History > 2014 > USA > Gun violence (III)

Erik Carter

  Censorship in Your Doctor’s Office

NYT

1.8.2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/02/opinion/censorship-in-your-doctors-office.html 

Murders Drop to a Record Low,

but Officers Aren’t Celebrating

 

DEC. 31, 2014

The New York Times

By J. DAVID GOODMAN

and AL BAKER

The number of murders in New York City has dropped to what years ago would have seemed like an impossible low: 328 killings recorded in 2014, the lowest figure since at least 1963, when the Police Department began collecting reliable statistics.

With hours left in 2014, the number of murders capped a year of lower numbers in nearly every major crime category and offered an answer to what had been a central question of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s first year: Could a mayor elected on promises of police reform keep the specter of the bad old days from returning?

But there is little celebration among the city’s police officers, who remain in mourning after the recent killings of two comrades. They have also heard calls to reverse their policing practices and found their union representatives locked in a bitter public struggle with the mayor that, in recent days, has coincided with a substantial drop in enforcement of everyday crime by officers.

Reports of major crimes citywide continued their yearlong decline, to 105,428 through Dec. 28, from 110,728 in the same period in 2013, according to Police Department statistics. Murders dropped from 335 in 2013.

The decrease in crime in 2014 continues a two-decade slide in New York City. While other cities have seen fluctuations and occasional increases in recent years, New York has largely grown safer. Los Angeles, for example, was on pace to end 2014 with more overall violent crime than in 2013, including big jumps in assaults and rapes. In Chicago, crime is down, but the city recorded 392 murders through Dec. 21 in a much smaller population.

Mr. de Blasio told Police Academy graduates on Monday that when he took office, the Police Department spoke of 2013 with reverence. “But this year — 2014 — this N.Y.P.D. beat the record,” he said. “That is an achievement for the ages.”

Under the guidance of his police commissioner, William J. Bratton, the department ended its reliance on stopping and frisking vast numbers of mostly minority men, a practice that exposed rifts between the police and some communities. But even as street crime receded, the mayor found those rifts torn open by the chokehold death of Eric Garner after his arrest on Staten Island in July, and a grand jury’s decision last month not to indict the officer involved.

During his first stint as police commissioner, Mr. Bratton sought to honor police officers in 1995 with a parade through Manhattan to celebrate what he saw as their success in turning a corner on crime. That year, there were 1,177 murders. The highest number came in 1990, with 2,245.

This time around, as Mr. Bratton ends the first year of his return to the commissioner’s office, no such parade has been suggested in the Canyon of Heroes. Instead, officers have been assigned in those same corridors of Lower Manhattan to patrol demonstrations over Mr. Garner’s death and other police killings.

Police officials chalked up their success in 2014, in part, to an increased focus on the small number of people responsible for a majority of offenses and their patterns of criminal behavior. “We have the luxury to really dig in,” said Dermot F. Shea, the department’s deputy commissioner of operations.

The number of robberies, a bellwether crime that erodes public perception of safety, reached their lowest levels yet recorded, 16,326 through Dec. 28, down 14 percent from 2013. The high point for robberies came in 1981, when the police recorded 107,495.

Shootings, which spiked over the summer, leveled off at 1,162 through Dec. 28, and remained only slightly ahead of 2013’s low levels. Mr. Shea said 200 to 300 mostly young men are responsible for a majority of those shootings, according to a department analysis.

Despite a continuation of the steep drop in recorded stop-and-frisk encounters, the department’s philosophy of crime prevention has remained the same between the Bloomberg and de Blasio administrations, said Dennis C. Smith, a professor of public policy at New York University who has studied the Police Department’s strategies.

But Mr. Bratton has made adjustments. Where in the past, commanders from particular precincts or areas of the city gathered to discuss crime trends, officers now also gather in so-called CompStat meetings to discuss particular crimes of concern, such as grand larcenies and rooftop burglaries.

Among the more surprising trends in 2014 was a sudden uptick in car thefts, a crime that had virtually disappeared as a fear for most New Yorkers. Much of the rise, Mr. Shea said, came from a loophole in state law that allows for older model cars — those that are also easier to steal — to be junked with minimal paperwork that proves ownership.

But homicides provided the starkest development, a continued slide that came despite an atmosphere of tit-for-tat gun violence among some gangs. The Police Department recorded at least 40 homicides in December, Mr. Shea said, a high tally that includes roughly a dozen deaths stemming from assaults in prior months or years.

George L. Kelling, an architect of the “broken windows” theory of crime-fighting, which emphasizes focusing on low-level crimes to prevent larger ones, said the low numbers called to mind the long-ago notions of a London policing luminary often cited by Mr. Bratton.

“It goes back to Sir Robert Peel,” he said. “The sign of an effective police department is the absence of crime. Not the activities dealing with it, like an arrest.”
 

A version of this article appears in print on January 1, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Murders Drop to a Record Low, but Officers Aren’t Celebrating.

    Murders Drop to a Record Low, but Officers Aren’t Celebrating,
    NYT, 31.12.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/01/nyregion/
    new-york-city-murders-fall-but-the-police-arent-celebrating.html

Woman at Walmart

Is Accidentally Shot Dead

by 2-Year-Old Son

DEC. 30, 2014

The New York Times

By BILL MORLIN

and KIRK JOHNSON

HAYDEN, Idaho — The details are shatteringly ordinary. A 2-year-old toddler, sitting in a shopping cart in a Walmart, his mother’s purse unattended and within reach as she shopped. Three girls, all under age 11 — relatives of the boy and his mother, the police said — tagging along. A frosty morning in the northern Idaho panhandle, the temperature in the teens. Holiday break. The clothing aisles near electronics, back of the store.

Then, shortly before 10:20 a.m. on Tuesday, as the store video cameras recorded the scene, the little boy found a gun in his mother’s purse and it discharged once at near point-blank range from where she stood, less than arm’s length away, said Lt. Stu Miller, a spokesman for the Kootenai County sheriff’s office. She died at the scene, he said, her death appearing to be accidental.

“He probably still doesn’t even know what has happened,” Lieutenant Miller said of the boy.

The victim, Veronica Jean Rutledge, 29, of Blackfoot, Idaho, about 380 miles from Hayden in Idaho’s southeast corner, was visiting family members here in this community of about 13,000 people bordering the resort town of Coeur d’Alene, about 40 minutes from Spokane, Wash. Both her parents and her husband’s live in the area, Lieutenant Miller said.

He did not know whether Ms. Rutledge had a permit to carry a concealed weapon. Her husband came to the store to collect his son and the girls after the accident.

“This situation is such a tragedy, particularly happening so close to the holidays,” Lieutenant Miller said. Asked why the woman might have felt the need to go armed to the Walmart, he said that carrying a weapon was not particularly remarkable or unusual.

“It’s pretty common around here — a lot of people carry loaded guns,” he said.

This part of Idaho, about 100 miles from the Canadian border, is not part of the state’s famed agriculture belt, known for its potatoes, which stretches far to the south. Up here, evergreen forests, the blue expanse of nearby Lake Coeur d’Alene, and the deep historical imprint of the silver mines that defined life for decades starting in the 1800s, make it feel more like Montana and Washington, the states that sandwich it on either side.

“It’s a small-town atmosphere with a lot of tourism and a lot of growth,” said Stefan T. Chatwin, the city administrator, in an interview at City Hall, about three blocks from the Walmart, which sat closed, its parking lot mostly empty, on a stretch of U.S. 95 that wends down from British Columbia. The store is expected to reopen on Wednesday,

Mr. Chatwin also said that guns are a part of the culture here. The city amended its gun laws just last week, he said, to conform with state laws and make it clear that a gun owner is justified in firing a weapon in defense of persons or property.

Judy Minter, a self-employed artist who was working on an art display at City Hall, said that she too supported the right to bear arms, though she said she did not carry a weapon herself. The wisdom of when to go armed or not seemed to her to be more the question at issue in Tuesday’s accident.

“There’s a lot of people who do carry guns in this area,” said Ms. Minter, who had spent most of the day photographing bald eagles, a common sight on Lake Coeur d’Alene. “But for her to have it within reach of her child — that was not very smart.”

Bill Morlin reported from Hayden, and Kirk Johnson from Seattle.

A version of this article appears in print on December 31, 2014, on page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: 2-Year-Old Boy Sets Off Gun, Killing Mother in Idaho Store.

    Woman at Walmart Is Accidentally Shot Dead by 2-Year-Old Son,
    NYT, 30.12.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/31/us/walmart-shooting-by-2-year-old.html

Police Combing Through Shooting Suspect’s

Arrest History and Violent Day

 

DEC. 20, 2014

The New York Times

By J. DAVID GOODMAN

Hours after Ismaaiyl Brinsley shot a former girlfriend in Maryland on Saturday, he returned to New York, his place of birth, armed with a gun and harboring intentions to attack police officers, officials said.

He would do so by the afternoon, they said, killing two New York City police officers in an ambush shooting in Brooklyn and then killing himself.

By the end of the day, detectives were combing through the life of Mr. Brinsley, 28, who has ties to East Flatbush and whose last known address appeared to be in Atlanta, said William J. Bratton, the police commissioner.

His recent arrest history, mostly in Georgia and Ohio, depicted a man familiar with the criminal use of firearms — but without any apparent acts of serious violence that would have anticipated the sort of premeditated killing of police officers that Mr. Bratton called an “assassination” and that Mayor Bill de Blasio said had been done “execution-style.”

Mr. Brinsley was arrested on robbery charges in Ohio in 2009 and weapons possession in Georgia, court records showed. Investigators in New York believe he had been in the city as recently as 2011 when he was a suspect in a harassment case.

Later that year, he was convicted of felony gun possession in Georgia, and sentenced to two years in prison. It was not immediately clear when he was released from custody.

Reached by phone at her Georgia home, a woman who identified herself as Mr. Brinsley’s sister said she had not seen him in two years. She said she did not remember hearing her brother express anger at police officers. “I need to call my mom,” she said before hanging up.

It was not immediately clear what brought Mr. Brinsley to Baltimore County. But he was there Saturday around 5:45 a.m., when the authorities said he shot the former girlfriend, 29, in the stomach, wounding her in her apartment in Owings Mills, Md.

Soon after, messages began appearing on the woman’s Instagram account, believed to have been posted by Mr. Brinsley, that carried some “very antipolice” messages, Mr. Bratton said at a news conference on Saturday evening. Based on the postings, Baltimore County authorities determined one of them had come from Brooklyn. They said they placed a call to the 70th Police Precinct in New York City around 2:10 p.m.

By 2:45 p.m., law enforcement officials in Baltimore County had warned their counterparts in New York and elsewhere to be on the lookout, sending around a digital warning poster with Mr. Brinsley’s face and history. Around that time, the police said, Mr. Brinsley walked up to a marked squad car on a Brooklyn street with a silver semiautomatic handgun and opened fire at the two police officers inside, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos.

Mr. Brinsley shot himself a short time later on the platform of a subway station.

As Mr. Brinsley appeared to have posted antipolice messages to the web before the killings, Mr. de Blasio implored New Yorkers to tell the authorities if they see similar postings warning of coming violence.

Yet even as Mr. Brinsley “indicated” on the account that he was going to attack the police, Mr. Bratton told reporters on Saturday night that the motive for the shooting remained unclear. Investigators were looking into whether Mr. Brinsley had considered killing police officers before the shooting in Maryland, or if had been a deadly outgrowth of that burst of violence.

Part of the investigation, Mr. Bratton said, would be focused on his recent activities, including whether he had taken part in any of the protests after the deaths of two unarmed black men in confrontations with the police. No indication emerged as of late Saturday that he had. With Mr. Brinsley taking his own life, Mr. Bratton said, investigators were now working to piece together his movements and motivations with an eye toward restoring “some sanity to the madness that occurred here this afternoon in the streets of Brooklyn.”
 

Ashley Southall contributed reporting, and Jack Begg contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on December 21, 2014, on page A35 of the New York edition with the headline: Authorities Comb Through Suspect’s Arrest History and Violent Day.

    Police Combing Through Shooting Suspect’s Arrest History and Violent Day,
    NYT, 20.12.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/nyregion/
    police-combing-through-shooting-suspects-arrest-history-and-violent-day.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

De Blasio Remains Guarded

in Remarks on Garner Case

DEC. 7, 2014

The New York Times

By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM

Mayor Bill de Blasio has striven for a delicate balance in his response to the Eric Garner case, eager to show his empathy for protesters dismayed at the unpunished death of a black man, yet careful to show respect for the New York City police force that reports to him.

That nuance, and the mayor’s reluctance to engage with questions he dislikes, was put to a sharp, nationally televised test on Sunday morning, when Mr. de Blasio faced tough questions during an appearance on ABC’s “This Week.”

Asked several times by the host, George Stephanopoulos, if he respected the grand jury’s decision not to pursue criminal charges in the Garner case, Mr. de Blasio refused to say either way.

When asked if the outcome of the case had been just, Mr. de Blasio said, “I make it a point not to talk about any element of judicial process per se.”

Mr. Stephanopoulos quickly interjected: “Others are willing to, why not you?”

“Because as an executive in public service, I think it’s important to respect the judicial process,” the mayor replied.

“So you respect the grand jury’s decision?” the interviewer asked.

“I respect the process,” Mr. de Blasio replied, ambiguously.

The mayor has insisted on an above-the-fray approach to the fallout from the Garner case, defending the Police Department as committed to reforms but also allowing protesters to march mostly unencumbered in New York’s streets.

But Mr. de Blasio, who staked his mayoralty on improving relations between the police and minorities, is walking a narrow path. Police union officials have already accused the mayor of undermining law enforcement by sharing what he said were his fears that his biracial son, Dante, could be unfairly treated during an encounter with a police officer.

In the interview, Mr. Stephanopoulos raised the issue bluntly by saying, “Your son is at risk from your own police department?”

The mayor paused. “Look,” he said, “I want to say it the right way, because I think there was so much misunderstanding here.”

“It’s different for a white child,” Mr. de Blasio continued. “That’s just the reality in this country. And with Dante, very early on with my son, we said, ‘Look, if a police officer stops you, do everything he tells you to do, don’t move suddenly, don’t reach for your cellphone.’ Because we knew, sadly, there’s a greater chance it might be misinterpreted if it was a young man of color.”

“We all want to look up to figures of authority,” the mayor added. “But there’s that fear that there could be that one moment of misunderstanding with a young man of color, and that young man may never come back.”

Mr. Stephanopoulos also asked the mayor about comments made by Rudolph W. Giuliani, who said protesters should focus on violence within African-American communities, rather than aggression by the police.

“I think he fundamentally misunderstands the reality,” Mr. de Blasio said of Mr. Giuliani, adding: “A lot of voices on both ends of the spectrum want to keep us mired in a history that hasn’t worked for us.”

Mr. de Blasio’s police commissioner, William J. Bratton, also spoke about Mr. Garner’s death on Sunday morning during a separate appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” Mr. Bratton said that the Police Department’s internal inquiry, which was delayed pending the Staten Island district attorney’s criminal investigation, would proceed and could last three to four months.

Mr. Bratton said he expected it to conclude before the federal civil rights investigation.

The police investigators, who are looking for violations of departmental rules and procedures, began speaking with officers on Friday. Daniel Pantaleo, the officer shown using a chokehold on Mr. Garner in a video, is among those being interviewed.

“There will be a department trial, potentially,” Mr. Bratton said in the TV interview, outlining a process that could lead to a recommendation for punishment, including termination. “I will make the final decision.”

The use of a chokehold is not prohibited by state law, but it has been banned by the Police Department for two decades. Police policy defines a chokehold as “any pressure to the throat or windpipe, which may prevent or hinder breathing or reduce intake of air.” Mr. Garner could be heard 11 times on the video telling officers “I can’t breathe” as Officer Pantaleo held him.

“I don’t think anybody that watches that video is not disturbed by what they saw,” Mr. Bratton said in the interview. “Policing involving use of force, it always looks awful. We have an expression: lawful, but awful.”

Mr. de Blasio’s interview on “This Week” was his first appearance on the Sunday morning talk show circuit. (A scheduled appearance on “Face the Nation” last month did not occur.)

Later in the interview, Mr. de Blasio, a liberal, seemed pleased when Mr. Stephanopoulos asked about his efforts to tug national Democrats toward the political left.
 

J. David Goodman contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on December 8, 2014, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: De Blasio Remains Guarded in Remarks on Garner Case.

    De Blasio Remains Guarded in Remarks on Garner Case, NYT, 7.12.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/08/nyregion/
    in-tv-interview-de-blasio-remains-careful-not-to-take-sides-in-garner-case.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

Hope and Anger at the Garner Protests

DEC. 5, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By BRENT STAPLES

The country has historically reacted with doubt or indifference when African-Americans speak of police officers who brutalize — or even kill — people with impunity. Affluent and middle-class white Americans who were treated with respect by the police had difficulty imagining the often life-threatening mistreatment that black Americans of all walks of life dealt with on a daily basis. Perhaps those days are passing away.

You can see that from the multiracial cast of the demonstrations that have swept the nation since Wednesday, when a grand jury decided not to indict a white New York City police officer whose chokehold killed Eric Garner, an unarmed black man.

In city after city, white and nonwhite citizens have surged through the streets chanting or bearing signs with Mr. Garner’s final words: “I can’t breathe.” Others chanted: “Hands up; don’t shoot” or “Black lives matter” — slogans from the racially troubled town of Ferguson, Mo., where another grand jury declined to indict the officer who shot to death 18-year-old Michael Brown.

The viral spread of the demonstrations — and the wide cross section of Americans who are organizing and participating in them — shows that what was once seen as a black issue is on the way to being seen as a central, American problem.

The question of the moment is whether the country’s political leadership has the will to root out abusive and discriminatory policing — corrosive, longstanding problems that bore down on minority communities, large and small, urban and suburban.

The scope of the problem is evident from the work of the Justice Department, which has opened 20 investigations into local police departments over the last five years and is currently enforcing reform agreements with 15 departments, some of which were investigated in previous administrations.

This week, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. released a particularly alarming report on the barbaric conduct of the police department in Cleveland, which has been riven with discord in recent weeks, after a white police officer shot and killed a 12-year-old black boy, Tamir Rice, who was holding a toy gun.

The Times reported on Friday that the officer had quit a suburban police force after his supervisors judged that he had a “dangerous loss of composure” during firearms training and was emotionally unprepared to deal with the stresses of the job. The Cleveland Police Department had failed to examine the officer’s work history before hiring him. Thus an officer who had been unable to cope in a suburban district was given the power of life and death over people in a big city, where the task of policing the streets is far more demanding.

The Justice Department report describes the Cleveland Police Department as something far closer to an occupying military force than a legitimate law enforcement agency. The officers, for example, seem to take a casual view of the use of deadly force, shooting at people who pose no threat of harm to the police or others. In one case in 2013, for example, they actually fired at a victim who had been held captive in a house — as he escaped, clad only in boxer shorts.

The record in Cleveland is extreme. But aspects of illegal police conduct can be found in cities all over the country, subjecting millions to intimidation and fear that they could be killed for innocent actions.

Congress will have an opportunity to discuss this issue soon, during the Senate confirmation hearings of Loretta Lynch, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York, who has been nominated to succeed Mr. Holder as attorney general.

Ms. Lynch’s office will oversee the federal civil rights investigation into the Garner case. Some in Congress clearly understand that the grand jury’s failure to indict the officer — despite a clear video showing him choking the man — deserves review, not just on its face, but because it goes to the heart of the fundamental rights guaranteed by the Constitution.

Others, however, seem poised to argue that the federal government, which has a clear responsibility to enforce civil rights laws, should not be taking the lead. Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, for example, asked, “Why does the federal government feel like it is its responsibility and role to be the leader in an investigation in a local instance?” That sounds like something out of the Jim Crow era, when Southern states argued that they were entitled to treat black citizens any way they wished.

Mr. Holder was on the mark when he said that the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Tamir Rice raised urgent, national questions about the breakdown of trust between minority communities and the police forces that are supposed to serve and protect them.

That so many are in the streets protesting police abuse shows that outrage over these injustices is spreading. Now it is up to the nation’s political leaders to confront this crisis.


A version of this editorial appears in print on December 6, 2014, on page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: Hope and Anger at the Garner Protests.

    Hope and Anger at the Garner Protests, NYT, 5.12.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/06/opinion/
    hope-and-anger-at-the-garner-protests.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

12-Year-Old Boy Dies

After Police in Cleveland Shoot Him

 

NOV. 23, 2014

The New York Times

By EMMA G. FITZSIMMONS

Officials in Cleveland were investigating the police shooting of a 12-year-old boy who died on Sunday, a day after an officer shot him outside a recreation center when he reached for a weapon that turned out to be a fake pistol.

The boy, Tamir E. Rice, died on Sunday at MetroHealth Medical Center in Cleveland, the Cuyahoga County medical examiner’s office said. He was shot in the torso at a park on Saturday after witnesses reported that he was waving a gun around and pointing it at people, the police said.

