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NEW YORK - It was the morning after another fatal shooting and the mood was sombre and defiant.
Low Lopez and his friends were in a lobby of New York's Edgemere housing project, where Christopher Glenn, 16, was shot dead by two hooded men on Tuesday. But they were not eager to venture outside.
They don't get along with the police at the best of times, and right now tensions are high.
The Glenn killing came in the wake of a far more notorious homicide on Saturday, when police fired 50 shots at three unarmed black men in their car outside a strip club, killing 23-year-old Sean Bell on his wedding day.
Both Glenn and Bell were from the Rockaways section of Queens, a strip of land on the Atlantic Ocean about as far away from the glitter of Manhattan as one can get and still be in New York City. Jobs are scarce. Nearly everyone is black. And trust between youth and police is almost non-existent.
"It's all the cops. The white cops, the black cops, the Latino cops, the Chinese cops. Yeah, they harass us. That's not news. Nothing's changed," said Lopez, 24.
To be young and black and on the street is an invitation for police harassment, say Lopez and other neighbours at Edgemere.
Police say they are only trying to keep the peace.
"It's a rough place. There's a lot of gang violence," said one officer from the precinct where Bell was killed.
"It's almost all black, so unfortunately anyone who gets caught doing something wrong there is probably going to be that colour," said the officer, who did not want his name used.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg has acknowledged that too many New Yorkers believe they are stopped and frisked by police only because of their "ethnicity". The mayor also angered much of the police force by saying the firing of 50 bullets by five officers appeared excessive.
An undercover officer had pursued the men, believing one of them had gone to fetch a gun, police said.
Bell, the car's driver, had clipped an undercover officer and twice crashed into a police minivan during the confrontation.
The Queens district attorney is investigating.
"The rapper 50 Cent says Edgemere is the toughest housing project he was ever in. If something goes wrong out here, I live and die on my wits," said city councilman James Sanders, who is black, before meeting relatives of the teenager who was killed.
"So we do call for assertive policing. We are not the enemies of the police. We also call for respecting our rights. Respect has broken down in the police department. The culture itself needs to be looked at. It is a systemic problem."
At the Edgemere community centre - a city-sponsored recreation area where children can meet after school and teenagers can go at night - Darryl Duvore is trying to prevent kids from getting into trouble with the law.
"We deal with the best of the best and the worst of the worst," said Duvore, in a sweat from refereeing a basketball game. "For the most part these are good kids. They just need direction."
They were not getting it from the police, he said.
"I want the cops to come in here and talk about gang violence, but the kids tell me 'no'," he said. "I remember when I was a kid, we all wanted to be police officers. It's not that way now. And I can't say I blame them."
- REUTERS
