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History > 2014 > USA > Violence > Police (II)
Officer Ramos’s widow, Maritza Ramos, center,
flanked by sons Justin, left, and Jaden, right.
Photograph: Todd Heisler
The New York Times
A Sea of Blue, Mourning the First of Two Slain Comrades
At Funeral for Officer Rafael Ramos, Police Department’s
Solidarity Is on Display
NYT
DEC. 26, 2014
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/28/nyregion/funeral-for-slain-nypd-officer-rafael-ramos.html
Crowd Gathers in Brooklyn
to Protest a Police Shooting
DEC. 27, 2014
The New York Times
By DAN GLAUN
About 200 people marched through the East New York section of
Brooklyn on Saturday afternoon to protest the death of Akai Gurley, an unarmed
black man who was fatally shot last month by a police officer in a
public-housing project stairwell.
Mr. Gurley’s relatives led the demonstration from the building in the Louis H.
Pink Houses where the shooting occurred to a nearby police command post.
The protest began shortly after the close of funeral services for Officer Rafael
Ramos, who was shot to death in his patrol car along with Officer Wenjian Liu on
Dec. 20. By marching, those on hand were defying Mayor Bill de Blasio’s request
that protesters suspend their activities in the wake of the police killings.
“Every 28 hours a person is killed in the United States by a police officer or
authority figure or vigilante, and nothing stops for them,” said Kirbie Joseph,
an organizer of the march. “Everything goes business as usual, and so we can’t
stop.”
Mr. Gurley, 28, was killed on Nov. 20 in a Pink Houses stairwell while walking
with his girlfriend. Officer Peter Liang was conducting a so-called vertical
patrol in the building at the time and had his gun drawn. The weapon fired,
killing Mr. Gurley in what Police Commissioner William J. Bratton has described
as “an unfortunate accident.”
Demonstrators have not accepted that explanation. Mr. Gurley, whose death is the
subject of an inquiry by the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, has joined
Eric Garner and Michael Brown, both of whom died at the hands of police officers
this year, as a symbolic figure among those calling for an end to what they
consider a pattern of police violence against unarmed black people.
The protesters in Brooklyn repeated several of the chants heard at
demonstrations in New York and elsewhere in recent weeks — including “Hands up!
Don’t shoot!” and “I can’t breathe!” — and intoned Mr. Gurley’s name from the
steps of the building where he was killed.
A version of this article appears in print on December 28, 2014,
on page A28 of the New York edition with the headline: Crowd Gathers in Brooklyn
to Protest a Police Shooting.
Crowd Gathers in Brooklyn to Protest a Police
Shooting, NYT, 27.12.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/28/nyregion/
crowd-gathers-in-brooklyn-to-protest-a-police-shooting.html
De Blasio Delivers Quiet Eulogy
to Crowd of Unfriendly Faces,
and Many Backs
DEC. 27, 2014
The New York Times
By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM
He sat stoically in the church’s front pew, his wife at his side,
watching as the vice president spoke in booming tones and the governor told
jokes that earned some chuckles, even on this painful day.
When it was his turn to speak, he approached the stage with his face downcast,
and — finding the lectern too short for his liking — hunched his shoulders, as
if trying to recede from his own imposing frame.
Mayor Bill de Blasio is typically a baroque public speaker. On Saturday, at the
funeral of one of the police officers whose shooting deaths have roiled New York
City, at times he spoke barely above a whisper.
At the most difficult time in his mayoralty, with his leadership questioned by
police and protesters alike, Mr. de Blasio appeared to take pains to avoid
standing out.
There were no bold pronouncements, and the mayor did not promise — on this day,
anyway — to lead the city out of its current strife. After telling the family of
the officer, Rafael Ramos, that “our hearts are aching today,” Mr. de Blasio
offered plain-spoken praise for the Police Department, whose support for him,
never strong, has crumbled in recent weeks.
“I extend my condolences to another family, the family of the N.Y.P.D. that is
hurting so deeply right now,” the mayor said. In a 10-minute speech, he quoted
from the New Testament, saying, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” and described how
police officers “help make a place that otherwise would be torn with strife a
place of peace.”
After the service, Mr. de Blasio and his wife, Chirlane McCray, greeted and
embraced Officer Ramos’s widow and sons; they spoke for several minutes.
For some angered by Mr. de Blasio’s handling of the Police Department, whose
practices he had criticized in his mayoral bid last year, his gestures rang
hollow. Outside the church, scores of mourning police officers turned their
backs as the mayor began his remarks.
Police union leaders said the response had not been an organized protest. Still,
it was a sign of the discontent that Mr. de Blasio now faces.
On Saturday, the mayor stayed close by his police commissioner, William J.
Bratton. Arriving at the church in Glendale, Queens, a few minutes before 10
a.m., Mr. de Blasio looked downward until spotting Mr. Bratton; the men
embraced, along with their wives.
Lining up for the procession afterward, the mayor stood beside Mr. Bratton,
whose eulogy included an impassioned call for protesters and police officers to
unite. “When we see each other, we’ll heal,” the commissioner said. “We’ll heal
as a department. We’ll heal as a city.”
Mr. de Blasio has made few public appearances since Officer Ramos and his
partner, Officer Wenjian Liu, were fatally shot in Brooklyn on Dec. 20.
The mayor has avoided unscripted interactions with the news media, taking no
questions from reporters since Monday afternoon. On Friday, his aides would not
disclose his location until after 9 p.m., moments before he arrived for the
final minutes of a wake and memorial service for Officer Ramos.
Advisers to the mayor say Mr. de Blasio is intent on following the advice he has
publicly given to elected officials, demonstrators and police groups: avoid
divisive rhetoric and focus on the slain officers’ families.
In crafting the eulogy, the mayor’s speechwriters worked with officials at the
Police Department. Mr. de Blasio finished editing the remarks on Friday night at
Gracie Mansion.
Still, his attempts to stay above the fray have been complicated by his role in
the tensions, with some police groups accusing Mr. de Blasio of fueling
anti-police sentiment by condoning street demonstrations and describing how he
has warned his biracial son, Dante, about encounters with the police. On Friday,
a group of critics paid for an airplane to fly above the Hudson River with a
banner that said, “De Blasio, our backs have turned to you.”
His team has also been stretched thin by the holiday schedule.
Fred Siegel, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a past
adviser to former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, said Mr. de Blasio was “making up
lost ground” by praising the police in his funeral remarks and recognizing that
the department was in pain.
“This is what he had to say,” Mr. Siegel said, “and he did it very well.”
Nelson Schwartz contributed reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on December 28, 2014, on page A26 of
the New York edition with the headline: De Blasio Delivers Quiet Eulogy to Crowd
of Unfriendly Faces, and Many Backs.
De Blasio Delivers Quiet Eulogy to Crowd of
Unfriendly Faces,
and Many Backs, NYT, 27.12.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/28/nyregion/
de-blasio-delivers-quiet-eulogy-to-crowd-of-unfriendly-faces-and-many-backs.html
A Sea of Blue,
Mourning the First
of Two Slain Comrades
At Funeral for Officer Rafael Ramos,
Police Department’s Solidarity Is on Display
DEC. 26, 2014
The New York Times
By N. R. KLEINFIELD
The broad Queens avenue began filling with blue coats early. The
footsteps of the saddened officers, the buzz of police talk, fed the medley of
sounds of an apprehensive city shaking itself awake.
The temperature was generous for the season. Christmas decorations bedecked
doorways and windows, clashing with the morning’s solemn event: the funeral of a
police officer whose barbaric death has sliced deep into the city’s conscience
and tested its character.
On Saturday, one week removed from the slayings, the city wept for an officer,
Rafael Ramos, N.Y.P.D. Shield No. 6335, who was murdered Dec. 20 along with
another officer for their choice of occupation.
The turnout was extraordinary. Though no reliable count was made, it appeared
that more than 20,000 police officers came to Queens, from as far away as
Wisconsin and California and England, some driving through the night to make it.
Bordering streets were shut to traffic for blocks around. Traffic lights
continued to change their colors, but there was no traffic, nothing but thick
rows of police officers as far as anyone could see.
In these unsettled times, with police officers cautioned against operating
alone, about wearing their uniforms when they did not need to, here they were
everywhere, melded together and advertising who they were. For the funeral was
as much about policing and those who attack it as about a single man. Besides
the usual official presence of the governor, the mayor and the police
commissioner, this ceremony brought the vice president of the United States.
Rudy Zotter, 51 and retired from the Special Victims Unit, has grieved at 88
police funerals across 30 years. “This funeral is different from all funerals
I’ve been to because right now there’s a public outcry in law enforcement,” he
said. “With the beatings law enforcement has taken all over the country, this is
a way of everyone showing support in a friendly way.”
Few of the arrivals had met this particular officer. He came to police work late
and had not done it long. He was 40 and knew the job for just three years. But
his end came engulfed in symbolism. There were the haunting echoes from past
murders of police officers. And there was the overlay of the persisting protests
over race and policing that have followed Eric Garner’s death by chokehold on
Staten Island in July and that of Michael Brown, shot by a police officer in
Ferguson, Mo., in August. In neither case were the officers involved indicted.
The brief seconds of the killings are well-known. Officer Ramos sat with his
partner, Wenjian Liu, in a squad car, on a Brooklyn street corner on an
unremarkable afternoon. Without warning or provocation, the officers were gunned
down execution-style by an assassin expressing an intent to end the lives of
police officers. The killer, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, then shot himself on a nearby
subway platform.
The service for Officer Ramos was held at Christ Tabernacle Church in the
Glendale neighborhood. It is a brick, flat-roofed structure, reimagined from a
movie theater and a dress store, nestled in a lively commercial strip.
Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story
Continue reading the main story
The church can seat 850, hopelessly inadequate for the swell of attendees. The
enormous overflow crowd gathered outside in the mild Queens air. Those who could
edge near enough stood and saw the proceedings unspool on several huge screens.
Officer Ramos’s widow, Maritza, and his two teenage sons, Justin and Jayden, sat
up front. They knew this church on better occasions.
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., dispatched by President Obama, spoke
movingly of the courage of policing. “When an assassin’s bullet targeted two
officers, it targeted this city and it touched the soul of an entire nation,” he
said.
He referenced a headstone in Ireland that reads: “Death leaves a heartache no
one can heal. Love leaves a memory that no one can steal.”
Speaking next, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said, “We want every N.Y.P.D. officer to
know that they are not alone. Every New Yorker stands with you today.”
He drew laughs when he said that Officer Ramos’s sons were Mets fans.
He was followed by Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has been struggling with the
fallout since the shootings, as many officers on the city’s force have found him
disrespectful and unsupportive.
Photo
The killings of the two officers come at a time of rising tension between the
public and the police, and at a moment when relations with Mayor Bill de Blasio
have been poor. Credit Robert Stolarik for The New York Times
In his remarks, Mr. de Blasio also praised the Police Department and Officer
Ramos. “Our hearts are aching today,” he said. “New York City has lost a hero.”
Mr. de Blasio spoke of how Officer Ramos played basketball in the park with his
sons and blasted Spanish gospel music from his car, and how he “embodied a
powerful idea. If your way isn’t working, try God’s way.”
As he began to speak, a sizable pocket of officers gathered outside before one
of the screens turned their backs to his image. The New York City officers
swiveled around first, and then were imitated by officers from other
departments.
Asked whether they faced away because the mayor was speaking, one of them slowly
nodded his head.
Afterward, a mayoral spokesman said, “Our sole focus is unifying this city and
honoring the lives of our two police officers.”
Police Commissioner William J. Bratton noted how he has been coming to police
funerals for 54 years and every time he attends another one, “I always pray it
will be the last. But I know it won’t.”
Officer Liu’s funeral awaits the arrival of relatives from China.
Mr. Bratton said that the police are “the blue thread that holds the city
together when disorder might pull it apart.”
He urged everyone to “learn to see each other” as a means to halt the anger
against the police.
He said that Officer Ramos had been studying to become a minister one day, and
so he was appointing the officer the honorary chaplain of the 84th Precinct in
which he served. He was also promoted posthumously to detective first grade.
The eulogies and prayers ended, the stream of officers stood stock-still and
erect and watched the coffin, concealed beneath the green-blue-and-white police
flag, carried out on the shoulders of six officers and guided into the back of a
hearse. A pair of buglers played taps from an elevated platform. Police
helicopters roared overhead in missing-man formation, alerting the skies that
one of the department’s 35,000 was no longer among them.
Hundreds of motorcycles, lights blinking, hailing from police departments across
the country, thundered down the street, followed by bagpipers and drummers
beating black-draped drums.
Under wrinkled clouds, the hearse came next. As it passed, the men saluted with
their gloved hand. The hearse gathered speed and dwindled into the distance,
carrying a man who died because he wore the badge.
Correction: December 27, 2014
An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misspelled the given
name of one of Officer Ramos’s sons. He is Jaden Ramos, not Jayden.
Sandra E. Garcia, Elizabeth A. Harris and Marc Santora contributed reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on December 28, 2014, on page A1 of
the New York edition with the headline: A Vast Sea of Blue, Mourning the First
of Two Slain Comrades.
A Sea of Blue, Mourning the First of Two Slain
Comrades, NYT, 26.12.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/28/nyregion/
funeral-for-slain-nypd-officer-rafael-ramos.html
Arizona Police Officer and Suspect
Die in Shootings
DEC. 27, 2014
The New York Times
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ
A police officer in Flagstaff, Ariz., was killed Saturday
afternoon in a shootout while investigating a domestic violence case, the police
said.
The gunman then fatally shot himself, the authorities said.
The officer, Tyler Jacob Stewart, 24, was the first Flagstaff officer to die in
the line of duty in 13 years, and only the second fatality in the history of the
Flagstaff Police Department, according to the authorities.
Officer Stewart was investigating the case on the west side of Flagstaff when a
man opened fire; Officer Stewart was struck several times, the police said.
The gunman, who had contacted Officer Stewart after a domestic violence episode
at a different location earlier in the day, then shot himself, the police said.
He was identified as Robert W. Smith, 28, of Prescott, Ariz., about 90 miles
southwest of Flagstaff.
