Book Reviews

Beth Roy. 41 Shots … and Counting: What Amadou Diallo’s Story

Teaches Us about Policing, Race, and Justice. Syracuse: Syracuse

University Press, 2009.

In 1999, Amadou Diallo was shot 41 times by New York City police

officers. He had been lounging in his vestibule, unarmed, and had not

committed any crimes. His death or, if you like, murder set off a wave

of protest that capped more than a decade of community organizing

in the Bronx, Harlem, Brooklyn, Queens, and elsewhere against

racially motivated police brutality. The popular dissatisfaction with

police in communities of color and beyond abated after the signal

events of 9 ⁄ 11 instantly converted the NYPD into ‘‘heroes,’’ leading

to an overnight public burnishing of their image. It has only been in

recent years, especially after police killed Sean Bell in Queens, Oscar

Grant in Oakland, and others elsewhere, that police brutality has

again come to the fore as an issue around which many have rallied.

In her new book, 41 Shots … and Counting: What Amadou

Diallo’s Story Teaches Us about Policing, Race, and Justice, Beth Roy

focuses on the police shooting of Amadou Diallo as a way to explore

the logic and probable motivations of many of the actors involved.

Roy unravels some of the cultural and psychological fissures in

American society around race and policing, as well as the layers of

structural, cultural, psychological, and institutional forces that led four

police officers to shoot down an unarmed man in the Bronx that night

in 1999. She reveals an awful, tragic logic that lends, if not an air of

inevitability to the shooting, at least to the strong likelihood for racial

profiling and police abuse. She asks probing questions that take us

beyond the immediate acts: Why were they in this particular neighbor-

hood? Was their suspicion of Diallo reasonable and justified?

The context this book provides is quite significant. In Chapter 2,

‘‘Defining the Question: In the Courtroom,’’ Roy traces the legal

maneuverings that occurred after prosecutors charged the police officers

PEACE & CHANGE, Vol. 37, No. 1, January 2012

� 2012 Peace History Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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with murder and tried them in court. Roy highlights how the judge aided

the defense lawyers (and hence the police officers on trial) by implicitly

instructing jurors to disregard race, insisting that the jury stick to the

‘‘facts’’ and not let themselves be swayed by any other considerations. In

Chapter 3, Roy tries to reconstruct Amadou Diallo’s trajectory from

Guinea to the Bronx. Although her analysis of Guinea’s economic devel-

opment is weak, she speculates incisively about the economic pressures,

ambitions, and decisions that led Diallo to the United States to live in the

Bronx and to respond to the police as he did. In subsequent chapters,

Roy uses conversations with a wide variety of social actors: white law-

yers, policemen and ex-policemen, African–American men in a Harlem

church, a Latina who serves on the Civilian Complaint Review Board in

New York City, to paint a picture of the scene in all its cultural and

structural dynamism. Holding conversations is Roy’s method. She

analyzes the conversations to take stock of the racial fault lines and the

discrepant attitudes toward police. In a penetrating chapter entitled

‘‘Policing the Boundaries,’’ she discusses white masculinity, probes into

the Blue Wall of Silence, and illuminates police habituation to profiling.

Roy is endlessly patient in listening to people’s reasons for

thinking and acting the way they do. As a trained mediator, Roy is

practiced at enunciating various positions in their integrity. Herein lies

her central methodological challenge: how to pay her subjects the

respect of listening and believing their accounts while still maintaining

a critical take on how racism is lodged not only in overarching struc-

tures, but in the consciousness and actions of these individual social

agents. Early on, Roy argues against holding individuals responsible

for racist acts of brutality: ‘‘If we blame either the officers involved or

the victims, we collude in an obfuscation of urgent and prevalent

wrongs in our society. Blame may be emotionally satisfying, but it is

not analytically useful; above all, it does not contribute to change.’’

This is a strong claim that rules out attributing blame to police officers

for racially motivated killings. She is right to caution against assigning

blame solely and entirely to individuals without seeing the structures

at work but is it right to let individuals off the hook? At times, Roy

seems to want to attribute responsibility only to structures. At other

times, she appears to equivocate: toward the end, she concludes

‘‘when Ed McMellon pulled the trigger he was and was not acting as

a culpable individual.’’ Indeed, although she ultimately characterizes

the police shooting of Diallo as ‘‘brutality,’’ she argues that as it is

part of a larger social drama, the police should not be ‘‘demonized.’’

