In February 1999, four New York City police officers were on patrol in the Bronx when they saw a young black man standing on a stoop.
They thought he looked suspicious.
When they pulled over, he retreated into the doorway and began digging in his pocket.
He kept digging as the police shouted at him to show his hands; a few seconds later, the man, Amadou Diallo, a 23-year-old immigrant from Guinea, was dead, hit by 19 of the 41 bullets that the police fired at him.
What Diallo was reaching for was his wallet.
He was going for his ID as he stood on the steps of his own apartment building.
Diallo's story, and the officer's fatal pre-judgment of him, is recounted in Malcolm Gladwell's 2005 bestseller Blink.
Gladwell, and the social psychologists whose work he draws upon, explores Diallo's case as an example of that grey area between deliberate violence and an accident, propagated by non-conscious, or implicit biases.
The officers did discriminate against Diallo, but the prejudice they acted on may have been driven by something more subtle than simple hatred.
And that's an important thing to think about.