Officer Stewart was taken to Flagstaff Medical Center, where he died shortly
afterward. A police spokeswoman, Margaret Bentzen, said officials believed that
Officer Stewart had not been able to return fire, although the shooting was
still under investigation. Mr. Smith’s motive was not immediately clear.
Ms. Bentzen said Officer Stewart joined the police force in Flagstaff less than
a year ago. He is survived by his parents and a girlfriend.
According to Ms. Bentzen, the last killing of a Flagstaff police officer
occurred in 2001. “We’ve been fortunate, until today,” she said.
A version of this article appears in print on December 28, 2014, on page A27 of
the New York edition with the headline: Officer and Gunman Die in a Shootout in
Arizona.
Arizona Police Officer and Suspect Die in
Shootings, NYT, 27.12.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/28/us/
arizona-police-officer-and-suspect-die-in-shootout.html
After Killing of Police Officers,
Protest Movement
Is at a Crossroads
DEC. 25, 2014
The New York Times
N.Y. / Region
By NIKITA STEWART
City Council members took to the streets in New York to block
traffic in solidarity with the demonstrators demanding changes in policing. The
Council speaker opened a meeting of her fellow Council members with a call to
utter the protest mantra, “I can’t breathe,” the final words of a Staten Island
man killed by a police chokehold. And last Friday, the mayor sat down with
leaders of the demonstrations, heeding their appeal for a face-to-face meeting
even as they vowed to continue disrupting the city.
The gestures served as an unabashed embrace by the city’s unabashedly liberal
elected leaders, a sign that protest organizers, after weeks in the streets, had
begun the process of channeling raw anger into real change.
Then, on Saturday, in the seconds it took to shoot two officers dead in
Brooklyn, the ground shifted beneath the marching feet of the thousands of
people who had made New York the center of protests over the killing of unarmed
black men by the police.
Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were gunned down on Saturday afternoon as
they sat in their patrol car at a busy intersection in Bedford-Stuyvesant. They
were killed by a man who hours earlier announced his intentions on Instagram and
invoked the names of Eric Garner, the Staten Island man killed by the chokehold
in July, and Michael Brown, the man killed by the Ferguson, Mo., police in
August. The gunman, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, 28, killed himself minutes later, the
police said.
The killing of the officers, coming five days before Christmas, stunned the city
into collective mourning. In an instant, criticism of the police seemed out of
touch. “Die-ins,” which had become a staple of demonstrations in Grand Central
Terminal, City Hall and elsewhere, suddenly struck a discordant note. And as the
city prepared to bury Officer Ramos on Saturday, Mayor Bill de Blasio asked the
protesters to suspend their demonstrations until the officers’ funerals were
over.
The groups had already been grappling with their future, working on ways to
retain the energy and diversity of the younger protesters while exploiting the
organizational assets of established civil rights groups.
Now, they face an even more pointed test.
“This is par for the course,” the Rev. Michael A. Walrond Jr. told protesters
after a march through Harlem on Sunday, the day after the officers were killed.
“You were called for such a time as this. Don’t get tired. Don’t get weary.”
Indeed, though some groups were willing to stand down, others balked. Along with
the protest on Sunday, led by Justice League NYC, a demonstration was held on
Tuesday along Fifth Avenue. Another protest is to take place in Brooklyn on
Saturday, the day of the funeral for Officer Ramos.
Joo-Hyun Kang, executive director of Communities United for Police Reform, said
halting the protests would be misguided.
“It is wrong to connect the isolated act of one man who killed N.Y.P.D. officers
to a nonviolent mass movement,” she said.
“Silencing the countless voices of New Yorkers who are seeking justice, dignity
and respect for all, is a mistake.”
Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story
On Monday, the group Ferguson Action tweeted, “The N.Y.P.D. wants to use this
tragedy to silence this movement. Not gonna happen.”
Ashley Yates, a member of Ferguson Action and a co-founder of Millennial
Activists United, said she knew immediately that the officers’ deaths would
cause some backlash. But the call for a protest suspension surprised her.
“Once we were asked to cease our protests, that was affirmation that we could
not cease,” said Ms. Yates, 29, who lives in St. Louis but joined protests in
New York after the Staten Island grand jury declined to charge a police officer
in Mr. Garner’s case.
“They’re telling us that our grief doesn’t matter,” she said.
For some who share the protesters’ concerns, the insistence on pressing on in
spite of the funerals is damaging.
“I don’t think the protesters do themselves a favor by protesting until after
these officers are laid to rest,” said Ruben Diaz Jr., the Bronx borough
president.
Mr. Diaz, echoing some other elected leaders, said the groups were costing
themselves support with their disruptive tactics. “They’re losing favor with a
lot of New Yorkers,” he said.
Michael Kazin, a Georgetown University professor who studies protest movements,
said the strongest ones can survive a lot of animosity and adversity.
“In the antiwar movement, too, there was a lot of bad publicity given people
burning draft cards and burning flags,” Professor Kazin said. “But the movement
went on and was successful in convincing the public that we needed to get out of
Vietnam.”
Obstacles, he said, are inevitable. “In some ways, the test of a successful
movement is how you respond. You have to expect that there will be moments like
this in a movement. If you don’t, you’re naïve and you don’t know what you got
yourself into,” he said.
Just how dramatic the turnabout has been in New York could be measured by a
scene that unfolded this week at City Hall. There were no Council members
blocking traffic. There were no choruses of “I can’t breathe.” And there were no
mayoral meetings with protesters.
Instead, there was unstinting praise for the police from the Council speaker,
Melissa Mark-Viverito, who earlier this month had asked her colleagues to repeat
“I can’t breathe” 11 times, for the number of times Mr. Garner said those words
before he died in the encounter with the police.
“We are here to send a simple and direct message: that we unequivocally support,
appreciate and value our police officers, that we condemn any and all violence
against them, that we must end hateful and divisive rhetoric which seeks to
demonize officers and their work,” Ms. Mark-Viverito, flanked by fellow Council
members, said at a news conference.
Tanzina Vega and Vivian Yee contributed reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on December 26, 2014, on page A22 of
the New York edition with the headline: After Killing of 2 Officers, a Reversal
in Some Attitudes Toward the Police.
After Killing of Police Officers, Protest
Movement Is at a Crossroads,
NYT, 25.12.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/26/nyregion/
after-killing-of-2-officers-a-reversal-in-attitudes-to-police
-of-some-demonstrators-and-officials.html
De Blasio Confronts
a Crisis Over the Police and Race
With a Practiced Calm
DEC. 23, 2014
The New York Times
N.Y. / Region | News Analysis
By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM
and NIKITA STEWART
Mayor Bill de Blasio, confronting the gravest crisis of his young
administration, has been by turns composed and defiant, empathetic and
indignant, urging calm in one moment and lashing out in frustration the next.
In other words, he has acted like himself: a confident but mercurial leader
whose singular political style has not wavered, even in the face of a
potentially career-defining flash point over the police and race.
In a sharp turn from his predecessors — the pugnacious, prosecutorial Rudolph W.
Giuliani and the business-minded Michael R. Bloomberg — Mr. de Blasio, a
political professional who promised a warmer, friendlier City Hall, is
approaching the fallout from the shooting deaths of two police officers with an
operative’s touch, and a healthy dose of the personal.
He is turning to stagecraft, arranging for landmarks of the Manhattan skyline to
dim their lights on Tuesday evening in tribute.
He has invoked his family, comparing his own children to the offspring of the
two police officers whose killings on Saturday inflamed an already incendiary
dispute involving police unions, liberal activists and City Hall.
And where other politicians are quick to line up allies to reinforce their
message, Mr. de Blasio has been relatively insular. The mayor who recently
boasted “I never need rescuing” has conferred only with a small group of close
advisers since the shooting.
Mr. de Blasio has not spoken with Senator Charles E. Schumer or Representative
Hakeem Jeffries of Brooklyn, in whose district the shootings took place. Nor,
apart from a brief exchange of texts, has he spoken with Eric L. Adams, the
Brooklyn borough president.
The mayor’s approach will be tested in the coming days. Mr. de Blasio and his
aides hope the Christmas holiday will ease tensions and allow them to seek a
more civil and tempered discussion. Police union leaders have assailed the mayor
over what they see as his insufficient support for officers; protesters have
filled the streets for weeks, demanding changes in aggressive police practices.
Aides to the mayor say that they are intent on de-escalating the conflict, and
that they have been effective at it. Rather than dispatching surrogates to the
airwaves with an explicit set of talking points, they say they have privately
encouraged community leaders, labor allies and elected officials to echo Mr. de
Blasio’s message of calm and unity.
The mayor on Monday urged a moratorium on street demonstrations that he
previously had condoned, angering some of his allies on the left.
But Mr. de Blasio’s effort to, in his words, “rise above the fray” has been made
far more complicated by his own role in how those tensions arose: police unions
have accused him of undermining law enforcement and fueling anti-police
sentiment by expressing sympathy with protesters and describing his own warnings
to his biracial son, Dante, about interacting with the police.
The mayor faces a delicate task, as was underscored by the Rev. Al Sharpton —
one of Mr. de Blasio’s closest allies but a deeply polarizing figure to many in
law enforcement — who said he had raised objections to the mayor’s approach in a
conversation on Monday night.
“I said in principle, you can’t stop people from their democratic right to
protest,” Mr. Sharpton said in an interview. He said the mayor had assured him
that he saw no reason to cancel events planned by Mr. Sharpton’s group, the
National Action Network, for its weekly rally on Saturday or Christmas.
“I said, ‘Do those count as protests?’ He said that’s not what he meant.”
The mayor has sought to cast himself a neutral actor, instead dispensing blame
elsewhere. He became visibly angry during a question-and-answer session with
reporters on Monday, saying the news media had been complicit in fostering
divisions.
“That’s how you want to portray the world,” the mayor scolded a reporter. “But
we know a different reality.”
While some mayoral advisers blanched at the outburst, supporters said Mr. de
Blasio’s overall approach was guiding the city through a difficult moment.
“His response is measured; it’s being respectful of everyone,” said Bertha
Lewis, a longtime friend and adviser to the mayor, who, like another ally
interviewed for this article, volunteered the phrase “pitch perfect” to describe
his approach.
Ms. Lewis said the call to suspend protests and tough talk would give all sides
a chance to calm down. “Making that middle-of-the-road statement is a good idea
as mayor,” she said.
Inside City Hall, Mr. de Blasio’s staff has been working long hours coordinating
the city’s response to the shooting, which came at a time when many close aides
planned to be away.
The mayor’s top communications adviser, Peter Ragone, has stayed closely
involved from California, where he was on a prescheduled trip. Mr. de Blasio’s
press secretary, Phil Walzak, postponed a vacation.
Privately, some advisers say they expect the mayor can weather this week’s
tensions and they hope that it will catalyze an ultimately productive
conversation about race and the police.
Aides to Mr. de Blasio have often dismissed tough moments as fleeting, saying
that unpleasant stories will fade.
Some say the mayor, who has been loath to disappoint his liberal base, will have
to find a way to connect with a far broader constituency.
“The way he handles this is going to structure people’s perceptions of him as a
political leader, perhaps of him as a person,” said Kenneth Sherrill, who taught
political science for decades at Hunter College. “He needs to show he is capable
of unifying.”
Matt Flegenheimer contributed reporting.
A version of this news analysis appears in print on December 24, 2014, on page
A17 of the New York edition with the headline: Mayor Confronts a Crisis Over the
Police and Race With a Practiced Calm.
De Blasio Confronts a Crisis Over the Police
and Race With a Practiced Calm,
NYT, 23.12.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/24/nyregion/
mayor-de-blasio-confronts-crisis-with-a-practiced-calm.html
For Mayor de Blasio and New York Police,
a Rift Is Ripped Open
DEC. 21, 2014
The New York Times
By MATT FLEGENHEIMER
Mayor Bill de Blasio sat in the front pew at St. Patrick’s
Cathedral on Sunday, head bowed at times, with his wife on his left and the
police commissioner on his right.
The crowd had come, Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan said, to mourn the two officers
killed in an ambush in Brooklyn on Saturday. It had come to pray for their
families and their “brothers and sisters in uniform.”
He went on.
“We pray for our leaders as well,” the cardinal said, looking toward the mayor’s
row. “You’ve done what so many New Yorkers do in times of trial. You’ve come to
St. Patrick’s.”
At the helm of a grieving New York, still raw from weeks of protests amid a
national reckoning over law enforcement and race, Mr. de Blasio faces his
biggest test yet.
The mayor, who does not attend church regularly, did not speak publicly on
Sunday. His administration said he hoped to convey, in subdued terms, the need
for unity in the city.
Yet on the heels of the police deaths, the long-simmering tensions between Mr.
de Blasio and the department he has pledged to reshape have reached an
extraordinary nadir. Officers, led by union leaders, turned their backs on the
mayor and Commissioner William J. Bratton on Saturday night as the two walked
through a hospital to address the public about the deaths.
The president of the city’s largest police union, Patrick Lynch, blamed Mr. de
Blasio for the tragedy. The officers’ blood “starts on the steps of City Hall,”
he said, “in the office of the mayor.”
The reaction encapsulated weeks of escalating tensions. Even before the
shooting, union leaders had circulated a letter allowing officers to request
that the mayor not attend their funerals in the event of their death in the line
of duty.
Since Mr. de Blasio’s crusade on the campaign trail against what he viewed as
overreaching by the police in the Bloomberg administration, those close to the
mayor have professed that securing the trust of officers was an essential,
complicated task.
And for much of the department, it seems, he has fallen far short.
“This is a nightmare of the highest magnitude for everyone,” said Michael
Palladino, president of the Detectives’ Endowment Association. Leaders at City
Hall, he added, “need to dig down deep in their souls and understand that
campaigning to be a leader is easier than being a leader.”
While the mayor remained largely out of view on Sunday, his predicament
attracted a national audience. Current and former Republican lawmakers,
including George E. Pataki, a former governor of New York, and Senator Lindsey
Graham of South Carolina, suggested Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat, had set a
troubling tone and contributed to a dangerous climate for officers.