Two police officers responded to the scene and ordered the boy to raise his hands, the police said, but he refused and reached for a gun in his waistband. An officer fired two shots, striking the boy once, the police said.

In a 911 call released by the police, a man said that “a guy” who appeared to be a juvenile was pointing a pistol at people and scaring them. The caller said twice that the gun was “probably fake.”

The police were investigating what information from the call was relayed to the officers, said Jennifer Ciaccia, a police spokeswoman. The Cuyahoga County prosecutor’s office was also investigating the shooting.

The two officers were placed on administrative leave, and one of the officers was taken to a hospital for an injury to his ankle, the police said.

The boy lived near the park and went there on Saturday with friends and family, a lawyer for his family, Timothy Kucharski, said on Sunday. Mr. Kucharski said he would conduct his own investigation into the shooting and review the police’s investigation to determine “how exactly an innocent young 12-year-old boy could be killed playing at the park.”

“His mother is devastated,” Mr. Kucharski said. “We’d love to have the prayers of the community right now.”

The shooting of the boy, who was African-American, came as a grand jury is expected to make a decision soon over whether to charge a white police officer who shot an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Mo., setting off months of protests.

Mr. Kucharski said that he did not know the race of the officer who shot the boy, and that the shooting did not appear to have anything to do with race. The important question, he said, was why the officers did not act with more caution because they were dealing with a child.

“The police have to address these things in the proper context,” he said. “This is a 12-year-old boy. This is not a grown man. I’d think you would handle situations with children differently than you would with an adult. They don’t fully understand everything that is going on.”

The shooting happened about 3:30 p.m. at the Cudell Recreation Center on the city’s west side, the police said. Deputy Chief Ed Tomba of the Cleveland police said on Saturday that the boy had not threatened the officers or pointed the weapon at them.

The police learned that the gun was fake after the shooting, Ms. Ciaccia said. The weapon was an “airsoft” replica gun resembling a semiautomatic pistol, with the orange safety tip removed, the police said.

“It looks really, really real, and it’s huge,” Ms. Ciaccia said.

Ashley Southall contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on November 24, 2014, on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: Boy Dies After Police in Cleveland Shoot Him.

    12-Year-Old Boy Dies After Police in Cleveland Shoot Him,

    NYT, 23.11.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/24/us/
    boy-12-dies-after-being-shot-by-cleveland-police-officer.html

Baby Girl Accidentally Shot

in New York City Home

 

NOV. 23, 2014

1:00 A.M. E.S.T.

The New York Times

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

NEW YORK — Police say a 9-month-old girl is hospitalized after she was accidentally shot inside her home in New York City.

The incident happened Saturday afternoon in apartment in Brooklyn's East New York section.

Police say the father told officers he was cleaning his gun when it accidentally discharged.

The bullet hit the child in the hip. She was taken to Woodhull Medical Center and then transferred to Bellevue Hospital. She is in stable condition there.

Charges are pending against the father. His name was not immediately released.

    Baby Girl Accidentally Shot in New York City Home, NYT, 23.11.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2014/11/23/us/ap-us-baby-shot.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

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

Another Teenager in Washington

State School Shooting Dies

NOV. 8, 2014

1:49 A.M. E.S.T.

The New York Times

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

SEATTLE — Another of the teenagers wounded in a Washington state high school shooting has died, raising to five the number of fatalities after a student opened fire in the cafeteria two weeks ago.

Andrew Fryberg, 15, died Friday evening at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, a hospital spokeswoman said.

Zoe Galasso, 14, was killed during the shooting Oct. 24 by a popular freshman at Marysville-Pilchuck High School. Gia Soriano, also 14, died Oct. 26 at Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett and 14-year-old Shaylee Chuckulnaskit died Oct. 31 at the Everett hospital.

The shooter, Jaylen Fryberg, died of a self-inflicted wound.

"We express our thanks for the amazing support from the community, as well as from everyone around the world that have been praying for us all through this tragic event," Andrew Fryberg's family said in a statement released by the hospital. The family also thanked "all the amazing staff" who cared for the boy in Harborview's pediatric intensive care unit. The relatives asked for privacy.

Andrew Fryberg was the last wounded student still hospitalized.

On Thursday, 14-year-old Nate Hatch was released from Harborview and returned home. He had been shot in the jaw.

More than 200 friends and family gathered along the road leading onto the Tulalip Indian Reservation north of Seattle to welcome Hatch home. He was driven past the crowd in a black tribal police vehicle.

Andrew Fryberg and Nate Hatch were cousins of the shooter.

In a statement Friday night, the Tulalip Tribes said they and Marysville "will be forever changed as a result of the senseless and tragic incident that took place on the morning of Oct. 24 and know that healing will not happen overnight. We remain committed to taking this journey together, step by step, holding up the families most impacted and helping our communities heal."

The school 30 miles north of Seattle reopened Monday after being closed for a week. Hundreds of people lined the entrance. Well-wishers waved at returning students and many held candles. People cheered as buses and cars entered the school campus.

The school day started with an assembly. Students ate lunch in the gym because the cafeteria where the shooting took place remains closed.

Snohomish County Sheriff Ty Trenary told reporters last week that Jaylen Fryberg invited his victims to lunch by text message, shot them at their table, then killed himself.

The sheriff said detectives were digging through reams of text messages, phone and social media records as part of an investigation that could take months.

"The question everybody wants is, 'Why?'" Trenary said. "I don't know that the 'why' is something we can provide."

Jaylen Fryberg, a football player who was named a prince on the school's homecoming court a week before the killings, was a member of a prominent Tulalip Tribes family. He seemed happy although he was also upset about a girl, friends said. His Twitter feed was recently full of vague, anguished postings, like "It won't last ... It'll never last," and "I should have listened. ... You were right ... The whole time you were right."

Nate Hatch was still hospitalized when he posted a message of forgiveness on Twitter.

"I love you and I forgive you jaylen rest in peace," he wrote. A friend confirmed the feed's authenticity to The Associated Press.

    Another Teenager in Washington State School Shooting Dies,
    NYT, 8.11.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2014/11/08/us/
    ap-us-washington-school-shooting.html

Washington School Shooting

Claims Another Victim

 

OCT. 27, 2014

The New York Times

By KIRK JOHNSON

MARYSVILLE, Wash. — A 14-year-old girl who was shot by a high school classmate in an attack in the school’s cafeteria on Friday in this northern suburb of Seattle died late Sunday, hospital officials said.

Gia Soriano was sitting with friends when Jaylen Ray Fryberg, also 14 and a freshman, opened fire with a .40-caliber handgun during a lunch period, witnesses said. In a span of minutes, he killed another female classmate and seriously wounded four others, including Gia, each of them his childhood friends and two of them his relatives, before dying by a bullet from his own gun.

The attack has gripped this community, raising questions about why a popular 14-year-old boy would turn on classmates with lethal malice, as the wounded have fought for their lives in hospitals.

Gia’s family said in a statement posted on the Facebook page of Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett that her organs would be donated to help others. “We are devastated by this senseless tragedy. Gia is our beautiful daughter, and words cannot express how much we will miss her,” the family said.

Other details about the attack itself also began to emerge on Sunday, especially the role of a young teacher many students are calling a hero.

The teacher, Megan Silberberger, was only about six weeks into her first job out of college — as a social studies teacher at Marysville-Pilchuck High School — when she came into the cafeteria on Friday morning and saw students on the floor and another student firing a gun.

Many students interviewed on Friday vividly remembered what happened after the initial shots were fired, as a woman grabbed Jaylen’s arm — few knew the woman as Ms. Silberberger at the time, perhaps because she is still so new to the school. A few seconds later, they said, they saw Jaylen fall to the ground as he either turned the weapon on himself or shot himself accidentally in the struggle.

Late Saturday, the president of the local teachers’ union released a statement from Ms. Silberberger saying that she has asked for time to heal. Her statement was simple and direct.

“This teacher did everything possible to protect students,” she said.

The union president, Randy Davis, said in an interview on Sunday that Ms. Silberberger, who he said is in her 20s and did her student-teaching here at Marysville-Pilchuck last year, was “very traumatized” and was with her family, declining interviews.

After Gia’s death, three students remain hospitalized. Shaylee Chuckulnaskit, 14, remained in critical condition on Sunday at Providence Regional Medical Center; Nate Hatch, 14, who was transported to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, remained in serious condition in intensive care; and Andrew Fryberg, 15, also being treated at Harborview, remained in critical condition, hospital officials said on Sunday. The boys were Jaylen’s cousins, family members said.

Neither officials nor relatives have publicly identified the other girl who was killed.

Jaylen came from a prominent family on the Tulalip Indian Reservation near Marysville, and the tribe’s chairman, Herman Williams Sr., issued a joint statement on Sunday with the city of Marysville, saying the two governments were collaborating fully in the investigation into the shooting, and the larger response in the community.

“The Tulalip Tribes and the city of Marysville stand together,” Mr. Williams said in the statement. “Our priority is now on our children and young people.”

Here in Marysville, on the suburban-rural fringe of the Seattle metro area, horses graze near the high school, but strip malls and housing tracts crowd in toward Interstate 5 a few miles away. On Sunday, a chain-link fence on the school grounds had become a destination for grieving and had grown thick with hundreds of flowers, messages and balloons. Many came on Sunday to leave something — a memento, a candle, flowers — others to read the tributes or simply stand and cry as a cold rain fell.

Joe Sheldon, 33, a real estate agent from Seattle who said he had never been to Marysville before Sunday, drove up with his daughter, Annika, 7, and his son, Donovan, 9, to leave flowers and say a prayer and talk about loving others. He hugged his children close, squatting down by the fence, and when he stood up, wiped away tears.

“This just hits too close to home,” he said.

    Washington School Shooting Claims Another Victim, NYT, 27.10.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/28/us/
    washington-school-shooting-claims-another-victim-gia-soriano.html

Once Again, Guns

OCT. 24, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist

Gail Collins

There’s a TV ad that’s been running in Louisiana:

It’s evening and a mom is tucking in her baby. Getting a nice text from dad, who’s away on a trip. Then suddenly — dark shadow on a window. Somebody’s smashing the front door open! Next thing you know, there’s police tape around the house, blinking lights on emergency vehicles.

“It happens like that,” says a somber narrator. “The police can’t get there in time. How you defend yourself is up to you. It’s your choice. But Mary Landrieu voted to take away your gun rights. Vote like your safety depends on it. Defend your freedom. Defeat Mary Landrieu.”

Guns are a big issue in some of the hottest elections around the country this year, but there hasn’t been much national discussion about it. Perhaps we’ve been too busy worrying whether terrorists are infecting themselves with Ebola and sneaking across the Mexican border.

But now, as usual, we’re returning to the issue because of a terrible school shooting.

The latest — a high school freshman boy with a gun in the school’s cafeteria — occurred in the state of Washington, which also happens to be ground zero for the election-year gun debate. At least that’s the way the movement against gun violence sees it. There’s a voter initiative on the ballot that would require background checks for gun sales at gun shows or online. “We need to be laser focused on getting this policy passed,” said Brian Malte of the Brady Campaign.

Think about this. It’s really remarkable. Two years after the Sandy Hook tragedy, the top gun-control priority in the United States is still background checks. There is nothing controversial about the idea that people who buy guns should be screened to make sure they don’t have a criminal record or serious mental illness. Americans favor it by huge majorities. Even gun owners support it. Yet we’re still struggling with it.

The problem, of course, is the National Rifle Association, which does not actually represent gun owners nearly as ferociously as it represents gun sellers. The background check bill is on the ballot under voter initiative because the Washington State Legislature was too frightened of the N.R.A. to take it up. This in a state that managed to pass a right-to-die law, approve gay marriage and legalize the sale of marijuana.

The N.R.A. has worked hard to cultivate its reputation for terrifying implacability. Let’s return for a minute to Senator Mary Landrieu, who’s in a very tough re-election race. Last year, in the wake of Sandy Hook, she voted for a watered-down background check bill. It failed to get the requisite 60 votes in the Senate, but the N.R.A. is not forgetting.

Nor is it a fan of compromise. Landrieu has tried to straddle the middle on gun issues; she voted last year for the N.R.A.’s own top priority, a bill to create an enormous loophole in concealed weapons laws. As a reward, she got a “D” rating and the murdered-mom ad. In Colorado, the embattled Senator Mark Udall, who has a similar voting record, is getting the same treatment.

The N.R.A.’s vision of the world is purposefully dark and utterly irrational. It’s been running a series of what it regards as positive ads, which are so grim they do suggest that it’s time to grab a rifle and head for the bunker. In one, a mournful-looking woman asks whether there’s still anything worth fighting for in “a world that demands we submit, succumb, and believe in nothing.” It is, she continues, a world full of “cowards who pretend they don’t notice the elderly man fall ...”

Now when was the last time you saw people ignore an elderly man who falls down? I live in what is supposed to be a hard-hearted city, but when an old person trips and hits the ground, there is a veritable stampede to get him upright.

The ad running against people like Landrieu makes no sense whatsoever. If that background-check bill had become law, the doomed mother would still have been able to buy a gun for protection unless she happened to be a convicted felon. And while we have many, many, many things to worry about these days, the prospect of an armed stranger breaking through the front door and murdering the family is not high on the list. Unless the intruder was actually a former abusive spouse or boyfriend, in which case a background check would have been extremely helpful in keeping him unarmed.

A shooting like the one in Washington State is so shocking that it seems almost improper to suggest that people respond by passing an extremely mild gun control measure. But there is a kind of moral balance. While we may not be able to stop these tragedies from happening, we can stop thinking of ourselves as a country that lets them happen and then does nothing.

Unless your worldview is as bleak as the N.R.A.’s, you have to believe we’re better than that.

    Once Again, Guns, NYT, 14.10.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/25/opinion/
    gail-collins-once-again-guns.html

Concern and Anger

After a Toddler Is Killed

 

OCT. 12, 2014

The New York Times

By NIKITA STEWART

IRVINGTON, N.J. — Sania Cunningham, 15 months, was bouncing up and down on a bed — the kind of game that can bring a toddler to uncontrollable giggles.

Then a stray bullet tore through a wall of the apartment and into the little girl, taking her life as her parents looked on in horror.

They had just moved in, arriving two days earlier to live with relatives in a second-floor apartment in the house, officials said.

But if the age of the victim, and the presence of the news media and the county prosecutor were unusual, the violence was not, neighbors said.

Ellis Avenue has been plagued by violence, said Isaam Houston, a 32-year-old visual artist whose family’s home was struck by the same spate of gunfire on Saturday afternoon. Often, he said, one could see stray balloons, the remnants of someone’s memorial. “We’re surrounded by balloons, and there’s not a party in sight,” he said. The street has turned up regularly in police reports in recent years as the scene of numerous shootings.

Neighboring Newark, the state’s largest city, often attracts attention for its violence. But a few of northern New Jersey’s smaller municipalities, among them Irvington and Paterson, also endure considerable crime. In Paterson, a 14-year-old girl was fatally shot last month and a 12-year-old was shot to death in July.

As in those cases, the shooting on Saturday here drew an outpouring of concern and anger.

On Sunday, investigators swarmed the street. Some residents complained that it took a toddler’s death to bring attention to a place that is under siege.

Essex County Sheriff’s CrimeStoppers is offering $10,000 for information. Mayor Tony Vauss posted condolences on his Facebook page. He also wrote that the township recently received $1 million to hire more police officers.

Investigators were searching for three men who were wearing hooded sweatshirts as they fired multiple shots on the block. Carolyn A. Murray, the acting Essex County prosecutor, said bullets struck the home where the toddler was staying, the Houston family’s house and a car. She spoke at a news conference on Sunday morning. It was unclear if the gunmen were firing at each other, randomly or at a target.

Mr. Houston grew up in a house across the street from the home where his family now lives. He said he has remained in an apartment on the same block “to keep an eye on” his family. He was not there on Saturday, when one bullet pierced his mother’s bedroom. She was at a church retreat, Mr. Houston said, and was so shaken that she refused to return on Sunday.

“I’ve seen the downward spiral between the drug activity, the gang activity,” Mr. Houston said. “You see this neighborhood destroying itself.”

Still, some residents were sitting on their porches. Some homes were decorated for Halloween and autumn. But several houses were boarded up with broken windows.

At the home where Sania was shot, a bright orange sign that said “Enough is Enough” was affixed to the door with duct tape.

Just after Mr. Houston showed reporters the bullet holes in his family’s house, Katherine Lara arrived to pay her condolences, though she did not know the family.

Ms. Lara said the gunfire on Saturday had awakened her from a nap. “I was screaming, ‘My girls, my girls, my girls,’ ” she said. “Bullets don’t have no eyes.” Her daughters are ages 5, 10 and 17.

In front of the fence, she left a pink stuffed star that played “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,”, a candle and a balloon that said “Princess.”

A version of this article appears in print on October 13, 2014, on page A15 of the New York edition with the headline: Concern and Anger After a Toddler Is Killed.

    Concern and Anger After a Toddler Is Killed, NYT, 12.10.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/13/nyregion/
    concern-and-anger-after-a-toddler-is-killed.html

The First to Fear Gunplay

California Wisely Includes Families
in Gun Seizure Law

 

OCT. 5, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

No one may have a more intimate and wary reading of the unstable behavior of a potentially dangerous gun owner than his own family. This is the driving force behind a new California law that, for the first time in the nation, allows concerned family members to petition a court to seize the firearms of a family member they fear is on the verge of harming himself or others.

The law was prompted by the murderous spree near Santa Barbara, Calif., in May, when a troubled 22-year-old, Elliot Rodger, killed six people and himself and wounded 13 others. A few weeks earlier, his mother had warned authorities that his behavior was increasingly erratic, even life-threatening. But he was able to convince police that he presented no threat, even though he had legally purchased three guns and devised plans for a rampage.

The California law cleverly confronts gun rights advocates whose customary response after shooting sprees is to try to get people to focus on complex mental health issues so as to divert attention from the need for gun safety legislation. The California approach embraces both fronts. Why shouldn’t family members be able to have lethal weapons confiscated on the basis of threatening behavior they can attest to firsthand? Any defense from the gun owner will be weighed by the court. Besides helping to prevent mass shootings, the law could help families prevent suicides in their midst.

The law, similar to one authorizing restraining orders in domestic violence cases, is not a total cure. Mr. Rodger used a knife to kill his first three victims, then guns for the rest. But the Legislature’s Democratic majorities wisely decided some progress against the gun scourge was possible by inviting relatives to weigh in with valuable and timely family expertise on those who seem near the breaking point and who also have guns legally at hand.


A version of this editorial appears in print on October 6, 2014, on page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: The First to Fear Gunplay.

    The First to Fear Gunplay, NYT, 6.10.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/06/opinion/
    california-wisely-includes-families-in-gun-seizure-law.html

California Will Allow Family Members

to Seek Seizure of Guns

 

SEPT. 30, 2014

The New York Times

By IAN LOVETT

LOS ANGELES — California will be the first state in the country to allow private citizens to ask a court to seize guns from family members who they believe pose a threat to themselves or the public, under a measure signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown on Tuesday.

The law will allow law enforcement officials, family members and some others to seek a gun restraining order from a judge. That order would authorize officials to temporarily seize any firearm owned by someone deemed potentially violent, who would also be placed on a list of people prohibited from purchasing weapons.

“This puts California in the leadership on efforts to stop gun violence, and it gives a very effective tool to law enforcement and families to intervene before a shooting tragedy occurs,” said Nancy Skinner, the California assemblywoman who sponsored the bill.

Several states have passed laws allowing law enforcement officials to petition to take firearms from people considered dangerous, but California is the first to allow family members to do so as well — a provision that gun control advocates said would be crucial in preventing suicides as well as mass shootings.

“Family members are the ones who most acutely understand when their loved ones are in a dangerous situation,” said Josh Horwitz, the executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, which lobbies for stricter gun control across the country. “Now, when they see dangerous behavior — whether because of substance abuse or a mental health issue or a traumatic brain injury — a court can act.”

The legislation was introduced in direct response to the shooting in Isla Vista, Calif., in May, when Elliot O. Rodger, 22, killed six people and wounded more than a dozen others. Mr. Rodger had legally purchased three firearms in the preceding months and had been able to keep them even though his family warned the police that he might be unstable.

The petition process would be similar to the one used to obtain restraining orders in cases of domestic violence. The new measure will take effect in 2016.

Gun rights advocates said that the firearm restraining orders would do little to prevent mass shootings like the one in Isla Vista and would instead deprive some Californians, before they had committed a crime, of their right to defend themselves. Several suggested the law would not withstand a challenge in court.

“Every one of us wants to prevent a mass shooting,” said Tim Donnelly, a California assemblyman and gun rights proponent. “The question is: Would this bill stop that? I don’t believe you can ever stop that with laws. I don’t believe you can legislate evil out of the hearts of men.”

With Democrats controlling the Legislature and every statewide office, California already has some of the strictest gun measures in the country. Still, Mr. Brown has often been reluctant to further restrict access to guns. Last year, he vetoed several high-profile gun-control bills, but on Tuesday, he approved the gun restraining orders without comment.

