A State Supreme Court justice said yesterday that ''white police have been virtually given a license to shoot and kill blacks with impunity'' and he warned black listeners to ''beware.''
''You are an endangered species,'' the judge, Bruce Wright, who is black, said in a speech at a conference on ''Issues Facing Minorities in the Law'' at New York Law School. ''Thus,'' he said, ''a legitimate issue and concern of minority students is survival.''
A police spokesman, Sgt. Edward Burns, said last night that the department would have no comment on Justice Wright's charges until it had read a text of the speech.
Similar Remarks Before
Justice Wright, 66 years old, has made similar comments before. In a 1979 address at Princeton University, he said jury acquittals virtually gave white police officers ''a license to hunt and kill blacks.''
A New York City Bar Association Committee called his comments ''unseemly'' and the judge allowed that his language might have been ''excessive.''
As a criminal court judge in the 1970's, Justice Wright was criticized by the police and Mayors Koch and John V. Lindsay for setting low bail for defendants. He was elected to Supreme Court in Manhattan in 1982 and has been assigned to the civil branch.
To back up his assertions, Justice Wright cited two 1970's cases in which white police officers fatally shot blacks and were acquitted of wrongdoing.
The first took place on April 28, 1973, on New York Boulevard in Jamaica, Queens. Thomas J. Shea, a 13-year veteran of the police force, was searching for two black men in their 20's who were accused of stealing a taxicab when he shot Clifford Glover, a 10-year- old black youth. The officer said the youth had ''made a reaching motion.''
A jury acquitted the officer of murder on June 12, 1974, but he was dismissed from the police force at a departmental trial that summer for ''wrongfully and without just cause'' firing the shots that caused the death.
Justice Wright said Mr. Shea had said ''the byword of American apartheid'' when he told the judge in the trial that he had ''paid no particular attention'' to height, weight or faces except ''just the color of the skin.''
The second incident Justice Wright cited was the slaying of Randolph Evans, a 15-year-old black youth, outside a Brooklyn housing project on Thanksgiving Day 1976 by a white police officer, Robert Torsney.
Officer Torsney, who was answering a call near the project, fired a single shot into the victim's head, killing him. The officer contended that he had fired after seeing the youth draw a gun, but witnesses and other police officers disputed this.
Rare Form of Epilepsy
The officer was acquitted after his attorney contended that he suffered from a rare form of psychomotor epilepsy. He was placed in a mental institution and released in 1979 after a court found he was not ''presently'' dangerous either to himself or to others.
''There are others you should not forget,'' Justice Wright said yesterday.
After he was appointed to the criminal court bench by Mayor Lindsay in 1970, the judge launched several attacks on what he perceived as racism in government, in the judiciary and among police officers and jail guards.
He has also been an outspoken proponent of using bail not as a means of detaining a defendant but of assuring his appearance at trial. Police officials criticized him for this policy when he freed without bail a man accused of slashing the throat of a police officer.
JUDGE SAYS POLICE HAVE A VIRTUAL 'LICENSE TO SHOOT AND KILL BLACKS' - NYTimes.com
