Amadou Diallo was born on September 2, 1975, in Sinoe County, Liberia, to Saikou and Kadiatou Diallo, members of a historic Fulbe trading family in Guinea. His childhood was itinerant -- Togo, Singapore, Thailand, back to Guinea -- following his father's work. In September 1996, he came to New York City and started a small business with a cousin, selling video cassettes, gloves, and socks on the sidewalk along 14th Street. He was studying to take college classes. His immigration status was precarious; his asylum application contained false claims about his origins, a desperation common among West African immigrants navigating a system designed to reject them. He was a young man building something, piece by piece, in a city that offered opportunity on brutal terms.

At about 12:40 a.m. on February 4, officers Sean Carroll, Richard Murphy, Edward McMellon, and Kenneth Boss were cruising the Soundview neighborhood in an unmarked car, searching for a serial rapist. They spotted Diallo standing in front of his building, looking up and down the street. They stopped to question him. When they ordered him to show his hands, Diallo moved into the building entrance and reached into his pocket. What he pulled out was a wallet. Officer McMellon, assuming a weapon, fired and fell backward on the steps. The other three officers, believing their partner had been shot, opened fire. The fusillade lasted seconds. Eyewitness Sherrie Elliott said the shooting continued after Diallo was already on the ground. No weapon was found on or near him. The internal NYPD investigation ruled the officers had acted within policy.

A Bronx grand jury indicted the four officers on charges of second-degree murder and reckless endangerment in March 1999. The trial was moved to Albany due to pretrial publicity. On February 25, 2000, a jury of four Black and eight white jurors acquitted all four officers. The verdict detonated. Protests erupted across the city and nation. Civil rights leaders demanded federal intervention. In March 2000, the U.S. Department of Justice found that the Street Crime Unit engaged in systematic racial profiling. The Diallo family filed a $61 million lawsuit; they settled in 2004 for $3 million, one of the largest wrongful-death settlements in New York for a single person without dependents. In 2002, the Street Crime Unit was disbanded. Officer Kenneth Boss, who had previously been involved in the shooting of another unarmed Black man, was reassigned to desk duty but later had his firearm restored, was promoted to sergeant in 2015, and was named 'sergeant of the year' by his union the following year. He retired in 2019.

Diallo's killing inscribed itself into American culture with a force that outlasted the news cycle. Bruce Springsteen wrote 'American Skin (41 Shots),' which prompted a police boycott of his concerts. Wyclef Jean, Erykah Badu, Public Enemy, The Strokes, and Talib Kweli all recorded responses. Dead Prez embedded 41 tracks of silence into their album Let's Get Free. Art Spiegelman drew a police officer at a shooting gallery with a banner reading '41 shots 10 cents' for the cover of The New Yorker; 250 officers picketed the magazine's offices. Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, released a decade earlier, seemed prophetic. Diallo's mother, Kadiatou, published a memoir in 2003 and continued speaking publicly. In 2021, asked about the conviction of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd, she said it was 'a right step in the right direction' but that it was hard to tell if a corner had been turned. The vestibule on Wheeler Avenue where her son died holding his wallet has become one of the city's quiet landmarks -- a place where the distance between suspicion and death measured exactly the time it takes to reach for identification.