The legislation will ban plastic shopping bags at supermarkets, liquor stores and other retail locations, where customers have long relied on them. Paper bags and reusable plastic bags will be available at checkout counters for a 10-cent fee meant to prod shoppers to remember their own reusable bags.

The measure is intended to reduce the number of plastic bags that clog rivers, snag on trees and take up space in landfills. The law is to take effect in July, but a coalition of bag makers has vowed to try to overturn it.

“This bill is a step in the right direction — it reduces the torrent of plastic polluting our beaches, parks and even the vast ocean itself,” Mr. Brown said in a statement. “We’re the first to ban these bags, and we won’t be the last.”

The state law follows bans in more than 100 California municipalities, including Los Angeles and San Francisco. As the bag-ban movement has progressed, the plastics industry has sunk millions of dollars into defeating the measures here and in other states. Industry groups argue that plastic bags are targeted unfairly as environmental ills, when paper bags and some reusable bags have their own drawbacks.

On Tuesday, the American Progressive Bag Alliance, which has led the industry’s fight against bans, said it would gather signatures to put a repeal of the law on the 2016 ballot in California.

“If this law were allowed to go into effect, it would jeopardize thousands of California manufacturing jobs, hurt the environment and fleece consumers for billions,” Lee Califf, the executive director of the alliance, said in a statement.

Several municipalities reported reduced litter in waterways and streets after banning plastic bags. And environmental groups are now bullish that they can use their success in California to push for similar measures nationwide.

“California has led the way on everything from clean water to clean air to climate change,” said Nathan Weaver, a spokesman for Environment California, a statewide advocacy group. “This law will mean a cleaner ocean for everyone, and we hope other places that care about their oceans, their rivers and their environment will look at this as well.”
 

A version of this article appears in print on October 1, 2014, on page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: California Will Allow Family Members to Seek Seizure of Guns.

    California Will Allow Family Members to Seek Seizure of Guns,
    NYT, 30.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/01/us/
    california-will-allow-family-members-to-seek-seizure-of-guns.html

The Quickening Pace of Gun Sprees

SEPT. 26, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

It is a sorry commentary on the shooting sprees that regularly afflict the nation that only recently has the Federal Bureau of Investigation been authorized to delve into how prevalent the threat has become. The bureau’s new survey across the past 13 years concludes that horrific shootings like those in 2012 at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., and the movie theater in Aurora, Colo., are occurring with greater frequency.

The average annual number of shooting sprees with multiple casualties was 6.4 from 2000 to 2006. That jumped to 16.4 a year from 2007 to 2013, according to the study of 160 incidents of gun mayhem since 2000. (In 2000, The Times examined 100 spree killings, all those that the paper’s staff could find going back 50 years.) The F.B.I. report makes the shooters’ terrible effectiveness clear: 486 people were killed — 366 of them in the past seven years — and 557 others were wounded, many of them gravely incapacitated for years afterward. Sixty percent of the sprees ended before police could arrive, and 40 percent of the shooters committed suicide. F.B.I. analysts found that many of the gunmen had studied earlier gun massacres and were attracted to the attention mass killers received.

Part of the gun lobby’s grip on timorous congressional lawmakers has involved the suppression of studies and information vitally needed to enlighten the public and galvanize support for stronger gun safety laws. Congress ducked the need for effective controls after the Sandy Hook massacre, which left 20 children and six adults dead. The new F.B.I. survey is the first such federal study, despite decades of gun carnage.

Far more attention must be paid; the bureau’s report did not address the issue of easily available military rifles and pistols that enable crazed shooters to spray crowds with bullets in a matter of seconds. The report’s casualty count of innocent Americans is undeniable. And the likelihood that gun sprees will continue is inescapable.

A version of this editorial appears in print on September 27, 2014, on page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: The Quickening Pace of Gun Sprees.

    The Quickening Pace of Gun Sprees, NYT, 26.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/27/opinion/
    the-quickening-pace-of-gun-sprees.html

In Death, Florida Family

Reveals a Spiral of Domestic Abuse

 

SEPT. 19, 2014

The New York Times

By LIZETTE ALVAREZ

and FRANCES ROBLES

BELL, Fla. — Sarah L. Spirit was 22 years old and eight months pregnant with her fourth child when she called the police in desperation: Her father was violent, she was afraid of him, and she had nowhere to go.

“He pushed me against the refrigerator really hard then closed his hands really hard on my face and caused me pain,” she wrote in the summer of 2008, when she went to a Gilchrist County Court to seek a domestic violence injunction against her father, Don C. Spirit. “I am very scared of him. I know what he is capable of.”

Ms. Spirit wrote that her father threatened to make her life “hell” if she called the authorities. She did go to the police. Although she did not follow up on her request for a restraining order, online court records show he was later sentenced to six months in jail on a battery charge that arose that same week.

The Spirits lived together in a cycle of extreme poverty, drug addiction and domestic violence in Bell, a tiny town west of Gainesville where peanuts are grown and dairy cows roam the fields.

The Spirit family’s story shows how a downward spiral of drug use, debt and repeated arrests can sometimes result in extreme violence, despite interventions by the authorities. Repeated interactions with the Florida Department of Children and Families did not save the children, even though court records show social workers sent the parole authorities to the Spirit home just a month ago. It is also a reminder that amid the recent focus on domestic violence, it is not just spouses and boyfriends who can be assailants.

The agency would not say why the children were still in the home, despite court records showing that it knew that Ms. Spirit and her boyfriend, James Stewart, had smoked synthetic marijuana in front of their children while both were on probation. The agency said Friday that a Critical Incident Rapid Response Team would assess the agency’s “interactions and interventions” with the family before the killings.

A close friend of Ms. Spirit, who lives in Bell and spoke on the condition of anonymity because she feared reprisals in her tight-knit community, said Ms. Spirit had a good heart but was always struggling to support her family and keep it together. “Her life was a mess,” the friend said. “She had no job. She couldn’t work with all them kids. Every time I turned around, something bad was happening to her.”

Ms. Spirit was 15 when her father, an ex-convict, accidentally shot and killed her brother Kyle during a hunting trip. Mr. Spirit was not supposed to be in possession of a firearm, and for that he was sentenced to three years in prison, records show.
Continue reading the main story

At 17, Ms. Spirit was pregnant with her first child. By the time her father was released from prison, Ms. Spirit had two more children and was taking care of a little brother as well, her parents’ divorce records show.

In the years that followed, Ms. Spirit was in and out of court. She was arrested on charges of theft, battery and illegal drug use, and sought child support payments from the fathers of her children. One of those arrests was after a fight with an 18-year-old girl.

Ms. Spirit was also convicted of grand theft this year, after she stole $400 from the wallet of an acquaintance she visited in 2013.

She had been living in a dilapidated shack on the property of her boyfriend’s family. The boyfriend, Mr. Stewart, also ran afoul of the law. He was arrested on charges of battery and dealing in stolen property and is in jail.

Ms. Spirit lived hand to mouth on government assistance, her friend said. The children were often dirty and unfed, and at one point they were removed from her custody.

A couple of weeks ago, Ms. Spirit knocked on her friend’s front door, asking for diapers for the newborn and food for the other children. With her brother Joshua and both the fathers of her children behind bars, Ms. Spirit, who had epilepsy, was so down on her luck that she felt she had no choice but to return to live with her father, the friend said.

Their relationship was clearly strained. Court records show Mr. Spirit took his daughter to court three years ago, accusing her of collecting support payments for one of her children, Johnathon, even though he had been living with Mr. Spirit. Mr. Spirit said the money belonged to him.

A judge ordered Ms. Spirit to pay her father $6,578 in back payments. She was supposed to be paying him $100 a month.

Residents said Mr. Spirit disliked his grandchildren and called them names in public, The Gainesville Sun reported.

“You see how small this town is; we all knew he didn’t like those kids,” the newspaper quoted Kim Berry, a Bell resident, as saying. “We’re shocked it came to this.”

The investigators said they knew of no motives.

“As far as I know, there was no motive related to anybody,” Lt. Jeff Manning of the Gilchrist County Sheriff’s Department said at a news conference Friday morning. “I don’t know how you get clear signs that something like this could happen.”

He choked up and paused. “It’s a difficult scene to try to fathom why somebody did what they did,” he said.

What is known about Mr. Spirit indicates a troubled life that deteriorated even further after the death of his son Kyle. “I may not have lived the best life,” he said in 2001 after killing his son on the hunting trip, The St. Petersburg Times reported then.

Mr. Spirit’s divorce records show that when he was released from prison, he planned to take custody of his surviving son, Joshua. He argued with his former wife over possessions such as a Jet Ski and a camper, and in letters to her, he clearly saw himself as the better parent.

The relationship had not always been so fractious. His former wife, Christine Jeffers, had urged the court to be lenient on him in the shooting death of Kyle, saying that Mr. Spirit had not recovered from his death.

“The loss of our son has really taken a toll on him, and he blames himself every day,” she wrote in a letter to the judge, according to The Gainesville Sun.

“He has punished himself more than the court system ever could punish him.” she wrote. “Since our son’s death, my husband has been severely depressed. The doctors have not found a medication yet to help him. There is not a day that goes by that I don’t catch him crying.”

But court records show that even before his son’s death, Mr. Spirit had a criminal record. In cases dating back to 1990, he had been convicted of drug possession, battery and “depriving a child of food and shelter.”

Bill Shaffer, a neighbor, said Mr. Spirit had a strange quality. Mr. Shaffer said he once gave Mr. Spirit a ride, but his neighbor scarcely said a word and never even said thank you.

Police would not reveal any details about the crime scene. Other family members were unavailable for comment.

Robert Rankin, superintendent of Gilchrist County schools, said there were no indications of any problems with Ms. Spirit’s children. Three attended Bell Elementary School, one in second grade, one in third and one in fifth.

Mr. Shaffer said Bell, population 453, is a “nice, quiet” agricultural community, the kind of place where if someone’s house burns down, people set up a donation box right away to help. There are few jobs, though. Most of the good ones involve hauling rocks, sand and logs.

Mr. Spirit was often seen in the neighborhood riding his bicycle.

Another neighbor, Mark Hall, said he knew the Spirits only through his own fifth-grade son. Kaleb, he said, had gotten into fights in school, and Mr. Hall said he was concerned that he was bullying his son.

“My son tried to befriend him, but I had to tell him to stop being friends with him,” Mr. Hall said. “I didn’t want him to get dragged into that lifestyle.”

Bell, he said, is “very country. People know your good news and your bad news.”

Kitty Bennett contributed reporting from St. Petersburg, Fla.

A version of this article appears in print on September 20, 2014, on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: In Death, Florida Family Reveals a Sad Spiral of Domestic Violence.

    In Death, Florida Family Reveals a Spiral of Domestic Abuse,
    NYT, 19.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/20/us/
    in-death-florida-family-reveals-a-sad-spiral-of-domestic-violence.html

Florida Man

Fatally Shoots Daughter

and 6 Grandchildren

 

SEPT. 18, 2014

The New York Times

By ASHLEY SOUTHALL

A grandfather shot and killed his daughter and her six young children before killing himself at his home in north-central Florida on Thursday, the authorities said.

The man, identified as Don Charles Spirit, 62, called the police around 4 p.m., and indicated that he planned to harm himself and others, Sheriff Robert Schultz of Gilchrist County said in an evening news conference.

“It was enough to alarm us to get there, and we needed to get there in a hurry,” he said.

But it was too late. After exchanging words with a deputy at the scene, Mr. Spirit killed himself, Sheriff Schultz said.

Inside the home in Bell, Fla., the police found the bodies of Mr. Spirit, his daughter Sarah Lorraine Spirit, 28, and her children: Kaleb Kuhlmann, 11; Kylie Kuhlmann, 9; Johnathon Kuhlmann, 8; Destiny Stewart, 5; Brandon Stewart, 4; and Alanna Stewart, 2 months. Sheriff Schultz said some people there were left alive, but he did not give details. He said that Mr. Spirit had a criminal history, and that deputies had been called to the home for “a wide range of things.”

Mr. Spirit pleaded guilty to a felony firearms violation in 2003, after he accidentally shot and killed his 8-year-old son during a hunting expedition in 2001, according to The Orlando Sentinel. He was sentenced to three years in prison. The report said he had been convicted of felony possession of marijuana in 1998, and had not gone through the process of having his gun rights restored. Florida law makes it illegal for convicted felons to own guns.

Bell, a rural town about 30 miles west of Gainesville, has a population of about 450 people.

“We’re all family here,” Sheriff Schultz said.

Betty Dyer, 67, who lives half a block from the Spirit house on NW 29th Terrace, said that the children had arrived in recent months and that she saw some of them walk to and from the school bus each day. She saw nothing indicating trouble in the home.

“It’s very, very sad, very, very cruel, she said. “I just don’t understand people.”

Sheriff Schultz had no motive for the shooting. “There are certain things in life you can explain; there are certain things you can’t,” he said. “This is one of those things that I can’t explain.”
 

A version of this article appears in print on September 19, 2014, on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: Florida Man Fatally Shoots Daughter and 6 Grandchildren.

    Florida Man Fatally Shoots Daughter and 6 Grandchildren,
    NYT, 18.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/19/us/
    florida-man-fatally-shoots-daughter-and-6-grandchildren.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

When a Child Kills

Reflections on a Shooting Range Death,

From One Who Knows

AUG. 29, 2014

By GREGORY ORR

The New York Times

SundayReview | Opinion

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — WHEN I was 12 years old, I killed a younger brother in a hunting accident near our home in upstate New York. I returned to that memory this week, when I read about what happened to the young New Jersey girl who lost control of a submachine gun at a shooting range outside Las Vegas, killing her instructor.

I don’t have a political argument to put forward — most of what I read indicates that people cling to their opinions regardless of anyone else’s arguments. But I do find myself wondering whether what I went through so many years ago can tell me anything about what she is going through or will go through. She and so many other children who suddenly find themselves living out the consequences of a fatal accident and trying to comprehend their part in it.

The first thing I’d say is: They can’t. They can’t comprehend it or cope with the suffering that’s been let loose in their lives and the lives of those around them. This much is certain: The child has seen something that he or she is not equipped to understand. And the child isn’t standing as a witness at the edge of this scene, but at its terrifying center, holding the gun.

I was on the cusp of adolescence. Just a kid participating in a popular American ritual: hunting, firing a gun. To hunt, to fire a gun is to have your imagination tangled up with fantasies of power. A fatal accident makes a mockery of these fantasies, leaving the unlucky fantasist exposed to the deeper randomness of life and the terrifying fact that so much of our experience is beyond our control.

It’s as if the world you inhabit (in my case, a rural field; in hers, a shooting range) is suddenly shown to be only a stage set with one of those old-fashioned painted backdrops, and your inadvertent, violent act has torn a gash in the scenery. “Accident” steps through it. “Accident,” which is such an innocuous and useful term in most contexts, but now for the child is suddenly a terrifying word, perhaps even the name of the grim and mocking god who rules this new reality.

With the accident that took my brother’s life, my whole world was changed, utterly and to its core. I survived, grew, and perhaps even thrived. But I never healed. And my survival had as much to do with luck as anything else. Part of my luck was to discover poetry, which has sustained me through a lifetime.

As a writer, my faith is that words can help us connect and make sense of our lives by bringing out our secrets and shames as well as our joys. And yet, when I try to think of what I might say to that girl, I think also of the danger of words used as premature consolation and explanation. I lost a (naïve and conventional) religious faith the day of my brother’s death, because a well-meaning adult assured me that my dead brother was already, at that very moment, sitting down in heaven to feast with Jesus. How could I tell her that my brother was still near me, still horribly close to me — that every time I squeezed shut my eyes to keep out the world, I saw him lying lifeless at my feet?

It’s too late to know if a subtler approach would have worked, but here’s my warning: What happened to that child has plummeted her deep into the terror of existence. Don’t think that quickly administered bromides will help, much less heal.

But not to speak of what has happened is also dangerous. Silence quickly transforms guilt into shame, and shame builds walls of isolation that can be almost impossible to breach. I worry not just for the child, but also the parents. One of the saddest things in my family was the way that my parents retreated into their own separate guilts and griefs, quietly and inadvertently abandoning each other as well as myself and my siblings.

In my experience, when something like this takes place, people in a family are often willing to take on responsibility and guilt rather than admit something even scarier: that accidents happen; that even the most ordinary among us live in a world of risk and randomness that we don’t control. Sometimes, blaming ourselves feels safer than this realization that the world is an unpredictable and even dangerous place. But self-blaming and shame isolate and shrivel the human spirit.

In this impossible situation, I hope that whatever is said to that girl is not said in order to relieve adult anxieties in the face of horror. And this also, as a deep longing out of my own, long-ago shame and isolation: that someone larger and trusted by her, someone who pretends to understand this bewildering world, will hold her and give her permission to feel what she feels and, in some way beyond words, give her the courage to endure what she must endure.
 

Gregory Orr is a professor of English at the University of Virginia and the author, most recently, of the poetry collection “River Inside the River.”

    When a Child Kills, NYT, 29.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/31/opinion/sunday
    /reflections-on-a-shooting-range-death-from-one-who-knows.html

Police Shooting

Kills Crew Member Working

for Reality Show ‘Cops’

AUG. 27, 2014

The New York Times

By CARSON VAUGHAN

and EMMA G. FITZSIMMONS

OMAHA — The Omaha police chief said Wednesday that the fatal shooting of a crew member filming the television show “Cops” by one of his officers was an “unfortunate incident” and that it appeared that the three officers involved had acted professionally.

Police officers responded to a report of a robbery at a Wendy’s restaurant in Omaha on Tuesday night with two crew members from the reality television show riding in the back seat of their patrol car for a night of filming. After a standoff with a suspect inside the fast-food restaurant, both the robbery suspect and a sound supervisor for the show, Bryce Dion, were killed by police gunfire.

Officials said that Mr. Dion, 38, was accidentally shot when officers opened fire on the robbery suspect, who they believed had fired at them. The officers later found that the suspect, Cortez Washington, 32, had shot a pellet gun, not a real firearm, the Omaha police said.

“I can tell you that nobody wanted Bryce to get hurt. Nobody wanted anybody to get hurt,” Chief Todd Schmaderer said at a news conference on Wednesday afternoon. “Police work is very dangerous and very chaotic. When you’re reporting police work and riding along with us, unfortunately, you subject yourself to that same level of violence that Omaha police officers do every day.”

After reviewing footage from inside the restaurant, Chief Schmaderer said it appeared that the three officers who fired their weapons had followed protocol.

The three officers have been placed on paid administrative leave while the incident is being investigated, Chief Schmaderer said. He identified the officers as Darren Cunningham, 37; Brooks Riley, 35; and Jason Wilhelm, 39.

Mr. Dion’s death was the first time a crew member had been killed during the filming of “Cops,” a reality television show that first aired in 1989 and has filmed more than 900 episodes. Mr. Dion, who had worked on the show for seven years, was wearing a protective vest, but he was hit in an opening near his left arm, the police said.

The executive producers of the television show, John Langley and his son, Morgan, appeared alongside the police chief at the news conference, calling the shooting a “tragic event.” They said that the officers in Omaha were a professional police department and that the shooting should not reflect negatively on the city.

Around 9:20 p.m. on Tuesday, the police said, Officer Cunningham called for backup for a robbery in progress at the Wendy’s restaurant. The two other officers arrived, along with the “Cops” film crew, and three witnesses inside the restaurant said they saw Mr. Washington discharge a handgun at two of the officers, Chief Schmaderer said. The officers returned fire and shot Mr. Washington multiple times before he collapsed in the parking lot.

Mr. Dion was shot once when the suspect began to exit the building and the officers fired at him, Chief Schmaderer said. Mr. Dion had become stuck in the vestibule and collapsed near the doorway. When the officers recovered the suspect’s weapon, they saw that it was not a real handgun. Based on the video footage from the restaurant, the police chief said the officers had no choice but to act in the manner that they did.

Asked by a reporter whether the officers were showing off for the cameras, Chief Schmaderer said that was “absolutely ridiculous” and that the shots fired by the suspect sounded real. He noted that Mr. Washington had a “lengthy criminal history” and was on parole for a previous robbery in Missouri.

On Wednesday morning, 13 bullet holes riddled the entryway to the Wendy’s at 43rd and Dodge Streets in Omaha. Curtis Johnson, a manager at a nearby Kentucky Fried Chicken, said he had seen the police cars fly past the store on Tuesday night. That part of town does not have a reputation for violence, Mr. Johnson said, but he added that the area appeared to be getting worse. “I didn’t think that many robberies happened here, that it was that violent here,” he said. “I guess I was wrong, though.”

Known for its “Bad Boys” theme song, “Cops” was among the first reality television shows. Before Tuesday night, the most serious injury to a crew member while filming happened in a 2009 car accident, but that person recovered and returned to the show, producers said.

Last year, the show moved from the Fox network to the cable channel Spike TV, a division of Viacom Media Networks.

Earlier this summer, the Omaha Police Department said it had agreed to allow filming for the show in an attempt to improve relations with community members.
 

