I agree that ramming the car into the van probably led to the shooting but it isn’t certain what the circumstances that led to the accident were. I don’t know if Bell felt threated by the presence of the undercover cops- it’s possible he thought they were just guys going to mug him.

In any case, I don’t begrudge cops firing. But they are trained to take three shots and reassess the situation. One cop reloaded his clip and kept shooting- and that’s the most suspect aspect of the police behavior in this confrontation in my opinion.

Regarding Giuliani and crime in NY, I don’t profess to be knowledgable about that, but that information is interesting, Preston.

It’s thundering ice here as I write this with a possibility of a foot of snow tomorrow. Yesterday it was 70 degrees. Glad I don’t have to go out.

Unless you count the car that Sean Bell drove over a police officer, and then rammed an undercover police vehicle (twice) with a weapon. In which case, according to the law, he was armed with a deadly weapon: his car.

According to the involved officers, the undercover officer told him to freeze and put up his hands; instead he ran over the officer before ramming the undercover vehicle:

The detective insisted he identified himself as a cop long before he fired on the car carrying Sean Bell and his buddies.

“This cop screamed, `Police!’ and he had his shield out,” attorney Philip Karasyk told the New York Daily News.

Investigators have a mountain of evidence to go through, including video from one or more surveillance cameras near the scene of the shooting, radio transmissions among cops and ballistic reports for the 50 shots fired.

Until the investigation, I’m going to give the benefit of the doubt to the police officers.

Those other drops in crime came without the outright hostility that Giuliani held for so many New Yorkers. A good comparison is the shooting of an unarmed man, Amadou Diallo, 41 times and the recent shooting of another unarmed man, Sean Bell, 50 times. Giuliani was unable to express any remorse for a needless death- it’s not to say that the police behavior was criminal but obviously something went wrong. In contrast, Mike Bloomberg has been able to balance his acknowledgement of the tremendously difficult job that cops have while simultaneously recognizing that an innocent life was taken (on the man’s wedding day, no less.)

I give all the credit in the world to Giuliani’s humanity on September 11- honestly he was the only public figure to step up on that day and speak so eloquently about the horrors we witnessed. However, I just don’t believe that his commendable press conferences 5 years ago qualify him to be president in light of all his other failings.

Lord, I’m glad I’m not a teenager these days- so many more ways for humiliation that we didn’t have before the internet.

At least Rudy didn’t pull a Britney Spears, who dumped her husband K-fed via a text message reading, “Ur dumped.”

Giuliani informed his second wife, Donna Hanover, of his intention to seek a separation in a 2000 press conference. The announcement was precipitated by a tabloid frenzy after Giuliani marched with his then-mistress, Judith Nathan, in New York’s St. Patrick’s Day parade, an acknowledgement of infidelity so audacious that Daily News columnist Jim Dwyer compared it with “groping in the window at Macy’s.”