Following Police Acquittals, NYCLU Calls on Federal Government to Open Civil Rights Investigation into Diallo Shooting

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

NEW YORK–Aside from the question of individual criminal culpability decided today by a state jury, the New York Civil Liberties Union believes that the federal civil rights of Amadou Diallo were violated when he was shot and killed by four members of the New York Police Department’s Street Crime Unit on February 4, 1998.

As we have done in similar cases, we call upon the federal government to initiate an investigation into this fatal shooting of an unarmed black immigrant by four white police officers and to bring a federal civil rights action against the City of New York. The information that has been publicly disclosed about the training, supervision, and operation of the Street Crime Unit strongly indicates that Amadou Diallo was a victim of racial stereotyping and that this shooting was not an unforeseeable “accident”; indeed it may have been the foreseeable and almost inevitable outcome of widespread unconstitutional practices by the City and by the NYPD.

Moreover, it is incumbent upon the NYPD to undertake a full and open investigation of the police conduct at issue in the fatal shooting of an unarmed man.