So I step out side my midtown Manhattan workplace yesterday, turned the corner and walk smack dab into a team of New York City police commandos armed with M15 semiautomatic machine guns, finger triggered and at the ready. The subway station below was undergoing a random security check. I stopped, (slowly) approached the guy with the biggest gun and biggest helmet (slowly) and asked (slowly) if it would be okay if I reached into my camera bag (slowly), pull out my camera (slowly) and take some pictures.

He said yes and I did, slowly. The last thing I wanted was to be mistaken for a potential suicide bomber and end up laying on the ground shot in the head thirty-five times before anybody realized that the bulges around my waist are actually love handles and not an IED (Improvised Explosive Device).

Western journalists are tripping over themselves justifying Scotland Yard’s public execution of a Brazilian national following London’s recent spate of terrorist attacks.

The media is quick to repeat the police account that the Brazilian, Jean Charles de Menezes, 27, was out of place wearing a heavy coat on a ‘warm’ London day and that he refused to stop after jumping a turnstile and rushing into a crowded subway train.

Plain-clothes police officers stalked this guy from his home, along his bus route and into the train station without ever identifying themselves. After he tripped and fell while getting on the train they shot him in the head seven times at point blank range. They thought they were disarming a potential suicide bomber and thereby preventing him in a last ditch effort from, with the flick of a finger, blowing himself up and possibly killing other innocent people.

Well, Mr. Menezes was not a terrorist. He didn’t have a bomb. And, he took to his grave the reasons he dressed the way he did that day (it was reported to have been 62 degrees). We know he was in a strange northern climate thousands of miles away from his tropical home. I’ve watched people evade subway fares in New York and Europe for years. Most fare evaders run directly onto a train after jumping over the turnstile.

Absolutely nothing Mr. Menezes did warranted seven shots to the head. He died not knowing who the men running behind him were or what they wanted. He may have assumed they were terrorists.

I hate that terrorists have undermined our emotional security but we don’t need to condone or accept shoddy and incompetent law enforcement.

Terrorists, whose aim is to instill fear and diminish our trust in each other and our public institutions, must be rolling over laughing at their success in creating widespread panic.

We can almost hear them say, “they are afraid to fly and commute to work. We have them in chaos running around scared and trigger happy, killing themselves and their own innocent.”

What London police did in killing Mr. Menezes was reacting out of fear and in panic.

The infamous New York case of Amadu Dialo, a west African immigrant who was shot at 41 times in the doorway of his apartment building by cops who mistook his pocket wallet for a handgun drew international attention also. Recently a team of Los Angeles police officers fired 116 bullets into a vehicle driven by an unarmed black man. They feared he had a gun.

Fear and panic are not characteristics of sound law enforcement or adequate self-defense.

In defeating any enemy it is important to keep ones head cool and wits collected to insure the innocent are protected. If officers are not capable of that they should find other work.

I need to know that the guy holding the AK47 outside my office building won’t mistake something like my chomping on a Snicker Bar as a threat to his life and use me for target practice.

What good does it serve if those who protect the public are as frighten and skittish as the public is?

Men of color like me are more likely to wrongly die at the hands of law enforcement than any other group. A black former gridiron star is shot dead by police outside of Pittsburgh; An unarmed black insurance salesman shot dead by police in Miami; An unarmed black business man shot dead by police in Cincinnati.

Why are white cops more apt to mistakenly kill an innocent black man than a white one? Because, like much of society, we frighten them.

We, however, must demand more from those who run our police departments, those whose charge it is to protect us from the threat of terror, those responsible for protecting us against crime.

They have to be more like a crouching tiger, steady and vigilant, striking only with confidence and surety. They can’t let fear and panic continue to reduce them to Keystone Cops shooting and killing dark folk indiscriminately.

We have to be smarter and better than our enemy in every way. And we have to let people be people without killing them for it.

© 2005 www.codywilliams.com