Seven NYPD officers — including the three recently cleared of all criminal wrongdoings — are now facing a variety of departmental charges from the NYPD for their actions on the night that soon-to-be groom Sean Bell was killed and his friends were wounded. They range from “firing weapons outside of departmental guidelines” to “taking police action while undercover.” No immediate action can be taken on the charges, since a federal investigation is still taking place.

The lawyer for Gescard Isnora, the officer who initially confronted Bell and friends outside of a Queens strip club, downplays the charges, telling the NY Post that the department only charged the officers because the 18-month statue of limitations is almost up. After an investigation is complete, he says, the charges are usually dropped or modified. As is, the charges could lead to suspension or firing. Several civil rights leaders (one in particular) has called on the brass to fire the officers immediately. Clearly, that’s not going to happen any time soon. And maybe never…

BACKLASH An organization called 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement, along with New York State Senator Eric Adams, have decided that the inappropriate questioning of an off-duty NYPD officer, who happens to be the highest-ranking black officer in the NYPD, by two white cops is the last straw. They gathered at police headquarters to “express their outrage.” “When you have the head of the Community Affairs division stopped at gunpoint, what kind of community affairs do you have?” asked Adams. [NY1]

Oh, NYPD. What are we going to do with you. Right on the heels of a racial profiling lawsuit from a NY Post reporter (although his paper doesn’t believe racial profiling exists), the Sean Bell disaster, and a report questioning the racial imbalance of the police force’s stop-and-search technique, two white, plain-clothes officers are in deep trouble after ordering an off-duty black officer, who happens to be the highest-ranking black officer in the NYPD, out of his car. Needless to say, they didn’t recognize him.

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Ever heard of Romona Moore? I hadn’t either. She was a 21-year-old Hunter College student who lived in the Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn with her parents, who are immigrants from Guyana. When she left the house to go to Burger King one night five years ago and didn’t return by the next morning, her mother, Elle Carmichael, called the police. The police told her she shouldn’t even be calling for a 21-year-old missing woman. They didn’t help and closed the complaint that an officer had drafted out of pity. In the four days that followed, as the police refused to help Carmichael by opening an investigation, Romona Moore was being raped and tortured by two men in a house a few blocks from her home. They beat her death on the day that police reluctantly launched an investigation. Carmichael had to help the police find her daughter’s body by conducting her own amateur investigation.

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Unless there is some sort of extreme weather or the subways are messed up or you’re looking for an affordable apartment, most days are good to live in New York City. Today is definitely not one of them. A judge, citing a “lack of witness credibility”* just acquitted three NYPD detectives of any wrongdoing in the death of 23-year-old Sean Bell, who died after plainclothes cops sprayed his car with 50 bullets as he left a Queens strip club with his friends. He was getting married to the mother of his child later that day. The cops claimed they had reason to believe that Bell was armed (he wasn’t) and was planning a drive-by-shooting around the corner (sort of hard with no gun), they also said they identified themselves as law enforcement before they started shooting. Bell’s friends claimed the officer never identified himself, and that they feared for their lives when they saw an armed man in street clothes running towards them.

There are going to be some very angry New Yorkers today, and for good reason. This was a tragic accident, but this verdict suggests it was a tragic, unavoidable accident and that the officers were justified in their actions. But it’s not like the precedent wasn’t set in New York City long before Sean Bell was killed on his wedding day. And with further proof that cops won’t be punished when they make “mistakes” of this magnitude and with little effort on the city’s part to solve the problem, it is sure to happen again.

*By many accounts, the prosecution’s major blunders should be blamed for the acquittal.

“A bunch of young people ran up behind me quickly, Mr. Ricco recalled. They wore pins for the New Black Panther Party. “One said, ‘I want to ask you a question.’ They’re asking me about the case. ‘How could you?’”

Anthony L Ricco, the lawyer for the detective accused of firing the opening salvo in the hail of gunfire that killed Sean Bell in 2006, is black, and he’s taking a whole lot of heat over his latest case. As Ricco tells The New York Times in their recent profile of him and the trial, it’s irrelevant to the outraged masses that his client, Gescard F Isnora, is also African American; that he could literally defend yet another seemingly senseless killing of a black man by the NYPD has people — even Ricco’s friends and colleagues — baffled. Perhaps counterintuitively, Ricco told the Times that bigotry is actually what propelled him to accept the case.

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• Saved by the ingrown hairs! NYPD officers are now required to have a clean-shaven look. Black cops with shaving problems are exempt. No, really! [ND]

• Making the Band rears its ugly — who am I kidding — beautiful head once again. [MTV]

• Tracey Morgan hopes the writer’s strike doesn’t force him into a Chitlin’ Circuit play with Cockroach from the Cosby Show. That makes two of us. [Defamer]

• Speaking of the writers strike, the NAACP Image Awards got a pass from the Writers Guild. [E!]

• I think we’ve all learned a valuable lesson about who should and shouldn’t be stumping for presidential candidates. [XXL]

• White women are beating black women to the boardroom, according to a new report. Gee, that information must have been so hard for researchers to acquire. [NPR]

• Oh, please. Go tell it to a community that needs more teenage pregnancy and fatherless children and grandmothers-turned-guardians, because this one ain’t it. [SFC]

• See! [FWST]

• Most blacks think the NYPD cops — who shot up the car (and body) of Sean Bell as he left a strip club with his boys the night before his wedding — are guilty. I just don’t understand how they could come to that conclusion. [NYDN]

• Old-school civil rights joins new-school gay rights. [QT]

The federal government has always had a knack for misusing our tax money in the most wasteful of ways. Take, for instance, the FBI’s interest in Coretta Scott King in the years following her husband’s assassination. A recently unearthed memo shows that the geniuses at the FBI were worried that the wife of a man famous for his use of non-violent resistance to effect change would become some violent anti-Vietnam rebel.

In memos that reveal Coretta Scott King being closely followed by the government, the FBI noted concern that she might attempt “to tie the anti-Vietnam movement to the civil rights movement.”

Four years after Martin Luther King Jr.’s death, the FBI closed its file on Coretta Scott King, saying, “No information has come to the attention of Atlanta which indicates a propensity for violence or affiliation of subversive elements,” according to a memorandum dated Nov. 30, 1972.

This is more ridiculous — but less surprising — than the time the NYPD felt the need to stalk the dangerous terrorist that is Alicia Keys, who was no doubt up to some subversive shit on the set of the Nanny Diaries.

[MSNBC]

As a New Yorker, I’m glad my tax dollars are being put to such good use. You can never be too careful when dealing with criminals as diabolical as Alicia Keys, so thank God the NYPD spent so much time and resources staking her out back in 2004. Because of their diligence, we are all safe from terror.

According to All Hip Hop, documents uncovered by the New York Civil Liberties Union show that Jay-Z, Diddy, Alicia Keys and LL Cool J were under surveillance by the NYPD in the months leading up to the 2004 Republican National Convention. Beyond a lot of groupie sex, sipping of Cristal, piano playing, and licking of lips, I don’t know how much the cops hoped to find.

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