Protesters have filled the streets nearly every night in the more than two weeks
since a grand jury declined to bring criminal charges in the police chokehold
case of Eric Garner. Many of them have chafed at the mayor’s defense of “broken
windows” theory of policing, the aggressive enforcement of low-level offenses,
which Mr. Bratton has championed. (Officers approached Mr. Garner in July over
the sale of loose cigarettes.)
The protests, which have been predominantly peaceful but have overtaken bridges
and city streets, inspired union accusations that Mr. de Blasio had placed too
high a priority on protecting the rights of the demonstrators. (He met on Friday
with one of the protest groups, Justice League NYC.)
Even when trying to defend officers, the mayor has, at times, been criticized by
them. After reports of an attack on two police lieutenants during protests on
the Brooklyn Bridge on Dec. 13, union leaders lamented that the mayor’s
statement condemning the episode included the qualifier that police were
“allegedly assaulted.”
In interviews, officers have noted the commissioner’s repeated defense of Mr. de
Blasio — for a mayoral motorcade that apparently defied traffic laws; for
counting the Rev. Al Sharpton as a confidant; and for comments he made after the
Garner decision.
“Our police are here to protect us, and we honor that,” the mayor said then,
invoking his biracial son, Dante. “And at the same time, there’s a history we
have to overcome, because for so many of our young people, there’s a fear.”
Allies heard a mayor making good on a central campaign pledge: to salve the
wounds of residents who had come to distrust the police.
Many in the department heard something else: the most striking example yet of
what has been — according to a dozen officers interviewed before the shooting —
the consistent vilification of the police by the city’s leader.
In fact, Mr. de Blasio has repeatedly praised the police, particularly
throughout the recent sprawling protests. And many in the city have been
critical of the unions’ treatment of the mayor since the shootings. (A spokesman
for Mr. Lynch did not respond to questions on Sunday.)
Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president and a former police captain, said,
“We need to use the pain that all of us are experiencing and turn it into
purpose.” He added that “calling for reform is not a call for harm of police
officers.”
Even Rudolph W. Giuliani, a Republican and former mayor, offered a measure of
cover to Mr. de Blasio, telling Fox News that it “goes too far” to blame the
mayor for the deaths. But, he added, Mr. de Blasio “did not properly police the
protests” by allowing them to block city streets.
In an interview on Friday, Mr. Bratton acknowledged that “morale in the
department, in general, is not good.”
Administration officials have attributed much of the police unrest to a contract
dispute, suggesting that union leaders were not necessarily reflecting the
opinions of the rank and file.
Many critics, though, trace the roots of department angst to the election last
year. In an interview on ABC on Sunday, Mr. Bratton’s predecessor as
commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, echoed a familiar refrain of the mayor’s
skeptics: that he had run an “antipolice campaign.”
Mr. Bratton, in the interview on Friday, disputed this notion, arguing that Mr.
de Blasio had in fact campaigned against the zealous use of stop-and-frisk
tactics, not against those in the department.
“He didn’t run against the Police Department,” Mr. Bratton said. “He ran against
practices of the Police Department.”
Once in office, during another year of decreased crime, Mr. de Blasio pushed for
retraining programs for officers and a loosening of penalties for possession of
small amounts of marijuana. Even ostensibly minor issues, like the use of
profanity by officers, have been broached.
At the same time, Mr. de Blasio said in an interview on Friday, he is mindful
that keeping the peace in the city is his “foundational” obligation. After Mr.
Garner’s death in July, the mayor had staff members research past episodes of
police violence in the city, like the cases of Abner Louima and Amadou Diallo,
to see how the city navigated the aftermath.
Mr. de Blasio has also examined the 1991 riots in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in
internal discussions.
Yet in the interview on Friday, less than a day before the shootings, the mayor
spoke hopefully of his efforts to win officers over, predicting that the “vast
majority of officers” would eventually line up behind his proposed changes.
“The transitional process is always tense and difficult,” the mayor said. “But I
think we’re going somewhere.”
Correction: December 25, 2014
Because of an editing error, a picture caption on Monday with an
article about the rift between Mayor Bill de Blasio and the New York Police
Department’s rank and file officers gave an outdated title for James O’Neill. He
is the chief of department, no longer the chief of patrol. (He was promoted in
November.)
A version of this article appears in print on December 22, 2014, on page A23 of
the New York edition with the headline: A Widening Rift Between de Blasio and
the Police Is Savagely Ripped Open.
For Mayor de Blasio and New York Police, a
Rift Is Ripped Open,
NYT, 21.12.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/22/nyregion/
a-widening-rift-between-de-blasio-and-the-police-is-savagely-ripped-open.html
New York Officers’ Killer,
Adrift and Ill, Had a Plan
DEC. 21, 2014
The New York Times
By KIM BARKER and AL BAKER
Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who had drifted between friends and family
members for most of his short life, alienating most of them and failing at
almost anything that he tried, decided to come home on Saturday. He boarded a
bus in Baltimore, arrived in Midtown Manhattan just before 11 a.m., and then
disappeared onto the N train at the Times Square subway stop.
He was bound for Brooklyn, where he had been born 28 years before, carrying the
silver Taurus 9-millimeter pistol he had used earlier to shoot his
ex-girlfriend.
He had a plan, which he soon shared with the world via Instagram: He wanted to
kill two police officers.
What exactly pushed Mr. Brinsley to fatally shoot two police officers before
shooting himself is not clear. But by Sunday evening, several things had become
obvious. He had an extensive history with the police, having been arrested 20
times, mainly for petty things, crimes ranging from stealing condoms from a Rite
Aid in Ohio to shooting a stolen gun in a public street in Georgia.
Mr. Brinsley had also suffered from mental problems. Relatives told the police
he had taken medication at one point, and when he was asked during an August
2011 court hearing if he had ever been a patient in a mental institution or
under the care of a psychiatrist or psychologist, he said yes. He had also tried
to hang himself a year ago, the police said.
By this year, Mr. Brinsley had become isolated. He was estranged from his
family. His on-again, off-again relationship with Shaneka Thompson, 29, who
works for the Maryland Department of Welfare and serves in the Air Force
Reserve, was off again. By Saturday, he had seized on the deaths at the hands of
police officers of Eric Garner on Staten Island and Michael Brown in Ferguson,
Mo., focusing his rage against the authorities. In his short life, during which
Mr. Brinsley failed to finish high school, to hold a steady job or, seemingly,
to commit even the smallest crime without being caught, thoughts of revenge
seemed to be the one thing giving him purpose.
“Most of his postings and rants are on the Instagram account, and what we’re
seeing from this right now is anger against the government,” Robert K. Boyce,
the Police Department’s chief of detectives, said at a news conference on
Sunday. Chief Boyce added that one of those posts showed a burning flag, and in
others Mr. Brinsley talked of the anger he felt toward the police. There were,
Chief Boyce said, “other postings as well, of self-despair, of anger at himself
and where his life is right now.”
No members of his family spoke of Mr. Brinsley with fondness. He bounced from
family home to family home growing up, attending high school in New Jersey but
reaching only the 10th grade. A sister in Atlanta, Nawaal Brinsley, said she had
not seen him in two years. Another sister who had lived in the Bronx could not
be reached, but the police said they had been called to a dispute with Mr.
Brinsley at her home in 2011. Mr. Brinsley’s mother, who lives in Brooklyn, told
the police she feared her son and had not seen him in a month. She said “he had
a very troubled childhood and was often violent,” Chief Boyce said.
Mr. Brinsley was so transient that the police did not have a solid address for
him. That made tracing his movements difficult, even as his disintegration was
there for anyone to see online. But his movements on Saturday had become clearer
by Sunday, according to the police.
About 5:30 a.m. Saturday, Mr. Brinsley arrived at the apartment complex of Ms.
Thompson, who lives in Owings Mills, Md., just northwest of Baltimore. The two
had known each other for about a year. Mr. Brinsley entered Ms. Thompson’s
third-floor apartment using a key. Ms. Thompson called her mother, complaining
about Mr. Brinsley’s being there. Ms. Thompson’s mother overheard the two
arguing. Then the phone went dead.
A neighbor heard a woman scream, and a pop. “She was yelling, ‘You shot me, you
shot me!’ ” said the neighbor, who asked to remain anonymous. “I heard him run
out the door. She was yelling for help, banging, yelling: ‘Help me, help me.’ ”
The Baltimore police arrived about 5:50 a.m. Ms. Thompson then told Baltimore
County police that Mr. Brinsley had shot her in the stomach and taken her
cellphone, leaving his behind.
As Mr. Brinsley made his way to the Bolt Bus stop in Baltimore, he called Ms.
Thompson’s mother from her daughter’s phone at about 6:05 a.m. He told her that
he had shot her daughter by accident, and that he hoped that Ms. Thompson
survived. (She remained hospitalized Sunday.)
By 6:30 a.m., the Baltimore County police started tracking Ms. Thompson’s
cellphone. It soon pinged, moving northbound on Interstate 95. Mr. Brinsley was
on the bus to New York.
As the bus traveled north, Mr. Brinsley kept calling Ms. Thompson’s mother,
trying to find out Ms. Thompson’s condition.
Meanwhile, the Baltimore police were tracking his progress. By 10:49 a.m., Mr.
Brinsley had arrived in New York. The phone let out a signal near 43rd Street
and Eighth Avenue. A video camera caught him getting on the N train.
Once in Brooklyn, he used Ms. Thompson’s phone to make posts to Instagram. One
showed a leg of his camouflage pants and his greenish shoe, spattered in blood.
The other showed his pistol. “I’m Putting Wings On Pigs Today They Take 1 Of
Ours...... Let’s Take 2 of Theirs #ShootThePolice,” he wrote.
At 12:07 p.m., Mr. Brinsley dropped the phone near the Barclays Center and
disappeared.
The phone kept pinging, though, and the Baltimore County police contacted the
police in Brooklyn. At 2:10 p.m., Baltimore County authorities reached the 70th
Precinct, near where the signal had been detected, and said they had faxed over
a wanted poster of Mr. Brinsley.
It was not clear if the fax was received. Police Commissioner William J. Bratton
said on Saturday that it did not show up until about 2:45 p.m.
By then, time had run out. Mr. Brinsley was in Bedford-Stuyvesant. He stopped
two men on a street corner. He asked them what gang they belonged to. He urged
them to follow him on Instagram. Then he said they should watch what he did
next.
That was when Mr. Brinsley walked past the patrol car where Officers Wenjian Liu
and Rafael Ramos sat, near Myrtle and Tompkins Avenues. Crossing the street, he
approached the car from behind. He fired four shots, killing both men. He fled
to a nearby subway station, where he shot himself.
A version of this article appears in print on December 22, 2014, on page A1 of
the New York edition with the headline: Officers’ Killer, Adrift and Ill, Had a
Plan.
New York Officers’ Killer, Adrift and Ill, Had
a Plan, NYT, 21.12.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/22/nyregion/
new-york-police-officers-killer-was-adrift-ill-and-vengeful.html
At Demonstrations,
a Change in Tone
After Officers Are Killed
DEC. 21, 2014
The New York Times
By LIZ ROBBINS
and NIKITA STEWART
For weeks after a Staten Island grand jury declined to indict a
white police officer in the chokehold death of a black man, civil rights rallies
in New York City had gathered momentum and spurred dialogue among activists and
city officials.
But the conversation, in one shocking instant on Saturday, took an unexpected
turn.
One day after two police officers were fatally shot at point-blank range as they
sat in their squad car in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, leaders of
several groups who had been rallying for criminal justice reform scrambled to
condemn the killings while still keeping the push for police reform alive.
Justice League NYC, an organization that had met with Mayor Bill de Blasio on
Friday, held a march as planned on Sunday night. But after the killings, the
route was redirected to end at First Corinthian Baptist Church in Harlem for a
service of healing to remember all victims of violence — including police
officers.
“An act of violence is against humanity,” Carmen Perez, a co-founder of Justice
League NYC, said in a telephone interview. The group is an organization of
criminal justice advocates that has planned several of the recent protests.
“It’s not mutually exclusive. We can mourn Eric Garner and the two officers.
It’s O.K. to do that.”
On Sunday, it was too early to predict how the killings would affect future
protests. But that night, the march in Harlem, attended by more than 200, was
subdued.
Instead of chanting Mr. Garner’s last words, “I can’t breathe,” participants
held candles as they walked and sang the children’s gospel song “This Little
Light of Mine.”
Less than 30 minutes later in Brooklyn, the song’s refrain of “I’m gonna let it
shine” echoed on Myrtle Avenue, where 30 marchers walked to the spot where the
two officers, Wenjian Liu, 32, and Rafael Ramos, 40, were killed the day before.
The marchers met a group of tearful police officers and about 150 mourners at a
memorial, where those gathered thanked the officers for their service. Earlier
in the day, the Rev. Al Sharpton held a news conference at the National Action
Network in Harlem, standing beside the mother and the widow of Mr. Garner, the
Staten Island man who died in July after an officer trying to arrest him placed
him in a chokehold.
Mr. Garner’s family denounced the police killings as senseless violence. “I
would ask that everyone who is protesting with us to protest in a nonviolent
way,” Esaw Garner, Mr. Garner’s widow, said. “My husband was not a violent man.”
“We do not feel these killings had anything to do with us directly,” said Mr.
Sharpton, who added that he had received anonymous death threats, including one
that accused him of killing innocent people. “The results are being misused by
people on the right to blame elements of the protest movement.”
The protests in New York have largely been peaceful, but on Dec. 13 some
activists assaulted two lieutenants on the Brooklyn Bridge, worsening tensions
between the Police Department and City Hall.
After the killings on Saturday, the protest motto of “Black Lives
Matter” was joined by a chorus of “Blue Lives Matter” on social media, in
support of officers.
On Sunday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo spoke outside the family home of Officer Ramos
and praised both officers who were killed.
Asked how the killings might affect policy change, he said: “I’ve said there are
reforms that we should make to the system to make the system better. I’m open to
them, and I’m researching them, and I will discuss them. If people want to
protest, fine, they have a right to protest. They don’t have a right to break
the law. They don’t have a right to abuse police officers. That’s how we govern
this city.”
So what becomes of the budding police reform movement?
“We cannot not respond to this with new laws, because we only create the climate
where this is going to continue to happen,” Mr. Sharpton said. “We need to solve
it, not scapegoat it on either side.”
