Officer in Diallo Killing Wants His Name Restored: White Cop Fired 5 of the 41 Shots that Killed Unarmed Black Man

From the NY Times [HERE] 

 
Kennneth Boss cannot remember a time when he did not want to be a police officer.

Not when he took the police academy test early, at age 16, and had to wait four years to be hired.

Not when his first assignment was in the transit bureau, far from his dream job.

Not when he pulled out his gun on a dark Bronx street one frigid night in 1999 and fired 5 of the 41 police bullets aimed at an unarmed West African immigrant named Amadou Diallo, whose killing unleashed a torrent of rage against the Police Department.

And not now, more than seven years after a jury acquitted him and three other officers of murder charges in the Diallo case, leaving Officer Boss in a shadowy limbo that he has spent years fighting to escape, an effort he has redoubled of late.

While the other three have walked away from the department, Officer Boss, 35, is still a New York City police officer, though you might not know it by his duties. He fixes power tools for the department in a repair shop on a lonely aviation field in Brooklyn, and sometimes plays the victim or the perpetrator in police drills. He is forbidden to carry a gun.

In March, Officer Boss filed a federal lawsuit against the Police Department and the city demanding his gun back and a return to full enforcement duty. He says the department has no reason not to reinstate him, especially since he earned a Navy Achievement Medal after a seven-month tour with the Marines in Iraq in 2006.

Instead, Officer Boss says, he is a pariah in the Police Department whom others derisively call “Kenny No-Gun.”

“I find myself in a fight now, a fight for my name,” Officer Boss said last week in an interview at the office of his lawyers, Rae Koshetz and Edward W. Hayes, in Midtown Manhattan. “They won’t acknowledge that I’m anything but a bad memory. They won’t acknowledge that I ever was a good cop.”

On its face, Officer Boss’s lawsuit seeks to answer the question of what it means to be a police officer and what a department can and cannot do with an officer who has been legally cleared, but is clearly stigmatized in the eyes of the public.

But police experts said the suit could not have been filed at a worse time. Less than four months earlier, on Nov. 25, a young man named Sean Bell died in a storm of 50 police bullets that also wounded two of his friends. Critics drew comparisons between the shootings of Mr. Diallo and Mr. Bell, who also was black and unarmed, and whose death rekindled tensions between the Police Department and minority communities.

Three of the five undercover officers involved in Mr. Bell’s shooting, and two of the three indicted for it, were black, and officers said they fired only after Mr. Bell drove into one of the officers.

Delores Jones-Brown, a former prosecutor in New York City and interim director of the Center on Race, Crime and Justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said feelings in minority communities were still too raw from the Bell shooting.

“The police have a community relations problem, and the notion that he would end up back on the force, I’m sure they see it as a political football,” she said. “And yeah, it means he gets caught in the middle of that.

“By no fault of his own, I don’t think it would be good for anyone, even him, if he were to get his gun back,” Ms. Jones-Brown said.

The department’s chief spokesman, Paul J. Browne, refused to comment on the case. But the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, made his position clear long before the Sean Bell shooting, when Officer Boss filed a similar lawsuit in State Supreme Court in Manhattan in 2002. Mr. Kelly said the notoriety of the Diallo case would erode the public’s trust in Officer Boss, and in the department, if he were put back on patrol. And it would be disastrous for the department, Mr. Kelly said, if Officer Boss were involved in another shooting.

In the 2002 case, the court said that the police commissioner had the right to decide whether to return an officer’s gun. An appeals court upheld the decision in 2005. So Officer Boss pressed ahead this spring in federal court.

Days after he filed the lawsuit, a grand jury handed down manslaughter indictments for two of the five officers who shot at Mr. Bell and reckless endangerment charges for a third. The three officers, who have pleaded not guilty, have been suspended without pay.

By his own acknowledgment, Officer Boss is alone in his fight. Two of the other officers who fired at Mr. Diallo, Richard Murphy and Edward McMellon, joined the Fire Department. The fourth, Sean Carroll, who, like Officer Boss, was assigned to a job at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, quit in 2005.

The Police Department said at least a couple of other officers were in positions like Officer Boss, cleared of wrongdoing but not allowed to carry a gun. One is Officer Richard S. Neri Jr., who accidentally shot and killed an unarmed teenager, Timothy Stansbury Jr., on a Brooklyn rooftop in 2004.

Patrick J. Lynch, president of the police union, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, said in a statement that any officer not facing criminal or department charges should be armed and returned to full duty. But Officer Boss said support from other officers had been thin. “Everyone knows full well it would be career suicide to help,” he said. “Most cops feel what I’m doing is futile.”

