From Wallet to Water Bottle: What Have We Learned Since Amadou Diallo?

The fatal police shooting of 17-year-old Anthoneil Williams II raises an old question—and a more important one: Could better policing have prevented officers from ever having to make a split-second decision?

More than 27 years ago, four New York City police officers approached Amadou Diallo outside his Bronx apartment building shortly after midnight. When Diallo reached toward his clothing, the officers believed he was reaching for a gun.

They fired 41 shots.

Diallo was struck 19 times and killed. He was unarmed. The object in his hand was his wallet.

The shooting became one of the defining police-use-of-force controversies of its generation. The officers were prosecuted and acquitted. The U.S. Department of Justice later concluded that the evidence was insufficient to establish a federal criminal civil-rights violation.

More than a quarter century later, the fatal police shooting of 17-year-old Anthoneil Williams II in Austin, Texas, presents an unsettling comparison.

This time, the object was not a wallet.

It was a water bottle.

What Happened in Austin?

According to currently available public information, shortly before 4:00 a.m. on July 24, 2026, Austin police received a 911 report concerning a teenager at a neighborhood park who might have a gun. Authorities subsequently determined that the call apparently originated from Williams’s own phone.

Williams arrived at the park and sat there for several minutes before officers arrived.

Video released after the shooting reportedly shows officers encountering Williams shortly after 4:00 a.m. Upon information and belief, Williams initially had his hands raised. When his hand appeared to move toward his waistband, officers opened fire.

Williams fell behind the playground structure. He subsequently moved while on the ground, and two officers fired again.

Williams had no firearm.

Police recovered a water bottle from his waistband.

Austin Police Chief Lisa Davis has characterized the incident as potentially “suicide by police.” The shooting remains under investigation, and no court has determined that the officers violated Williams’s constitutional rights.

But the circumstances demand a broader inquiry than simply asking whether officers could have perceived Williams’s final movement as threatening.

From Diallo’s Wallet to Williams’s Water Bottle

The comparison with Amadou Diallo is difficult to ignore.

Diallo was unarmed. Williams was unarmed.

Police interpreted Diallo’s movement as indicating a firearm threat. Police apparently interpreted Williams’s movement toward his waistband the same way.

Diallo had a wallet.

Williams had a water bottle.

In both encounters, officers ultimately confronted an ambiguous movement and had seconds to determine whether it represented a deadly threat.

But focusing exclusively on those final seconds misses perhaps the most important lesson.

We have had more than a quarter century since Amadou Diallo to improve police training, tactics, communications, crisis intervention, de-escalation and decision-making.

The question should therefore not be limited to:

Were the officers justified in firing at the precise instant Williams moved toward his waistband?

We should also ask:

How did the encounter reach that point—and could reasonable police tactics have prevented it from getting there?

4:00 A.M. Is Not 4:00 P.M.

Context matters.

Imagine police receive a call at 4:00 p.m. reporting an armed individual threatening people in a crowded park. Children are playing nearby. Families are present. The reported individual is moving toward others.

Officers may have seconds to intervene before someone is seriously injured or killed. The governmental interest in immediate action could hardly be greater.

Now change the circumstances.

It is 4:00 a.m.

The park is essentially deserted. There is no crowd requiring immediate protection. No hostage has been identified. No shooting has occurred. There apparently is no victim telling police that someone just threatened him with a firearm.

Instead, officers encounter a 17-year-old alone in a park after an unusual 911 call that police would later determine apparently originated from the teenager himself.

Those circumstances matter.

They potentially give officers one of the most valuable resources available in a dangerous encounter:

Time.

Time to establish distance.

Time to take cover.

Time to contain the area.

Time to communicate.

Time to gather information from dispatch.

Time to recognize indicators of a possible mental-health crisis.

Time to summon appropriate resources.

And, where feasible, time to slow an encounter down rather than compressing it into a binary choice between immediate compliance and deadly force.

De-escalation does not require officers to gamble with their lives. Nor does it require officers to wait until someone points a firearm at them before responding to a genuine lethal threat.

It means using available tactical advantages to avoid unnecessarily creating a situation in which officers and civilians are left with only terrible options.

The Supreme Court Has Rejected “Chronological Blinders”

This distinction is not merely a policy argument.

In 2025, the United States Supreme Court unanimously decided Barnes v. Felix, a police-shooting case that arose in Texas.

The lower courts had applied the Fifth Circuit’s “moment-of-threat” doctrine. Under that approach, the court effectively isolated the final seconds before the officer fired and asked whether the officer reasonably perceived a threat at that precise moment.

The Supreme Court rejected that approach.

The Fourth Amendment requires examination of the totality of the circumstances. Although the circumstances at the instant an officer fires will often be particularly important, relevant events leading up to the shooting cannot simply be excluded from consideration.

As the Supreme Court memorably explained, courts evaluating a police shooting cannot put on “chronological blinders.”

That principle is particularly important when considering the Williams shooting.

What did officers know from the 911 call?

What information was communicated by dispatch?

What did they know about the person they were approaching?

What threat existed to other people at 4:00 a.m. in that park?

What distance existed between Williams and the officers?

What cover was available?

How quickly did officers close distance?

Could the scene have been contained?

Were there indications that Williams might be experiencing a mental-health crisis?

What efforts, if any, were made to slow the encounter down?

The ultimate legal significance of those facts will depend upon evidence that has not yet been fully developed.