Dante Barry, the founder of Million Hoodies Movement for Justice,
one of the groups involved in the New York demonstrations, said, “I fear that
we’re going to see people who don’t want to risk getting involved in the
protests.”
A version of this article appears in print on December 22, 2014, on page A22 of
the New York edition with the headline: At Demonstrations, a Change in Tone.
At Demonstrations, a Change in Tone After
Officers Are Killed,
NYT, 21.12.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/22/nyregion/
at-demonstrations-a-change-in-tone-after-officers-are-killed.html
Officers’ Killer
Took Aim
at New York City of Today
DEC. 21, 2014
The New York Times
About New York
Jim Dwyer
*If you happen to walk the Macombs Dam Bridge, which crosses the
Harlem River between the Bronx and Manhattan near 155th Street, you may notice a
staircase that drops down to the street on the Manhattan side. Nearby are the
Colonial Park Houses.
On a May night in 1971, two police officers, Joseph Piagentini and Waverly
Jones, were killed in an ambush there, shot in the back multiple times as they
returned to their car after answering a call. It is said that the staircase was
used by a lookout for the killers, and as a getaway route.
An eighth-grade classmate of mine lived in those houses, and he called off plans
for me to come by in the days after the shooting. His father said it was not
safe.
Once or twice a year I walk across that bridge while coming home from Yankee
Stadium and pass those stairs, and from the peaceful summer nights of 2014 think
back to that moment and that world, more than four decades ago. That same week,
two police officers guarding the home of the Manhattan district attorney were
attacked with a machine gun; they survived critical injuries. Eight months
later, two other officers, Gregory Foster and Rocco Laurie, were assassinated as
they patrolled the Lower East Side, gunned down from behind.
In an instant this weekend, it seemed as though 43 years had not passed, and
that it was 1971 again.
The head of the principal police union said that the mayor, Bill de Blasio, had
blood on his hands; police officers turned and showed him their backs when he
arrived at the hospital. A former mayor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, and a former
governor, George E. Pataki, blamed Mr. de Blasio for fostering a climate of
violence against police officers. They say he indulged protesters who have been
demonstrating over the lack of charges after the death of Eric Garner, a Staten
Island man who died in July while being arrested.
New York City in the early 1970s was riven and dangerous, its ordinary criminal
activity outdone by political violence. The attacks on the police officers had
been carried out by elements of a radical group called the Black Liberation
Army. “It’s open season on the cops in this city,” Ed Kiernan, the president of
the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, said after the shootings of Officers
Jones and Piagentini, and he urged all officers to carry shotguns, bringing them
from home if necessary.
On Saturday, a gunman shot his ex-girlfriend near Baltimore, then came to
Brooklyn and opened fire into a police car parked on Tompkins Avenue.
Inside were Officers Wenjian Liu, 32, and Rafael Ramos, 40, one a
Chinese-American, the other a New Yorker of Puerto Rican origin.
The killer was shooting at the New York City of 2014.
The officers in the patrol cars of New York City come from 50 countries and
speak scores of languages. The Police Department looks more like the city than
ever. In two generations, as the city was becoming ever safer, the Police
Department utterly changed its makeup. Of course, to the person who killed
Officers Liu and Ramos, just as to the people who killed Officers Jones and
Piagentini, Foster and Laurie, the only color that mattered was blue. All of
them, with skin tones that ran from black to white, got bullets to the head.
To look upon social media now is to see a river of rage, a contempt for racial
others and political others that is raw or scarcely disguised. The official news
conferences get no better. It makes the heart sick.
Late in the afternoon on Sunday, a woman named Lucy Ramos, an aunt of Officer
Ramos, stepped before a group of reporters. She thanked people for their support
for his family, and extended condolences to the family of Officer Liu.
With her next words, she suggested that there had to be ways that would not make
the terrible events of the weekend even worse.
“I hope and pray that we can reflect on this tragic loss of life that has
occurred,” Ms. Ramos said, “so that we can move forward and find an amicable
path to a peaceful coexistence.”
Correction: December 22, 2014
An earlier correction for this article was posted in error. As the initial
article correctly noted, Officer Rafael Ramos was a New Yorker of Puerto Rican
origin, not Dominican origin.
Officers’ Killer Took Aim at New York City of
Today, NYT, 21.12.2014,
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/jim_dwyer/index.html
For de Blasio, Attack Comes
Amid Tension Over Police
DEC. 20, 2014
The New York Times
By MATT FLEGENHEIMER
It is the sequence that every mayor dreads: the ominous report,
the scramble to the hospital and the confirmation that, yes, an attack against
the police has proved fatal.
But for Mayor Bill de Blasio, the tragedy on Saturday — when two police officers
were shot and killed in an ambush in Brooklyn, according to the authorities —
arrived at a particularly trying moment, amid an already fractious relationship
with the police.
Police union leaders and officers could be seen turning their backs to the mayor
and the police commissioner, William J. Bratton, as they walked past, in a video
taken at the hospital where the two held a news conference on Saturday.
A written message from Edward Mullins, president of the Sergeants Benevolent
Association, addressed the mayor directly. “Mayor de Blasio,” it read in part,
“the blood of these two officers is clearly on your hands.”
For weeks, New York City has been the roiling epicenter of a
national reckoning over the police and race, attracting nightly protests since a
Staten Island grand jury declined to bring criminal charges against a white
police officer in the case of Eric Garner, an unarmed black man who died after a
chokehold in July.
Police union leaders have condemned the mayor for what they have called
insufficient support of the police; they have circulated a letter allowing
officers to request that he not attend their funerals in the event of a
line-of-duty death.
At the news conference on Saturday, at Woodhull Hospital in Brooklyn, the mayor
tried to deflect focus on the recent tensions. He said it was “a time to think
about these families” and not “a time for politics or political analysis.”
Asked on Saturday about the turned backs and union messages, Phil Walzak, the
mayor’s press secretary, said it was “unfortunate that in a time of great
tragedy, some would resort to irresponsible, overheated rhetoric that angers and
divides people.”
During the briefing, Mr. de Blasio largely deferred to Mr. Bratton. The mayor
recalled the emotional scene with the families of the officers, Wenjian Liu and
Rafael Ramos, at the hospital. The 13-year-old son of Officer Ramos, the mayor
said gravely, “couldn’t comprehend what had happened to his father.”
The murder of an officer, he said, “is an attack on all of us.”
Even before the shooting, the mayor — who has staked his tenure, in part, on a
pledge to reshape the Police Department, healing rifts between communities and
their officers in the process — had been engaged in a high-wire act of sorts.
He has sought to express sympathy for the protesters, many of whom have placed
their faith in the mayor to turn back what they see as years of overreaching by
the police, and support for the officers, who remain wary, in many circles, of
his designs.
Amid the protests, Mr. de Blasio had already been forced to confront the specter
of violence against the police. Last Saturday, two police lieutenants were
attacked during a demonstration on the Brooklyn Bridge.
Speaking at a police promotions ceremony on Friday, the mayor seemed to provide
an unwitting preview of his Saturday remarks. “Any act of violence against our
police officers,” he told a packed auditorium at Police Headquarters in Lower
Manhattan, “is an act of violence against our values."
Many lawmakers and protesters expressed sympathy and gratitude for the police on
Saturday. Some advocates noted that mourning the deaths of officers and deaths
at the hands of officers were not mutually exclusive.
Yet by Saturday night, it seemed clear that the dialogue over policing in the
city remained fraught.
Among other grievances, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the city’s
largest police union, has in recent weeks criticized the mayor for invoking his
biracial son, Dante, after the Garner decision. At the time, the mayor described
his experience instructing Dante to “take special care” during any police
encounters. Some union leaders suggested that Mr. de Blasio was conveying that
police officers were to be feared.
Mr. Bratton has defended his boss, and both have taken pains to highlight the
dangers of patrolling the city. “You put that blue uniform on,” he said on
Saturday, “and you become part of that thin blue line between us and anarchy.”
A version of this article appears in print on December 21, 2014, on page A35 of
the New York edition with the headline: For Mayor, Attack Comes Amid Tension
Over Police.
For de Blasio, Attack Comes Amid Tension Over
Police,
NYT, 20.12.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/nyregion/
worst-case-scenario-comes-true-for-de-blasio.html
Two N.Y.P.D. Officers Are Killed
in Brooklyn Ambush;
Suspect Commits Suicide
DEC. 20, 2014
The New York Times
By BENJAMIN MUELLER
and AL BAKER
Two police officers sitting in their patrol car in Brooklyn were
shot at point-blank range and killed on Saturday afternoon by a man who,
officials said, had traveled to the city from Baltimore vowing to kill officers.
The suspect then committed suicide with the same gun, the authorities said.
The officers, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, were in the car near Myrtle and
Tompkins Avenues in Bedford-Stuyvesant in the shadow of a tall housing project
when the gunman, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, walked up to the passenger-side window and
assumed a firing stance, Police Commissioner William J. Bratton said. Mr.
Brinsley shot several rounds into the heads and upper bodies of the officers,
who never drew their weapons, the authorities said.
Mr. Brinsley, 28, then fled down the street and onto the platform of a nearby
subway station, where he killed himself as officers closed in. The police
recovered a silver semiautomatic handgun, Mr. Bratton said.
Mr. Brinsley, who had a long rap sheet of crimes that included robbery and
carrying a concealed gun, is believed to have shot his former girlfriend near
Baltimore before traveling to Brooklyn, the authorities said. He made statements
on social media suggesting that he planned to kill police officers and was
angered about the Eric Garner and Michael Brown cases.
Authorities in Baltimore sent a warning that Mr. Brinsley had made these
threats, but it was received in New York at essentially the same time as the
killings, officials said.
The shootings, the chase, the suicide of Mr. Brinsley and the desperate but
failed bid to save the lives of the officers — their uniforms soaked in blood —
turned a busy commercial intersection on the Saturday before Christmas into a
scene of pandemonium.
The manager of a liquor store at the corner, Charlie Hu, said the two police
officers were slouched over in the front seat of their patrol car. Both of them
appeared to have been shot in the head, Mr. Hu said, and one of the officers had
blood spilling out of his face.
“Today two of New York’s finest were shot and killed with no warning, no
provocation,” Mr. Bratton said at Woodhull Hospital in Williamsburg, where the
officers were declared dead. “They were, quite simply, assassinated — targeted
for their uniform and for the responsibility they embraced to keep the people of
this city safe.”
“Officer Ramos and Officer Liu never had the opportunity to draw their weapons,”
he continued. “They may have never even seen the assailant, their murderer.”
Mayor Bill de Blasio, standing beside the police commissioner, said, “It is an
attack on all of us; it’s an attack on everything we hold dear.”
Mr. de Blasio said he had met with the officers’ families, including Officer
Ramos’s 13-year-old son, who “couldn’t comprehend what had happened to his
father.”
Late Saturday night, President Obama condemned the “murder of two
police officers in New York City,” noting that officers who serve their
communities “deserve our respect and gratitude every single day. Tonight, I ask
people to reject violence and words that harm, and turn to words that heal —
prayer, patient dialogue, and sympathy for the friends and family of the
fallen.”
The double killing comes at a moment when protests over police tactics have
roiled the city and other parts of the nation. Since a grand jury declined to
bring criminal charges in the case of Mr. Garner, a black Staten Island man who
died after a police chokehold in July, protesters have filled the streets on
numerous occasions. Those protests followed more violent ones in Ferguson, Mo.,
after there were no charges in the police shooting of Mr. Brown, an unarmed
black teenager.
The mayor has taken care to praise officers’ work repeatedly since the grand
jury decision, but he has stressed the rights of protesters to express
themselves and spoken of his personal experience instructing his biracial son,
Dante, to “take special care” during any police encounters.
Some union leaders suggested the mayor had sent a message that police officers
were to be feared. Cries for the police to use more restraint have been
buttressed by historic drops in violent crime. The city has seen roughly 300
killings so far this year, a number so low as to be unheard-of two decades ago.
But the shooting on Saturday seemed reminiscent of decades past, when the city
was mired in an epidemic of drugs and violence and, in 1988, a police officer
was shot while he sat alone in his patrol car guarding the home of a man who had
testified in a drug case. That killing shook the city, sparking an escalation in
the war on drugs and an aggressive crackdown on violent crime. Mr. Bratton said
that the attack on Saturday was the seventh time since 1972 that partners in the
Police Department had been killed at the same time.
The killing seemed to drive the wedge between Mr. de Blasio and rank-and-file
officers even deeper. Video posted online showed dozens of officers turning
their backs to the mayor as he walked into anews conference on Saturday night.
“There’s blood on many hands tonight — those that incited violence on the street
under the guise of protests, that tried to tear down what New York City police
officers did every day," the head of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association,
Patrick Lynch, said outside Woodhull Hospital. He added, “That blood on the
hands starts on the steps of City Hall, in the office of the mayor.”
Mr. Brinsley, whose records indicate that he was born in New York, had been
arrested several times in Georgia and Ohio. He was arrested on accusations of
carrying a concealed weapon and stealing in Georgia, and in Ohio in connection
with theft and robbery, among other run-ins with the police. His last known
residence was in Georgia. Mr. Bratton said the suspect also had ties to East
Flatbush, Brooklyn, but would not be more specific.
Earlier on Saturday, law enforcement officials said, Mr. Brinsley shot his
former girlfriend in the stomach near Baltimore. She survived.
Mr. Bratton said investigators believed that after the Maryland shooting, Mr.
Brinsley posted to an Instagram account that he was headed to New York to attack
police officers and that the posting might be his last. Mr. Bratton lamented the
timing of the warning from authorities. “The tragedy here is that just as the
warning was coming in, the murder was occurring,” he said.
Mr. Bratton said that the Instagram posts reviewed by investigators, which he
said had been widely circulated and may have been on the account of a
girlfriend, revealed a “very strong bias against police officers.”
In the Instagram posting that was apparently written by Mr. Brinsley, he called
the attack retribution for the deaths of Mr. Garner and Mr. Brown.
Below a photo of a firearm, the Instagram posting, which misspells Mr. Garner’s
name, reads: “I’m Putting Wings On Pigs Today. They Take 1 Of Ours......Let’s
Take 2 of Theirs #ShootThePolice #RIPErivGardner #RIPMikeBrown.”