Carson Vaughan reported from Omaha, and Emma G. Fitzsimmons from New York

A version of this article appears in print on August 28, 2014, on page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: Police Shooting Kills Crew Member Working for Reality TV Show.

    Police Shooting Kills Crew Member Working for Reality Show ‘Cops’,
    NYT, 27.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/28/us/
    police-shooting-kills-crew-member-working-for-reality-show-cops.html

A 9-Year-Old at a Shooting Range,

a Spraying Uzi and Outrage

AUG. 27, 2014

The New York Times

By KIMBERLEY McGEE

and FERNANDA SANTOS

WHITE HILLS, Ariz. — The four-hour tours offered by one of the big gun ranges here are a popular tourist attraction. Starting at $200 a person, a bus will pick up visitors at their hotel in Las Vegas, 25 miles to the north, show them Hoover Dam and bring them to a recreational shooting range called Last Stop, where they can fire the weapons of their dreams: automatic machine guns, sniper rifles, grenade launchers. A hamburger lunch is included; a helicopter tour of the nearby Grand Canyon is optional.

But on Monday, one family’s adventure went horribly wrong. A 9-year-old girl from New Jersey accidentally shot and killed her instructor with an Uzi submachine gun while he stood to her left side, trying to guide her. A video of the shooting, which her parents recorded on a cellphone, suggests that the girl, in pink shorts and with a braided ponytail, was unable to control the gun’s recoil; the instructor, Charles Vacca, 39, was rushed to a hospital in Las Vegas, where he died Monday night.

The parents turned over the cellphone video to the sheriff’s department, which released it publicly. As they spread online and on television, the images of a small girl losing control of a powerful war weapon during a family vacation created a worldwide spectacle, prompting some commentators to castigate parents who would put a submachine gun in the hands of a child.

“What in the name of Jesus is wrong with us, Americans?” one person wrote on the TripAdvisor page for Bullets and Burgers, the tour company that brings people to Last Stop, amid other reviewers who raved about the great time they had firing guns there. “Automatic weapons as toys? And now a man is dead, for no reason, and a 9-year-old girl is scarred for life.”

Some gun owners took to Twitter to defend the practice of letting children use firearms and pointed out that it is both legal and commonplace in the Las Vegas area and elsewhere. But even the owner of Last Stop, Sam Scarmardo, said he would reconsider the practice in light of Monday’s accident. He said he had been in business 14 years and had never had a problem before.

“It is pretty standard in the industry to let children shoot on the range,” Mr. Scarmardo said in an interview. “We are working with the Mohave County Sheriff’s Office, and we’ll make a decision if we’ll make any changes after we review all the facts.”

Mr. Scarmardo said that the girl’s parents “were very familiar with weapons” and that Mr. Vacca and a tour guide had driven the family to the shooting range from their hotel in Las Vegas.

“We lost a friend — basically, we lost a brother. We are all very close. We are a tightknit organization and community,” Mr. Scarmardo said. “Everyone here at Last Stop is either former military or police officer. We are all highly trained in firearms and safety.”

There is nothing illegal about a girl handling an Uzi. In Arizona, there are no age limits for firing guns, and while federal law prohibits people under 18 from possessing a handgun, there are exceptions for shooting ranges, said Laura Cutilletta, senior staff attorney at the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a legal nonprofit that works to strengthen gun laws.
Continue reading the main story

Some ranges in the area do prohibit young children from handling such heavy weapons, but Last Stop allows children as young as 8 to participate. Bullets and Burgers said on its website that customers could “shoot a wide variety of fully automatic machine and belt fed guns including the AK-47, Colt M-16, MP5/40, FN FAL, Bren, M4, M249, M60, PKM and M203 Grenade Launcher.”

But Uzis are considered particularly tricky because they are light — unloaded, they weigh just under eight pounds — and powerful, making recoil tricky to handle even for adults, gun experts said. Designed for the Israeli military in the 1950s, Uzis are known for their simple design and operation, and they have been featured extensively in popular movies and video games.

“We allow children to shoot, but not a fully automatic Uzi,” said Genghis Cohen, owner of an indoor shooting range, Machine Guns Vegas. He called the shooting on Monday tragic, but added, “It was completely and utterly avoidable.”

“It was just a result of a lapse of attention,” Mr. Cohen said, “but I would never let a girl of that size shoot a fully automatic gun of that size — never.”

Mr. Cohen said that Uzis were notorious for rising as they fire, although usually to the right rather than the left. The video of the girl firing the Uzi on Monday shows the weapon rising and jerking to the left, toward Mr. Vacca.

Mr. Cohen said it was “pretty much the same situation” as in 2008 at a gun show in Westfield, Mass., when an 8-year-old Connecticut boy, Christopher K. Bizilj, accidentally shot and killed himself. In reaction, Connecticut imposed tougher gun regulations a year later, restricting access to machine guns for anyone under 16.

In the video, the girl, whose name has not been released, positioned herself before the target at an outdoor shooting range in this outpost in the Mojave Desert — one leg in front of the other, torso turned to the left, hands clutched around the grip of the Uzi, which appeared compact and light enough for her age and small build. When the girl fired her first shot, a puff of dust rose as the bullet hit the knoll behind the target. Mr. Vacca let out a celebratory “all right,” and then shifted the gun to fully automatic mode. The girl again pulled the trigger, but could not hold the gun straight as bullets came flying out at a rate of 600 rounds per minute.

Mr. Vacca “just dropped,” Sheriff Jim McCabe of Mohave County said. Mr. Vacca was airlifted to a hospital in Las Vegas and died 11 hours later.

Mr. Vacca “had a long military career” and “was very well-trained,” said Mr. Scarmardo of Last Stop, which is off a four-lane stretch of Route 93 linking Phoenix to Las Vegas, framed by mountains, cactus and sand. The place has a gift shop that sells beer, bracelets and roadside kitsch.

“In the last 14 years, we’ve probably had 100,000 people shoot five million rounds of ammunition, and of those, a thousand to two thousand of them were children,” he said. “We’ve never given out a Band-Aid — no one’s never even got a scratch.”

Craig Cox, who is certified by the National Rifle Association to train firearms instructors, said he told students it was “a judgment call on their part as far as allowing people of a certain age, children, to use certain types of firearms,” especially submachine guns.

“This is a personal opinion,” said Mr. Cox, based in Mesa, Ariz. “I don’t think a 9-year-old should be shooting them.”

This year, at least 45 children have been killed in accidental shootings after they found loaded guns at home, according to the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Daniel Webster, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, said that what happened at Last Stop was “an outlier.” Shooting ranges are generally regarded as safe places, where guns are fired in a controlled setting and under the supervision of trained instructors.

The tour company Bullets and Burgers had drawn numerous positive reviews on the website TripAdvisor; out of its 946 ratings, 932 were “excellent” or “very good.” An accompanying description of its services reads: “You will choose the guns which you want to shoot from our extensive collection, and we provide the eye/ear protection, ammunition, and expert guidance.”

It adds: “Our .50 Cal. selections includes the Barrett Sniper Rifle, the Browning BMG .50 Cal (‘the deuce’) and the Desert Eagle. We even have the actual firearms used in several Hollywood hits including ‘The Terminator’ and ‘Rambo II.’ ”
 

Kimberley McGee reported from White Hills and Las Vegas, and Fernanda Santos from Phoenix. Timothy Williams contributed reporting from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on August 28, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: A 9-Year-Old, a Deadly Uzi and Outrage.

    A 9-Year-Old at a Shooting Range, a Spraying Uzi and Outrage,
    NYT, 27.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/28/us/
    arizona-firing-range-instructor-killed-by-girl-9-in-accident.html

A Knock on the Door,

a Stranger,

Then a Killing

at a Rural Summer Home

2 Are Held in Death

of Mary E. Whitaker, New York Violinist

 

AUG. 25, 2014

The New York Times

By MARC SANTORA

A woman is alone at her home on a quiet country road.

It is early morning when there is a knock on the door. A man, a stranger, is on her porch asking for help. He has run out of gas, he says. He needs to use a phone.

The woman, in an act of kindness, obliges.

The woman was Mary E. Whitaker, 61, an accomplished violinist who lived in Manhattan and spent her summers in her home in far western New York, near Lake Erie.

The man was a homeless drifter, Charles Sanford, 30, according to law enforcement officials. And he was not alone last Wednesday morning when he knocked on Ms. Whitaker’s single-story home at 8448 Titus Road, on the Westfield-Sherman town line in Chautauqua County. Hiding nearby, the authorities said, was his accomplice, Jonathan Conklin, armed with a .22-caliber rifle and a plan.

Mr. Conklin, the authorities said, wanted to rob Ms. Whitaker so he could live like a “rock star,” using whatever they stole to buy drugs and other goods.

But the plan, as laid out in court documents, quickly turned bloody.

By the time the deadly robbery was finished, Ms. Whitaker had been shot twice, stabbed in the neck once, and left to die bleeding in her garage.

Mr. Sanford and Mr. Conklin, 43, fled in her car, with little more than some checks and her credit cards, the authorities said. They drove to Pennsylvania, where they were arrested on Friday.

The court documents filed in United States District Court in Buffalo offer a graphic and disturbing account of what the police believe happened.

For her friends and loved ones, Ms. Whitaker’s violent end remains incomprehensible. Mairi Dorman-Phaneuf posted a tribute on Facebook to her friend that seemed to capture the general sentiment.

“Going to speak from my heart,” Ms. Dorman-Phaneuf wrote, calling Ms. Whitaker “a very, very rare and gentle human, who thought deeply and carefully about what mattered, and made you feel like she saw who you truly were when you were near her.

“She was killed yesterday with a gun. She has a family and scores of friends and colleagues who are completely at a loss for how to process her being taken.”

According to court documents, Mr. Sanford and Mr. Conklin met in a homeless shelter in Erie, Pa., several months ago.

Early last week, Mr. Sanford told Mr. Conklin he was looking for a new place to stay, and Mr. Conklin told him he had an idea. Late on Tuesday, a mutual acquaintance drove the pair to Sherman.

“Conklin and Sanford slept for a few hours in a clearing near an old railroad trestle,” according to an affidavit filed in federal court.

Before dawn, the two set off to an apartment near a bar in downtown Sherman.

Mr. Conklin told Mr. Sanford that the person who lived in the apartment owed him money, and they robbed the place, taking multiple shotguns and a .22-caliber rifle, the affidavit states.

It was around 5 a.m. when the pair set off again.

After walking for a while, they arrived — at random, the authorities believe — at Ms. Whitaker’s home, a green ranch-style house atop a hill and opposite a sunflower field.

Investigators said Mr. Sanford had told them that Mr. Conklin said he intended to rob the house so he could “live like a rock star.”

The plan was for Mr. Sanford to ring the buzzer and ask to use the phone, saying he ran out of gas. Mr. Conklin, with the rifle at the ready, hid.

When Mr. Sanford first rang the buzzer, around 7 a.m., there was no response. So he pounded on the door.

Ms. Whitaker eventually answered and gave her phone to Mr. Sanford, who made two calls.

Mr. Conklin burst out of the shadows, announcing, “This is a robbery.”

Ms. Whitaker screamed.

Mr. Conklin fired. The gunshot hit her in the chest, according to the account provided by Mr. Sanford.

She then lunged for the gun, grabbing it by the barrel. Another shot rang out. She was hit in the leg.

But she was still alive. Mr. Sanford dragged her into the garage, he told the authorities, adding that Mr. Conklin ordered him to use his knife to finish the job.

Mr. Sanford told investigators that he tried to cut her throat but could not get the blade to penetrate deeply.

She was left bleeding on the floor, where she died. (Her body was found later that day by a fellow musician who was concerned when she could not reach Ms. Whitaker.)

Mr. Sanford and Mr. Conklin scoured the home for valuables, found some credit cards and a checkbook, and then fled in Ms. Whitaker’s gray Chevrolet.

The next day, after returning to Erie, they set about on their shopping spree.

They called a woman who they knew to be addicted to crack and offered her drugs if she posed as Ms. Whitaker to shop at a local Walmart.

She bought a large flat-screen television for the two men.

Mr. Sanford and Mr. Conklin were arrested on Friday after they were recognized on surveillance video using Ms. Whitaker’s credit cards at a convenience store, the authorities said. They were charged with federal crimes related to the home invasion and robbery and are being held without bail in the Chautauqua County Jail in Mayville.

As the state continues to investigate the killing, Ms. Whitaker’s friends remain devastated.

For more than two decades, Ms. Whitaker played with the Westchester Philharmonic and toured widely, including once with Barbra Streisand. In the summers, she played with the Chautauqua Institution’s Symphony Orchestra. Her last concert there was the night before she was killed.

Jason Minter, 44, a neighbor of Ms. Whitaker’s in the Inwood section of Manhattan, said that “everyone is in shock.”

Mr. Minter called the crime “the most random awful thing anyone can imagine,” adding that her killing was “confusing, bizarre and disturbing all at the same time.”
 

Kate Pastor contributed reporting from New York City, and Michael D. Regan from western New York. Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on August 26, 2014, on page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: A Knock on the Door, a Stranger, Then a Killing at a Rural Summer Home.

    A Knock on the Door, a Stranger,
    Then a Killing at a Rural Summer Home,
    NYT, 25.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/26/nyregion/
    2-are-held-in-manhattan-violinists-death-in-western-new-york-robbery.html

Timeline for a Body:

4 Hours in the Middle

of a Ferguson Street

 

AUG. 23, 2014

By JULIE BOSMAN

and JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN

FERGUSON, Mo. — Just after noon on Saturday, Aug. 9, Michael Brown was shot dead by a police officer on Canfield Drive.

For about four hours, in the unrelenting summer sun, his body remained where he fell.

Neighbors were horrified by the gruesome scene: Mr. Brown, 18, face down in the middle of the street, blood streaming from his head. They ushered their children into rooms that faced away from Canfield Drive. They called friends and local news stations to tell them what had happened. They posted on Twitter and Facebook and recorded shaky cellphone videos that would soon make their way to the national news.

Mr. Brown probably could not have been revived, and the time that his body lay in the street may ultimately have no bearing on the investigations into whether the shooting was justified. But local officials say that the image of Mr. Brown’s corpse in the open set the scene for what would become a combustible worldwide story of police tactics and race in America, and left some of the officials asking why.

“The delay helped fuel the outrage,” said Patricia Bynes, a committeewoman in Ferguson. “It was very disrespectful to the community and the people who live there. It also sent the message from law enforcement that ‘we can do this to you any day, any time, in broad daylight, and there’s nothing you can do about it.’ ”

Two weeks after Mr. Brown’s death, interviews with law enforcement officials and a review of police logs make clear that a combination of factors, some under police control and some not, contributed to the time lapse in removing his body.

The St. Louis County Police Department, which almost immediately took over the investigation, had officers on the scene quickly, but its homicide detectives were not called until about 40 minutes after the shooting, according to county police logs, and they arrived around 1:30 p.m. It was another hour before an investigator from the medical examiner’s office arrived.

And officials were contending with what they described as “sheer chaos” on Canfield Drive, where bystanders, including at least one of Mr. Brown’s relatives, frequently stepped inside the yellow tape, hindering investigators. Gunshots were heard at the scene, further disrupting the officers’ work.

“Usually they go straight to their jobs,” Officer Brian Schellman, a county police spokesman, said of the detectives who process crime scenes for evidence. “They couldn’t do that right away because there weren’t enough police there to quiet the situation.”

For part of the time, Mr. Brown’s body lay in the open, allowing people to record it on their cellphones. A white sheet was draped over Mr. Brown’s body, but his feet remained exposed and blood could still be seen. The police later shielded the body with a low, six-panel orange partition typically used for car crashes.

Experts in policing said there was no standard for how long a body should remain at a scene, but they expressed surprise at how Mr. Brown’s body had been allowed to remain in public view.
Continue reading the main story

Asked to describe procedures in New York, Gerald Nelson, a chief who commands the patrol forces in much of Brooklyn, said that as soon as emergency medical workers have concluded that a victim is dead, “that body is immediately covered.”

“We make sure we give that body the dignity it deserves,” Chief Nelson said.

St. Louis County police officials acknowledged that they were uncomfortable with the time it took to shield Mr. Brown’s body and have it removed, and that they were mindful of the shocked reaction from residents. But they also defended their work, saying that the time that elapsed in getting detectives to the scene was not out of the ordinary, and that conditions made it unusually difficult to do all that they needed.

“Michael Brown had one more voice after that shooting, and his voice was the detectives’ being able to do a comprehensive job,” said Jon Belmar, chief of the St. Louis County Police Department.

Mr. Brown and a friend, Dorian Johnson, were walking down Canfield Drive at 12:01 p.m. when Officer Darren Wilson of the Ferguson Police Department encountered them. Moments later, Mr. Brown was dead, shot at least six times by Officer Wilson.

Other Ferguson officers were summoned, including Tom Jackson, the chief of police in this town of 21,000 people. While Chief Jackson was en route, he called Chief Belmar of the county police.

It was typical, given the limited resources of the Ferguson Police Department, to transfer a homicide investigation to the St. Louis County police, a much larger force with more specialized officers.

According to police logs, the county police received a report of the shooting at 12:07, and their officers began arriving around 12:15. Videos taken by bystanders show that in the first minutes after Mr. Brown’s death, officers quickly secured the area with yellow tape. In one video, several police cars were on the scene, and officers were standing close to their cars, a distance away from Mr. Brown’s body.

Around 12:10, a paramedic who happened to be nearby on another call approached Mr. Brown’s body, checked for a pulse, and observed the blood and “injuries incompatible with life,” said his supervisor, Chris Cebollero, the chief of emergency medical services at Christian Hospital. He estimated that it had been around 12:15 when a sheet was retrieved from an ambulance and used to cover Mr. Brown.

Relatives of Mr. Brown said they were at the scene quickly after hearing of the shooting from a family friend, who had been driving in the area and recognized the teenager’s body. They said they begged for information but received nothing.

Louis Head, Mr. Brown’s stepfather, said the police had prevented him from approaching the body. “Nobody came to nobody and said, ‘Hey, we’re sorry,’ ” he said. “Nobody said nothing.”

At one point, Brendan Ewings, Mr. Brown’s uncle, is seen in a video walking up to the police tape and staring at Mr. Brown’s body. Mr. Ewings, 39, ducked under the tape and walked slowly toward the body, prompting one officer to yell, sprint toward him and lead him away.

“I went up to it,” Mr. Ewings recalled in an interview on Thursday. “I seen the body, and I recognized the body. That’s when the dude grabbed me.”

Mr. Ewings said he pleaded for information about his nephew. “I said, ‘A cop did this?’ ”

It was not until 12:43 p.m. that detectives from the county police force were notified of the shooting, according to county police records. Officer Schellman, the county police spokesman, said Friday that Chief Belmar did not recall exactly when he had received the call from his counterpart in Ferguson. But, Officer Schellman said, Chief Belmar reported that as soon as he hung up, he immediately called the chief of detectives.

The detectives arrived around 1:30, and an hour later, a forensic investigator, who gathers information for the pathologist who will conduct the autopsy, arrived from the medical examiner’s office, said Suzanne McCune, an administrator in that office.

Mr. Brown’s body had been in the street for more than two hours.

Francis G. Slay, the mayor of St. Louis, whose city did not have a role in the shooting or the investigation, said in an interview that his city had a “very specific policy” for handling such situations.

He continued: “We’ll cover the body appropriately with screening or tents, so it’s not exposed to the public. We do the investigation as quickly as we can.”

Dr. Michael M. Baden, the former New York City chief medical examiner who was hired by the Brown family’s lawyers to do an autopsy, said it was “a mistake” to let the body remain in the street for so long.

“In my opinion, it’s not necessary to leave a body in a public place for that many hours, particularly given the temperature and the fact that people are around,” he said. “There is no forensic reason for doing that.”

The St. Louis County police declined to give details about what evidence investigators had been gathering while Mr. Brown’s body was in the street.

Typically, said John Paolucci, a former detective sergeant at the New York Police Department, crime scene investigators would work methodically.

If there had been a struggle between an officer and a shooting victim, the officer’s shirt would be taken as evidence. The police cruiser would be towed to a garage and examined there.

Detectives would want to find any shell casings, said Mr. Paolucci, who retired in 2012 as the commanding officer of the unit that served as liaison between the detective bureau and the medical examiner’s office.

Usually, the police conduct very little examination of the body at the scene, other than photographing it, he said.

“We might use vehicles to block the body from public view depending on where cameras are and how offensive the scene is, if something like that is starting to raise tensions,” Mr. Paolucci said.

Chief Belmar said that while he was unable to explain why officers had waited to cover Mr. Brown’s body, he said he thought they would have done so sooner if they could have.

As the crowd on Canfield Drive grew, the police, including officers from St. Louis County and Ferguson, tried to restore order. At one point, they called in a Code 1000, an urgent summons to nearby police officers to help bring order to a scene, police officials said.

Even homicide detectives, who do not ordinarily handle such tasks, “were trying to get the scene under control,” said Officer Rick Eckhard, another spokesman for the St. Louis County police.

