New York City, 1999. A city that can bring immigrant dreams to life. You move here, you work hard, you carve out a space for yourself, and then one day your name is on New Yorkers' lips. TV personalities discuss you, your parents are greeted at the airport by cameras and a motorcade. Sitting in a crowded town hall in Harlem, they listen to strangers praise you. Your boss, a Bangladeshi migrant named Shahin Chowdhury says, "He was a jewel. I will never forget him."

For Kadiadou and Saikou Diallo of Guinea, this was the reality. They had come to New York to pick up the bullet-riddled body of their son Amadou -- shot to death by New York City police in a case of mistaken identity. The police claimed that Diallo was mistaken for a suspect. But as columnist Angela Ards pointed out, Amadou resembled the suspect "in the most generic sense: eyes, ears, a nose, a mouth, male, black, young."

Amadou Diallo was a 22-year-old West African immigrant who lived in the Bronx. He studied English and Computer Science before coming to America. A devout Muslim, he worked twelve hours a day selling videos to earn enough money to finish his bachelor's degree. On February 4, 1999, as he was standing in the vestibule of his apartment -- four undercover police approached him. As they yelled commands, a frightened Diallo reached for his wallet. The officers had fired 41 shots before his hand was out of his pocket -- somehow, 22 of the 41 shots missed their target, even though the officers aimed into a space the size of a telephone booth. Of the 19 bullets that did hit, 11 were in the legs, 5 pierced the torso, 1 hit the right arm, 1 went through the chest and 1 entered through the back. This was the grisly consequence of a police system that institutionalized racism and built a vision of the feral, "wilding" Black male -- Public Enemy Number One.

In Mayor Giuliani's New York, a steep drop in crime had been accompanied by a relentless increase in racial profiling and police violence. According to the Civilian Complaints Review Board, between 1993 and 1998, complaints about police brutality had risen 39% to 4,975. Between January and June of 1998 alone, there was a 58% increase in police beatings, 27% increase in "drag/pull" allegations and 30% increase in the use of the painful pepper spray against suspects. In 1996, Amnesty International issued a report reviewing 90 cases of police brutality in New York. Giuliani savagely attacked the report as "exaggerated". At the same time, a Bronx judge acquitted Officer Francis Livoti, who choked Latino teenager Anthony Baez to death during a routine arrest. When another officer, with seven civilian complaints against him, shot a homeless man at point blank range, the Mayor called it an "ambiguous situation".

New York in the 1990s was in midst of an "end justifies the means" frenzy. The argument was familiar -- the city was out of control, and only excessive force would bring it back to normal. In 1997, two officers shot an unarmed Black man 24 times. A Brooklyn grand jury returned a verdict of "not guilty" against the officers. Police also fired seventeen times at 16 year-old Michael Jones, mistaking his toy gun for a real firearm. The Mayor later issued a statement blaming lack of "adult supervision" for the incident. Black immigrants were frequent targets and in the most infamous case before Diallo, Haitian immigrant Abner Louima was brutally beaten and sodomized by a group of four police officers.

This pattern of violent police behavior had a traumatizing impact on the psyche of Black New Yorkers. 27 year-old Floyd Coleman told the NEW YORK TIMES, "Even when it's cold, I try not to wear my hood. Especially at night, because you're going to get stopped." Coleman, who worked with young children in Youth Ministries for Truth & Justice, said, "It makes me want to cry. Here I am steering young people in the right direction. And we have cops approaching us for no reason. I feel like we're in prison." Alexie Torres, director of the youth center, added: "In the process of helping reduce crime, sometimes there is a long-lasting sense of something else in a generation of young men. You're breaking their spirit. You're breaking their will." Columnist Bob Herbert, a long-time voice for New York's poor, wrote: "Some parents and civic leaders are teaching Black and Hispanic children to quickly display their hands during any encounter with the police, like little criminals. This is to show that the youngsters are not armed and therefore should not be blown into eternity at age 10 or 15 or 20 by a trigger-happy stranger in a blue uniform."