Mr. Brinsley’s sister, Nawaal Brinsley, said on Saturday that she had not seen
her brother in two years. “Oh my goodness, oh my goodness,” she said when told
of the attack. She said she did not remember hearing her brother express anger
at the police.
Mr. Bratton said that Officer Liu had been a seven-year veteran of the force and
that Officer Ramos had been an officer since 2012. Officer Liu, he added, had
been married two months.
The shootings seemed poised to cool the protests of recent months. The Rev. Al
Sharpton, who has been an outspoken backer of the protests in recent weeks,
condemned the attack.
“Any use of the names of Eric Garner and Michael Brown in connection with any
violence or killing of police is reprehensible and against the pursuit of
justice in both cases,” he said.
The Brooklyn borough president, Eric Adams, worried that the attack would
“tarnish” the campaign against police brutality that has swept the city.
“It’s horrific to have someone intentionally shoot a police officer; it’s the
wrong message,” he said. “And that is not the message that many have been
calling on when they talk about reform.”
The intersection where the shooting occurred, which is dominated by the Tompkins
housing project across the street, is a spot where residents often see police
keeping watch. The officers had been assigned to patrol the Tompkins Houses in
response to an uptick in violence there this year, Mr. Bratton said.
The increased police presence had improved the neighborhood, some said. “It’s
changed and gotten better through the years,” said Felix Camacho, 40, an airport
ramp agent who has lived for eight years on the block where the shooting
happened. But other residents worried that the episode on Saturday would inflame
relations.
More than 100 officers lined the hospital’s exit ramp as the bodies of Officers
Liu and Ramos were driven out in ambulances.
Reporting was contributed by Emma G. Fitzsimmons, Matt Flegenheimer, Dan Glaun,
J. David Goodman, Mike Isaac, Matt Krupnick and Ashley Southall. Jack Begg
contributed research.
A version of this article appears in print on December 21, 2014, on page A1 of
the New York edition with the headline: Two Officers, Ambushed, Are Killed in
Brooklyn.
Two N.Y.P.D. Officers Are Killed in Brooklyn
Ambush;
Suspect Commits Suicide, NYT, 20.12.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/nyregion/
two-police-officers-shot-in-their-patrol-car-in-brooklyn.html
Police Killings
Reveal Chasms Between Races
DEC. 5, 2014
The New York Times
By JOHN ELIGON
FERGUSON, Mo. — In the decade that Ashley Bernaugh, who is white,
has been with her black husband, her family in Indiana has been so smitten with
him that she teases them that they love him more than her.
So Ms. Bernaugh was somewhat surprised by her family’s reaction after Darren
Wilson, a white police officer here, killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black
teenager. Forced into more frank discussions about race with her family than
ever before, Ms. Bernaugh, 29, said her relatives seemed more outraged by the
demonstrations than the killing, which she saw as an injustice.
“They don’t understand it’s as prevalent as it is,” Ms. Bernaugh said, referring
to racial discrimination. “It’s just disappointing to think that your family
wants to pigeonhole a whole race of people, buy into the rhetoric that, ‘Oh,
these are violent protests.’ ”
It is as if Ms. Bernaugh, a nonprofit organizer living in the St. Louis suburb
of Florissant, is straddling two worlds. In one, her black mother-in-law is
patting her on the back, saying she is proud of her for speaking out against Mr.
Brown’s killing. In the other, her white family and friends are telling her to
quiet down because “you don’t know the whole picture.”
Race has never been an easy topic of conversation in America. But the recent
high-profile deaths of black people at the hands of police officers in Ferguson,
New York, Cleveland and elsewhere — and the nationwide protests those deaths
spurred — have exposed sharp differences about race relations among friends,
co-workers, neighbors and even relatives in unexpected and often uncomfortable
ways.
Put bluntly, many people say, they feel they are being forced to pick a team.
In interviews here and around the country, both blacks and whites described
tense conversations in office cubicles or across dinner tables about the
killings and subsequent protests. Many described being surprised to learn, often
on social media, about the opinions — and stereotypes — held by family and
friends about people of other races. In some cases, those relationships have
fractured, in person and online.
Kenny Hargrove, a black man from Brooklyn married to a white woman, said he and
his wife confronted one of his in-laws for posting a racially insensitive meme
on Facebook around the time Mr. Brown was killed. The relative was so upset that
she unfriended them. Now, she is trying to mend fences and has sent a new friend
request. But Mr. Hargrove, 36, said he was torn about whether to hit “confirm.”
“If I see one stupid thing from you, it’s over forever,” Mr. Hargrove said.
In fact, the day that a Staten Island grand jury declined to indict a police
officer in the chokehold death of Eric Garner, Mr. Hargrove posted this to his
Facebook page: “This is for anyone still left on my friends list who’s wondering
why black people are so angry right now. If you still don’t get it, if you still
can’t see the pattern, if you still think the protests are nothing more than
angry thugs who just want free TVs, let me know. I don’t have the energy to
connect the dots for you, but I do have just enough left to hit ‘unfriend.’ ”
But Peter Weiss, a white resident of Staten Island, said many black people seem
unwilling to consider alternative perspectives on police violence.
To illustrate his point, Mr. Weiss, 41, described an encounter on Wednesday at
Karl’s Klipper, a bar and restaurant in Staten Island, when news flashed on a
television screen that the grand jury had decided not to indict. An
African-American whom he was friendly with walked over and called him a redneck,
Mr. Weiss said.
The acquaintance was normally calm, kind and sensitive, but the news had set him
off, Mr. Weiss said. The exchange solidified his belief that people were
reaching conclusions about current events based on past racism that, in his
view, no longer exists.
“Blacks and whites, we don’t hate anymore, there is no real racism anymore for
anything real, like who can get a job,” he said. “Honestly, people are so stuck
on the past, people need to grow up.”
Attitudes like that are why David Odom believes that race relations have
deteriorated amid the recent police killings, and why he avoids talking to white
people about sensitive racial topics. Blacks and whites come from different
experiences, so reconciling their world views is too difficult, he said.
Mr. Odom, 50, a black lawyer living in the affluent, mostly white Chicago suburb
of Naperville, recalled trying to explain to a close white friend why he thought
the grand jury process in Mr. Brown’s case was racist.
“He didn’t believe it because, in his mind, he believed that the judicial system
isn’t rigged,” Mr. Odom said. “He believed that the judicial system and the
criminal justice system generally is fair, and I don’t. There’s a chasm between
us.”
A black infantry lieutenant in Texas said he is generally hawkish about foreign
policy and conservative on the economy. So some of his white Army colleagues
were surprised to hear his reaction to the non-indictment in the Garner case.
Several people came into his office the day it was announced and said, “Can you
believe these idiots in New York protesting?” said the lieutenant, Christopher,
who asked that his last name be withheld because he was not authorized to speak
to the news media. His response, he said, was, “Can you believe these idiots
didn’t hand out an indictment?”
He got awkward looks in response. “A lot of people at work, they have no idea
how to respond to me right now,” he said.
Divisions over the killings are not simply black and white. They also run along
generational, socioeconomic and geographical lines. Whites have joined blacks in
street protests here and across the nation against police violence. And some
blacks have joined whites in raising concerns about the behavior of blacks.
Still, in Ferguson, some whites said they felt like blacks had rushed to
judgment in condemning them as bigots.
In Old Ferguson, where the police station is, a group of mostly black
demonstrators marched down the street one recent, frigid evening, chanting angry
slogans, and as they came upon Marley’s Bar and Grill, a line of police officers
quickly formed between them and the establishment. The patrons inside were
mostly white, and demonstrators stood outside yelling at them. When protesters
peered in through a window and took pictures, some of the patrons pulled down a
shade.
“We were told many times we were going to burn to the ground because we were
white owners,” said Kelly Braun, 48, who owns the corner bar with her husband.
“They yell stuff at us.”
Ms. Braun said her bar usually hosts a diverse crowd. But many black patrons
have stayed away recently, dismayed over some of the actions on the street, she
said.
“I’ve had so many apologies from different people — it’s because they’re
embarrassed,” she said.
For some black business owners in Ferguson, the calculation about the
protesters’ demands and the community’s well-being is a more complicated one.
Cathy Jenkins, who owns Cathy’s Kitchen with her husband, has experienced the
wrath of angry demonstrations — someone threw a chair through one of her
restaurant’s windows the night the grand jury decision in the Brown case was
announced. But she has also experienced racism: Someone has been calling the
restaurant regularly and repeating the N-word when the phone is answered.
Not surprisingly, she was torn about the reaction, sometimes violent, to the
Brown killing. “I don’t want the community torn up, but I believe in standing up
for your rights when it’s something that’s just,” she said.
Montague Simmons expected resistance last month when he and 20 other people
slipped into the election night party of the newly elected St. Louis County
executive, Steve Stenger, to protest Mr. Stenger’s support of Robert P.
McCulloch, the prosecutor who many Brown supporters said mishandled the grand
jury investigation of Mr. Wilson. But Mr. Simmons, a black union organizer, said
he never thought the stiffest opposition would come from people he considered
close allies.
As several demonstrators clustered to begin chanting, Mr. Simmons said, some
white union members joined in trying to block them, while also identifying them
to the police. These were the same white union members, Mr. Simmons said, whom
he had worked with to advocate for things like raising the minimum wage and
protecting collective bargaining rights.
“In any other setting, any other fight over the last two or three years, we’d be
shoulder to shoulder,” Mr. Simmons said. “When it comes to race, all of a sudden
that’s not the case.”
Reporting was contributed by Nate Schweber and Mosi Secret from New York, and
Manny Fernandez, Mitch Smith, Monica Davey and Campbell Robertson from Ferguson.
A version of this article appears in print on December 6, 2014, on page A1 of
the New York edition with the headline: Police Killings Reveal Chasms Between
Races.
Police Killings Reveal Chasms Between Races,
NYT, 5.12.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/06/us/
police-killings-reveal-chasms-between-races.html
Eric Garner and the Legal Rules
That Enable Police Violence
DEC. 5, 2014
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributors
By SHAKEER RAHMAN and SAM BARR
ERIC GARNER was not the first American to be choked by the
police, and he will not be the last, thanks to legal rules that prevent victims
of police violence from asking federal courts to help stop deadly practices.
The 1983 case City of Los Angeles v. Lyons vividly illustrates the problem. That
case also involved an African-American man choked by the police without
provocation after he was stopped for a minor offense — a burned-out taillight.
Unlike Mr. Garner, Adolph Lyons survived the chokehold. He then filed a federal
lawsuit, asking the city to compensate him for his injuries. But he wanted more
than just money. He also asked the court to prevent the Los Angeles Police
Department from using chokeholds in the future. The trial court ordered the
L.A.P.D. to stop using chokeholds unless an officer was threatened with death or
serious injury, and to institute better training, reporting and record-keeping.
The Supreme Court overturned this order by one vote. The court explained that
Mr. Lyons would have needed to prove that he personally was likely to be choked
again in order for his lawsuit to be a vehicle for systemic reform. Without
that, he could win compensation only for past injuries.
This is the legal standard when a plaintiff asks a federal court for an
injunction — or a forward-looking legal order — in order to stop illegal
practices that could harm him in the future. It makes some sense in the
abstract: If someone can’t show he will be harmed in the future, why should a
court try to prevent the harm? But even though Mr. Lyons couldn’t prove that the
L.A.P.D. would choke him again, he could be confident that the police would
eventually choke someone else. When the stakes are this deadly, federal courts
should step in.
The decision instead left it to local authorities to enact solutions. History
shows they’re not up to the job. In 1985, the New York Police Department agreed
that chokeholds were “potentially lethal and unnecessary” and announced that it
would no longer use them “routinely.” That policy failed. After more deadly
chokeholds, Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly banned their use altogether in 1993.
But just last year, the city received 233 allegations of police chokeholds.
Federal courts could address police violence by legally forbidding practices
like chokeholds, as well as by mandating improved training and reporting. If
police departments still failed to comply, federal judges could impose penalties
and harsher requirements.
How do we know that these interventions would be more effective? Consider school
segregation. Local officials had promised change but failed to ensure it, and it
took decades of close supervision by federal courts to make a dent in the
problem. As the courts started to leave this field in more recent years, de
facto segregation returned.
In his dissent in the Lyons case, Justice Thurgood Marshall pointed out that,
without judicial enforcement, the city would “continue the policy indefinitely
as long as it is willing to pay damages for the injuries and deaths that
result.” Today we still depend on bureaucratic cost-benefit analysis, with
cities weighing the cost of compensating victims against the perceived value of
aggressive policing.
Unfortunately, the hurdles to winning compensation are also severe. To get money
from police officers who act illegally, victims must prove not just that a
practice is illegal, but that no reasonable officer would think the practice was
legal. To get money from a local government, a victim must prove that his injury
was part of a pattern or policy. On the rare occasions when victims do prevail,
governments can afford the costs and have little incentive to reform.
To be sure, there are still ways that federal courts can address the Garner
case. The Justice Department has announced that it will conduct a federal civil
rights investigation, as it did in Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Mo. But
the Justice Department has limited resources and fluctuating political will.
Protests help bolster this will. But the Justice Department cannot notice (let
alone investigate) every allegation of police violence. Citizens need to be able
to instigate judicial reform on their own.
Some federal judges have recently acted boldly to allow these suits despite the
Lyons precedent. For example, in last year’s N.Y.P.D. stop-and-frisk decision,
the judge found that discriminatory police searches were pervasive enough to
issue an injunction in a case brought by past victims.
Public indignation about police violence should be directed not only at the
grand juries and prosecutors that fail to vindicate victims of police violence,
but also at the legal rules that enabled this violence in the first place. The
law shouldn’t just serve to punish past conduct: It should also drive reform.
Shakeer Rahman and Sam Barr are third-year students at Harvard Law School.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on December 6, 2014, on page A23 of the
New York edition with the headline: Legal Rules Enable Police Violence.
