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NEW YORK - Mayor Michael Bloomberg, saying he was "deeply disturbed", sought to contain community outrage today after New York police killed a black man on his wedding day by firing 50 bullets at three unarmed men.
Bloomberg summoned more than 30 political and religious leaders from the Queens neighbourhood where the shootings took place outside a strip club shortly after 4 am on Saturday local time.
Sean Bell, 23, who was out for a bachelor party, was killed hours before he was to marry the mother of his two children. Two friends with him were wounded, one of them critically.
All three were black, prompting protests of racial discrimination, and none of them had broken any laws in the hours leading up to the shooting, Bloomberg said.
Demonstrators who gathered yesterday outside the hospital where two of the shooting victims were being treated evoked the memory of a 1999 case in which an unarmed African immigrant named Amadou Diallo was shot to death by police who fired 41 bullets.
"The community is outraged, and I am, to put it mildly, deeply disturbed," Bloomberg told reporters after meeting with Queens leaders.
Bloomberg acknowledged many people in the borough believed the shootings were racially motivated but that he saw no evidence of that. Of the five officers who fired shots, two were black, two were white and one was a black Latino.
The Queens district attorney was investigating.
"What we have to do here is recognise the fact that all too often people are stopped (by police) and believe that they were stopped based on their ethnicity. That is just unacceptable," Bloomberg said.
The officers opened fire on the three men in a car near the club, apparently in the belief one of them had gone to fetch a gun in order to settle a dispute that arose at the club, police said.
An undercover officer who had been in the club confronted them in the car, drawing his gun and displaying his badge, police said. According to police, the driver -- Bell -- struck the officer with his car, then crashed into a police minivan that had come to back up the undercover officer.
Bell then backed up, hitting a gate, and drove forward again, ramming the police vehicle once more, police said.
At some point, the barrage of gunfire began.
"It is to me unacceptable or inexplicable how you can have 50 odd shots fired, but that's up to the investigation to find out what really happened," Bloomberg said.
Police rules ban officers from firing on a vehicle charging at them where there are no other weapons present.
The mostly black leaders who were called to City Hall praised Bloomberg for striking the right tone but said he needed to keep reaching out to the Jamaica neighbourhood of eastern Queens, near John F. Kennedy airport.
"We are going to get to the bottom of this. We are all in the pursuit of the truth and we expect to find that out. And so we are asking our community to be patient with us (pending the investigation)," New York Democratic state Sen. Malcolm Smith told reporters after the meeting.
City Councilman James Sanders said patience was wearing thin.
"Anger is justified," Sanders said. "Patience is not necessarily justified. These people have been told for 400 years to be patient."
- REUTERS
