Don’t shoot

IN THE basement of St Gregory’s church in Crown Heights, a Brooklyn neighbourhood where kosher pizzerias compete with jerk-chicken shacks for business, the officers of the 77th precinct are giving away colouring books for children. “Police officers are your friends,” the book’s title proclaims. Around the city, protests at the decision not to prosecute the officer who choked Eric Garner to death suggested that plenty of New Yorkers did not agree.

A few blocks away, not long after the precinct’s black commanding officer listened to complaints of police racism from 100 mostly black residents of the neighbourhood, a mentally disturbed man with a knife stabbed an Israeli student at an Orthodox religious school. Police shot the knifeman dead, after he threatened to stab more people, to the relief of some of the assembled faithful. The police were their friends after all.