Eric Garner and the Legal Rules That Enable
Police Violence,
NYT, 6.12.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/06/opinion/
eric-garner-and-the-legal-rules-that-enable-police-violence.html
Officer’s Errant Shot
Kills Unarmed Brooklyn Man
NOV. 21, 2014
The New York Times
By MICHAEL WILSON
Two police officers prepared to enter the pitch-black
eighth-floor stairwell of a building in a Brooklyn housing project, one of them
with his sidearm drawn. At the same time, a man and his girlfriend, frustrated
by a long wait for an elevator, entered the seventh-floor stairwell, 14 steps
below. In the darkness, a shot rang out from the officer’s gun, and the
28-year-old man below was struck in the chest and, soon after, fell dead.
The shooting, at 11:15 p.m. on Thursday, invited immediate comparison to the
fatal shooting of an unarmed man in Ferguson, Mo. But 12 hours later, just after
noon on Friday, the New York police commissioner, William J. Bratton, announced
that the shooting was accidental and that the victim, Akai Gurley, had done
nothing to provoke a confrontation with the officers.
Indeed, as the investigation continued into Friday night, a leading theory
described an instance of simple, yet tragic, clumsiness on the part of the
officer. Mr. Gurley was not armed, the police said.
The episode promised to bring scrutiny to a longtime police practice of officers
drawing their weapons when patrolling stairwells in housing projects.
The shooting occurred in the Louis H. Pink Houses in the East New York
neighborhood. The housing project had been the scene of a recent spate of crimes
— there have been two robberies and four assaults in the development in the past
month, two homicides in the past year, and a shooting in a nearby lobby last
Saturday, Mr. Bratton said.
Additional officers, many new to the Police Department, were assigned to patrol
the buildings, including the two officers in the stairwell on Thursday night,
who were working an overtime tour.
Having just inspected the roof, the officers prepared to conduct what is known
as a vertical patrol, an inspection of a building’s staircases, which tend to be
a magnet for criminal activity or quality-of-life nuisances.
Both officers took out their flashlights, and one, Peter Liang, 27, a
probationary officer with less than 18 months on the job, drew his sidearm, a
9-millimeter semiautomatic.
Officer Liang is left-handed, and he tried to turn the knob of the door that
opens to the stairwell with that hand while also holding the gun, according to a
high-ranking police official who was familiar with the investigation and who
emphasized that the account could change.
It appears that in turning the knob and pushing the door open, Officer Liang
rotated the barrel of the gun down and accidentally fired, the official said. He
and the other officer both jumped back into the hallway, and Officer Liang
shouted something to the effect that he had accidentally fired his weapon, the
official said.
Mr. Gurley had spent the past hours getting his hair braided at a friend’s
apartment. Neighbors said he had posted photos of himself on an online site for
models, featuring his tattoos, his clothing and his muscular frame.
He and his girlfriend, Melissa Butler, waited for an elevator on the seventh
floor, but it never came, so they opened the door to the dark stairwell instead.
An instant later, the shot was fired. Mr. Gurley and Ms. Butler were probably
unaware that the shot came from a police officer’s gun.
“The cop didn’t present himself, he just shot him in the chest,” Janice Butler,
Ms. Butler’s sister, said. “They didn’t see their face or nothing.”
Mr. Gurley made it two flights down, to the fifth floor, where he collapsed.
Melissa Butler called 911 from a lower floor, the official said.
Officer Liang and his partner came upon Mr. Gurley and called in the injury on
the police radio, saying it was the result of an accidental discharge, the
official said.
Mr. Gurley was taken to Brookdale Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Following protocol, Officer Liang was relieved of his gun and his badge pending
an investigation.
Commissioner Bratton called Mr. Gurley “a total innocent” and said the shooting
was “an unfortunate accident.” The victim was not engaged in any activity other
than trying to walk down the stairs, Mr. Bratton said.
Mayor Bill de Blasio was also quick to offer his condolences to Mr. Gurley’s
family. “This is a tragedy,” he said.
About 6:45 p.m. on Friday, the mayor, accompanied by his wife, Chirlane McCray,
and Mr. Bratton, arrived at the Red Hook East Houses to visit the home of Mr.
Gurley’s domestic partner, Kimberly Michelle Ballinger, 25.
They spent a little more than 10 minutes there and left without making any
comment.
Earlier, Mr. Bratton said that whether an officer should draw his weapon while
on patrol when there was no clear threat was a matter of discretion.
“There’s not a specific prohibition against taking a firearm out,” he said,
adding, “As in all cases, an officer would have to justify the circumstances
that required him to or resulted in his unholstering his firearm.”
The president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, Patrick J. Lynch,
declined to say anything about the officer, but commented on the conditions of
stairwells in projects, including the setting of the shooting.
“The Pink Houses are among the most dangerous projects in the city, and their
stairwells are the most dangerous places in the projects,” he said. “Dimly lit
stairways and dilapidated conditions create fertile ground for violent crime,
while the constant presence of illegal firearms creates a dangerous and highly
volatile environment for police officers and residents alike.”
The Brooklyn district attorney, Kenneth P. Thompson, issued a statement that
questioned the condition of the lighting in the stairwell.
“Many questions must be answered, including whether, as reported, the lights in
the hallway were out for a number of days, and how this tragedy actually
occurred,” Mr. Thompson said.
Neighbors said darkened stairwells were nothing new in the Pink Houses. “The
staircases from eight down are dark,” said Mattie Dubose, a resident. “If you
want to walk in them, you need an escort.”
The Police Department is still dealing with the fallout over the death of Eric
Garner, a Staten Island man who died after a confrontation with the police in
July. The department sought to defuse tension on Friday both by naming the
officer in the shooting — an unusual step — and by noting repeatedly that the
victim was blameless.
At City Hall, aides to the mayor were well aware of the imminent decision by a
grand jury on the police shooting in Ferguson and the charged atmosphere that
the death of an unarmed black man can create.
The mayor and Mr. Bratton conferred by telephone several times on Friday
morning. Deputy Commissioner Benjamin B. Tucker spoke with the Rev. Al Sharpton
about the shooting and the city’s response. The chief of the Police Department’s
community affairs bureau, Joanne Jaffe, went to Mr. Gurley’s home in Red Hook,
Brooklyn, and was with relatives when his young daughter was told of her
father’s death.
Ms. Ballinger, the mother of Mr. Gurley’s young daughter, and his sister, Akisha
Pringle, were scheduled to appear with Mr. Sharpton at an event on Saturday.
“She’s got to explain to her 2-year-old old why her father did not pick her up
from school today and why he was not home to play with him as is their routine,”
Kirsten Foy of the National Action Network, Mr. Sharpton’s organization, said
after meeting with the family.
The officer’s future is unclear beyond an expected interview he will give to
police superiors. It was not known whether he could face criminal prosecution.
“The cops have tremendous leeway with self-defense cases, but less leeway with a
case like this,” said Eugene O’Donnell, a former prosecutor who teaches at John
Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan. “A life was lost, and you are
going to have to account for it.”
A similar shooting occurred in January 2004, when Officer Richard S. Neri Jr.
killed Timothy Stansbury Jr., 19, on a roof at the Louis Armstrong Houses in
Brooklyn. A grand jury declined to indict Officer Neri after he gave emotional
testimony that he had unintentionally fired; he was startled, he said, when Mr.
Stansbury pushed open a rooftop door in a place where drug dealing was rampant.
On Friday night in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, a next-door neighbor of Officer
Liang described him as cautious and helpful. “He wouldn’t mess around or do
anything out of the ordinary,” said the neighbor, Ronald Chan, 24.
When Mr. Chan learned about the shooting, he said he was shocked and could not
believe someone as cautious as his neighbor could have been involved.
“I think it was an honest mistake, because safety first,” he said. “Why would he
do that? It sounds like an accident.”
Reporting was contributed by Matt Flegenheimer, Michael M. Grynbaum, Benjamin
Mueller, James C. McKinley Jr., Marc Santora, Nate Schweber, Jeffrey E. Singer
and Alex Vadukul, and research by Alain Delaquérière.
A version of this article appears in print on November 22, 2014, on page A1 of
the New York edition with the headline: City Officer’s Errant Shot Kills an
Unarmed Man.
Officer’s Errant Shot Kills Unarmed Brooklyn
Man, NYT, 21.11.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/22/nyregion/
new-york-police-officer-fatally-shoots-brooklyn-man.html
Ferguson Officer Who Killed Teenager
Is Said Not to Be Returning to Duty
NOV. 21, 2014
The New York Times
By MONICA DAVEY
and JULIE BOSMAN
FERGUSON, Mo. — The white police officer who fatally shot an
unarmed black teenager here over the summer, setting off months of protests,
will not return to duty in the city’s police department, those close to him said
on Friday, as the region braced for a grand jury’s decision on whether to indict
him.
Signs pointed to that decision’s coming as early as this weekend. One nearby
school district announced that it would close on Monday and Tuesday, decision or
no decision, to avoid unrest that might follow the news. An array of law
enforcement officials, including some from the F.B.I., were making final
preparations for the possibility of large-scale demonstrations similar to those
that erupted, and sometimes turned violent, after the shooting in August. And
the St. Louis County prosecutor’s office, which is overseeing the grand jury,
began making arrangements on Friday for a public announcement of the decision,
whenever it comes.
President Obama, in a television interview, urged Americans in Ferguson and
elsewhere to “keep protests peaceful.” In comments to ABC News from a program
that aired on Friday night, Mr. Obama said, “Using any event as an excuse for
violence is contrary to rule of law and contrary to who we are.”
In an interview with ABC News, President Obama said that protesters in Ferguson,
Mo., should “keep protests peaceful” and that there would be no excuse for
violence.
Video by ABC News on Publish Date November 21, 2014.
Since the shooting of Michael Brown, 18, on Aug. 9, there have been numerous and
strenuous calls for the police officer, Darren Wilson, to resign or be fired.
Those close to him said on Friday that Officer Wilson, who has been on paid
administrative leave since the shooting, had no intention of returning to the
mostly white police department in this mostly black St. Louis suburb.
Discussions between Ferguson officials and Officer Wilson’s lawyers had begun in
the last two months, some involved said, but tapered off without resolution. On
several occasions, Ferguson officials have urged him to resign, but he has not
agreed on the timing of his departure, an official with knowledge of the talks
said Friday. The city does not plan to offer Officer Wilson, who says that he
feared for his life when he encountered Mr. Brown and shot him, severance pay or
any compensation in exchange for his resignation, an official said.
Ferguson personnel rules require that an investigation be completed in order to
fire an employee. That has not yet happened, the official said. If Officer
Wilson is indicted in Mr. Brown’s death, city officials have said, he will be
fired.
All around the St. Louis region, people were girding for what might follow an
announcement of the grand jury’s decision, as the shooting spurred months of
furious protests over police conduct, racial profiling and what demonstrators
here consider a racially biased justice system. Many protesters said they
expected that Officer Wilson would not be indicted, and that the grand jury’s
finding would set off renewed — and perhaps still larger — responses of anger,
even violence.
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. issued recommendations to law enforcement
agencies on Friday aimed at limiting clashes with protesters. And, as Missouri
National Guard troops were being called up to assist a unified command of state
and local police officers, Mr. Brown’s father, Michael Brown Sr. recorded a
public service announcement urging demonstrators to be peaceful.
Continue reading the main story
“Hurting others or destroying property is not the answer,” he said in the
videotaped statement. “No matter what the grand jury decides, I do not want my
son’s death to be in vain. I want it to lead to incredible change — positive
change, change that makes the St. Louis region better for everyone.”
Mr. Holder also called for peaceful protest, but also for restraint from law
enforcement officers.
“The Justice Department encourages law enforcement officials, in every
jurisdiction, to work with the communities that they serve to minimize needless
confrontation,” Mr. Holder said in a videotaped statement. “It is vital to
engage in planning and preparation, from evaluating protocols and training to
choosing the appropriate equipment and uniforms.”
Separate from the grand jury, the Justice Department is conducting two civil
rights inquiries — one into the shooting of Mr. Brown, and another into the
Ferguson Police Department and whether it has engaged in a pattern of civil
rights violations.
State and local officials have encouraged the Justice Department to announce the
results of its inquiry into the shooting at the same time as the announcement of
the grand jury’s decision, arguing that, if no charges are filed against Officer
Wilson, Mr. Holder’s credibility among African-Americans will reassure people
that the decision was a result of a thorough investigation. But Mr. Holder and
his top aides have repeatedly refused, saying their investigation was not
complete and that rushing to finish it to meet the state’s timeline would be
inappropriate.
The F.B.I. has sent several dozen of its personnel to the St. Louis area,
according to law enforcement officials. Many of them are uniformed police
officers who will be there to protect the bureau’s field office in St. Louis if
there are riots or protests.
Specialized computer technicians have been sent to Ferguson to help the police
department and the local government fend off attacks from hackers who have
pledged to bring down their computer networks. Intelligence analysts are also in
the area to help identify anarchists and others who may use the verdict as an
excuse to lash out violently.
In his video, Mr. Holder also urged restraint from demonstrators. “Peaceful
protest has been a hallmark and a legacy of past movements for change, from
patriotic women who demanded access to the franchise, to the civil rights
pioneers who marched for equal rights and equal justice,” he said.
Since the afternoon of Aug. 9, when Mr. Brown was shot at least six times after
a confrontation with Officer Wilson, protesters have held demonstrations nearly
nightly. In the last few nights, eight people have been arrested during
gatherings outside the Ferguson police’s headquarters. On Friday, a handful of
people performed a mock lynching across the street from St. Louis’s Old
Courthouse as a silent protest of police killings.
The authorities said on Friday that they would abide by a set of “rules of
engagement” proposed during talks with demonstrators in recent weeks, though
they did not agree to all of the 19 suggested rules.
The police, for instance, agreed that the government should not limit cellular
or Internet service and that officers would treat “protesters as citizens and
not ‘enemy combatants.’ ” Yet law enforcement officials refused a request to
provide 48 hours’ notice of the grand jury announcement, saying that was not
their choice to make, and offered qualified agreement to demands to limit the
use of riot gear and not to stop reporters or legal observers from working.
“If protesters are nonviolent, police will not be aggressive,” Mayor Francis G.
Slay of St. Louis said during a news conference outlining the rules. “When
demonstrators are being civilly disobedient, they will in most cases be given a
chance to adhere to the law before being arrested. And then, if necessary, they
will be arrested in a nonviolent manner.”
