By Bob Herbert
This time it was 50 shots from five officers. With Amadou Diallo it was 41 shots from four officers. With Eleanor Bumpurs, an aging, overweight, disoriented grandmother, it was a pair of shotgun blasts from a single officer — inside her apartment!
The decades pass. The stories remain the same. Nathaniel Gaines Jr., a 25-year-old Navy veteran, was shot to death by a cop on a subway platform in the Bronx on the Fourth of July in 1996. The mayor at the time, Rudolph Giuliani, no softy on crime, said of the shooting: “There does not seem to be any reason for it.”