Sometime around 4 p.m., Mr. Brown’s body, covered in a blue tarp and loaded into a dark vehicle, was transported to the morgue in Berkeley, Mo., about six miles from Canfield Drive, a roughly 15-minute drive.

Mr. Brown’s body was checked into the morgue at 4:37 p.m., more than four and a half hours after he was shot.
 

Alan Blinder and John Eligon contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on August 24, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Timeline for a Body: 4 Hours in the Middle of a Ferguson Street.

    Timeline for a Body: 4 Hours in the Middle of a Ferguson Street,
    NYT, 23.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/24/us/
    michael-brown-a-bodys-timeline-4-hours-on-a-ferguson-street.html

Despite Similar Shooting,

Los Angeles’s ‘Bank of Trust’

Tempers Reaction

 

AUG. 22, 2014

The New York Times

By JENNIFER MEDINA

LOS ANGELES — When Los Angeles police officers shot and killed Ezell Ford, an unarmed 25-year-old black man last week, it took less than 24 hours for Lita Herron to get a phone call from a ranking officer at a nearby station.

“They wanted to check in and gauge our rage,” said Ms. Herron, a grandmother and organizer who has worked to prevent gang violence on the streets of South Los Angeles for years. “They wanted to ask us to quell rumors and hear what we need. We’ve all been through this before — even when we know things are wrong, we aren’t looking for things to explode.”

In Ferguson, Mo., however, angry protests stretched on for nearly two weeks after the police killing of Michael Brown in circumstances that were strikingly similar: an unarmed young black man shot by the police, who some witnesses say was not putting up a struggle.

The killings occurred two days apart. The protests in Missouri were driven initially, in large part, by the police’s refusal to release the name of the officer involved or details of the Aug. 9 shooting. Here, the police are still holding back the autopsy report and the names of the officers involved, citing security concerns.

Yet the reaction in Los Angeles, where clashes between the police and residents have a long history, has so far been much calmer.

While there have been several protests since the Aug. 11 shooting of Mr. Ford, who was mentally ill, including an impromptu march that blocked traffic on city streets, the police have maintained a relatively low profile, relying primarily on a handful of bicycle-riding officers in polo shirts rather than the rifle-carrying officers in riot gear pictured in Ferguson. This week, Chief Charlie Beck and other top-ranking officials showed up for a community meeting at a local church, telling the angry crowd of several hundred that there were still more questions than answers about the shooting.

In the more than two decades since riots erupted after white police officers were acquitted in the beating of Rodney G. King, a black construction worker, relations between law enforcement and their communities here have changed drastically. In many South Los Angeles police precincts, officers routinely check in with organizers like Ms. Herron. Local church leaders have officers’ phone numbers committed to memory. When protests are planned, seasoned organizers let the police know — even when the police are the target of their outrage.

“We have an infrastructure here where there are outlets for people to vent frustration and move into action,” said Marqueece Harris-Dawson, the president of Community Coalition, which runs several programs for residents in South Los Angeles. “This has taken more than 20 years to build and sustain — there’s no question it would not have been this way a generation or two ago.”

Still, on the streets of South Los Angeles, a predominantly black and Latino neighborhood, a sense of distrust of the police remains. Mr. Harris-Dawson, who is black, often points out that he has had a gun pointed at him by an L.A.P.D. officer four times and has never carried a weapon. Black and Latino teenage boys rattle off instances where they were pulled over and questioned for what they say was no reason. Still, many local leaders are willing to give the department some leeway to continue the investigation into the Ford shooting before coming to a clear conclusion.
Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story

“The chief also does not make it the job of the department to exonerate the officer,” Mr. Harris-Dawson said. “They do take a minute to have some remorse for the fact that someone is dead.”

When Earl Ofari Hutchinson, a longtime civil rights leader here and a frequent critic of the department, demanded a meeting with top police officials last week, they quickly arranged to discuss the case. They listened to Mr. Hutchinson’s demands for a “fast track” investigation and a quick release of the officers’ names and the autopsy results. Earl Paysinger, an assistant police chief, declined to predict when such information would be available, saying detectives were still canvassing the area looking for witnesses.

Chief Paysinger said in an interview on Friday that the department was “well aware we can’t let it go on indefinitely.”

“We’ve seen this film before — this is ‘Groundhog Day’ for us,” Chief Paysinger said. “What the people are demanding is not unreasonable. We know that whatever we say first will become gospel, and we’d rather deal with some discontent now than putting out information we have to correct later.”

Mr. Paysinger, who has been with the department for nearly 40 years and oversees its day-to-day operations, said that the department had for years now tried to rely on what it called the “bank of trust” among community members. Just more than a year ago, the department was under a consent decree imposed by the Justice Department, after dozens of officers were accused of tampering with evidence and physically abusing and framing suspects.

“We’ve learned that community outreach can’t wait for the day when you’re in trouble and need help,” Chief Paysinger said. Now, he said, the network of community support is so wide, it is a matter of course for officers to call local leaders routinely. And the efforts have expanded along with the importance of social media: Each police station now assigns personnel to monitor websites, Facebook and Twitter almost round-the-clock, watching for everything from signs of gang activity to how people are reacting to political events.

In some sense, Mr. Ford’s death is remarkable for the publicity it has received here — several longtime activists said it would be easy to imagine the shooting getting little attention were it not for the outrage in Missouri.

Officers here have shot and killed 12 people so far this year, compared with 14 such deaths all of last year. In several protests after the Ford shooting, one organization held up a large banner listing the names of more than 300 people who have died during conflicts with law enforcement here in the last seven years.

“This happened just as it became clear that Ferguson was a billboard of what we did not want to do,” said Curren Price, a city councilman who represents South Los Angeles and organized the community meeting this week, which was attended by the police chief, as well as the head of the police oversight board. “We all knew this is another critical juncture for us.”

“There are a lot of deep wounds — L.A.P.D. was a pretty notorious organization not that long ago,” Mr. Price said. “Unfortunately, anytime something like this happens, it brings all that back to the surface. There’s still a long way to go before we can say things are good.”
 

A version of this article appears in print on August 23, 2014, on page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: Despite Similar Shooting, Los Angeles’s ‘Bank of Trust’ Tempers Reaction.

    Despite Similar Shooting,
    Los Angeles’s ‘Bank of Trust’ Tempers Reaction,
    NYT, 22.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/23/us/despite-similar-shootings-steps
    by-los-angeles-police-temper-reaction.html

Man Killed by St. Louis Officers

in Disturbance at Store

 

AUG. 19, 2014

The New York Times

By ALAN BLINDER

and MARC SANTORA

ST. LOUIS — An emotionally disturbed 23-year-old black man was shot and killed by St. Louis police officers on Tuesday afternoon, the authorities said, threatening to further inflame a community still reeling after another shooting by an officer in a suburb less than two weeks ago.

The St. Louis police said officers received a call at about 12:20 p.m. regarding a disturbance at the Six Stars Market in northwest St. Louis.

Sam Dotson, the chief of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, said two officers encountered a man behaving “erratically” and brandishing a knife when they arrived. The officers repeatedly warned, “Stop, drop the knife,” but he refused, Chief Dotson said. The man approached the officers, knife raised, and was shot and killed after he came within three or four feet, the chief said.

The shooting at the market came 10 days after an officer shot and killed an unarmed 18-year-old African-American, Michael Brown, in the nearby St. Louis suburb of Ferguson. That shooting has triggered protests, looting and general unrest that has put the area on edge.

In a sign of how tense the situation remains, Chief Dotson made a point of going out into a crowd at the scene of Tuesday’s shooting to tell them what the police understood had occurred. .

“I think it’s important that people understand what happened,” he said. He said that several witnesses confirmed the account of the officers, including a local alderman. “I want this message to be out as truthfully and quickly as possible,” he said.

Not all of them were willing to listen.

“Even if this is a legitimate shooting, they are going to capitalize on this and try to use it for their martial law agenda,” said Christopher Hobbs, 21, who joined dozens of other residents who quickly came to the scene to see what happened.

Witnesses seemed to confirm the account of the police.

Robert Buchanan, who works at Betterway Auto Repair and Sales, across the street from the shooting, said that the man who had been shot was clearly disturbed.

“The suspect was inside the store and was arguing with them,” he said, referring to the Six Stars Market. “He was cussing them out. And he came out the store. And he was still arguing.”

The police arrived quickly, Mr. Buchanan said, and the man confronted them. “He was hollering, ‘Shoot me! Shoot me!’ ” he said. “I did not know what he had in his hand.”

Then, Mr. Buchanan said, he heard four shots. “I turned around and saw him laying on the ground,” he said.

The police left the scene by mid-afternoon, but a few dozen demonstrators remained in front of the store.

But, perhaps in a sign of preparation, officers were seen on a side street a few blocks away.

    Man Killed by St. Louis Officers in Disturbance at Store,
    NYT, 19.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/20/us/
    man-killed-by-st-louis-officers-in-disturbance-at-store.html

Obama Administration Plans

Autopsy of Michael Brown

in Effort to Keep Peace

 

AUG. 17, 2014

The New York Times

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR

and MATT APUZZO

EDGARTOWN, Mass. — Senior White House aides have made repeated, urgent phone calls to Gov. Jay Nixon of Missouri, to state police officials and to civil rights leaders in recent days as President Obama’s administration becomes more deeply involved in trying to maintain peace in Ferguson and to ensure an independent investigation of the fatal shooting of an unarmed African-American teenager by a white police officer.

White House officials also said Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who is the administration’s most outspoken voice on racial issues, had been in frequent touch with the governor and State Highway Patrol in Missouri as angry protests continued to simmer there. Mr. Holder is scheduled to provide a formal briefing to the president in Washington on Monday, officials said. Both men were returning Sunday from Martha’s Vineyard, where they had been vacationing for the past week.

Mr. Holder announced Sunday that a federal medical examiner would conduct an independent autopsy of Michael Brown, the 18-year-old who was shot Aug. 9 in Ferguson by Officer Darren Wilson. Officials said the decision was the result of “extraordinary circumstances” in the case, and was part of a civil rights investigation the F.B.I. is conducting.

The order for an additional autopsy may also help the Obama administration to reassure Mr. Brown’s family and others who are suspicious of the state’s investigation and are eager for an independent inquiry, something that Mr. Holder promised the family personally.

Brian Fallon, a Justice Department spokesman, said the department would also consider the results of the first, state-conducted autopsy. There was no indication that federal investigators saw any problems with the local examination. The family has also had a private autopsy conducted.

After spending two days in Washington, Mr. Obama is scheduled to return to Martha’s Vineyard on Tuesday night to finish his two-week vacation.

Although the president continued to relax on the island, playing golf or going to the beach and taking leisurely dinners with friends since arriving Aug. 9, White House officials said Sunday that the situation in Ferguson had dominated his working time over the past several days. Mr. Obama received briefings several times a day, including at least once each day by Mr. Holder. Valerie Jarrett, who heads the White House office of outreach, has also talked daily with Mr. Nixon, his staff, local elected officials and leaders from national civil rights organizations.

“Any time you have a situation like this that spirals quickly to a boiling point and where people are looting and getting hurt, it’s a concern for the president,” Ms. Jarrett said in an interview from Martha’s Vineyard, where she was also vacationing.

Officials said Mr. Nixon, a Democrat, had not asked for federal troops to help keep the peace in Ferguson. But 40 additional agents from the F.B.I. arrived in Missouri on Saturday to assist with the federal investigation, Mr. Nixon said Sunday.

Officials with the F.B.I. and the Justice Department have said investigators interviewed several witnesses to the shooting and were canvassing the area for others.

“That’s the kind of independent, external, national review and investigation of this that I think will assist everyone in making sure we get to justice,” Mr. Nixon said Sunday on the CNN program “State of the Union.”

The tensions in Ferguson are shaping up as a signature moment for Mr. Holder, who has made civil rights issues a cornerstone of his tenure and who has indicated he will most likely leave office by the end of the year. The attorney general has fought against policies such as racial profiling and mandatory minimum sentences, which he believes discriminate against minorities and undermine their confidence in the criminal justice system. The Ferguson protests have touched on both themes.

White House officials said the shooting of Mr. Brown and the reaction among African-Americans in Ferguson were also another instance in which the president’s policy response is motivated in part by a deep, personal connection to the issues of race and justice.

Mr. Obama has in the past spoken in emotional terms about racial issues, including the shooting of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed young black man in Florida, and the acquittal of the man who shot him, George Zimmerman. The president’s aides said the situation in Ferguson had affected him in similar ways.

“He wants to make sure that he’s doing everything in his power to ensure a thorough investigation,” Ms. Jarrett said. “He wants to make sure that there’s continuing exploration of ways that they are keeping the violence down, reducing it down to zero.”

White House officials said Mr. Obama had not lost confidence in Mr. Nixon or State Highway Patrol officers in Missouri; one official described them as “acting in good faith” to help resolve the situation. But the official stressed that the White House did not necessarily believe the same of the local police in Ferguson.

Behind the scenes, administration officials have sought to minimize the potential for angry reaction on the streets of the city.

The Justice Department asked the Ferguson police not to release surveillance footage of a convenience store robbery in which, police said, Mr. Brown was a suspect, because of concerns that “it would roil the community further,” a federal law enforcement official said on Saturday.

The Ferguson Police Department released the video on Friday, and the official said it “occurred over the objection of federal authorities.” Federal investigators had a copy of the video as well, the official said, “and there were never any plans by the federal investigators to release that copy.”

Mr. Nixon said Sunday that state officials had not known that the Ferguson Police Department intended to release the video. “We were unaware they were going to release it, and we certainly were not happy with that being released, especially in the way that it was,” Mr. Nixon said on ABC’s “This Week.”

Federal law enforcement authorities in Washington, however, said Sunday that the Justice Department had discussed its concerns over the release of the video in advance with members of the governor’s staff.

Mr. Nixon said on Sunday that he believed that the decision by the local police had contributed to the renewed tensions in Ferguson on Saturday night, which took the form of some clashes and a shooting by an unknown assailant. Seven people were arrested.

“I think it had an incendiary effect,” he said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “I mean, when you release pictures and you clearly are attempting to besmirch a victim of a shooting, shot down, a young man in his own street, and at the same you’re releasing information to try to tarnish him, then properly there was a lot of folks that were concerned about that.”
 

Michael D. Shear reported from Edgartown, and Matt Apuzzo from Washington. Emmarie Huetteman contributed reporting from Washington, and Alan Blinder from Ferguson, Mo.

A version of this article appears in print on August 18, 2014, on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: White House Efforts to Keep Peace Include Plan for a Justice Dept. Autopsy.

    Obama Administration Plans Autopsy of Michael Brown
    in Effort to Keep Peace, NYT, 17.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/18/us/politics/independent
    michael-brown-autopsy-planned-by-obama-administration.html

Autopsy Shows Michael Brown

Was Struck at Least 6 Times

 

AUG. 17, 2014

The New York Times

By FRANCES ROBLES

and JULIE BOSMAN

FERGUSON, Mo. — Michael Brown, the unarmed black teenager who was killed by a police officer, sparking protests around the nation, was shot at least six times, including twice in the head, a preliminary private autopsy performed on Sunday found.

One of the bullets entered the top of Mr. Brown’s skull, suggesting his head was bent forward when it struck him and caused a fatal injury, according to Dr. Michael M. Baden, the former chief medical examiner for the City of New York, who flew to Missouri on Sunday at the family’s request to conduct the separate autopsy. It was likely the last of bullets to hit him, he said.

Mr. Brown, 18, was also shot four times in the right arm, he said, adding that all the bullets were fired into his front.

The bullets did not appear to have been shot from very close range because no gunpowder was present on his body. However, that determination could change if it turns out that there is gunshot residue on Mr. Brown’s clothing, to which Dr. Baden did not have access.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said Sunday that the Justice Department would conduct its own autopsy, in addition to the one performed by local officials and this private one because, a department spokesman said, of “the extraordinary circumstances involved in this case and at the request of the Brown family.”

The preliminary autopsy results are the first time that some of the critical information resulting in Mr. Brown’s death has been made public. Thousands of protesters demanding information and justice for what was widely viewed as a reckless shooting took to the streets here in rallies that ranged from peaceful to violent.

Mr. Brown died last week in a confrontation with a police officer here in this suburb of St. Louis. The police department has come under harsh criticism for refusing to clarify the circumstances of the shooting and for responding to protests with military-style operational gear.

“People have been asking: How many times was he shot? This information could have been released on Day 1,” Dr. Baden said in an interview after performing the autopsy. “They don’t do that, even as feelings built up among the citizenry that there was a cover-up. We are hoping to alleviate that.”

Dr. Baden said that while Mr. Brown was shot at least six times, only three bullets were recovered from his body. But he has not yet seen the X-rays showing where the bullets were found, which would clarify the autopsy results. Nor has he had access to witness and police statements.

Dr. Baden provided a diagram of the entry wounds, and noted that the six shots produced numerous wounds. Some of the bullets entered and exited several times, including one that left at least five different wounds.

“This one here looks like his head was bent downward,” he said, indicating the wound at the very top of Mr. Brown’s head. “It can be because he’s giving up, or because he’s charging forward at the officer.”

He stressed that his information does not assign blame or justify the shooting.

“We need more information; for example, the police should be examining the automobile to see if there is gunshot residue in the police car,” he said.

Dr. Baden, 80, is a well-known New York-based medical examiner, who is one of only about 400 board-certified forensic pathologists in the nation. He reviewed the autopsies of both President John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and has performed more than 20,000 autopsies himself.

He is best known for having hosted the HBO show “Autopsy,” but he rankles when he is called a “celebrity medical examiner,” saying that the vast majority of what he does has nothing to do with celebrities.

Dr. Baden said that because of the tremendous attention to the case, he waived his $10,000 fee.

Prof. Shawn L. Parcells, a pathologist assistant based in Kansas, assisted Dr. Baden.

“You do this for the families,” Mr. Parcells said.

The two medical experts conducted the four-hour examination Sunday at the Austin A. Layne Mortuary in St. Louis. Benjamin L. Crump, a lawyer for Mr. Brown’s family who paid their travel expenses, hired them.

“The sheer number of bullets and the way they were scattered all over his body showed this police officer had a brazen disregard for the very people he was supposed to protect in that community,” Mr. Crump said. “We want to make sure people understand what this case is about: This case is about a police officer executing a young unarmed man in broad daylight.”

A spokesman for the Ferguson Police Department, Tim Zoll, said the police had not seen a report of the autopsy and therefore had no comment on it.

Dr. Baden said he consulted with the St. Louis County medical examiner before conducting the autopsy.

One of the bullets shattered Mr. Brown’s right eye, traveled through his face, exited his jaw and re-entered his collarbone. The last two shots in the head would have stopped him in his tracks and were likely the last fired.

Mr. Brown, he said, would not have survived the shooting even if he had been taken to a hospital right away. The autopsy indicated that he was otherwise healthy.

Dr. Baden said it was unusual for the federal government to conduct a third autopsy, but dueling examinations often occur when there is so much distrust of the authorities. The county of St. Louis has conducted an autopsy, and the results have not yet been released.

He stressed that his examination was not to determine whether the shooting was justified.

“In my capacity as the forensic examiner for the New York State Police, I would say, ‘You’re not supposed to shoot so many times,’ ” said Dr. Baden, who retired from the state police in 2011. “Right now there is too little information to forensically reconstruct the shooting.”

No matter what conclusions can be drawn from Dr. Baden’s work, Mr. Brown’s death remains marked by shifting and contradictory accounts more than a week after it occurred. The shooting is under investigation by St. Louis County and by the F.B.I., working with the Justice Department’s civil rights division and the office of Attorney General Holder.

According to what has emerged so far, on Saturday, Aug. 9, Mr. Brown, along with a companion, Dorian Johnson, was walking in the middle of Canfield Drive, a fistful of cigarillos in Mr. Brown’s hand, police say, which a videotape shows he stole from a liquor store on West Florissant Ave.

At 12:01 p.m., they were stopped by Darren Wilson, a police officer, who ordered them off the road and onto the sidewalk, Mr. Johnson, who is 22, later said.

The police have said that what happened next was a physical struggle between Mr. Brown and Officer Wilson that left the officer with a swollen face. Mr. Johnson and others have said that it was a case of racial profiling and police aggression from a white officer toward a black man. Within minutes, Mr. Brown, who was unarmed, was dead of gunshot wounds.

The sequence of events provided by law enforcement officials places Mr. Brown and Mr. Johnson at Ferguson Market and Liquors, a store several blocks away on West Florissant Ave., at about 11:50 a.m. After leaving the store with the cigarillos, the two walked north on West Florissant, a busy commercial thoroughfare, toward Canfield Drive, a clerk reported to the police.

Mr. Brown was a big man at 6-foot-4 and 292 pounds, though his family and friends described him as quiet and shy, a homebody who lived with his grandmother.

It is about a 10-minute walk from Ferguson Market to the spot where Officer Wilson, 28, with six years’ experience, approached Mr. Brown and Mr. Johnson.

