Amadou Diallo went straight from anonymity to symbol. The only image most of us have is the one given to us by the four policemen who saw him last, a man they saw standing in the shadows of a doorway, pacing back and forth, looking suspicious.

When approached by the officers, several things happened at once. The policemen identified themselves. Diallo backed away toward the door, reaching into his pocket as he did so. We now know he was taking out his wallet. The police saw only a black object, and perhaps inevitably given the fears that must rise like gorge every time they make a stop, in their mind's eye they saw the butt of a pistol. One of the officers yelled ''Gun!'' Another tripped on the stairs and fell backward, leading the others to think he had been shot. Forty-one bullets and five seconds later, Amadou Diallo was dead.

In a sequence of events that has become all too familiar in these high-profile cases, the first thing to happen was for the defense to file a motion for a change of venue. The argument goes that the publicity given to the episode makes it impossible to assemble an impartial jury where the events occurred, so the trial must move to some faraway place where people will be less swayed by all the publicity.

In this day and age of television and mass media, it is hard to understand why judges continue to give credence to the idea that moving a trial a couple of hundred miles away will somehow eliminate the effects of pre-trial publicity. The Diallo shooting was all over the networks, the wire services, USA Today , and all the local New York papers. To believe that people in Albany would not be aware of the case is farcical.

But, you might protest, the point is to have an impartial jury, a jury that won't be swayed by emotions. True enough. We must have jurors who will listen to the facts carefully and apply them thoughtfully against the applicable laws before reaching a verdict. But some cases require more than that.

In this case, the facts were never in doubt. Four policemen shot down an unarmed man. These facts were never in dispute. What was in dispute was whether the overall sequence of events was within the bounds of proper police procedures. Did the four officers act reasonably or were they out of control?

Such questions are only partly questions of law. There is also a question of judgment. Did the actions of the police conform to their community's expectations of police behavior? In New York, Mayor Giuliani has placed great emphasis on making the streets safer. The resulting reduction in crime has been credited to vigorous application of the ''broken light'' theory of crime prevention, which holds that if you come down hard on small crimes, this will deter major crimes because you have instilled the idea that all crimes, great and small, will be vigorously prosecuted.

This requires an in-your-face style of police work that focuses on rousting suspicious-looking characters in hopes of catching them in some smaller offense, especially weapons possession, before they have time to perpetrate a bigger crime. This work generally fell to the Special Crimes Unit, a group of police officers who usually worked in plain clothes and who specialized in stop-and-frisk operations.

Their tactics had already aroused concern in the minority community, because inevitably young black males were the primary focus of the police. Statistically, this was sound because of the high proportion of crimes committed by young black males.

In practice, the results were a high number of stop-and-frisk incidents but a small number of actual arrests. In 1998, 27,061 stops were made, leading to 4,647 arrests: a ratio of 6 stops for every 1 arrest. It was this disparity in results that led to increasing concerns being voiced within the black community. And when the judge decided to move the trial to Albany, the voice of the black community, the community most intimately affected by these events, was silenced.

Again, the question was not who shot Amadou Diallo. The jurors already knew that. The question is did the police have a good reason to question Diallo in the first place, or was he questioned solely because he was a young black man out at night? The question is were they justified in fearing he might be armed or were they predisposed to believe this as a result of their training and tactics, especially racial profiling? Did all this lead one or more of those officers to see a weapon where there was none? Was this part of a pattern of overly aggressive police work or an isolated instance of group think gone wrong?

These are questions that even the best intended person cannot answer if they don't live in the community and see what goes on around them from one day to the next. How can a bunch of folks in Albany be expected to understand what goes in the Bronx?

It is especially telling that the jurors made a special point of saying race was not a factor in their decision. The question that seems destined never to be answered is to what extent race was a factor in the decision of the four policemen to ask Amadou Diallo a few questions and to what extent did racial stereotypes influence their perceptions when Amadou reached into his pocket?

Copyright © 2000 G.J. Lau All Rights Reserved

G.J. Lau toils deep in the bowels of the Washington bureaucracy. A long-time observer of American politics and mores, he now edits his own e-zine, Singleminded, which can be found at http://www.singmind.com/singleminded/