Knee-jerk reactions will send feet into the mouths of black and white communities.

If they respond to the Sean Bell shooting with the classic reactions that surround issues of race and police work, they'll get toenails caught in their throats.

"Every one of those police officers should be in jail for the rest of their lives, and after they die, they should go straight to hell," New York City councilman Charles Barron said just two days after the fatal shooting of Bell, reports the New York Times.

More than a week later, facts are still fuzzy about how Bell was gunned down the night before his wedding.

And the mayor and police commissioner are playing a guessing game with the scarce details available to them.

Just 48 hours after the horrible shooting though, Barron was more than ready to claim the police officers were on their way to perdition even when Bell's initial actions didn't reflect the most angelic of intentions.

Barron tore a page from former New York Mayor Giuliani's playbook when he chose a position so static in its ignorance.

After the intensely painful shooting of Amadou Diallo, an immigrant who was shot 19 times when police mistook him for a serial rapist, Giuliani was fast to repeat his stock defense of shaky police actions.

A jury did acquit the officers of criminal charges, but five years after his hard words, Giuliani swallowed his response when a $3,000,000 settlement came out of the city's pocket and landed in the hands of Diallo's family.

After New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly condemned his officers, Giuliani maintained his staple stance.

Whether or not Giuliani's and Barron's responses were racially motivated, they still followed the guidelines of hatred and ignorance: No matter what the situation, no matter how isolated or rare an incident, always choose one side.

Just as Giuliani sided with all cops, Barron sided with every non-cop.

Until communities break their provincial thought-boundaries, pre-determined mindsets that lay the groundwork for hatred and ignorance will pervade all statements and actions. The violent "explosion" in the black community that Barron promises us would do nothing except deepen the cerebral quicksand that has already gripped so many.

Diallo was an unarmed man who made a sudden move that brought about his sudden, unjustified death.

According to the first reports, Bell hit a police van and intentionally crashed into an undercover officer who had already identified himself.

The difference between "victim" and "criminal" is separated only by a few cryptic details of that night.

All we know for sure is that a man is dead and that New York's Police Commissioner agrees his death needs to be investigated.

In finding the root of these tragic shootings, race is a black, white, yellow and red herring.

Out of about 750,000 police officers in the United States, 51 were killed last year.

In the past, police fatalities in New York City alone easily topped 51 when America's police force was a fraction of today's.

Back then, most metropolitan police carried .38 caliber revolvers with six-shot capacities. Current armament is beefed up even though police deaths are markedly lower than in the past.

As Joseph McNamara, research fellow at Stanford University and former NYPD officer, notes, "Concern about such firepower in densely populated areas hitting innocent citizens has given way to an attitude that the police are fighting a war against drugs and crime and must be heavily armed."

Several bullets fired at Bell careened into nearby homes.

Community leaders should seek the police training reforms that Commissioner Kelly acknowledges are much needed instead of playing the race card.

The 2004 shooting of 19-year-old Timothy Stansbury contradicts that theory, though. An NYPD officer had his gun drawn and accidentally shot Stansbury when the teen stumbled into him on a roof.

Maybe it's the armament. Maybe it comes down to the individual police officer. Police have been working for more than 200 years in America, and mistakes still happen.

Amid the accidental shootings and wildly emotional nights that have wracked New York's communities, one thing remains certain.

Snap reactions, often in response to issues fraught with racial tension, only strengthen the essence of the very racism, ignorance and hatred that leaders and communities ostensibly seek to eliminate.