The police tell of an officer who was enforcing the minor violation of jaywalking, as Mr. Brown and Mr. Johnson ignored the sidewalk and strolled down the middle of the road instead.

The morning after the shooting, Chief Jon Belmar of the St. Louis County police said that Officer Wilson was leaving his police car when Mr. Brown “allegedly pushed the police officer back into the car,” where he “physically assaulted the police officer.”

“Within the police car there was a struggle over the officer’s weapon,” Chief Belmar said. “There was at least one shot fired in the car.” At that point, the police said, Officer Wilson left his vehicle and fatally shot Mr. Brown. “More than a few” shell casings were recovered from the scene.

Mr. Johnson, who declined to be interviewed, has described the events differently in television interviews. While he and Mr. Brown walked, he said, Officer Wilson stopped his vehicle and told them to get on the sidewalk. When they refused, Officer Wilson slammed on his brakes and drove in reverse to get closer.

When the officer opened his door, it hit Mr. Brown. With his left hand, Officer Wilson reached out and grabbed Mr. Brown by the neck, Mr. Johnson said.

“It’s like tug-of-war,” Mr. Johnson said. “He’s trying to pull him in. He’s pulling away, that’s when I heard, ‘I’m gonna shoot you.’ ”

A witness, Tiffany Mitchell, said in an interview with MSNBC that she heard tires squeal, then saw Mr. Brown and Officer Wilson “wrestling” through the open car window. A shot went off from within the car, Mr. Johnson said, and the two began to run away from the officer.

According to Ms. Mitchell, “The officer gets out of his vehicle,” she said, pursuing Mr. Brown, then continued to shoot.

Mr. Johnson said that he hid behind a parked car and that Mr. Brown was struck by a bullet in his back as he ran away, an account that Dr. Baden’s autopsy appears to contradict.

“Michael’s body jerks as if he was hit,” Ms. Mitchell said, “and then he put his hands up.” Mr. Brown turned, Mr. Johnson said, raised his hands, and said, “I don’t have a gun, stop shooting!”

Officer Wilson continued to fire and Mr. Brown crumpled to the ground, Mr. Johnson said. Within seconds, confusion and horror swept through Canfield Drive. On that Saturday afternoon, dozens of neighbors were at home and rushed out of their apartments when they heard gunshots.

One person who claimed to witness the shooting began posting frantic messages on Twitter, written hastily with shorthand and grammatical errors, only two minutes after Officer Wilson approached Mr. Brown. At 12:03 p.m., the person, identified as @TheePharoah, a St. Louis-area rapper, wrote on Twitter that he had just seen someone die.

That same minute, he wrote, “Im about to hyperventilate.”

At 12:23 p.m., he wrote, “dude was running and the cops just saw him. I saw him die bruh.”

A 10-minute video posted on YouTube appeared to be taken on a cellphone by someone who identified himself as a neighbor. The video, which has collected more than 225,000 views, captures Mr. Brown’s body, the yellow police tape that marked off the crime scene and the residents standing behind it.

“They shot that boy ’cause they wanted to,” said one woman who can be heard on the video.

“They said he had his hands up and everything,” said the man taking the video, speaking to a neighbor.

Mr. Brown’s body remained in the street for several hours, a delay that Chief Jackson said last week made him “uncomfortable.” Antonio French, a St. Louis alderman who has been active in this case, said on ABC on Sunday that the body had remained in the street for nearly five hours.

At one point, a woman can be heard shouting, “Where is the ambulance? Where is the ambulance?” The man taking the video, who remained off-camera, said, “God rest his soul. He’s gone.”

A version of this article appears in print on August 18, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Missouri Shooting Victim Was Hit at Least 6 Times.

    Autopsy Shows Michael Brown Was Struck at Least 6 Times,
    NYT, 17.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/18/us/
    michael-brown-autopsy-shows-he-was-shot-at-least-6-times.html

Violence Flares in Ferguson

After Appeals for Harmony

 

AUG. 17, 2014

The New York Times

By ALAN BLINDER

and TANZINA VEGA

FERGUSON, Mo. — Hours ahead of a second night of a mandatory curfew, the most chaotic violence in a week of unrest broke out here Sunday evening, with law enforcement officers facing off against angry protesters and responding to reports of gunfire and fire bombs.

The violence began about 9 p.m. along West Florissant Avenue, one of the city’s main streets, within two blocks of where Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was fatally shot. Hundreds of police officers turned out in riot gear, shooting rubber bullets and firing canisters of tear gas in an effort to disperse protesters. Some in the crowd retrieved the smoking canisters and threw them back toward the officers.

It was not immediately clear what set off the violence, but there were reports that the police feared that some of the protesters were trying to encroach on their command post in a shopping center parking lot. Protesters said the police fired without provocation.

Key Smith, 46, a veteran who served in Iraq, said that he, his wife and their 7-year-old son had traveled two hours from Fort Valley, Ga., to attend a church rally to honor the memory of Mr. Brown and that they were caught up in the violence as they were trying to get home.

“I just came out to see a peaceful rally,” Mr. Smith said. “It takes away from his death, his memory.”

Mr. Smith said he did not blame the police for their response. “You have to disperse the crowd if the crowd gets wild,” he said. “This is getting out of hand. It’s kind of sad that it’s come to this. If you really want to hit them in the right way, get out there and vote.”

After the initial barrage of tear gas, the police formed into ranks and moved down the street, pushing the protesters from the area.

Scattered clashes and violence had flared early Sunday morning during the first hours of the curfew, which began at midnight and continued to 5 a.m. But the trouble Sunday evening was a sharp contrast to the mood of the rest of the day. At churches across the area, ministers, the police and civil rights figures joined parishioners in trying to tamp down the anger that has followed the Aug. 9 death of Mr. Brown, 18.

In a packed sanctuary at Greater Grace Church, not far from the site of evening demonstrations, Capt. Ronald S. Johnson, the Missouri State Highway Patrol official brought in by the governor to take over security here, spoke with the cadence of a preacher as he apologized to the family of the teenager. “My heart goes out to you, and I say that I’m sorry,” Captain Johnson said. “I wear this uniform, and I should stand up here and say that I’m sorry.”

Before a mostly black audience, Captain Johnson, who is African-American, spoke of his own “black son, who wears his pants saggy, wears his hat cocked to the side and has tattoos on his arms.” He added, “That’s my baby.”

“Michael’s going to make it better for our sons so they can be better black men,” he said, predicting that the treatment of black youths here would somehow change. “We need to pray. We need to thank Michael for his life. And we need to thank him for the change that he is going to make.”

Time and again, he won applause. But in a vivid display of the challenges faced by the authorities in this tumultuous city of 21,000 that has become the center of a national debate about race and policing, a large crowd outside continued to protest Mr. Brown’s death. The shooting of the teenager on Aug. 9 by a white officer, Darren Wilson, is the subject of inquiries by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the St. Louis County police.

Several demonstrators held signs reading “Stop racist police killing,” while many others joined in the chant that has echoed through this city’s streets for days: “Hands up! Don’t shoot!” Hours earlier, just after a midnight curfew went into effect on Saturday, police officers dressed in riot gear and driving heavily armored vehicles engaged in a new clash with angry demonstrators. One person threw a bottle bomb that lit the street ablaze and left a lingering scent of gasoline. Before long, a police caravan, with lights flashing, began rolling slowly toward the protesters.

“You are violating the state-imposed curfew,” an officer said over a loudspeaker. “You must disperse immediately or you’ll be subject to arrest and or other actions.” The crowd did not back down, cheering louder. Eventually a canister of tear gas was lobbed into the crowd. Smoke filled the air. Some people ran away from the police. Bottles crashed onto the pavement. Captain Johnson said the heavy police response had been prompted by reports of armed people at a barbecue restaurant.

Someone also had fired a gun toward a police car, he said.

Seven people were arrested and accused of failing to disperse, and one man was critically wounded in an overnight shooting, apparently by another protester. The authorities said the police had not opened fire.

Officials extended the curfew, which runs from midnight until 5 a.m., for another night and said they would decide each day whether to continue its enforcement.

On Sunday, civil rights organizations called on Gov. Jay Nixon to rescind the state of emergency and the curfew in Ferguson.

The American Civil Liberties Union, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund said in a statement that the governor’s action “suspends the constitutional right to assemble by punishing the misdeeds of the few through the theft of constitutionally protected rights of the many.”

The sequence of events after the shooting of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old unarmed teenager, by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., on Aug. 9.
OPEN Timeline

In St. Louis, about 100 people turned out in a show of support for Officer Wilson, according to local media reports.

In churches here, the calls for calm continued.

At the Greater St. Mark Family Church in Ferguson, the state attorney general, Chris Koster, said he came to pray and grieve with the mostly African-American parishioners. “You have lost a member of your community at the hands of a member of my community,” he said. “Not just the Caucasian community, but the law enforcement community. And that is painful to every good-hearted person in this city.”

He said he feared that the armored vehicle the police used on West Florissant Avenue was a symbol of the armor that had grown between the black community and law enforcement.

“This week is a 50-year flood of anger that has broken loose in this city the likes of which we have not seen since Dr. King was killed,” he said, referring to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “And I am sorry that I have not done more from the law enforcement community to break down that wall of anger, that wall of armor.”

At the Sunday morning service at New Jerusalem Missionary Baptist Church here, about 40 people gathered. On a screen hanging above the pulpit, Jaquan Vassel, 24, the church deacon, played a video that he had seen the night before on his Facebook news feed. In it, two black men were reading from the Book of Psalms during a protest on West Florissant Avenue. “I commend them for trying to look to God,” Mr. Vassel told the congregants, “but you hear the anger in their voices.”

“They are angry at the police officers,” he added. “We have to show them how to forgive, just like God forgave us.”

Forgiveness was also emphasized by Alonso Adams Jr., the assistant pastor of the church, who spoke after Mr. Vassel. “How many of us have killed people with our lips?” he asked. “How many brothers and sisters, white or black, have we defamed with our words?”

Mr. Adams acknowledged the anger toward the police, in particular toward Officer Wilson. But, the pastor added, “If he came into this church this morning and asked Jerusalem to forgive him, how many of you would offer up your arms?”

And later at Greater Grace Church, where cars were lined up for at least a mile, the Rev. Al Sharpton called the killing of Mr. Brown “a defining moment on how this country deals with policing and the rights of its citizens to address how police behave in this country.”

Mr. Sharpton recalled Marlene Pinnock, a black woman who was assaulted by an officer in Los Angeles this summer; Eric Garner, a black man in Staten Island who was put in a chokehold by an officer and who later died; and the death of Mr. Brown, saying: “We have had enough.”

One woman in the crowd raised a handwritten sign that equated the Ferguson Police Department with the Ku Klux Klan.

Mr. Sharpton admonished the crowd not to loot in Mr. Brown’s name. “We are not looters,” he said. “We are liberators.”

Correction: August 18, 2014

An earlier version of this article misstated the location of the city of Fort Valley. It is in Georgia, not Missouri.

John Eligon contributed reporting from Ferguson, Emma G. Fitzsimmons from New York, and Emmarie Huetteman from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on August 18, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Violence Flares After Appeals for Harmony.

    Violence Flares in Ferguson After Appeals for Harmony,
    NYT, 17.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/18/us/ferguson-missouri-protests.html

Emotions Flare in Missouri

Amid Police Statements

 

AUG. 15, 2014

The New York Times

By TANZINA VEGA,

TIMOTHY WILLIAMS

and ERIK ECKHOLM

FERGUSON, Mo. — One day after roiling tensions over the police shooting of a black teenager here began to subside, emotions flared anew on Friday as the police identified the officer involved but also released evidence that the victim was a suspect in a convenience store robbery moments before being shot.

The manner in which the police here released the information, which included a 19-page police report on the robbery but no new details about the shooting, led to the spectacle of dueling police news conferences, one led by a white officer who seemed ill at ease and defensive, and the other dominated by a charismatic black officer who expressed solidarity with the crowd even as he pleaded for peace.

The white officer, Thomas Jackson, the police chief in Ferguson, gave a series of incomplete accounts that sowed confusion about whether the officer who shot the teenager knew he was a suspect in the robbery. The black officer, Capt. Ronald S. Johnson of the Missouri State Highway Patrol, expressed his displeasure with how the information had been released.

“I would have liked to have been consulted,” he said pointedly about the pairing of the shooter’s identity with the robbery accusation.

All week, community members had demanded the name of the officer who killed Michael Brown, 18, last Saturday, but when it finally came, it was accompanied by surveillance videotapes that appeared to show Mr. Brown shoving a store clerk aside as he stole a box of cigarillos.

Mr. Brown’s family, their lawyer and others in the community expressed disgust, accusing the police of trying to divert attention from the central issue — the unexplained shooting of an unarmed young man.

“It is smoke and mirrors,” said Benjamin L. Crump, a lawyer for the Brown family, of the robbery allegations. “Nothing, based on the facts before us, justifies the execution-style murder by this police officer in broad daylight.”

The videotapes seemed to contradict the image portrayed by Mr. Brown’s family of a gentle teenager opposed to violence and on his way to college.

Captain Johnson, who grew up in the area and had been brought in by the governor on Thursday to restore peace after days of confrontations between demonstrators and the police in riot gear and military-style vehicles, said he had not been told that the authorities planned to release the video of the robbery along with the name of the officer. But he sought to calm people down, saying, “In our anger, we have to make sure that we don’t burn down our own house.”

Captain Johnson won over many but also faced skepticism over his role along with anguished questions about who the police really represent and the lack of educational and economic opportunities in Ferguson.

“I find it utterly disgusting,” one man shouted at him. “What am I supposed to tell my people? It looks like you’re a figurehead.”

Gov. Jay Nixon, a Democrat, stood next to Captain Johnson at their news conference and emphasized that the details released Friday were not “the full picture.” He added, “I think the focal point here remains to figure out how and why Michael Brown was killed and to get justice as appropriate in that situation.”

The day began when Chief Jackson said at a news conference that the officer who shot Mr. Brown was Darren Wilson, who has served four years in Ferguson and two in another local department and had no disciplinary charges. Officer Wilson, who is white, has been placed on leave, and his location is unknown.

But the release of his name was overshadowed by the simultaneous announcement of the robbery allegations, leading to questions about timing and motives.

In a later news conference, on Friday afternoon at Forestwood Park, a sports complex in Ferguson, Chief Jackson said that Officer Wilson had not been aware that Mr. Brown “was a suspect in the case” and instead had stopped him and a companion “because they were walking down the street blocking traffic.”

But that only highlighted the central issue: How did an officer’s interaction with an unarmed young man escalate into a deadly shooting?

The videotapes, from an unidentified convenience store, show a tall burly man, identified by the police as Mr. Brown, shoving aside a clerk as he left the store with an unpaid-for box of Swisher Sweets cigarillos. According to a police report, Mr. Brown was accompanied at the store by his friend Dorian Johnson, who was also with him when he was shot.

Mr. Johnson has admitted being in the convenience store with Mr. Brown and told investigators from the F.B.I. and St. Louis County that Mr. Brown did “take cigarillos,” Mr. Johnson’s lawyer, Freeman Bosley Jr., a former mayor of St. Louis, told MSNBC.

Standing near a store that was vandalized during protests this week, Mark Jackson, who has participated in the demonstrations, expressed skepticism about police motives in describing the robbery. “They just want to make the case seem more reasonable on their side,” he said. “But at the end of the day, the man didn’t have a gun, so they didn’t have to shoot him.

In his afternoon appearance, Chief Jackson sought to explain why the information was released on Friday. “All I did was release the videotape because I had to,” he said. “I had been sitting on it.” He said his hand was forced by requests by the news media under public records laws. He acknowledged that he had not alerted the other police departments about the tape. “I should have done that,” he said.

Chief Jackson described Officer Wilson as “a gentle, quiet man” and “a distinguished officer.”

Greg Kloeppel, a lawyer for the union representing the Ferguson police, said Officer Wilson received an award for “extraordinary effort in the line of duty” in February.
Continue reading the main story
Document: Ferguson Police Department Incident Report

The police have not released the official report on the shooting because it is now the subject of federal and local investigations. In the robbery report released Friday, an officer wrote that “it is worth mentioning that this incident is related to” the fatal shooting of Mr. Brown.

After seeing Mr. Brown’s body and reviewing the surveillance video, “I was able to confirm that Brown is the primary suspect” in the robbery, the officer wrote.

Any suggestion that Officer Wilson sought out Mr. Brown and Mr. Johnson because they were robbery suspects, however, was dispelled by the police chief at the afternoon news conference. Adding to the day’s confusion, Chief Jackson told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch later on Friday that while Officer Wilson did not originally approach the two youths as suspects, he was aware of the nearby store robbery.

The officer has said that once he saw cigars in Mr. Brown’s hand, he “realized that he might be the robber,” Chief Jackson said.

After the revelations of the day, the atmosphere in Ferguson on Friday night remained peaceful, though boisterous. Cars clogged streets as horns blared and music played. Hundreds of demonstrators clutched signs and chanted slogans, but many others danced to music. On one street, six people danced atop a white delivery truck.

The police presence was limited. But among the officers on the street was Captain Johnson, who walked among the crowds, posing for pictures and shaking hands.

“I’m pleased with how it’s going,” he said.
 

Tanzina Vega reported from Ferguson, and Timothy Williams and Erik Eckholm from New York. Serge F. Kovaleski contributed reporting from New York, and Brent McDonald from Ferguson.

A version of this article appears in print on August 16, 2014,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Dueling Police Statements as Anger Rises in Missouri.

    Emotions Flare in Missouri Amid Police Statements, NYT, 15.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/16/us/
    darren-wilson-identified-as-officer-in-fatal-shooting-
    in-ferguson-missouri.html

Ferguson Police Identify

Darren Wilson as Officer

in Fatal Shooting

and Link Teenager to Robbery

 

AUG. 15, 2014

The New York Times

By ALAN BLINDER

and TIMOTHY WILLIAMS

FERGUSON, Mo. — The police in Ferguson broke their weeklong silence on Friday and identified the officer involved in the fatal shooting of an unarmed African-American teenager. At the same time, they released videotape and photographs to show that the young man, Michael Brown, was suspected of taking part in a robbery at a convenience store shortly before the shooting.

The manner in which Ferguson officials released the information, which included a police report on the robbery but no new details about the fatal shooting last week, set off renewed anger among residents. Gov. Jay Nixon and Captain Ronald S. Johnson of the Missouri Highway Patrol, an African-American who is heading the security efforts in Ferguson, tried to defuse their frustration and to address broader concerns about the lack of racial diversity among police forces in the area and problems in local schools.

After a peaceful night on Thursday, which had followed several nights of violent confrontations, concerns grew on Friday that the release of information about the robbery would stoke more disorder.

Pleading for calm, Captain Johnson said, “In our anger, we have to make sure that we don’t burn down our own house.” He added, “That does not prove a point.” Captain Johnson said he had not been told how the authorities planned to release the information. “I would have liked to have been consulted,” he said.

Earlier Friday, Ferguson’s police chief, Thomas Jackson, identified the officer who fatally shot Mr. Brown, 18, as Darren Wilson, a six-year veteran of the department who had no disciplinary actions taken against him. Chief Jackson did not disclose any other information about the officer. He has been placed on administrative leave.

Greg Kloeppel, a lawyer for the union representing the Ferguson police, said Officer Wilson had received an “extraordinary effort in the line of duty” award in February, but it was not immediately clear what that case involved.

Chief Jackson said that Officer Wilson had been alerted to the robbery on Saturday shortly before the encounter with Mr. Brown, who was walking home from a store when he was shot.

The Ferguson police released security camera videotape after the news conference that showed a confrontation inside the store about 15 minutes before Saturday’s shooting. The images show a man, identified by the police as Mr. Brown, who appears to be pushing a store clerk.

The police said that Mr. Brown, who was in the store with a friend, had stolen a box of Swisher Sweets cigars. When confronted by the clerk, Mr. Brown “forcefully pushed him back into a display rack” before leaving, the police report said.

Benjamin L. Crump, a lawyer for the Brown family, said that “Nothing, based on the facts before us, justifies the execution-style murder by this police officer in broad daylight."​

Mr. Crump said that he and the Brown family were “flabbergasted” that the police would release security camera photos, which police say show Mr. Brown, but none of Officer Wilson. ​

“The police are playing games here and the parents are beyond incensed with the way that the police are handling the distribution of information,” Mr. Crump said. “The police are not being transparent and they are strategically trying to justify this execution-style murder."​

Mr. Brown’s death had ignited several days of protests that have been quashed by police officers shooting rubber bullets and tear gas at groups of demonstrators.

Earlier, Chief Jackson said the authorities had agreed that Friday was an appropriate time to identify the officer.

“A lot of the stakeholders had a big meeting conversation yesterday, and then yesterday evening,” Chief Jackson told a St. Louis television station, “and we made the determination that today is the day.”

“Nothing specific went into that decision, but we feel that there’s a certain calm. There’s a huge outcry from the community,” he said, as well as a number of legal requests for the information.

