Outrage Will Follow Officers' Trial Out of Town

NEW YORK –– There they were in the dark, in the Bronx: four white police officers from an elite street unit approaching a black man in the small lobby of his apartment building. To the ( # 1 ), something seemed suspicious. Amadou Diallo probably felt some ( # 2 ) , too. He reached for something in his jacket. The officers believed it was a gun. They pulled their weapons and opened fire, hitting Diallo with 19 of the 41 bullets they shot at him.
When the gunfire ended, the thing Diallo ( # 3 ) from his pocket lay on the bloody floor nearby: not a gun, just a wallet.
The fatal shooting of Amadou Diallo was a classic urban ( # 4 ), one that has occurred several times in American cities and has inflamed ethnic, legal and political passions many times. Police detractors--especially people of color--accuse the police of racism and trigger-happiness. Police officials--tired of being called ( # 5 ) and callous--close ranks, saying that a terrible mistake was made.
Jurors in this case will have to navigate between these two ( # 6 ) views, and today the process of selecting a panel to judge the Diallo case gets underway in Albany. Beyond the ( # 7 ) question for the jurors--whether murder was committed--is the broader issue that troubles civil rights proponents here: whether the shooting is a result of the broad license that New York police have been given to clean up the streets and whether that ( # 8 ) affects most harshly the city's poor and minority residents.
Some fear that a conviction of the four officers in this case would have a dampening impact on law enforcement and might cause officers to hesitate in their street encounters, with possibly fatal consequences. Others fear that an ( # 9 ) would create a new layer of bitterness and distrust between police and citizens that could make the city more ( # 10 ) and more prone to anger the next time such a case of abuse, real or perceived, erupts.
Al Sharpton, the controversial and highly vocal civil rights activist who led several weeks of daily demonstrations over Diallo's death last February, said last week that he has arranged for busloads of ( # 11 ) to descend on Albany from New York City for the start of jury selection.
Even a lawyer such as Hillary Rodham Clinton, during a Senate campaign appearance at Sharpton's National Action Network offices on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, referred to the case as a "the tragic murder of Mr. Diallo" even though no verdict has been reached. Clinton extended her "personal ( # 12 )" to Kadiatou Diallo, the slain man's mother, who was seated before her at the event, and said, "Your effort to seek justice is our effort as well."
Diallo, 22 at the time of his death, was a "blameless, unarmed and defenseless" man, as District Attorney Robert T. Johnson described him in announcing the indictment last year. An ( # 13 ) from the West African nation of Guinea, he supported himself in the United States as a street vendor of videotapes. He had no criminal record. Published accounts of his life here say he ( # 14 ) to the United States a few years before his death and hoped to get a college education and return home to his relatively affluent family as a proud success.
The men charged with killing him on Feb. 4 were New York police officers, all members of the "street crimes unit," an elite division mandated to search out illegal guns and those who possess them. Attorneys for the officers say the men began scrutinizing Diallo the night of their encounter because he ( # 15 )a suspect they were seeking.

Adapted from the Washingpost.com