The Frame Game

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The Du Page Seven trial comes at a moment of extraordinary soul-searching for the Illinois justice system. Earlier this month Anthony Porter, who has an IQ of 51, was freed from death row after serving 16 years for a double murder he did not commit. At the time of his trial, Porter could not afford an investigator to work on his case, and his lawyer called a grand total of three defense witnesses. Porter was freed when a Northwestern University journalism class investigated his case and obtained a confession from another man. A key prosecution witness, who later recanted, now says police threatened him into testifying against Porter.

In another Illinois case this month, four men who served up to 18 years for a double murder they did not commit reached a $36 million settlement with Cook County. In their suits, the so-called Ford Heights Four charged that the sheriff's office fabricated evidence and ignored or hid leads pointing to the four men who actually committed the crime. In the past dozen years, Illinois has freed 11 men from death row--one less than it has executed since 1977. Nine of the freed men were black or Latino.

The frame game some Illinois authorities have allegedly been playing hits the headlines at a time of heightened national concern over aggressive law-enforcement practices. In New York City, authorities have been on the defensive since last month, when a West African street peddler named Amadou Diallo was killed by police. He died in a barrage of 41 bullets as he entered his Bronx apartment building. The police say the officers fired on Diallo because they thought he was reaching for a gun. He was unarmed.

The Diallo killing has prompted a wave of protests and civil disobedience. More than 140 demonstrators, including Congressman Charles Rangel, former Mayor David Dinkins and N.A.A.C.P. president Kweisi Mfume, have been arrested in front of New York's police headquarters in the past two weeks. The protests are designed to pressure the police department--and especially Mayor Rudolph Giuliani--into addressing racism and brutality in the ranks. And New York City public advocate Mark Green last week called on Police Commissioner Howard Safir to resign, saying Safir has failed to deal adequately with the allegations against his department.

The officers who shot Diallo were members of the elite street-crimes unit, a plainclothes force charged with getting guns off the street. The unit makes up 1% of the police department but seizes 40% of guns recovered in New York. Critics say the unit, whose unofficial motto is "We own the night," cuts legal corners and is too quick to resort to force. "You have to have a new paradigm of policing," says Ron Daniels, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. "This gung-ho, military-type, fraternity-style policing has got to change."

A particular sore point is the unit's aggressive use of "stop and frisk" tactics. Of the 27,061 people its officers frisked last year, more than 80% were unarmed, which suggests that the cops felt they needed little in the way of probable cause to stop someone. Critics say the frisks are overly intrusive and unequally applied. "They will shake you down because of the color of your skin or the way you dress," charges Dinkins. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan last week launched a probe of N.Y.P.D. tactics.

Last Friday, Safir appointed a black officer to the No. 2 position in the street-crimes unit. (Black leaders dismiss the move as window dressing.) Both Safir and Giuliani have emphatically denied that the police are guilty of misconduct or racial bias. The Diallo controversy, Giuliani says, has been stirred up by political activists and the scandal-hungry press. In fact, he points out, fatal shootings by police are at their lowest level in 13 years. The police department is controversial, its supporters say, because it has been doing its job vigorously. And they note that it has been phenomenally effective. Robberies are down 50% in the past four years, and murders are down 60%. The real danger, some New Yorkers say, is that the criticism will cause the crime rate to rise once again. "We need to be careful," says former New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton. "We don't want to oversensationalize it so the cops play turtle and decide not to get involved."

In California, Riverside remains torn by the shooting of Tyisha Miller last December. Miller, 19, a black woman, was waiting in a car with a flat tire for a cousin to bring help. When the cousin arrived, Miller seemed to be unconscious in the locked car with a gun on her lap. The cousin, fearing Miller was sick, called 911, and when the police arrived, they yelled at her to open the door and smashed a car window. Suddenly they fired 24 bullets into the car, striking Miller at least 12 times and killing her. Miller's family accuses the police of murder. But police say Miller was reaching for the gun despite their orders not to. The explanation hasn't satisfied many people in Riverside's black community. Last week more than 1,200 people crowded into a Baptist church for a protest meeting led by the Rev. Jesse Jackson.