The initial refusal of Chief Jackson to reveal the officer’s name had galvanized demonstrators and prompted civil rights groups to go to court to force its release. Chief Jackson had said that his unwillingness to disclose the name had been based on safety concerns after death threats against the officer and his family were posted on social media.

On Thursday, Governor Nixon ordered the Missouri Highway Patrol to take control of security and crowd control in Ferguson, replacing the St. Louis County Police Department, which has been criticized for its heavy-handed tactics against protesters. Wednesday night’s protests ended with the police firing tear gas and rubber bullets into the crowd.

The difference in tactics and tone was apparent Thursday night. The armored vehicles and police cars were gone, and the atmosphere was celebratory. A street barricaded on previous nights was filled with slow-moving cars blasting their horns. There were few signs of police officers, let alone a forceful response.

Clashes between the heavily armed police officers and furious protesters in Ferguson have defined the aftermath of Mr. Brown’s death on Saturday, and the latest moves came as federal and state officials scrambled to quell the growing crisis. Alarm had been rising across the country at images of a mostly white police force, in a predominantly African-American community, aiming military-style weapons at protesters.
 

Serge Kovaleski contributed reporting from New York.

    Ferguson Police Identify Darren Wilson as Officer in Fatal Shooting
    and Link Teenager to Robbery, NYT, 15.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/16/us/
    darren-wilson-identified-as-officer-in-fatal-shooting-
    in-ferguson-missouri.html

Hackers’ Efforts to Identify Officer

Create Turmoil

Ferguson Case
Roils Collective Called Anonymous

AUG. 14, 2014

The New York Times

By NICOLE PERLROTH

They urged the citizens of Ferguson, Mo., to confront the police in the streets. They caused the city’s web servers to crash, forcing officials to communicate by text. They posted the names and address of the county police chief’s family. And then on Thursday they released what they said was the name of the police officer who killed Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old black man, on Saturday.

Members of Anonymous — the shadowy, snide international collective of hackers and online activists — have played a key role in the growing confrontation outside St. Louis over Mr. Brown’s death, goading and threatening the authorities, and calling the effort Operation Ferguson.

Operations in the collective’s decade-long history have included taking down the World Cup website to protest poverty, helping identify assailants in a rape case in Ohio, cheering on the Occupy Wall Street movement and carrying out coordinated cyberassaults on repressive foreign governments. But this one ran into trouble faster than most.

The St. Louis police said on Twitter that the name given out was wrong, and that the man was not even a police officer. Within Anonymous there was an unusual amount of dissent. In interviews, in private chat channels and on Twitter, members accused those who had initially posted details of producing faulty information and putting one another in harm’s way by openly chatting about their methods online.

On Thursday, Twitter suspended @TheAnonMessage, the account that had posted the dubious information about the officer, although Twitter officials declined to say why. Those behind the account said in an email that they would post information from a backup account, @TheAnonMessage2, while other Twitter accounts affiliated with Anonymous tried to distance themselves from the post.

“But for the record, one last time. Operation Ferguson has NOT, repeat NOT released the name of Mike Brown’s killer, nor have we claimed to,” the individual behind the Operation Ferguson account said on Twitter.

Gabriella Coleman, an anthropologist who studies Anonymous and teaches at McGill University in Montreal, said she was taken aback that members of Anonymous would be so quick to release unverified information, and would speak so openly about their methods in online chat channels.

“My jaw was dropping,” Ms. Coleman said, reading members’ communications. “I was surprised because what I was seeing was suggestive but not definitive. Anonymous tends to care about its image quite a bit, and if they were wrong, it would be really bad.”

In private chat channels early Thursday, she said, members argued about the release of a photo of a man who resembled one of the officers at the scene of Mr. Brown’s shooting.

Some of it was reminiscent of past Anonymous campaigns, such as that prompted by a rape case in Steubenville, Ohio, and another three years ago in Manhattan, when hackers identified a high-ranking police officer who pepper-sprayed Occupy Wall Street protesters.

In the Ferguson case, many were drawn to the Anonymous campaign after Tef Poe, a St. Louis rapper, began posting live video and news updates to his Twitter, Vine and Instagram feeds this week. By Monday, the Operation Ferguson Twitter account had been set up, and prominent members of Anonymous had joined the effort.

Members assert that the organization is not a group but a loose collective working to advance similar ideals — but sometimes contradictory ones. While Anonymous espouses privacy, its members also use the release of others’ personal information as a tactic in cases where they believe the authorities are not acting in the public interest, or the news media has not released pertinent information. Members are quick to condemn any individual who claims to speak for the entire collective, and dissent and infighting are common.

Members also sought to explain the internal bickering and uncoordinated communications.

“For those new to Anonymous, it’s a global collective of millions of autonomous individuals and groups,” an Operation Ferguson post on Twitter said. “Each is responsible for themselves only.”

Since a prominent Anonymous hacker, Hector Xavier Monsegur, became a federal informant more than two years ago, members of the collective have taken great pains to use Internet security and anonymity software tools.

Some members were desperate in their pleas this week that the man’s photo not be released until more definitive information had been gathered. Ultimately, some members held a vote and decided to release the photo.

But within hours, many had backtracked. Some openly said the “dox” — a hacking term for the release of an individual’s personal information — had been wrong. “The original dox were faulty, it happens, an excess of zeal,” one Anonymous member said in a direct message on Twitter.

The infighting seemed to have taken its toll. Those behind the @TheAnonMessage2 account, who were behind the initial disclosures, had grown considerably more circumspect.

“ANNOUNCEMENT: We are ceasing any future dox releases until further notice,” they posted on Twitter.
 

A version of this article appears in print on August 15, 2014,
on page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: Hackers’ Efforts to Identify Officer Create Turmoil.

    Hackers’ Efforts to Identify Officer Create Turmoil, NYT, 14.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/15/us/
    ferguson-case-roils-collective-called-anonymous.html

Ferguson Images

Evoke Civil Rights Era

and Changing Visual Perceptions

 

AUG. 14, 2014

The New York Times

By RANDY KENNED

and JENNIFER SCHUESSLER

Danny Lyon, one of the photographers whose work came to define the civil rights upheaval in the South in the 1960s, said he was struck on Thursday when he saw a news image from the racially torn suburb of Ferguson, Mo., showing four police officers arrayed in a phalanx.

In part, it was because Mr. Lyon had taken a picture in 1963 in Birmingham, Ala., that looked very much like it: four officers standing in front of a police car with rifles and helmets, in a city where highly publicized clashes between protesters and the police helped turn the tide of public opinion toward the civil rights movement. But the image from Ferguson, for all its formal similarities, could not have been more different. Today’s riot police officers were wearing military-style camouflage and carrying military-style rifles, their heads and faces obscured by black helmets and gas masks as they stood in front of an armored vehicle.

“It didn’t look like America. It looked like Soweto,” Mr. Lyon said, referring to the South African township that was a hotbed of protests against apartheid. “It looked like soldiers. And soldiers’ job isn’t to protect. Their job is to kill people and to be ready to die.”

The photographs that have emerged during several days of unrest in Ferguson after the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a police officer have drawn mournful comparisons to pictures of the Deep South in the 1960s or of more recent racial unrest, like the 1992 Los Angeles riots. But they have also prompted a flood of commentary about the differences half a century has made in the visual economy.

They have raised questions about whether photos have the same power now to sway public opinion and political will; about the increasingly sophisticated ways an image-saturated public reads a picture’s racial and political subtext; and about the rapid transformation of the protests, even more so than the Los Angeles riots or the Occupy movement, into a war of images. The war pits what appears to be a large-scale paramilitary police presence against crowds of African-American protesters walking with their hands raised in surrender — or people throwing things and looting.

The Philadelphia Daily News was a case in point in the speed with which 21st-century image parsing can occur. In the wee hours of Thursday morning — in response to readers’ comments on Twitter about a photo the newspaper had planned to run on its front page, showing an African-American protester in Ferguson about to hurl what looked like a firebomb — editors changed their minds and instead used a photograph of an African-American woman standing in front of police officers, holding a sign urging answers in the death of the teenager, Michael Brown.

An assistant city editor wrote on Twitter to those objecting to the first picture that they would be able to understand the whole story, in a “sympathetic treatment,” if they opened the paper. But a reader responded, “Yes, in ten-point font I can see the fine print, which is completely overwhelmed by the picture.”

In the civil rights era, the visual stamp of the movement was determined by newspapers and the nightly news. Today, the imagery one sees depends on the filters one uses. One person’s Twitter feed may be full of footage of police firing tear gas or of peaceful protesters with their hands up. But David J. Garrow, a historian at the University of Pittsburgh’s law school and the author of several books on the civil rights movement, noted that when he searched for images of Ferguson on Google, roughly half showed what appeared to be looting.

Such images look “more like Watts in 1965 or Newark in 1967, not Birmingham in 1963 or Selma in 1965,” Dr. Garrow said. And historically, he said, such photos were “deadly when it came to white public opinion.”

In Ferguson, the police seem to be just as worried about the dominance of certain imagery. The city’s police chief, Thomas Jackson, said during a news conference Thursday that officials were meeting “to talk about not only the tactics but the appearance” of the police force, whose resemblance to American soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan has quickly become a social media theme.

Some visual echoes of the 1960s, like the Ferguson police’s use of dogs, may be unintentional. (During the 1963 March on Washington, President John F. Kennedy forbade the use of dogs for crowd control, knowing how badly it would play.) But on the protesters’ side, there have been deliberate efforts to evoke the nonviolent protests of the civil rights era, like T-shirts with the slogan “I Am a Man,” borrowed from signs carried during the 1968 Memphis sanitation strike.

Diane McWhorter, the author of “Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution,” said she also saw echoes of those signs in the protesters’ hands-up gesture, an instantly recognizable cue that seems to be both born of the quick-read Internet news cycle and able to shape it.

“In one case, it’s a kind of mass witness of personhood,” Ms. McWhorter said of the “I Am a Man” signs, “and in the other case, a mass witness of innocence. Those images are very powerful.”

Some historians see dangers in those visual echoes. Martin A. Berger, a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author of “Seeing Through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography,” said that while images of a protester throwing a firebomb or of the police spraying tear gas may start conversations, the historical associations can also distort public understanding.

“We can look at these pictures and say that Ferguson is the same as Los Angeles or Birmingham, because it looks the same,” Dr. Berger said. “But we have to ask not just, ‘What is the same?’ but also, ‘What are the ways in which America has changed?’ To just have another conversation that stops at the level of police brutality doesn’t really get us very far.”

A version of this article appears in print on August 15, 2014,
on page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: Ferguson Images Evoke Civil Rights Era and Changing Visual Perceptions.

    Ferguson Images Evoke Civil Rights Era and Changing Visual Perceptions,
    NYT, 14.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/15/us/
    ferguson-images-evoke-civil-rights-era-and-changing-visual-perceptions.html

For Missouri Governor,

Test at an Uneasy Time

 

AUG. 14, 2014

The New York Times

By ALAN BLINDER

and JOHN ELIGON

BELLERIVE, Mo. — When Gov. Jay Nixon of Missouri stepped to the lectern at a university here on Thursday afternoon, he confronted one of the toughest challenges of his political career: the police killing of an unarmed black teenager in suburban St. Louis and the violent unrest that followed.

As he announced that he had ordered the State Highway Patrol to take over command of the police in the troubled city of Ferguson, he was by turns defensive and resolute, sentimental and personal.

He pushed away broad questions about healing by saying, “We’re a little focused right now on operational specifics.” At another point, when asked about his relationship with the black community, he spoke of the relationships he had with “so many of my friends over so many years” and went on to say, “I don’t think this is a time to divide.”

Mr. Nixon, 58, has had a successful political career by most measures. He is finishing his second and final term as a Democrat in a solidly Republican state. But when he first ran for national office, seeking a Senate seat in 1988, he was trounced by the incumbent Republican, Senator John C. Danforth. Mr. Nixon rebounded, serving for years in the State Senate, then as attorney general, and winning the race for governor in 2008.

As governor, he has constantly sought a middle ground, sometimes vetoing tax cuts and abortion restrictions from the Republican-led legislature, sometimes allowing certain abortion restrictions to go into effect.

But there has been a history of strain between Mr. Nixon and the black community that dates to the 1990s, when he was attorney general. He fought to end a school desegregation program that bused children from St. Louis schools to surrounding communities with better districts. The program, which was the result of the settlement of a court case, continues to this day.

Even on Thursday, as he was joined by black public officials during the nearly 40-minute news conference, and even though he appeared with black clergy members earlier in the day, some black leaders in Missouri criticized him as being insensitive to their community.

“I truly believe,” said State Senator Jamilah Nasheed, a former leader of the Legislative Black Caucus, “the governor hasn’t been in touch with the black community like he should.”

Mr. Nixon has been criticized as being slow to respond to the shooting and unrest in Ferguson, where the police are still investigating the death of Michael Brown, 18, on Saturday. Mr. Nixon did issue a statement calling for a federal investigation into the shooting two days after it happened. And he did appear this week at a St. Louis County church.

On Thursday, he took his boldest steps yet, canceling an appearance at the Missouri State Fair to come here to announce changes in the police command in Ferguson. Under St. Louis County police supervision, chaos had broken out in Ferguson over several nights, with officers firing rubber bullets and unleashing tear gas on protesters.
Continue reading the main story

Still, some have seen Mr. Nixon’s actions as too little, too late.

“I think his historical lack of authentic connections and engagement with the black community is apparent in this situation by what I consider to be a tardy response to what is happening in Ferguson,” said Gwendolyn Grant, the president and chief executive of the Urban League of Greater Kansas City.

Critics say the governor has a habit of responding to pressing issues for black residents only after he faces great public pressure.

Mr. Nixon said during the news conference that he refused to inject race into the situation.

Over the past year, members of the state’s Legislative Black Caucus have openly feuded with the governor over policy proposals that they said would have deprived the needy of food stamps and taken away housing tax credits for low-income Missourians. Leaders in Kansas City were frustrated when he did not meet with them recently to discuss the city’s struggles with a school district that lost its accreditation a couple of years ago.

Mr. Nixon met with members of the Legislative Black Caucus in January, but they said it had taken a year for them to get him to come to the table.

Before that meeting, Ms. Nasheed, a Democrat, who led the caucus at the time, held a news conference with the lieutenant governor, Peter Kinder, a Republican, to denounce the governor’s threat to eliminate the low-income housing tax credit. When Mr. Nixon walked into the meeting, Ms. Nasheed recalled, “the first thing he said was, ‘I don’t like the fact that the chair of this caucus stood alongside a Republican attacking me.’ ”

Mr. Nixon also has been criticized for the lack of diversity in his administration. In his sixth year in office, the governor has appointed one African-American to direct an executive department. This in a state whose two major cities, Kansas City and St. Louis, have large black populations.

But a spokesman for the governor noted that he had received strong support from black residents for efforts like his push to expand Medicaid and a veto of legislation that would have eliminated important provisions from the Missouri Human Rights Act. The governor has also appointed blacks to state boards and commissions, as well as the state’s Supreme Court, Court of Appeals and Board of Education.

“It appears to me that he’s working more closely with the African-American community, putting African-Americans in key positions in state government and supporting issues that are important to us,” said Harold Crumpton, a former president of the St. Louis N.A.A.C.P., who now leads a community development organization in the city.

Alan Blinder reported from Bellerive, Mo., and John Eligon from Kansas City, Mo.

A version of this article appears in print on August 15, 2014,
on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline:
For Missouri Governor, Test at an Uneasy Time.

    For Missouri Governor, Test at an Uneasy Time, NYT, 14.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/15/us/politics/
    for-gov-jay-nixon-of-missouri-test-at-an-uneasy-time.html

Missouri Unrest

Leaves the Right Torn Over Views

on Law vs. Order

 

AUG. 14, 2014

The New York Times

By JEREMY W. PETERS

WASHINGTON — When the police bring the hammer down, whether on Occupy Wall Street in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park in 2011 or outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, the response from conservatives tend to be fairly consistent: The protesters got what they had coming.

But demonstrations this week over the shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager, by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., and the overwhelming law enforcement response that followed have stirred more complicated reactions, with many on the right torn between an impulse to see order restored and concern about whether the crackdown is a symptom of a state run amok.

With broadcasts from Ferguson showing the streets engulfed in smoke as officers looked on wearing military fatigues and carrying high-powered rifles, some prominent conservative commentators and leading Republican politicians began questioning whether the police had gone too far.

These reactions point to a larger debate inside the conservative movement today as Republicans struggle with how enthusiastically to embrace an ascendant strain of libertarianism within their ranks. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, a likely candidate for president in 2016, starkly laid out one side of the argument in an op-ed published on Time.com on Thursday.

“There should be a difference between a police response and a military response,” he wrote. “The images and scenes we continue to see in Ferguson resemble war more than traditional police action.”

Other conservatives have focused on instances in which chaos has broken out in the streets. Images and headlines on The Drudge Report and Breitbart.com have singled out acts of violence among demonstrators and shown looters breaking store windows.

In one segment broadcast on Fox News on Thursday, a reporter walked down the street with demonstrators who he said were members of the New Black Panther Party, a radical group.

Since Richard M. Nixon made cracking down on crime a central issue of his 1968 presidential campaign, Republicans have held themselves up as the alternative to a Democratic Party they have derided as soft on issues of law and order. But an appetite for changes in the criminal justice system has been building among Republicans, many of whom believe the tough-justice approach has run its course.

Mr. Paul, Senator Rob Portman of Ohio and Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin are among those who say that the federal and state governments need to rethink the way convicts are sentenced and imprisoned, arguing that the current system is inhumane and too costly.

Mr. Paul’s remarks on Thursday were similar to those of other leading conservatives who have weighed in on the events in Ferguson.

“Reporters should never be detained — a free press is too important — simply for doing their jobs,” Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, wrote on his Facebook page on Thursday, reacting to news that journalists from The Washington Post and The Huffington Post had been held by the police. “Civil liberties must be protected, but violence is not the answer.”

Many conservatives were unsettled by the militaristic response from law enforcement officials in Ferguson — a show of force that they said dangerously resembled the actions a police state would take.

Mr. Paul, quoting from research by the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute and the conservative Heritage Foundation, noted the trend of police departments’ buying military-style vehicles and weapons, condemning “the cartoonish imbalance between the equipment some police departments possess and the constituents they serve.”

“When you couple this militarization of law enforcement,” he added, “with an erosion of civil liberties and due process that allows the police to become judge and jury — national security letters, no-knock searches, broad general warrants, preconviction forfeiture — we begin to have a very serious problem on our hands.”

But that attitude was not universally shared. In much of the conservative news media, the protesters in Ferguson are being portrayed as “outside agitators,” in the words of Sean Hannity, the Fox News host.

Mr. Erickson said, “The natural reaction of conservatives, I think, has always been in defense of law and order.”

But lately, he added, there has been an awakening among many on the right. Many see an increasingly disproportionate response to crime as a sign of a larger problem that should rattle the consciences of conservatives who are wary of centralized authority, he said.

“As more and more people become aware of how overcriminalized the law and regulatory system of the United States is, they become aware of just how easily it is for them to be carted off to jail for innocuous behavior,” Mr. Erickson said. “That necessarily increases distrust of the system over all.”

Another question raised by the unrest in Ferguson — one that poses far more discomfort for Republicans — is how race plays into unequal treatment under the justice system.

On this delicate issue, Mr. Paul went a step further than many other conservatives this week. With a system so broken, he wrote, it is no wonder black people in Ferguson feel singled out.

He added a personal aside. “If I had been told to get out of the street as a teenager, there would have been a distinct possibility that I might have smarted off,” Mr. Paul wrote. “But I wouldn’t have expected to be shot.”
 

A version of this article appears in print on August 15, 2014,
on page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: Missouri Unrest Leaves the Right Torn Over Views
on Law vs. Order.

    Missouri Unrest Leaves the Right Torn Over Views on Law vs. Order,
    NYT, 14.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/15/us/politics/
    seeing-missouri-unrest-views-begin-to-shift-among-conservatives.html

The Search for Calm in Missouri

Abusive Police Tactics in Ferguson
Will Only Delay Justice

 

AUG. 14, 2014

The New York Times

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Higher authorities wisely stepped into the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Mo., on Thursday after a night that startled the nation with images of police overkill: flash grenades, rubber bullets and huge clouds of tear gas fired at demonstrators protesting the police shooting Saturday of an unarmed black teenager.

Gov. Jay Nixon — after keeping a low profile for too long — made an urgent tour of the town and replaced local police officers with the Missouri State Highway Patrol. He gave the Highway Patrol an order that should have been given over the weekend: Let protesters who are angry about the shooting protest peacefully, without aggressive demands to disperse, as is their constitutional right.

It’s time to make sure, he said, “that we allow peaceful and appropriate protests, that we use force only when necessary, that we step back a little bit and let some of the energy be felt in this region appropriately.”

Earlier in the day, President Obama denounced tactics of “excessive force” by the police and the “bullying” and arrest of journalists trying to cover the news. He said the federal investigation into the incident, which began earlier this week, must determine exactly what happened to Michael Brown, the 18-year-old shooting victim.

