Amadou Diallo - Aftermath

Aftermath

Diallo's death, the change of venue, and the verdict each sparked massive demonstrations against police brutality and racial profiling, resulting in more than 1,700 arrests over the course of many weeks. Those arrested in the daily protests at the entrance of One Police Plaza included former NYPD officers, former mayor David Dinkins, Congressmen Charlie Rangel and Gregory Meeks, Rev. Al Sharpton, Rev. Jesse Jackson, New York State Assemblyman Ruben Diaz Jr., activist actress Susan Sarandon, British documentary maker Louis Theroux (with his camera crew), more than a dozen rabbis and other clergy, and numerous federal, state, and local politicians. Charges against the protesters were later dropped.

In 2001, the Justice Department announced it would not charge the officers with a violation of Diallo's civil rights. In the vestibule where Diallo died, neighbors created a shrine of letters, teddy bears, and other items. Within several weeks, there was a severe rain period and the landlord of the building put all the items in the garbage. A neighbor, Jimmy Spice Curry, rescued the items, storing them until he was able to contact Eugene Adams, of Bronx Community College, who was given the items to donate to Diallo's mother.

On April 18, 2000, Diallo's mother, Kadiatou, and his stepfather, Sankarella Diallo, filed a US$61,000,000 ($20m plus $1m for each shot fired) lawsuit against the City of New York and the officers, charging gross negligence, wrongful death, racial profiling, and other violations of Diallo's civil rights. In March 2004, they accepted a US$3,000,000 settlement. The much lower final settlement was still reportedly one of the largest in the City of New York for a single man with no dependents under New York State's "wrongful death law", which limits damages to pecuniary loss by the decedent's next of kin.

Anthony H. Gair, lead counsel for the Diallo family, argued that Federal common law should apply, pursuant to Section 1983 of the civil rights act. In April 2002, as a result of the killing of Diallo and other controversial actions, the Street Crime Unit was disbanded. In 2003, Diallo's mother, Kadiatou Diallo, published a memoir, My Heart Will Cross This Ocean: My Story, My Son, Amadou (ISBN 0-345-45600-9), with the help of author Craig Wolff. Diallo's death became an issue in the 2005 mayoral election in New York City. Bronx borough president, and mayoral candidate, Fernando Ferrer, who had protested the circumstances of the killing at the time, later told a meeting of police sergeants that although the shooting had certainly been a tragedy, there was subsequently a move to "over-indict" the officers involved, which led to criticism of Ferrer by the Diallo family and many others following the case.

The event spurred subsequent social psychology research. A number of experiments have conducted with both undergraduate volunteers and police officers playing a computer game where they must choose whether to shoot or not to shoot a target who may be white or black, on the basis of whether or not they are armed. Such studies find that participants made slower and less accurate decisions on whether to shoot an unarmed black target than an unarmed white target, and were quicker and more likely to correctly decide to shoot an armed black target than an armed white target. Both black and white participants respond in this manner. No correlations have been found between participant's indicated levels of racial bias, and their performance in the games.

Amadou Diallo is buried in the village of Hollande Bourou in the Fouta Djallon region of Guinea, West Africa, where his extended family resides.