But after Barnes, the legal analysis cannot simply begin and end with: He reached toward his waistband.

The “Life-or-Death Decision” Rebuttal Misses the Larger Question

After controversial police shootings, one response is nearly inevitable:

Police officers have to make life-or-death decisions in fractions of a second.

Sometimes they unquestionably do.

But that observation can become a distraction if it prevents examination of everything that happened before that fraction of a second.

Police departments train officers precisely because police work involves dangerous and rapidly changing situations. Training, supervision, tactical planning, communication and de-escalation exist to help officers manage dangerous encounters before the only remaining choices are shoot or don’t shoot.

So the question is not simply:

Did the officer have only a second to decide?

Sometimes the more revealing question is:

Why did the officer have only a second to decide?

Was that unavoidable because the individual suddenly created an immediate threat?

Or did officers have time, distance, cover and other tactical options that could reasonably have reduced the danger?

Those are different cases.

And treating every police shooting as beginning at the instant an officer perceives a weapon—or what the officer believes may be a weapon—risks ignoring precisely the context the Supreme Court has said matters.

Austin Is Now Asking the Same Question

The Williams shooting has already become part of a broader debate in Austin about how the city responds to emergencies involving mental-health crises.

In August, the Austin City Council approved a plan to move 911 call-taking out of the Austin Police Department and into a standalone civilian emergency-communications office.

The change followed years of debate over Austin’s emergency-response system, but Williams’s death intensified calls for reform.

Council Member Mike Siegel identified the underlying problem directly: police officers are sometimes dispatched to mental-health crises when another type of response may be more appropriate. Sending police, he observed, can sometimes make a crisis more dangerous both for the person experiencing it and for the responding officers.

That point deserves attention.

This is not an argument against police.

It is an argument for sending the right responder, with the right training, to the right emergency.

Austin already has experience with alternative approaches. Its Austin FIRST program combines a mental-health clinician, a paramedic and a specially trained police officer for certain serious mental-health calls.

The policy question raised by Williams’s death is therefore not whether society needs police officers.

Of course it does.

The question is whether an armed police response should automatically become the primary response to every crisis simply because the person in distress entered the emergency system through 911.

Good public safety requires more than rapid response.

It requires the right response.

Every Volley Deserves Separate Scrutiny

There is another aspect of the Williams shooting that deserves particular attention: the additional gunfire after Williams had fallen.

The law does not measure the reasonableness of deadly force simply by counting bullets. When an officer is justified in firing to stop an ongoing deadly threat, the Constitution does not necessarily require the officer to stop after some predetermined number of shots.

But the justification for deadly force lasts only as long as the threat that justified it.

That makes the chronology critical.

Where was Williams when the first shots were fired?

Where were his hands?

How far was he from each officer?

What could each officer actually see?

When did Williams fall?

What movement did officers observe while he was on the ground?

How much time elapsed before the subsequent shots?

Which officers fired during each sequence?

And most importantly:

Did Williams still present an immediate threat when officers fired again?

Those questions are not technicalities. They are central to determining whether each use of deadly force was reasonable.

“Suicide by Police” Should Not End the Inquiry

Chief Davis’s suggestion that Williams may have intended to provoke officers into killing him raises profound questions about what happened that morning.

But even if investigators ultimately conclude that Williams intended to cause police to shoot him, that does not answer whether the police response was reasonable.

A person experiencing a suicidal or mental-health crisis may behave irrationally. He may ignore commands. He may even deliberately create the appearance of danger.

That makes the officer’s job extraordinarily difficult.

But it also makes crisis-intervention training, communication, distance, containment and de-escalation especially important when circumstances permit them.

“Suicide by police” may ultimately help explain Williams’s behavior.

It should not become a phrase that ends examination of the government’s behavior.

Twenty-Seven Years Later, What Have We Learned?

Technology has changed dramatically since Amadou Diallo was killed.

Officers routinely wear body cameras. Dispatch systems are more sophisticated. Police departments have decades of additional research concerning use of force. Crisis-intervention programs exist. De-escalation training is widespread. Cities increasingly recognize that some emergency calls require mental-health professionals rather than—or alongside—traditional law enforcement.

The law has evolved as well.

The Supreme Court has now made clear that courts examining police force cannot simply isolate the final instant of an encounter while ignoring relevant context that preceded it.

Yet more than 27 years after a wallet was mistaken for a firearm in the Bronx, we are discussing a 17-year-old killed in Texas after officers apparently interpreted movement toward a water bottle as a lethal threat.

The lesson from Diallo should not merely have been:

Look more carefully before deciding that an object is a gun.

The larger lesson is that good policing should seek, whenever circumstances reasonably permit, to create time, distance, communication and tactical options before an ambiguous movement becomes a fatal one.

Police officers should not be expected to sacrifice their lives or wait for a gun to be pointed at them before protecting themselves or others.

But communities should not be required to accept preventable deaths merely because the final second of an encounter was dangerous.

The measure of effective policing cannot be limited to whether an officer survived the final second.

It must also include how effectively the preceding minutes were managed so that, whenever reasonably possible, that final second never arrives.

Vince F. Sykes, Esq.

Sykes & Associates Law Firm

This article provides general commentary concerning constitutional and civil-rights issues based on publicly available information. The investigation into the death of Anthoneil Williams II remains ongoing, and no court has determined that the officers involved violated his constitutional rights. Additional evidence may materially affect the legal analysis.