I FEEL YOUR PAIN 77In his closing argument, Mr. Warner (the prosecutor) suggested that Mr.
Diallo may simply have been reaching for his wallet to hand it over to what
he thought was a gang of robbers. Or perhaps, Mr. Warner said, he was trying
to show the officers his identification.
The Times reports that Officer Carroll, who had yelled that Diallo had a
gun and was the first to shoot him, sobbed as he recounted in court how he
held the young man’s hand as he lay dying on his doorstep; Carroll said that
he felt “destroyed” by his error.
The problem was not only how a wallet can be mistaken for a gun (which,
being neither the same shape nor the same size, requires some explaining
about perception). It was also how a series of bodily actions can be equated
with one set of intentions rather than another. According to their testimony,
the officers assessed Diallo’s intentions not primarily by the details of the
object in his hand, but rather from observing him perform a sequence of^
actions — running away from them, putting his hand into his pocket, digging
around, and then turning toward them holding something. In short, they
thought his wallet was a gun because they thought Diallo was about to use
a gun. Why? Is it because his actions fit their assumptions about how armed
criminals behave? Is it because they were already prepared to see him as such?
Although intellectualist accounts of social cognition are rightly criticized
for being too abstract and disembodied, they have the benefit of being able
to easily account for failures. Simply put, theories of mind are wrong when
the propositions people use to assess others (such as racist ones) are wrong.
It is difficult to say precisely what these would have been in this case, but
one wrong proposition explicitly advanced by Carroll was that Diallo fit the
description of a suspect who had committed rapes in the area a year before.
Another would be that Diallo didn’t belong in the neighborhood. Yet another
might be that young black men should respond in a particular way to being
approached and questioned by police, or that people who fear the police are
criminals. It is clear that propositional errors were at work in this event. But
perhaps the theory is too rationalist to fully explain all forty- one bullets.
The simulation model advanced by Goldman could also explain errors.
Seeing someone as like me, putting myself in their shoes, is one way to under-
stand what another intends to do, but it does not guarantee success. In fact
this strategy could lead me badly astray if the other person would not behave
in the same way I would. Critics of simulation theory have pointed out that