Around the region, schools have been preparing for the grand jury’s return, and
some have asked that the announcement be made outside of school hours. On
Friday, officials in the Jennings School District, southeast of Ferguson,
announced that its eight schools would be closed Monday and Tuesday.
Other districts in the region have decided to remain open on Monday and Tuesday,
saying it would be premature to close schools when it was still unknown when the
grand jury’s decision would be announced. “As of right now, there’s been no
change in our schedule,” said Jana Shortt, a spokeswoman for the
Ferguson-Florissant School District. “It’s business as usual until we receive
something from the prosecutor’s office, some word of an announcement.”
Reporting was contributed by Manny Fernandez, John Eligon and Brent McDonald
from Ferguson; Alan Blinder and Mitch Smith from Clayton, Mo.; Michael S.
Schmidt and Matt Apuzzo from Washington; and Timothy Williams from New York.
A version of this article appears in print on November 22, 2014, on page A14 of
the New York edition with the headline: Ferguson Officer Who Killed Teenager Is
Said Not to Be Returning to Duty.
Ferguson Officer Who Killed Teenager Is Said
Not to Be Returning to Duty,
NYT, 21.11.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/22/us/
ahead-of-ferguson-grand-jury-finding-officials-and-protest-leaders-
set-rules-of-conduct.html
Fatal Encounter in Ferguson
Took Less Than 90 Seconds,
Police Communications Reveal
NOV. 15, 2014
The New York Times
By MONICA DAVEY
FERGUSON, Mo. — Audio of police radio communications and video
from surveillance cameras at the Ferguson Police Department offer new details
from the day that Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was shot dead by a
white police officer in August.
As the region waits tensely for a grand jury to decide whether to indict the
officer, Darren Wilson, in the shooting, the new disclosures gave yet another
glimpse of the complicated and unusually abundant information that the jurors
may be sifting through.
The audio and video were published on Friday by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
The police radio communications, including remarks by Officer Wilson, reveal
that the encounter with Mr. Brown on Aug. 9 was brief — less than 90 seconds
from start to finish. Though the time was short, questions remain about the
encounter: Were Mr. Brown’s hands raised in the air in a motion of surrender
when he was shot, as some witnesses have said? Was Officer Wilson punched and
scratched in a struggle with Mr. Brown, as he has told the authorities? Did
Officer Wilson view Mr. Brown as a suspect in a theft that had just occurred at
a store?
The newly published audio, which the newspaper said it obtained through the
state’s public records law, makes it clear that Officer Wilson was aware that
other officers were investigating a “stealing in progress” that had been
reported at a local market before he came across Mr. Brown and a friend on
Canfield Drive. But the radio dispatches do not clarify whether Officer Wilson,
who had initially warned the two friends not to walk in the street, suspected
Mr. Brown at that point in connection with the theft.
“Put me on Canfield with two,” Officer Wilson told a dispatcher at 12:02 p.m.,
moments before the shooting. “And send me another car.” Not long after the
shooting, officials released video from the market, showing Mr. Brown pushing a
store clerk and taking cigarillos a short time before his fatal confrontation
with Officer Wilson.
The videotapes, according to the newspaper, came from later in the afternoon of
Aug. 9 and show Officer Wilson walking out of the police department to go to the
hospital and returning later. The video images do not reveal injuries on Officer
Wilson, but they do not show his face clearly or close up.
On Saturday, lawyers for Mr. Brown’s family said the videotapes contradicted
reports of the officer’s injuries. “Information was leaked from within the
police department that Wilson was severely beaten and suffered an orbital eye
socket ‘blowout,’ indicating that Michael Brown somehow deserved to die,” a
statement from the lawyers said. “From the video released today it would appear
the initial descriptions of his injuries were exaggerated.”
Fatal Encounter in Ferguson Took Less Than 90
Seconds,
Police Communications Reveal, NYT, 15.11.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/us/
ferguson-shooting-michael-brown-darren-wilson.html
Police Behavior in Ferguson
Draws Attention of Justice Department
SEPT. 26, 2014
The New York Times
By JULIE BOSMAN
The Justice Department on Friday pressured the Ferguson Police
Department to stop its officers from wearing bracelets stamped with the message
“I am Darren Wilson,” in solidarity with the police officer who is being
investigated for shooting an unarmed black 18-year-old, and from covering up
their name plates with tape.
The bracelets, dark blue with white lettering, were photographed on the wrists
of several Ferguson police officers who were interacting with demonstrators this
week as protests flared up once again in this small city in the suburbs of St.
Louis. A grand jury is looking into the shooting of the teenager, Michael Brown,
on Aug. 9, and the police department is under investigation by the Justice
Department for possible civil rights violations.
In a stern letter to Chief Thomas Jackson, Christy E. Lopez, deputy chief of the
special litigation section of the Justice Department’s civil rights division,
said that the bracelets “upset and agitated people.”
“There is no question that police departments can and should closely regulate
officers’ professional appearance and behavior, particularly where, as here, the
expressive accessory itself is exacerbating an already tense atmosphere between
law enforcement and residents in Ferguson,” Ms. Lopez wrote. “These bracelets
reinforce the very ‘us versus them’ mentality that many residents of Ferguson
believe exists.”
Ms. Lopez noted that Chief Jackson had agreed to prohibit officers from wearing
the “I am Darren Wilson” bracelets while in uniform and on duty. Nonetheless,
she said she was making the letter to him public.
She also said that police officers were reported to have placed black tape over
their name plates, a violation of the police department’s own policies.
“Officers’ wearing name plates while in uniform is a basic component of
transparency and accountability,” Ms. Lopez wrote. “It is a near-universal
requirement of sound policing practices and required under some state laws.”
Chief Jackson had met with Justice Department officials on Thursday afternoon.
The city has struggled to recover since the shooting nearly seven weeks ago set
off days of sometimes violent protests that cast a spotlight on racial tensions
and police practices.
This week, city officials canceled an event called StreetFest that had been
scheduled for this weekend, citing safety concerns. On Thursday night, a protest
erupted outside the police department’s building on South Florissant Road, and
not long after Chief Jackson emerged to talk to protesters, a skirmish broke out
and several demonstrators were arrested.
A video statement from Chief Jackson, out of uniform, in which he apologized for
Mr. Brown’s death and the four hours his body lay in the street, was released on
Thursday morning but failed to repair relations between the police and
protesters.
The tumult in Ferguson extended to Devin James, a public relations official
whose firm was handling communications work for the city and released the video.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported on Thursday that Mr. James had been
convicted of negligent homicide in Tennessee in 2006. Mr. James told the
newspaper that he had acted in self-defense. He served 90 days in prison and was
on probation for five years.
Mr. James had been under contract with the St. Louis Economic Development
Partnership, which terminated his contract on Thursday. Ferguson officials said
they would continue working with him.
In an interview, Mr. James said that he had been open with city officials about
his history. His background was “exactly why they sent me to Ferguson,” he said,
making the case that as an African-American who had his own encounter with law
enforcement, he was sensitive to the protesters’ concerns.
A group of protesters who had camped out for weeks in a parking lot on West
Florissant Avenue were removed from the area on Friday by the police, who cited
health code violations.
Andy Wurm, the owner of an automotive shop across the street from the police
department, had allowed a small group of demonstrators to use an area of his
parking lot since the protests began. But on Friday, he said in an interview, he
asked them to leave.
“Every citizen in the city of Ferguson is a victim of the whole thing,” Mr. Wurm
said. “Their property values are going down. Our business is down 60, 70
percent. I love what I do, but it’s harder and harder to get up and do what I do
every day.”
A version of this article appears in print on September 27, 2014, on page A12 of
the New York edition with the headline: Police Behavior in Ferguson Draws
Attention of Justice Dept..
Police Behavior in Ferguson Draws Attention of
Justice Department,
NYT, 26.9.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/27/us/ferguson-missouri.html
Mostly White Forces
in Mostly Black Towns:
Police Struggle for Racial Diversity
SEPT. 9, 2014
The New York Times
By SHAILA DEWAN
MAPLE HEIGHTS, Ohio — The population of this working-class
Cleveland suburb has gone from nearly all white to two-thirds black since its
mayor declared more than 35 years ago that he did not know “what a minority is.”
But its police and fire departments have not kept pace: The Maple Heights police
force today still has only two black officers out of 35; the fire department is
100 percent white.
Maple Heights is far from unique. Across the country, police departments still
struggle to hire and retain minority candidates — in some cases despite great
efforts, in others because of a lack of initiative. But now, the problem has
taken on new relevance since the fatal shooting of a young black man last month
in Ferguson, Mo., where just four of the 53 police officers are black, according
to the police chief.
Nationwide, the total number of minority police officers has risen, but they
remain heavily concentrated in larger cities, with the numbers falling off
sharply in smaller ones, like Ferguson and Maple Heights.
Data from a federal survey of police departments in 2007, analyzed for The New
York Times by Andrew A. Beveridge, a sociologist at Queens College, found that
nearly 400 departments, most with fewer than a hundred officers, were
substantially whiter than the populations they served. In these departments, the
share of white officers was greater than the share of white residents by more
than 50 percentage points.
Ferguson and Maple Heights are about the same size, just over 20,000 people, and
in both, the black population has surged in recent decades. Both cities have
white mayors and largely white political leaderships. And both police
departments have fallen far short of reflecting the communities they serve —
even as some of Maple Heights’s neighboring police departments have achieved
much higher levels of diversity.
Critics point to the lack of racial balance in police departments as evidence of
systemic racism. But experts say the experiences of the two towns illustrate the
obstacles to achieving diversity in law enforcement, even for departments that
have made it a priority.
“I see all these pundits come on the Sunday talk shows and say: ‘Of course you
can hire more black people. Of course they’re not trying,’ ” said Nelson Lim, a
senior sociologist at the RAND Institute’s Center on Quality Policing who has
consulted with departments in Los Angeles and San Diego. “But it’s very, very,
very difficult.”
There is little hard evidence that diversity correlates with better performance,
in part because it is difficult to control for complex variables and to know
which outcomes, from crime rates to brutality cases, to measure. In fact, one
study of a Florida police department found that black officers were more likely
than white to use force against black suspects.
A review of court cases going back to the early 1990s revealed only a handful of
civil rights or excessive-force cases against the Maple Heights police, two of
which involved a white officer who is no longer with the department, and none
that involved a fatality like the shooting in Ferguson.
Still, it is an accepted tenet of community policing that when departments
reflect the communities they serve, they have an easier time building trust and
defusing, rather than escalating, tense situations.
In Maple Heights, some residents said they would like to see more black
officers, while others said that it was the attitude, experience and training of
the officer, not race, that mattered. Chris Turney, a home renovator who lives
with his wife and two daughters, said it was more important for officers to live
in the city. All but one do not.
“The police come here, they do their jobs, they don’t try to get to know
anybody,” said Mr. Turney, who is black. “The police don’t wave.”
Other residents drew a contrast between police attitudes in Maple Heights and
neighboring Bedford Heights, where three-quarters of the residents, and nine of
28 police officers, are black. “Bedford’s not going to do you like Maple,” said
Carlos Walker, 41, who is black. “You have to do something real stupid for
Bedford. Maple, soon as they get behind you, you sweating.”
In her 11 years as an officer in Bedford Heights, Detective Ericka Payne, who is
black, has often provided backup on calls in Maple Heights. “There are
definitely differences in the ways the departments interact with the outside
community,” Detective Payne said. “We try to be a little bit more community
oriented. Because we are a little bit more diverse, we understand those dynamics
and maybe have a little bit more ease dealing with that.”
Several Maple Heights officials said the diversity of the police and fire
departments had never been a major issue. It is hard to find qualified
candidates of any race, said John C. Popielarczyk, who has been with the Maple
Heights Police Department since 1990 and the acting police chief since May.
Maple Heights, devastated by the foreclosure crisis, has fallen on hard times,
and the police force has shrunk. And with most officers staying on the job for
25 years, Chief Popielarczyk said, the opportunity to hire is scarce. Of eight
recent hires, two were black. One, the chief said, was fired for cause before
his probationary period ended.
The department has advertised in minority newspapers and changed the private
company that administers its Civil Service exam in hopes that more minority
candidates would pass, he said. But he added: “The real goal of the department
is to provide qualified officers who are competent and can provide quality
service regardless of race. I don’t think people really care about the color of
the officer that responds; they care that the officer responds quickly, is
effective, treats them well and is respectful.”
The acting fire chief, James Castelucci, said much the same, adding that one
promising black candidate withdrew when his current employer offered him more
money.
The obstacles to diversity are many, Dr. Lim, the sociologist, said. Candidates
usually must pass written tests, physical agility tests, psychological tests,
polygraphs and background checks, some of which can have a disparate impact on
minority candidates. Qualified black candidates are sought after not just by
competing police departments, but also by employers in other industries. And
some police chiefs have cited a negative attitude toward law enforcement among
blacks that hinders recruiting.
Police departments have tried all kinds of remedies, from personal trainers to
help with physical fitness tests to tailored recruiting. (A RAND survey found
that women were attracted to the good salaries in policing, blacks to the
profession’s prestige and Asians to the excitement of the job.)
But many small departments lack the resources, or the will, to conduct an
exhaustive review of their hiring practices. In Maple Heights, job candidates
are ranked by how well they score on the written exam, earning bonus points for
factors like previous training, military experience and city residency. For each
opening, the candidates are considered one by one, in order of their score.
Some nearby suburbs like Bedford Heights and Cleveland Heights — where about 40
percent of the residents and 22 of 102 officers are black — do things
differently. The chiefs of both departments said officials were allowed to
consider the top 10 candidates on the list, which helps them hire more minority
candidates. Both chiefs said their cities took an aggressive approach to
diversity as early as the 1970s.
Cleveland Heights has two types of officer positions, one that requires a Civil
Service exam and a college degree, and a lower tier, called basic patrol, that
does not. Once a basic patrol officer is hired, the city will reimburse tuition
costs, and many eventually earn a degree and work their way to the upper tier.
The diversity of neighboring police departments poses a challenge to cities like
Maple Heights, Dr. Lim said: “If the leadership, if the police chief, is
dedicated to getting more diversity in the work force, how hard is it to figure
out how the other department is doing such a good job?”