Amadou Diallo has been on my mind recently. On Friday, London police shot dead an unarmed man in the rattled frenzy that followed the two sets of London bombings. The rhetoric around this case is eerily similar to that of New York, circa 1999. Just as American tabloids justified homicidal police force in response to "crime sprees," London's Daily Express ran banner headlines: "Shoot All Bombers: Demand Grows For Suicide Fanatics To Be Shown No Mercy" (this was before police revealed the man was innocent). Blogger Curious Hamster responded to the Express' view: "While we're at it, why don't we shoot all brown skins, all non-christians, all people with rucksacks, all people with bulky clothing, all people who look at me in a funny way. Crap, I might even be forced to stop wearing my hoodie. Wouldn't want to be shot dead for looking a bit funny." Indigo Jo's Blog dissected another tabloid, The Daily Mail: "Twaddle in the Daily Mail today. Stop and search in the streets and on the Underground, police road blocks, snooping, increased detention powers... Oh, and don't even think of listening to the anti-racist crowd. Never mind treading on the toes of ethnic minorities or invading their 'family sanctums.' This is the war on terror."

In 2000, while marching in huge Harlem rallies for Diallo, I was struck by the absence of Asian faces in the crowd. Of course there were the stalwart activists of South Asians Against Police Brutality & Racism (SAPBR) and Federation Of Indian Leftists (FOIL). But the brown masses of New York seemed to see this as a "black issue," choosing to stay away in a mixture of fear and indifference. " Don't they get it?" said one of the Bengali activists of FOIL. "Do they really think this will stop with Black New Yorkers? Racial profiling always finds new targets."

These days, maybe many people do "get it". The post 9/11 security sweeps have decimated neighborhoods like the formerly Pakistani enclave of Coney Island Avenue in New York. The immigrant populations that are left have a nervous, intimidated air. Racial profiling has gone deep into South Asian and Arab immigrants, and "driving while black" has been replaced by "flying while brown." Most Muslim immigrants tend to ethnicize their religious identity, failing to make the connection with similar struggles waged in the past by the Black and Latino underclass. There is also among Muslim populations a sense of historical injustice and particularity. By seeing the current crisis as some continuation of centuries old "Crusade" dynamics, they fail to see how it continues a pattern of violence endemic to any heavily policed state.

For the last few weeks, I've been in London for screenings of my film. At every venue I go to, I bring my laptop in case the tapes won't work. Carrying a big bulky backpack on the London Tube is a dicey proposition these days. The "stiff upper lip" has been replaced by rush-hour frayed nerves. Over time, I've developed a set of visual cues that are my way of saying, "It's ok, I want to get to my stop alive, just like you." I smile, I make eye contact (remember the fuss over the Arab passengers who wouldn't), I pull out my book slowly and start reading. Jean Charles de Menezes of Brixton had not developed these "reassurance" mechanisms. On Friday, when plainclothes policemen suddenly chased him with guns, he panicked and ran (which of us would not have done the same?). The tragic finale was the Stockwell station platform, where Menezes lay dead from multiple gunshot wounds at close range.

This week's killing comes at a crucial juncture for London police. At a time when they had taken the offensive, demanding more guns, more policing and surveillance power, the random shooting of a frightened electrician illustrates the dangers of overwhelming force in the hands of a nervous, trigger-happy and racist police force. In 1990s New York, a beefed-up police force and the decline of the crack epidemic led to a drop in the crime rate. But increased police presence came with heavy deployment of racial profiling, which brutalizing a general of young African-Americans. Black Britain (Asian, Arab and Black) will now face similar dehumanizing tactics. The Europhobia blog offers this comforting advice: "Note to anyone who looks remotely dark-skinned, has black hair etc. - if police are present, DO NOT RUN." New York 1999, London 2004, urban histories display parallels and circular logic. More tragedies like this week's shooting are in our foreseeable future if we don't speak up now. Don't let the rhetoric of the "war on terror" and violence by the terrorist fringes push us to sacrifice civil liberties. Learn from the mistakes and excesses committed in post 9/11 America.