Repeat: Innocent Until Proven Guilty

If pictures don’t lie, the one of Jeffrey C. Gilbert in last month’s newspapers told a horrible truth.

The photo of Gilbert, 25, eyes downcast in his hospital bed, said to anyone who saw it, “This man has been mercilessly beaten.”

The face looked like a freshly pummeled boxer’s - bloated, discolored, with eyes swollen to slits. But because Gilbert had been charged with slipping behind Prince George’s County (Md.) police Cpl. John J. Novabilski as he sat alone in his cruiser and blowing him away, the photo’s underlying messages were mixed.

Pictures may not lie, but people do. Many who saw the photo were inclined to accept the police explanation that Gilbert had “violently resisted arrest.” They were inclined to disbelieve Gilbert, who claimed innocence, and his girlfriend, who was with him when he was arrested. She insisted that Gilbert was with her when Novabilski had been killed. But lots of folks believe what a police reporter told me: “Every girlfriend swears, ‘He was with me!”’

Because of whom they chose to believe, even some people who were appalled by Gilbert’s photo were inclined to say, “Well, he killed a cop. … Of course there was payback.”

Now, however, Novabilski’s stolen gun and the assault pistol used to kill the officer were found with a Landover, Md., man who killed himself after a shootout with police. So prosecutors are reexamining the case against Gilbert and whether excessive force was used in his arrest.

It’s easy to see that sometimes, our inclinations may just be wrong. Being repulsed by someone’s suspected brutality never warrants “justice” being exacted outside the courtroom.

Some fair-minded folks just know this. Others know it because they know dozens of men, most of them black, who’ve been hurt or harassed by police because they seemed “suspicious.”

And though many people have less sympathy for a man like Gilbert - a convicted thief with numerous other arrests - police don’t overstep the bounds of fairness and law only with men like him.

Weeks ago, Earl G. Graves Jr., 33, senior vice president of Black Enterprise magazine, was seized by two police officers as he stepped from a train at Grand Central Terminal in New York. Police explained that they’d received an anonymous tip that a mustachioed black man - described as six inches shorter than the smooth-faced Graves - had been carrying a gun in his briefcase on the train. Police apologized and ran newspaper ads explaining the incident.

Though dissimilar, Graves’s and Gilbert’s stories have a too-familiar ring in the African American community. I asked a random group of Washington-area black male acquaintances, “Have you had any bad experiences with the police?”

“‘How many times?’ is a better question,” said one friend, a journalist, 36. “The first time I was stopped I was 10, riding my bike across Catholic University. The last time was in 1991, when my wife and I were driving (in an upscale suburb), getting wedding invitations. But whether it’s ‘What are you doing with that bike?’ or ‘What are you doing in this neighborhood?’ it’s the same thing. Something that, as a black man, you have to prepare yourself for.”

Said Greg, 39, a technician at the Library of Congress: “One afternoon, a friend and I had just left my apartment when a white police officer pulled up behind us, put his lights on and used his loudspeaker to tell us to get on the ground. He got out of his cruiser with his gun drawn. I’ve never been so frightened. He said there’d been a robbery and my car fit the description. He never apologized.”

Of the seven African American men I talked to, the only one who didn’t have a harassment story is so fair-skinned that he’s often mistaken for white.

But being white isn’t always a protection. My editor once wrote about a well-connected, blond New Yorker, 18, who, while driving his brother’s car, cut off some off-duty policemen. Pulled from the car by the cops, the youth was stomped to death.

Only a fool doesn’t know that police have an incredibly tough job, as Novabilski’s tragic death proves. The point is that the considerable power police need to maintain order brings with it a responsibility that too often is ignored. If middleclass men - who have access to considerable social and legal protections - are treated scornfully, what happens to the poor and uneducated?

What happens when you’re black and the automatic assumption by too many cops, white and black, is that you may be a criminal?

Whatever our inclinations, the rules exist for a reason. They say that even an ex-con is human and should make it to trial without being beaten half to death.

Whatever we believe at any given moment, the best reason to abide by “innocent until proven guilty” is that often, suspects really are innocent.

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