How many more? The killing of Patrick Dorismond

When juries acquit violent cops of murdering citizens, the typical response is a spike in police violence. This appears to be what's happening in NYC in the aftermath of the Diallo acquittal. Patrick Dorismond was shot and killed by NYPD officers last week in a confrontation with a street crimes unit. It boggles the mind to think of it, but the Dorismond shooting is even more questionable than the Diallo shooting.

Dorismond, a father of two young girls who had himself hoped to become a cop, was confronted by an undercover officer outside a bar where he had gone with a friend after a 3-11 p.m. shift as a guard for a Business Improvement District (BID) that operates in the westside Manhattan area of Pennsylvania Station and Madison Square Garden. The two stopped at a bar for a beer before seeking to hail a cab to go home.

Police claimed Dorismond became belligerent after the undercover cop approached him asking to buy drugs. The cop called in backup, also plainclothes, and Detective Anthony Vasquez intervened. While the New York Police Department's version of the confrontation had the security guard throwing a first punch, and Vasquez's attorney claimed that his client's gun went off after Dorismond lunged for it, civilian eyewitnesses gave very different accounts. Some said that the shot went off as Vasquez was beating the off-duty guard with his gun. Others said that a van pulled up with a screech and men jumped out, with a shot going off almost immediately.

There are elements in the Dorismond shooting that are reminiscent of the killing of Amadou Diallo in February 1999. Dorismond too was an entirely innocent victim of an aggressive police operation. Like Diallo, there is every reason to believe that Dorismond had no idea that the men who confronted and then killed him were police officers. His reaction, taking umbrage at someone assuming-because of his age and his race-that he was a drug dealer was entirely understandable, particularly for someone who was himself seeking to pursue a career as a cop.

Giuliani, perhaps sensing that some tipping point of citizen outrage might be rapidly approaching, immediately sprang to work, employing a two-pronged ad hoc disinformation campaign. His recitals of the Myth of Police Exceptionalism -- 'Policing is uniquely dangerous and should be treated specially' -- are the affirmative prong, just in case the negative prong -- 'Dorismond doesn't deserve due process or civil liberties because he was a dangerous person' -- isn't sufficient.

Before Patrick Dorismond's body was cold, the Giuliani administration launched an obscene campaign to vilify the dead security guard and all but portray him as someone who had a police bullet coming to him. Having little to work with, Giuliani ordered Police Commissioner Safir to unseal a juvenile record on the man, disclosing that he had been arrested for robbery and assault in 1987, when he was 13.

The charge, reportedly stemming from a childhood fist fight over a quarter, was dropped and his record sealed because he was a child. But Giuliani's legal advisers took the position that once he was dead, Dorismond's right not to have police records from his childhood publicized by the mayor died with him. It allowed Giuliani to declare that Dorismond was no "altar boy" and that his previous brush with the police "may justify, more closely, what the police officer did."

As for the cop who shot the security guard, Giuliani praised him for his "distinguished" career as an undercover officer, declaring that in going out and shooting an innocent, unarmed man to death in the street he "put his life on the line in the middle of the night to protect the safety and security of this city."

The Cult of the Dead Cop lives on, grounded in the myth of police exceptionalism, as the chief affirmative justification of police brutality.