(this item written by Gabriel Thompson originally appears in ColorLines Issue #47 Nov/Dec )

From the moment that the trigger was pulled, the shooting by the police of an unarmed Black male followed a familiar trajectory.

Early in the morning of January 24, 2004, Timothy Stansbury Jr. and his friend Terrence Fisher were enjoying a birthday party in a friend’s apartment when they left to retrieve additional compact discs (Fisher was the party DJ). They took to the roof, a technically prohibited but commonly used shortcut for residents moving within the buildings of the Louis Armstrong Houses in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. They picked up the CDs at Fisher’s apartment, were joined by another companion and headed back up the stairs to return to the party.

Just before 1 a.m., the threesome reached the top of the stairwell, with 19-year-old Stansbury in the lead. As he arrived at the door leading to the roof, it swung open from the outside, and a single bullet was fired into his chest, landing between his ribs and cutting through all three lobes of his right lung. He tumbled down the stairs, bleeding profusely. The high school senior died less than three hours later.

The shooter was Officer Richard S. Neri Jr., an 11-year veteran of the New York Police Department. Neri and his partner, Officer Jason Hallik, had been conducting a routine "vertical patrol" of the development, with one officer opening the door from the roof and the other checking the stairwell for suspicious activity. As he approached the door, Neri had his 9-millimeter gun loaded and raised, with his finger on the trigger. Hallik pulled the door open, and Neri fired. (Neri would reportedly state to a grand jury that he fired accidentally after being startled and could not actually remember raising his weapon.)

The impact of Neri’s bullet on a family and a community is captured in the documentary Bullets in the Hood, codirected by Stansbury’s best friend, Fisher. Fisher, ironically, was already working on a film about neighborhood shootings–motivated by the gun violence that had claimed the lives of seven friends prior to Stansbury. In the documentary, the raw pain of a community torn apart is on display, and Fisher himself struggles to come to terms with the death of a close friend–this time, at the hands of the police.

From the moment that the trigger was pulled, the shooting by the police of an unarmed Black male followed a familiar trajectory as the family and community expressed sorrow and outrage. But this time, it seemed there was a twist.

The following day, NYPD Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly stated that there appeared to be "no justification for the shooting," adding that the incident compelled the agency to "take an in-depth look at our tactics and training."

Kelly’s description of the Stansbury shooting as unjustified marked a sharp break from former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s administration, which reflexively backed the NYPD and at times sought to undermine support for shooting victims. In 2000, for example, Giuliani unsealed the juvenile record of Patrick Dorismond, a Black security guard, after he was shot and killed by an undercover detective, Anthony Vasquez. Dorismond was unarmed and had taken offense when Vasquez propositioned a crack-cocaine sale, leading to a scuffle and close-range shooting.

In the days after the shooting, along with unsealing Dorismond’s juvenile record, Giuliani argued to the press that the victim was no "altar boy," leading to a furor when it was discovered that Dorismond had been an altar boy and attended the same private Catholic school in Brooklyn as Giuliani.

Still, despite the contrast in post-shooting messages sent by the Giuliani and current Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administrations in the Dorismond and Stansbury cases, the end results were nearly identical. Grand juries cleared the involved officers, families filed wrongful death suits against the city in civil court, and the city eventually paid hefty settlements ($2.25 million to relatives of Dorismond and $2 million to Stansbury’s family).

City Councilmember Charles Barron, who represents the predominantly Black neighborhoods of Brownsville and East New York and has been a longtime critic of policing activities in communities of color, argues that the differences between Giuliani and Bloomberg are of rhetoric and access–not policy.

"Giuliani inflamed the situation; he would try to place blame on the victims," Barron comments. "Bloomberg, on the other hand, puts you to sleep. He says the right things, and they [Bloomberg and Commissioner Kelly] meet with leaders in the Black community. But the end results, as seen when looking at Dorismond and Stansbury, are the same. No one is held accountable." Nearly three years after killing Stansbury, Neri was suspended for 30 days by Commissioner Kelly and stripped of his gun: "A little slap on the wrist," scoffs Barron.