By AL BAKER
Published: May 8, 2008


“Unfortunately,” he continued, “we are human beings who do make mistakes. We make them. There were mistakes in the Diallo and Bell shootings. But that doesn’t make the department murderous.”

He added: “We have to make split-second life-and-death decisions and sometimes we make the wrong ones.”

As the numbers have changed, so have the reports that have categorized and collected them. Inspector Cerar said that firearms statistics were first seriously compiled by the department beginning in 1971.

There is a marked shift in the way the data is presented, beginning in 1998. For instance, the reports in 1996 and 1997 include the race of the officer and the person who was shot, facts that do not appear in the 1998 report.

The 1996 and 1997 reports said that 89.4 percent of those shot by the police were black or Hispanic. The racial information has not been included since then.

Testifying before the City Council’s Public Safety Committee on Monday, Deputy Chief John P. Gerrish downplayed how much understanding could come from releasing details on race.

“Every firearms discharge must be judged in light of the unique circumstances in which it occurs, and any conclusion drawn from the purely demographic data involved is fatally flawed,” he said.

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