The events that took place in Jamaica, Queens, on Nov. 25, 2006, prove how media can negatively skew a situation and unjustly make New York City cops look like they use excessive force and endanger our lives.

Sean Bell was a 23-year-old black male leaving a strip club on that eventful Saturday morning. Undercover cops present at the time believed he and his group had a gun. After Bell got in his car and hit the car in front of him, police came up behind him and fired 50 bullets at Bell and his two friends, Joseph Guzman and Trent Benefield. The barrage of bullets left Bell dead and the other two with bullet holes comparable to that of 50 Cent.

Now is this really excessive force? Sure, compared to the 1999 shooting of Amadou Diallo in which only 41 bullets were fired at an unarmed man. In Diallo’s case he was pinned up against a door and had nowhere to go, while these guys were in a car. Now some may argue that the police rulebook forbids policemen to fire at a vehicle, and that after three shots are fired a cop needs to stop and re-asses the situation, but these rules aren’t meant to be taken literally. Sure, one of the officers stopped to reload his gun at least once during the shootout, but he only did so because he was afforded the opportunity since none of the other participants were shooting back, nor did they have guns for that matter.

You ask about reckless endangerment? Hardly. I mean sure, surveillance cameras at the nearby Port Authority Jamaica AirTrain station recorded one of the bullets fired by the cops shattering the station’s glass window and narrowly missing a civilian and two Port Authority patrolmen, but come on ‘ it’s Jamaica, Queens ‘ chances are even if that civilian was shot standing in a train station at four in the morning, he was a criminal. At least police could pull up his rap sheet and mention all his previous arrests like they did with Bell and try to make the shooting more justifiable.

Being a police officer isn’t like any other position that has consequences for not following the rules, and we definitely need to give them a little leeway. Cops need to be held to a lower standard since they have so many rules to learn and follow, and we should understand if they get confused. They are there to protect us, which they do, and if they screw up once in a while, it’ll end in a wash; so I don’t know what the big deal is.

There was a time where cops could just cover themselves by planting evidence or, as Dave Chappelle suggests, sprinkling the bodies with crack. But today is different. It’s sad that these cops have to resort to this kind of scrutiny, even after explaining there was an unidentified fourth black male who ran off with all of Bell’s guns. A story so original has to be true.