In his current job, Officer Boss rarely gets overtime assignments. He acknowledged that missing out on potentially thousands of dollars a year in extra pay is a motivation to keep on fighting. But he said that his principal goal was to get his old job back and be freed from such indignities as having to carry an identification card stamped “No firearm.”

The ordeal has also capsized his personal life: At the time of the Diallo shooting, he had a live-in companion, but she moved out, he said, because their relationship was unable to bear the stress.

“I’m doing this to regain my name and set the record straight on this,” he said, “and to prevent the Police Department from doing to other cops what they’ve done to me.”

Officer Boss grew up in Holbrook, on Long Island, the son of a union carpenter and a registered nurse. He was hired by the transit police in 1992 and then transferred to the city’s Police Department, which was then a separate agency, in 1994.

He worked his way up through street patrols in Harlem and East New York, Brooklyn, eventually becoming part of the elite Street Crimes Unit. He said he had earned more than 40 medals and, with his partner, was named the unit’s Officer of the Month in December 1998 for having the most arrests of suspects with guns the previous month.

Officer Boss’s description of what happened the night Mr. Diallo was killed, Feb. 4, 1999, has remained unchanged: A tragic mistake.

He and the other officers were patrolling a troubled area of the Bronx, on the lookout for a serial rapist. They testified that they spotted Mr. Diallo, who was 22, on his stoop, and tried to question him because he was acting suspiciously. Officer Carroll said he began firing because he believed Mr. Diallo was reaching for a gun; instead, it was a wallet. Officer McMellon stumbled and fell backward off the stoop.

Bullets ricocheted in the vestibule, and Officers Murphy and Boss said they believed Officer McMellon had been shot. Officer Boss, the last out of the police car, fired five times, believing, he said, that a two-way gun battle was under way. It was not clear whether any of his shots hit Mr. Diallo, who died after being struck by 19 bullets.

“Not a day goes by that I don’t think about it and wish I could change the outcome,” Officer Boss said.

Critics and protesters said the shooting was brutal proof of ingrained racism in the department and overaggressive crime-fighting tactics. A grand jury indicted the four officers — all of them white — on murder charges in 1999, but a jury in Albany cleared them in January 2000, prompting more protests.

In April 2001, the Police Department’s Firearm Discharge Review Board concluded after an internal investigation that the shooting had not violated any department guidelines and that the officers should not be disciplined for it.

The police commissioner at the time, Bernard B. Kerik, agreed, but kept all four officers on modified duty and, in an unusual move, did not return their firearms, a decision Mr. Kelly upheld. The board also said the officers should be retrained on firearms and have their cases reviewed in a year, but neither directive was carried out, according to Officer Boss.

But he continued trying to prove himself. After Sept. 11, he said, he worked on the pile at ground zero doing search and recovery for nine months, a claim the Police Department did not dispute. In April 2002, Officer Boss wrote a letter to Mr. Kelly asking to be reinstated, but was turned down.

In 2004, he enlisted in the Marines. He took military leave and was deployed to Iraq in early 2006. He was the best in his platoon, according to his platoon commander, Capt. Gary K. Koon, and was awarded the achievement medal for combat operations.

During one exchange, according to a letter Captain Koon wrote to Mr. Kelly, Officer Boss shot dead an insurgent who had fired a bullet into his bulletproof vest. In a separate confrontation, he killed an armed insurgent who turned to confront him, Captain Koon wrote.

Officer Boss says his service in Iraq makes clear his ability to act appropriately under duress. Captain Koon and another officer, Major Craig R. Abele, wrote to Mr. Kelly, urging him to reinstate Officer Boss to full duty.

The state courts said that while Mr. Kelly did not have to give Officer Boss a gun, he could not keep him on “modified duty” indefinitely. While the department classifies his status as “full duty, no gun,” according to a court brief, Officer Boss’s new lawsuit argues that he is still, in effect, on modified duty.

Eugene O’Donnell, a professor of police studies at John Jay, said the Police Department was acting reasonably, echoing the argument that its liability, and Officer Boss’s, would increase if he were rearmed.

“What if this guy got himself into another situation?” Professor O’Donnell said. “In some ways, they’re saving the cop from himself. Even though the cop doesn’t want to be saved from himself.”

And Robert Conason, a lawyer who represented Mr. Diallo’s parents, said returning Officer Boss to full duty would be “inappropriate.” (In 2004, the city and the Diallo family reached a $3 million settlement.)

Officer Boss says that even if his lawsuit fails, he will stay on the force. He has less than five years left until full-benefit retirement, and after all, he said, his heart is with the department. [MORE]