On the night of February 4, 1999, Amadou Diallo, an innocent and unarmed African immigrant, was shot and killed in a hail of 41 bullets while he was in the vestibule of his own apartment building in the Bronx. The officers responsible for Diallo's death were part of the New York Police Department's "elite" Street Crime Unit. The plainclothes officers approached Diallo and pulled out their weapons. When Diallo, probably believing them to be robbers, took out his wallet, the "elite" officers opened a barrage of 41 bullets on the unarmed black man. Witnesses and forensic evidence suggest that officers fired a second series of shots after a brief pause and that Diallo's frame absorbed most of the bullets after hitting the ground. These facts clearly show that Diallo's human and civil rights were violated that night and that these four white police officers are guilty of murder. However, they were acquitted of all charges. Thousands of people protested both the initial compensation and the acquittal more than a year later. This included a collective of Stanford students, who coordinated a demonstration of two hundred people on March 10, 2000 to protest the Diallo verdict and all other acts of police brutality. Over a thousand members of the Stanford community have signed petitions to the U.S. Department of Justice calling for a federal new trial. Ultimately, the problems of police brutality and racial profiling could be alleviated by racially sensitive police training, which requires officers to come from the neighborhoods they police. and, most importantly, decentralize the police department. This would include holding police officers accountable to an effective community-elected review board that would take the place of… half of the paper… yes, it is how institutionalized racism operates in this country. To be racist, therefore, one must have power over such institutions. Therefore, in America, minorities and people of color do not have the power to commit acts of institutionalized racism. In this country, only white people have the power to commit such acts on an institutionalized level. Furthermore, this system is based on maintaining skin privilege; therefore all white people, simply because of the color of their skin, benefit from this system at the expense of other races, and are therefore racist to some extent. This reality may be difficult for many to digest, but white people must be aware of their active and passive participation in this country's institutionalized racism before they can attempt to make meaningful changes to the status quo..