Asked why Maple Heights considered only one candidate at a time, Chief
Popielarczyk said: “We’ve always done it that way. My understanding is that
that’s how we’re supposed to do it.”
Some Maple Heights residents have tried to persuade the city to hire more
blacks, forming a committee called the Maple Heights Citizens for Change. In
2012, Elaine Stone, a committee member who runs a blog called the Maple Heights
African American Gazette, was digging around and discovered a long-forgotten
affirmative action agreement, signed by the mayor, a citizens’ committee and a
representative from the federal Justice Department in 1977.
In that deal, Maple Heights, at the time about 96 percent white, agreed that
within three years minorities would make up at least 4 percent of its police and
fire departments. But it soon became clear that the city was less than fully
committed to this goal.
“I figure we’re all minorities,” the mayor at the time, Emil J. Lisy Jr., told
reporters when he was criticized for failing to live up to the agreement. “The
first thing is to find out what a minority is, and I haven’t figured that out.”
Federal officials threatened to withhold $500,000 in funds, but backed down
after the mayor submitted a 65-page response.
When Ms. Stone learned about the agreement, she contacted Frank Ross, the only
surviving signer of the document. Mr. Ross was a teacher in his 20s when he came
to Maple Heights, at a time when real estate brokers steered black customers to
a part of town called Presidential Row. He now lives 12 miles away, but agreed
to go to meetings of the committee, where he suggested that the group call the
Community Relations Service of the Justice Department, the same office that
helped broker the earlier deal.
Though new discussions were opened between the city and the service, which
provides mediation and training to governments, residents feel the talks have
stalled. Neither the mayor nor the Maple Heights legal director returned calls
for comment for this article, and the service does not publicly discuss its
work. Participation by local governments is strictly voluntary.
Ms. Stone said economics, not overt racism, had kept the police and fire
departments largely white. “There was white flight, but people were trying to
hold on to their jobs,” she said. “I can understand you don’t want to give up
that job.”
Mr. Ross said apathy among black voters was partly to blame for the situation.
But he does not accept the city’s excuses.
“They’re telling me in 40 years they can’t find any African-American policemen?”
he said. “Forty years later — it’s very emotional for me. Forty years later, I’m
still dealing with the same thing.”
Richard A. Oppel Jr., Susan Beachy and Archie Tse contributed reporting from New
York.
A version of this article appears in print on September 10, 2014, on page A1 of
the New York edition with the headline: Mostly White Forces in Mostly Black
Towns: Police Struggle for Racial Diversity.
Mostly White Forces in Mostly Black Towns:
Police Struggle for Racial Diversity, NYT, 9.9.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/10/us/
for-small-police-departments-increasing-diversity-is-a-struggle.html
A Step Toward Fairness in Ferguson
SEPT. 9, 2014
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages | Editorial
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
The racially torn city of Ferguson, Mo., took an important step
on Monday when the City Council announced proposals aimed at remaking its
troubled court system and creating a civilian review board for the Police
Department.
The initiatives, which have yet to be fully explained, speak to longstanding
grievances in the black community and are meant to defuse racial tensions that
erupted into riots last month after Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager,
was shot to death by a white policeman.
For the reforms to be truly meaningful, they will need to be adopted by
neighboring towns in St. Louis County that have similarly unfair legal systems,
which appear to single out black motorists for traffic and streets stops. The
reform effort also needs a strong push from the State Supreme Court, which
should bring the municipal courts into line with state law and United States
Supreme Court rulings that make it illegal to jail indigent defendants solely
because they are unable to pay fines.
Defense lawyers say that such abuses are common in St. Louis County, where black
motorists are often targeted for petty offenses that generate fines, which
provide some towns with 40 percent or more of their revenues. When motorists who
can’t afford to pay the fines and penalties miss their court dates, arrest
warrants are issued — which makes them vulnerable to losing job opportunities
and housing.
A Times article on Tuesday said that Ferguson had the highest number of warrants
relative to its size in the state. A report by ArchCity Defenders, a nonprofit
organization, found that last year Ferguson issued roughly three warrants for
every household in town.
The City Council seems to have gotten the message. It announced that it would
take up a proposal to repeal the offense of “failure to appear” in municipal
court so that defendants would no longer be charged or fined for not appearing.
Presumably, the new system will allow defendants to explain their absences and
permit them to work out payment plans for fines.
The Council also said it would take up proposals that limit court-fine totals to
15 percent or less of the city’s revenue and abolish onerous fees that can have
a catastrophic effect on the lives of impoverished defendants. The Council also
expressed the hope that municipal judges and prosecutors would explore
alternative methods of sentencing, including community service.
The state courts in Missouri are already forbidden by law to jail indigent
clients solely because they are too poor to pay. The State Supreme Court should
grant a recent request by defense lawyers and legal scholars that expressly
states that the same standard applies in municipal courts to indigent
defendants, many of whom are racial minorities.
In acting this week, the Ferguson City Council was clearly being mindful that
the Justice Department has begun a broad investigation into police practices in
Ferguson, focusing on issues like mistreatment of prisoners, use of excessive
force and discriminatory traffic stops.
That investigation needs to go forward, not just in Ferguson but in neighboring
towns in St. Louis County, which have been similarly bad records. The goal
should be to induce those towns to embrace judicial fairness as well.
A version of this editorial appears in print on September 10,
2014, on page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: A Step Toward
Fairness in Ferguson.
A Step Toward Fairness in Ferguson, NYT,
9.9.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/10/opinion/a-step-toward-fairness-in-ferguson.html
Justice in St. Louis County
Inquiry Into Ferguson, Mo., Police Practices
Is Just a Start
SEPT. 6, 2014
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
The Justice Department took a much-needed step last week when it
opened a broad civil rights investigation into police practices in Ferguson,
Mo., where the killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, by a white
police officer last month sparked days of demonstrations and riots.
But the investigation should not be limited to Ferguson. News accounts and a
recent study of court systems in neighboring towns strongly suggest that the
police in St. Louis County may be systematically targeting poor and minority
citizens for street and traffic stops (in part to generate fines), which has the
effect of criminalizing entire communities. This history of discriminatory stops
and abuse fueled the protests and violence that erupted after Mr. Brown was
gunned down.
In 1994, Congress gave the Justice Department the power to restructure troubled
or corrupt police departments, after Los Angeles police officers were captured
on video three years earlier beating up a black motorist, Rodney King.
Though federal officials have reformed several police departments in the past
two decades, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. has been particularly aggressive.
He has opened 20 such broad investigations into large and small police
departments across the country. The Justice Department is currently enforcing 14
consent decrees or out-of-court agreements — in places like New Orleans, Seattle
and Detroit — with the aim of making sure that police operations under its
guidance obey the Constitution.
The investigation into Ferguson’s policing practices will run parallel to a
separate federal inquiry focused specifically on the circumstances of Mr.
Brown’s shooting. In addition, President Obama — responding to disturbing images
of Ferguson police officers facing down civilians with military assault
equipment — has rightly ordered a review of the government’s policy of
outfitting local police with that level of firepower.
The civil rights investigation will focus on whether officers there made
discriminatory traffic stops, mistreated prisoners or used excessive force in
the years before last month’s fatal shooting of Mr. Brown.
The Justice Department will find plenty of evidence of disparate treatment of
black motorists in St. Louis County, which is crowded with municipalities. As
The Washington Post reported last week, some of these towns get 40 percent or
more of their revenue from traffic fines and fees from petty violations. And
since there are 90 municipalities in St. Louis County, that means drivers can
pass through several towns in just a few miles on one main thoroughfare.
Motorists who are detained in one town are often dragged through the courts or
jails in several communities.
As Campbell Robertson and Joseph Goldstein of The Times reported last month, the
municipal courts in places like Maplewood, Mo., are filled with blacks who are
pulled over by officers and charged with offenses that increase in cost when a
defendant misses a court date. According to a report by the state attorney
general in 2013, black motorists in Maplewood were searched or arrested during
stops at more than twice the rate of whites — even though searches of blacks and
whites were similarly likely to turn up contraband.
A startling analysis released last month by ArchCity Defenders, a nonprofit
group in St. Louis, offered up a harrowing portrait of these interlocking court
systems, which appear to be structured to persecute minority communities. In one
community, “100 percent of all searches and arrests originating from traffic
stops in Bel-Ridge in 2013 were of black individuals,” the report said.
Lawyers at ArchCity Defenders said their clients who were unable to pay the
fines were illegally jailed and lost their jobs and housing as a result of being
locked up. These practices “destroy the public’s confidence in the justice
system,” as the report notes, and they impose ruinous burdens on impoverished
citizens and violate the Constitution.
A wealth of evidence suggests that justice is not being fairly administered in
either Ferguson or greater St. Louis County. If the Justice Department confirms
what others have reported, it needs to use all of its authority to restore
fairness to the law enforcement process.
A version of this editorial appears in print on September 7, 2014, on page SR10
of the New York edition with the headline: Justice in St. Louis County.
Justice in St. Louis County, NYT, 6.9.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/opinion/sunday/
inquiry-into-ferguson-mo-police-practices-is-just-a-start.html
Justice Dept. Inquiry to Focus
on Practices of Police in Ferguson
SEPT. 3, 2014
The New York Times
By MATT APUZZO
and MANNY FERNANDEZ
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department will open a broad civil
rights investigation into police practices in Ferguson, Mo., where a white
police officer killed an unarmed black teenager last month and set off days of
racially charged unrest, the city’s police chief and other officials said
Wednesday.
The inquiry is in addition to the F.B.I. civil rights investigation that is
looking specifically into the shooting of the teenager, Michael Brown, on Aug.
9. The new investigation is expected to be announced soon, according to two
federal government officials who were briefed on the plans.
The broader Justice Department inquiry will cover whether the police in Ferguson
have a history of discrimination or misuse of force beyond the Brown case, but
the Justice Department has not ruled out expanding it to other St. Louis County
departments, one of the federal officials said. Both officials spoke on the
condition of anonymity because the investigation had not been formally
announced.
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and his aides first discussed such an
investigation weeks ago, immediately after the death of Mr. Brown, 18, when
reports surfaced that the Ferguson police force had previously been accused of
abuse.
Hundreds of police departments across the nation have forces with a white
percentage that is more than 30 percentage points higher than the communities
they serve.
Ferguson’s police chief, Thomas Jackson, said in an interview on Wednesday night
that he would welcome the investigation.
“We’ve been doing everything we can to become a professional police department
and a professional city,” he said. “We have no intentional policies or
procedures which discriminated or violated civil rights. But if we have anything
there which may unintentionally do that, we need to know about it.”
Chief Jackson said he met with Justice Department officials on Wednesday
afternoon and discussed the broader investigation. “Obviously, we have gaps. And
any help we can get to help fill those gaps and to make ourselves stronger, we
welcome,” he said. The population in Ferguson, a city of about 20,000 people
just north of St. Louis, is about two-thirds African-American. The city’s Police
Department has 53 officers, four of whom are black.
Adolphus M. Pruitt II, president of the N.A.A.C.P. chapter in the city of St.
Louis, said the investigation should be “just a start.” He said black leaders
had long complained about what he described as racial profiling, harassment and
improper stops of black residents by white officers from suburban St. Louis
police departments.
“They’re doing what we asked for,” Mr. Pruitt said of the Justice Department’s
inquiry. “We’re hoping that it brings some resolution to any number of
complaints we have in front of the Justice Department about various police
departments in St. Louis County.”
In the Ferguson case, the Justice Department will conduct what it calls a
“pattern or practice” investigation, with officials looking for evidence that
the police have repeatedly violated residents’ civil rights. Such inquiries have
been one of the Justice Department’s preferred tactics in addressing accusations
of police misconduct. The Ferguson investigation was first reported by The
Washington Post.
Under Mr. Holder, the Justice Department has opened 20 such civil rights
inquiries into police departments nationwide, more than twice the number opened
in the five years before he took office. The inquiries can lead to agreements
that give the Justice Department oversight of the police departments. The
Justice Department has said it is currently enforcing 13 such agreements, the
largest number in its history.
Mr. Brown was shot six times after Officer Darren Wilson, 28, stopped him for
“walking down the street blocking traffic,” as Chief Jackson put it. Mr. Brown
fell on his stomach, his arms at his sides and his head bloody. His body was
left on the street for hours. Officer Wilson, who was placed on administrative
leave, has not been charged with any wrongdoing.
Protests immediately after Mr. Brown’s killing led to a riot, and violence
continued for days as area police departments responded with a show of
military-style force.
Mr. Holder has personally assured Mr. Brown’s family that the federal
investigation will be thorough and independent. Civil rights investigations into
police shootings are difficult: Courts have given the police wide latitude to
use deadly force when they feel threatened. To bring charges, prosecutors must
show that Officer Wilson intended to violate Mr. Brown’s civil rights when he
opened fire and that he did so willfully — meaning he knew it was wrong but
fired anyway.
One incident that caught the attention of the federal authorities after the
Brown shooting was a 2009 case in which an African-American man said that
officers beat him and then charged him with damaging government property — by
getting his blood on their uniforms. Missouri N.A.A.C.P. leaders lodged another
Justice Department complaint against the St. Louis County Police Department last
year, accusing its officers of engaging in widespread racial profiling in an
attempt to crack down on crime in and around the South County Center, a shopping
mall.
Mr. Pruitt said one of the incidents referred to in the complaint involved two
white officers who arrested 145 black men and women in a 30-day period in the
mall area for outstanding warrants.
“We determined that the stops were not legitimate stops,” Mr. Pruitt said. “They
stopped them because they were black. The question is, how many blacks did they
have to go through to find 145 with warrants?”
Matt Apuzzo reported from Washington, and Manny Fernandez from Ferguson, Mo.
A version of this article appears in print on September 4, 2014, on page A12 of
the New York edition with the headline: Justice Dept. Inquiry to Focus on
Practices of Police in Ferguson.
Justice Dept. Inquiry to Focus on Practices of
Police in Ferguson,
NYT, 3.9.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/04/us/politics/
justice-dept-to-investigate-ferguson-police-practices.html
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