Call it a tale of two shootings. In each, an unarmed black man is killed in New York in a hail of bullets fired by police, fearing, rightly or wrongly, for their lives.

But the different responses of city leaders to last weekend's shooting of Sean Bell in Queens and the 1999 death of Amadou Diallo in the Bronx tell a tale of a city's evolution and its ability to learn the importance of acknowledging a community's outrage and responding to it. Such a changed response is evident not just in New York, but in other cities across the country.

Almost as soon as Mayor Michael Bloomberg heard Saturday that police fired 50 times on three possibly unarmed black men, he began reaching out to political, religious, and community leaders, assuring them a full, fair investigation would take place. By Monday morning, the mayor, police commissioner, and dozens of black leaders – many still angry – came together at City Hall.

In the immediate aftermath of the 1999 death of Mr. Diallo, a West African immigrant shot in the entry to his apartment building, then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani defiantly defended the police. He didn't meet with local black leaders until weeks later. Thousands of protesters poured into the streets, prompting more than 1,700 arrests.

"You learn from your errors," says Douglas Muzzio, a political analyst at the School of Public Affairs at Baruch College in New York. "The reaction reflects in part the mayor's personality and the police commissioner's professional personality, but they learned from what Giuliani did, and they're not going to make the same mistakes."

New York's reaction is emblematic of changes in community/police relations across the country. From Cincinnati to Atlanta to Los Angeles, police departments have realized they need the cooperation and support of minority communities – those that usually felt the brunt of the "get tough" crime initiatives of the 1990s. In each city, fumbled political reactions to a charge of police misconduct – whether it was the 1991 beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles or the 2001 shooting of a young black man in Cincinnati – have taught lessons about the importance of reaching out, urging calm, and dealing with nothing but the facts.

"There's now a more proactive, customer-service-oriented attitude and response in the aftermath of these incidents because police departments all over the country now understand their aggressive enforcement actions are typically felt disproportionately in the minority communities, and that further strains police/community relations," says Jack Riley, acting director of the Center on Quality Policing at the RAND Corp. in Pittsburgh. "With crime rates heading back up, the last thing you want to do is alienate a constituency you need to help keep crime level."

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