the cops and the robbers."