Fiddy Bullets in NYC

On Saturday, November 25, five police officers in Queens fired fifty bullets into a car carrying 23-year old Sean Bell as he left a bachelor's party. He died. He was to be wed later that day. This story has been extensively reported in the media, and I have little to add but to refer you to Democracy Now, which you can read or listen to. I suggest you subscribe to the podcast. Al Sharpton said exactly the right things. I would point out that these things always seem to happen in America, never Belgium or Singapore, although there is an American tradition of air-dropping bombs on weddings in Afghanistan and Iraq. It also seems to me that if the Al Capone school of policing is being employed, the police may have other resemblences to the famous criminal. Face it: New York City cops are notoriously crooked and some of these may have had a reason to off Mr Bell, but we will have to wait and see if it was complicated by corruption or just simple brutish incompetent fatal gun violence by the peace officers. Premeditated murder, or just murder on the impulse of the moment? I made the above collage, unable to resist the symbolism of the number 50.