152 PEACE & CHANGE / January 2012

Roy goes to pains to present all with equanimity. People in

her world are frank, friendly, and forthcoming. They do not lie,

self-delude, or try to delude her. She has no methodological apparatus

for sifting through what people say to discover any self-exculpatory

techniques people so often use to evade responsibility, to divert atten-

tion, or to throw up a false representation. In her interview with John

Carroll, lawyer for one of the police officers, Carroll, denies that the

Diallo case or the notorious case of police abuse of Abner Louima is

‘‘about race.’’ Roy seems to believe he is sincere. Why not explore the

emphasis on denial of race as a leitmotif in white racism? And its criti-

cal implications? This critical edge comes back but at a higher level of

abstraction: It is easier for Roy to talk about cultural involution in

police communities than individual wrongdoing.

The other side of the coin is that Roy leaves out or minimizes

accounts that do hold police, including individual police officers,

responsible. This could explain how, even in her efforts to include a

wide array of social actors in her many conversations, the book is

marked by the total absence of any anti-police brutality organizers or

activists (one African–American man she interviewed had attended a

rally in Albany). Do not the analyses of militant activists have a place

in this panoply of colors and opinions? Is anger and finger pointing

always misguided and counter productive?

Roy’s strategy of analyzing conversations is a good method, as far

as it goes, and it could serve her well. Many oral historians, journal-

ists, and other cultural critics from Studs Terkel to Patricia Williams

to Anna Deveare Smith have provided great insight into the

entanglements of race and violence in the United States chiefly through

reflecting on their conversations with people. On the other hand, Roy

puts too much of a burden on the interviews she does conduct: she

tries to get too much mileage out of each. For example, she makes a

lot out of an interview she held with two white men who say they

went to school with one of the police officers involved in the shooting.

This conversation, which holds a key place in her book, serves as a

vehicle to discuss the agonistic relationships white men have to each

other and highlight the masculine, violent jousting.

The best analysis in the book comes in her substantive critique of

many mainstream solutions to police brutality. She points out that

most people across the political spectrum usually offer ‘‘community

policing’’ as an alternative to the current model of police operations.

She catalogs four of the most common solutions to curb excessive

Book Reviews 153

police force: better training, recruitment of ‘‘minority’’ cadets, citizen

oversight, and community policing. Roy adroitly dismantles each

proposal. She has performed her homework well here, reviewing

Chicago’s comprehensive evaluation of its initially lauded attempt at

community policing and pointing out many of its deficiencies and

inherent limitations, given what she has argued convincingly about

police practices and police socialization in earlier chapters. She con-

cludes that none of these solutions, taken separately or even taken all

together, is sufficient to curtail police abuse. She turns in her conclu-

sion to what she believes are more practical and satisfying solutions to

‘‘Diallo’s Challenge’’ to evolve toward less murderous and racially

charged practices in the society at large.

The great tragedy, Renoir once said, is that people have their rea-

sons. Beth Roy could be said to be taking this humanist observation

as a challenge, trying to illuminate the troubling practice of racist

police murder in a society roiled by fear and social division.

Joshua Price

State University of New York at Binghamton

Harry Anastasiou. The Broken Olive Branch: Nationalism, Ethnic

Conflict, and the Quest for Peace in Cyprus. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse

University Press, 2008.

Clearly, there are no shortages of books about the Cyprus conflict, but

the Broken Olive Branch, by Harry Anastasiou, offers unique insights

about a situation that for over the past 35 years has defied the efforts

of the world’s best diplomats to negotiate a resolution that is accept-

able to both communities on the island. I recommend this book to

those interested in nationalism, conflict, and communication. It is

particularly relevant to anyone following the Cyprus problem; given

the current status of negotiations on the island, the timing of this

book’s publication is fortuitous.

It is very difficult for someone who is deeply embedded in the

Cyprus conflict to offer a treatment that is not subtly (or often explic-

itly) biased toward her or his community’s positions. Yet, Anastasiou

was able to achieve an impartiality that is commendable, despite his

many years of working closely with the island’s peace-building com-

munity. Given his Greek background, his presentation and analysis

154 PEACE & CHANGE / January 2012