Oscar-winning actress Susan Sarandon is among more than one thousand people arrested in protests of the Diallo police shooting

				The Shooting of Amadou Diallo
				Full coverage Chronology of events Articles in the archives Biographies of Diallo and the officers Discuss the case on our message board Mar. 31: Officers charged with second-degree murder Mar. 16: Giuliani's popularity plummets after shooting Feb. 16: Protests spread to Guinea Feb. 12: Thousands attend memorial service Feb. 5: New York awaits answers in police slaying

NEW YORK (Court TV) — It appears that the four white officers who shot down African immigrant Amadou Diallo in a barrage of 41 bullets last month will stand trial for second-degree murder.

The Bronx grand jury hearing evidence in the case wrapped up its inquiry Thursday but will not release the indictments publicly until next week.

However, sources close to the case spread the word to the media that the jury had sealed the indictments for second-degree murder, which means intentionally killing someone due to a "depraved indifference to human life" and carries a maximum sentence of 25 years to life in prison.

Despite the news of the pending indictments, the daily protests outside police headquarters in Manhattan continued unabated Friday. More than thousand people have been arrested.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson was arrested Friday, joining the honor roll of the handcuffed that includes NAACP president Kweisi Mfume, actresses Susan Sarandon and Ruby Dee, and former New York City Mayor David Dinkins.

"Indictment is only the first step," said protestor Yee Ling Poon, an attorney from Chinatown. "I am going to stay out here until the whole attitude toward minorities changes."

A 22-year-old street vendor from the French-speaking country of Guinea, Diallo was killed on Feb. 4 outside his apartment building in the South Bronx, shot 19 times by officers Kenneth Boss, Sean Carroll, Edward McMellon, and Richard Murphy.

The four officers, members of the elite Street Crime Unit, were searching for a rape suspect when they encountered Diallo and approached him, in plainclothes, with guns drawn.

They may have thought Diallo had a gun, or that he was the rape suspect in question, but he turned out to be unarmed and had no police record.

Diallo's violent death, splashed across headlines the following morning, galvanized blacks and Latinos already frustrated by what they call overly aggressive and discriminatory police tactics, and the Mayor's lack of ties to minority leaders.

"It's pay-back time in some respects with that community," said former police commissioner William Bratton, on a local television show.

The anger has proved contagious. At daily protests over the last two weeks, black activist the Rev. Al Sharpton has been joined by Asian and Latino leaders, rabbis and other Jewish leaders, union heads, college students of all races, and their professors.

"I look out here today and I see blacks, whites, Asians, Latinos, men and women, moving from battleground to common ground and the moral ground," Jesse Jackson proclaimed on Friday. "This is a great day. A day of joy. A day of hope."

The protests now focus as much on Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's administration as on the Diallo shooting that sparked them.

Several city college professors said they attended because they were angry not just about police brutality but about Giuliani's treatment of the city college system.

The indictment, and even the possible conviction, of the four officers is unlikely to end the furor, which is fuelled by a continuing flood of allegations of routine disrespect and outright abuse by the police.

High school students with babies say they are harassed by police as they board the subways with a student pass because the police are apparently unaware that dozens of high schools offer day care for teen parents.

Minority students in private-school uniforms say they are frequently late for school because they've been stopped and questioned because police don't believe they attend those schools.

A white attorney living in a predominantly minority community says he was thrown up against his car and searched because the police suspected he was buying drugs.

And a city of residents grateful for the steep decline in crime suddenly starts to wonder what price minority neighborhoods have paid for its new-found sense of security.

That question, and the protestors' abiding anger, extends far beyond the fates of the four relatively young officers whose careers appear to have been abruptly cut off mid-course.

After being promoted to the Street Crimes Unit only a year or two ago, all four are expected to turn in their badges on Monday when the indictment are made public.

One of the officers, Kenneth Boss, 27, shot and killed a suspect in 1997, but he had also received 23 citations and two awards from the police department. He fired at Diallo five times.

Another officer, 26, Richard Murphy, had made 120 arrests in his four years of service without ever firing a shot or receiving a single civilian complaint. He fired at Diallo four times on Feb. 4.

Edward McMellon, 26 and Sean Carroll, 35, both unloaded the 16 shots in their 9-millimeter pistols at Diallo. Both McMellon and Carroll had been on active duty with the unit for just a few months before the shooting.

"As sure as I was that he was going to be indicted, that's how sure I am that he's going to be acquitted," said Marvyn Kornberg, Carroll's lawyer.

City officials, defending the police's record while commiserating about the tragedy, have not yet offered an answer for the widespread allegations against the police.

Police Commissioner Howard Safir has refused even to say how many of the Street Crimes Unit officers are white, but 90 percent is estimated.

Some answers may be found in the federal and state investigations of the New York police launched in the wake of the Diallo shooting.

The Justice Dept., the state Attorney General, and the U.S. Civil Rights Commission are all studying complaints of civil rights violations and police brutality.

Regardless of those investigations, politicians and civic leaders worry that the breach of trust between minority communities and City Hall may hamper efforts to continue to reduce the crime rate.

Protestors gathered outside a mayoral town hall meeting Thursday night in Brooklyn to denounce Giuliani, but inside the hall, he received a friendlier welcome, suggesting that some New Yorkers may feel, enough is enough.

Court TV's Catherine Heins and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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