Once again, in New York City, cops charged with serious felony offenses after the shooting death of a black man who later proved to be unarmed have been acquitted.

If you have heard about the case, you probably know only that Sean Bell, the man who was killed, was due to be married the next day and that the three police officers discharged 50 bullets from their guns. What you may not know is that the bullets were fired outside a club known to be a drug den in the midst of a complicated melee late at night involving a violent confrontation on the sidewalk between civilians, a call for police backup, a cop knocked down by a fleeing car, a lot of screaming, and total confusion.

The number of bullets fired has been the mantra in this case — 50 shots, 50 shots. (A rapper named Papoose wrote a ditty with this as the subtitle, which is primarily notable for being the only work of hip-hop in which my name is mentioned.) But as the judge who decided the case indicated, the number of bullets fired is immaterial. The question is, did the police act so recklessly as to rise to a criminal standard? The answer, after two months of testimony, was that the witnesses on the scene were eminently untrustworthy in the claims they made about the misbehavior of the police officers.

It is true that police officers have a special responsibility because they are the only authorities inside the United States legally authorized to use deadly force. At the same time, they must be permitted to defend themselves against violent assault. It was clear, the day after the event, that everything went haywire on that Queens street — that there were scared and violent and drunken people acting up, that a cop was hit by a car, and that chaos ensued. What happened was a tragedy, but it was not a crime.

But there were crimes that followed it — political crimes of a sort, as a preening Mayor Mike Bloomberg all but declared the police officers in the case guilty before there had even been an investigation. So concerned was Bloomberg with the state of his own reputation as a racial healer that he allowed himself to be used as a prop by the most noxious person in New York, Al Sharpton, whose blood-stained hand a far better mayor than Bloomberg refused even to shake.

This is another detail to add to the proper accounting of Bloomberg’s problematic mayoralty.