Local authorities, including the police, have “a responsibility to be open and transparent about how they are investigating that death and how they are protecting the people in their communities,” Mr. Obama said, noting the “violent turn” in street confrontations that have been seen on screens around the world.

The two executives conferred and acted after anger and frustration in the streets had descended into widespread looting by some protesters earlier in the week, countered by aggressive street policing by officers outfitted in war gear who too often veered toward provocation more than protection. “The police response has become part of the problem,” Senator Claire McCaskill told residents during a visit, saying authorities had to “demilitarize” the force, which has aimed sniper rifles at innocent protesters and sent tear gas into people’s backyards.

Chief among the transparency issues for protesters has been local authorities’ adamant and inexcusable refusal to identify the police officer who shot Mr. Brown, saying the officer faced death threats. Residents have a right to know whether the officer has a record of reckless behavior, and whether the officer lives in the community among the residents being patrolled, or in a very different neighborhood.

Other communities across the nation have safely demonstrated greater openness in similarly tense situations by eventually identifying and protecting an officer as a matter of the public’s right to know. This should be the course taken in Ferguson if citizens are not to be further outraged at embattled authorities’ stonewalling. “When we get answers, things will calm down,” one resident told The Times’s Julie Bosman.

Mr. Nixon said Ferguson would become known “as a community that pulled together to overcome” violence. But first local politicians and law enforcement leaders will have to talk to residents to understand the deep vein of mistrust that has grown over the decades.

Restoring a sense of justice will not be an easy task in the town of 21,000, which is 69 percent black yet remains under white government leadership. While authorities have the right to respond forcefully to looting and violent rioting, the unyielding use of military tactics and abusive behavior have widened that rift. Once the tear gas has dissipated, Mr. Nixon and Mr. Obama have an obligation to ensure that a real dialogue begins in Ferguson and other racially segregated areas, in hopes of keeping armored vehicles off the streets of America.

A version of this editorial appears in print on August 15, 2014, on page A22 of the New York edition with the headline:
The Search for Calm in Missouri.

    The Search for Calm in Missouri, NYT, 14.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/15/opinion/
    abusive-police-tactics-in-ferguson-will-only-delay-justice.html

In Wake of Clashes,

Calls to Demilitarize Police

 

AUG. 14, 2014

The New York Times

By JULIE BOSMAN

and MATT APUZZO

FERGUSON, Mo. — For four nights in a row, they streamed onto West Florissant Avenue wearing camouflage, black helmets and vests with “POLICE” stamped on the back. They carried objects that doubled as warnings: assault rifles and ammunition, slender black nightsticks and gas masks.

They were not just one police force but many, hailing from communities throughout north St. Louis County and loosely coordinated by the county police.

Their adversaries were a ragtag group of mostly unarmed neighborhood residents, hundreds of African-Americans whose pent-up fury at the police had sent them pouring onto streets and sidewalks in Ferguson, demanding justice for Michael Brown, the 18-year-old who was fatally shot by a police officer on Saturday.

When the protesters refused to retreat from the streets, threw firebombs or walked too close to a police officer, the response was swift and unrelenting: tear gas and rubber bullets.

To the rest of the world, the images of explosions, billowing tear gas and armored vehicles made this city look as if it belonged in a chaos-stricken corner of Eastern Europe, not the heart of the American Midwest. As a result, a broad call came from across the political spectrum for America’s police forces to be demilitarized, and Gov. Jay Nixon installed a new overall commander in Ferguson.

Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was shot and killed Saturday by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo. The Times examines the demographics of the town and its police force, as well as crime rates.

“At a time when we must seek to rebuild trust between law enforcement and the local community,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said, “I am deeply concerned that the deployment of military equipment and vehicles sends a conflicting message.”

Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, and Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, voiced similar sentiments.

But such opposition amounts to a sharp change in tone in Washington, where the federal government has spent more than a decade paying for body armor, mine-resistant trucks and other military gear, all while putting few restrictions on its use. Grant programs that, in the name of fighting terrorism, paid for some of the equipment being used in Ferguson have been consistently popular since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. If there has been any debate at all, it was over which departments deserved the most money.

Department of Homeland Security grant money paid for the $360,000 Bearcat armored truck on patrol in Ferguson, said Nick Gragnani, executive director of St. Louis Area Regional Response System, which administers such grants for the St. Louis area.

Since 2003, the group has spent $9.4 million on equipment for the police in St. Louis County. That includes $3.6 million for two helicopters, plus the Bearcat, other vehicles and night vision equipment. Most of the body armor worn by officers responding to the Ferguson protests was paid for with federal money, Mr. Gragnani said.

“The focus is terrorism, but it’s allowed to do a crossover for other types of responses,” he said. “It’s for any type of civil unrest. We went by the grant guidance. There was no restriction put on that by the federal government.”

While the major Homeland Security grants do not pay for weapons, Justice Department grants do. That includes rubber bullets and tear gas, which the police use to disperse crowds. A Justice Department report last year said nearly 400 local police departments and more than 100 state agencies had bought such less-lethal weapons using Justice Department grant money.

The grants also paid for body armor, vehicles and surveillance equipment. It was not immediately clear if those grants had paid for equipment being used in Ferguson.

The military also sent machine guns, armored trucks, aircraft and other surplus war equipment to local departments. Compared with other urban areas, however, St. Louis County has received little surplus military equipment.

All these programs began or were expanded in response to the Sept. 11 attacks, when the authorities in Washington declared that local police departments were on the front lines of a global war on terrorism. Terrorism is exceedingly rare, however, and the equipment and money far outpaced the threat.

“You couldn’t say that back then with as much certainty as you can say that now, though,” said Frank J. Cilluffo, director of the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University. After Sept. 11, few people asked whether the police would use the equipment against protesters, Mr. Cilluffo said. “By and large, I don’t recall an outcry of any sort historically along these lines.”

In most instances, the government did not require training for police departments receiving military-style equipment and few if any limitations were put on its use, he said.

The increase in military-style equipment has coincided with a significant rise in the number of police SWAT teams, which are increasingly being used for routine duties such as conducting liquor inspections and serving warrants.

For years, much of the equipment has gone unnoticed. But as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have drawn down, police departments have been receiving 30-ton, mine-resistant trucks from the military. That has caught the attention of the public and caused controversy in several towns.

Nowhere has the deployment of military-style equipment been on starker display than this week in Ferguson.

The center of the protests is West Florissant Avenue, a run-down commercial strip that runs north-south. On it stands a nail salon, a barbecue restaurant and the burned-out remnants of a QuikTrip convenience store that looters targeted on Sunday night.

Late each afternoon, hundreds of people have trickled onto West Florissant, milling around on sidewalks and holding signs at television cameras.

As more protesters gathered, the police followed in greater numbers. They set up barricades of traffic cones so that cars could not enter. Protesters, usually young black men, have approached the police with their hands up in the air, a gesture that has become a taunt. (A witness to the shooting on Saturday said Mr. Brown had his hands up when he was shot.)

For three nights, the police made the same tactical move: When they determined that the protest was no longer peaceful, they used tear gas to force protesters off West Florissant and into the two residential neighborhoods on either side of it.

Once the protesters had been pushed onto side streets of small, one-story houses and low-slung apartment buildings, some of them said, they were effectively trapped on the wrong side of Florissant.

“Disperse! Go back to your homes!” the police shouted, often from the top of armored vehicles, through megaphones whose orders echoed throughout the streets.

Keonta Finch, 21, waited hours for the police to open the barricade on Monday. “There’s no way out,” she said. “I can’t get home. I was just here to be peaceful, and now I’m stuck.”

Ms. Finch echoed a common complaint from protesters: The police seemed unable to differentiate between people in the crowds who were causing trouble and those who were not.

A woman who was identified as a pastor tried to calm some unruly members of the crowd on Wednesday; later that night, she was shot in the abdomen with a rubber bullet.

“Peaceful protesters are being conflated with rioters and looters,” said Christopher Leonard, who joined a group of quiet protesters on Wednesday evening.

Journalists have also been caught up by the police use of weapons. On Monday night, the police aimed directly at a group of photographers and a reporter as they covered the growing protest. One photographer was hit with a rubber bullet. A police officer on Wednesday tossed a tear-gas canister directly at a television crew for Al Jazeera.

On Wednesday night, in the neighborhood on the east side of Florissant, several dozen people were drawn to the site where Mr. Brown was shot, on a gently looping street called Canfield Court. They stood in small groups and shared stories of harassment by the police; some people sat on their front stoops and smoked marijuana.

Suddenly, just after 10 p.m., explosions boomed from what sounded like a few blocks away, stopping conversations cold.

“Firecrackers,” one woman said, staring in the direction of Florissant. “No, no, gunshots,” a man said, telling everyone to drop to the ground.

In a few minutes, it was clear what had happened: Tear gas was drifting into the neighborhood, enveloping houses, cars and people, who ran for cover in cars and houses, coughing and gasping as their eyes stung and vision blurred.

Police officials have said that they felt they had no choice but to use tear gas and rubber bullets. They could not allow looting to happen again, they said, and dispersing the crowds was the only way to stop it.

Chief Thomas Jackson of the Ferguson police defended the use of force against demonstrators during the past five days and said heavily armed officers with military-style equipment would continue to be deployed if the authorities determined that circumstances warranted it.

The tactical units will be out there if firebombs are being thrown at officers or if demonstrators are otherwise behaving violently, Chief Jackson said.

“If the crowd is being violent,” he said, “and you don’t want to be violent, get out of the crowd.”

Correction: August 14, 2014

An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misstated when the photo was taken and credited the wrong photographer. The image of the police formation was from Wednesday, not Tuesday, and the photo was taken by Mario Anzuoni, not Whitney Curtis.

Julie Bosman reported from Ferguson, and Matt Apuzzo from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on August 15, 2014,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
In Wake of Clashes, Calls to Demilitarize Police.

    In Wake of Clashes, Calls to Demilitarize Police, NYT, 14.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/15/us/
    ferguson-missouri-in-wake-of-clashes-calls-to-demilitarize-police.html

New Tack on Unrest

Eases Tension in Missouri

 

AUG. 14, 2014

The New York Times

By JOHN SCHWARTZ,

MICHAEL D. SHEAR

and MICHAEL PAULSON

FERGUSON, Mo. — President Obama on Thursday called for an end to the violence here, denouncing actions both by the police and by protesters. Hours later, the Missouri governor, Jay Nixon, ordered the state highway patrol to take over security operations from local law enforcement.

Clashes between heavily armed police officers and furious protesters in Ferguson have defined the aftermath of an officer’s fatal shooting of an unarmed teenager on Saturday, and the latest moves came as federal and state officials scrambled to quell the growing crisis. Alarm had been rising across the country at images of a mostly white police force, in a predominantly African-American community, aiming military-style weapons at protesters and firing tear gas and rubber bullets.

Capt. Ronald S. Johnson, the highway patrol official appointed by the governor to take over the response, immediately signaled a change in approach. Captain Johnson told reporters he had ordered troopers to remove their tear-gas masks, and in the early evening he accompanied several groups of protesters through the streets, clasping hands, listening to stories and marching alongside them.

On Thursday night, the armored vehicles and police cars were gone, and the atmosphere was celebratory. A street barricaded on previous nights was filled with slow-moving cars blasting their horns. A man played a drum across the street from a convenience store that was looted this week. And there were few signs of police officers, let alone a forceful response.

Kimaly Diouf, co-owner of Rehoboth Pharmacy, said the reason for the difference was simple: “Because they’re not tear gassing us tonight.”

Captain Johnson, who is African-American and grew up in the area, said: “We’re just starting today anew. We’re starting a new partnership today. We’re going to move forward today, to put yesterday and the day before behind us.”

Criticism of the police response, already heavy because officials have refused to name the officer involved in the shooting, intensified after two journalists were arrested Wednesday while recharging their phones and working on their articles at a local McDonald’s.

Governor Nixon, appearing defensive at times at a briefing in St. Louis County on Thursday afternoon, did not criticize the local police but said of Ferguson, “Lately, it’s looked a little bit more like a war zone, and that’s not acceptable.” He said he had met with residents and listened to their concerns, and said of Michael Brown, the 18-year-old killed by the police in disputed circumstances on Saturday, that “a young man, a man not much younger than my own sons, lost his life.”

Mr. Nixon, a Democrat, who was state attorney general before being elected governor in 2008, did not describe specific changes to police practices, uniforms or equipment, but said it was time for a “different tone” that balanced the need to prevent looting with the right of residents to assemble and demonstrate.

President Obama, speaking to reporters at a hastily arranged news conference on Martha’s Vineyard, where he is vacationing, denounced attacks both on the police and on protesters, and pleaded for “peace and calm on the streets of Ferguson.” He said he had spoken to Mr. Nixon and confirmed that he had instructed the Justice Department and the F.B.I. to investigate the fatal shooting, “to help determine exactly what happened and to see that justice is done.”

The president asked for peace on the streets of Ferguson, Mo., after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by the police.
Video Credit By Reuters on Publish Date August 14, 2014. Image CreditSteven Senne/Associated Press

The local police continued to face criticism for their refusal to identify the officer who shot Mr. Brown. On Thursday, a group identifying itself as Anonymous, the computer hacking collective, disclosed what it said was the name, but the St. Louis County police said it was wrong.

Mr. Obama said that local officials had “a responsibility to be open and transparent about how they are investigating that death.” And he said the Justice Department was consulting with the local officials about appropriate responses to the protests.

“There is never an excuse for violence against police or for those who would use this tragedy as a cover for vandalism or looting,” he said. “There’s also no excuse for police to use excessive force against peaceful protests or to throw protesters in jail for lawfully exercising their First Amendment rights.”

Mr. Obama also criticized the detentions of reporters, saying, “Here in the United States of America, police should not be bullying or arresting journalists who are just trying to do their jobs and report to the American people on what they see on the ground.”

To many, though, the president seemed less emotional and personal than he had been two years ago, when he called for “soul searching” after the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, a young black man in Florida. “You know, if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” he said then.

Multiple national officials criticized the decision of the police in Ferguson to use military-style garb and equipment to respond to the protests. “At a time when we must seek to rebuild trust between law enforcement and the local community, I am deeply concerned that the deployment of military equipment and vehicles sends a conflicting message,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in a statement. Later on Thursday, Mr. Holder called Mr. Brown’s parents and promised a full, independent investigation, according to a Justice Department official.

Across the political spectrum, officials seemed to agree. “The militarization of the response became more of the problem than any solution,” Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, told reporters in Ferguson. Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat who has become a favorite of the American left, said on Twitter, “This is America, not a war zone.” And Senator Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican with libertarian leanings and presidential aspirations, wrote an essay for Time in which he called the militarization of the police “an unprecedented expansion of government power” and said, “The images and scenes we continue to see in Ferguson resemble war more than traditional police action.”
Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story

Elsewhere in the country, rallies were held to demand justice for Mr. Brown and to protest police tactics. In Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and Phoenix, thousands of protesters gathered in public squares with their hands up in gestures of surrender, chanting slogans like, “Hands up, don’t shoot.” In Miami, eight people were arrested.

In Ferguson, officials were unapologetic on Thursday for their tough response to the protesters, which they said had been necessitated by violence and criminality: The police said some protesters had thrown rocks, bottles and even a firebomb at officers. If the situation warrants it, “the tactical units will be out there,” said the Ferguson police chief, Thomas Jackson. “If the crowd is being violent and you don’t want to be violent, get out of the crowd.”

The county executive, Charlie A. Dooley, called on residents to “calm down, stand down and be reasonable.” But the mayor of St. Louis, Francis G. Slay, struck a different tone, describing himself as “sad and angry” and saying: “Justice must happen. The grieving must be comforted. The angry must be heard. The innocent must be protected.”

Local police units were still helping to patrol Ferguson, but under a new command. The changes were obvious.

Captain Johnson, walking through the streets on Thursday, was approached by Karen Wood, who had been clutching a bright green sign against police brutality. “Do you have a minute to at least talk to, you know, a parent?” Ms. Wood asked.

The captain, a veteran law enforcement officer assigned to oversee security here, stopped. As sweat stained his blue uniform, he clasped Ms. Wood’s right hand and stood, for several minutes, listening to her story.

“Our youth are out here without guidance, without leadership,” Ms. Wood told Captain Johnson. “It’s important that they know there is an order.”

When Ms. Wood finished, Captain Johnson patted her right shoulder and said softly: “I thank you. I thank you for your passion, and we’re going to get better.”

He then joined a group of passing protesters, marching with them as his eyes scanned the roadway. “I know a lot of them,” he said. “Our police department, we have to be reflective of our community, and that’s why we’re all out here.”

Jessica Daniel, who was marching with her young children, said she had listened to speeches by Ms. McCaskill and Mr. Nixon and perceived a change. “The whole tone just turned around,” she said. “Now I feel like they are letting us know they think it’s tragic, too. It’s a beautiful thing.”

Outside a restaurant, London’s Wing House, Kristopher Conner said he was upset both by Mr. Brown’s death and by the violence that followed it. He put up a sign saying proceeds from soda purchases would benefit Mr. Brown’s family. And as officials hoped for calm, so did he.

“I just want it to get back to normal,” Mr. Conner said. “Before everything happened, it was peaceful. You’d come to work, and now some people are just kind of worried that something might start up again.”
 

John Schwartz reported from Ferguson; Michael D. Shear from Edgartown, Mass.; and Michael Paulson from New York. Reporting was contributed by Matt Apuzzo from Washington; Alan Blinder from St. Louis and Ferguson; and Timothy Williams, Serge F. Kovaleski and Ashley Southall from New York. Susan Beachy contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on August 15, 2014,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
New Tack on Unrest Eases Tension in Missouri.

    New Tack on Unrest Eases Tension in Missouri, NYT, 14.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/15/us/ferguson-missouri-police-shooting.html

Michael Brown and Black Men

AUG. 13, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist

The killing of Michael Brown has tapped into something bigger than Michael Brown.

Brown was the unarmed 18-year-old black man who was shot to death Saturday by a policeman in Ferguson, Mo. There are conflicting accounts of the events that led to the shooting. There is an investigation by local authorities as well as one by federal authorities. There are grieving parents and a seething community. There are swarms of lawyers and hordes of reporters. There has been unrest. The president has appealed for reflection and healing.

There is an eerie echo in it all — a sense of tragedy too often repeated. And yet the sheer morbid, wrenching rhythm of it belies a larger phenomenon, one obscured by its vastness, one that can be seen only when one steps back and looks from a distance and with data: The criminalization of black and brown bodies — particularly male ones — from the moment they are first introduced to the institutions and power structures with which they must interact.

Earlier this year, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights released “the first comprehensive look at civil rights from every public school in the country in nearly 15 years.” As the report put it: “The 2011-2012 release shows that access to preschool programs is not a reality for much of the country. In addition, students of color are suspended more often than white students, and black and Latino students are significantly more likely to have teachers with less experience who aren’t paid as much as their colleagues in other schools.”

Attorney General Eric Holder, remarking on the data, said: “This critical report shows that racial disparities in school discipline policies are not only well-documented among older students, but actually begin during preschool."

But, of course, this criminalization stalks these children throughout their school careers.

As The New York Times editorial board pointed out last year: “Children as young as 12 have been treated as criminals for shoving matches and even adolescent misconduct like cursing in school. This is worrisome because young people who spend time in adult jails are more likely to have problems with law enforcement later on. Moreover, federal data suggest a pattern of discrimination in the arrests, with black and Hispanic children more likely to be affected than their white peers.”

A 2010 report by the Southern Poverty Law Center found that while the average suspension rate for middle school students in 18 of the nation’s largest school districts was 11.2 percent in 2006, the rate for black male students was 28.3 percent, by far the highest of any subgroup by race, ethnicity or gender. And, according to the report, previous research “has consistently found that racial/ethnic disproportionality in discipline persists even when poverty and other demographic factors are controlled.”

And these disparities can have a severe impact on a child’s likelihood of graduating. According to a report from the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University that looked at Florida students, “Being suspended even once in 9th grade is associated with a two-fold increase in the risk for dropping out.”
Continue reading the main story

Black male dropout rates are more than one and a half times those of white males, and when you look at the percentage of black men who graduate on time — in four years, not including those who possibly go on to get G.E.D.s, transfer to other schools or fail grades — the numbers are truly horrific. Only about half of these black men graduate on time.

Now, the snowball is rolling. The bias of the educational system bleeds easily into the bias of the criminal justice system — from cops to courts to correctional facilities. The school-to-prison pipeline is complete.

A May report by the Brookings Institution found: “There is nearly a 70 percent chance that an African American man without a high school diploma will be imprisoned by his mid-thirties.”

This is in part because trending policing disparities are particularly troubling in places like Missouri. As the editorial board of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch pointed out this week: “Last year, for the 11th time in the 14 years that data has been collected, the disparity index that measures potential racial profiling by law enforcement in the state got worse. Black Missourians were 66 percent more likely in 2013 to be stopped by police, and blacks and Hispanics were both more likely to be searched, even though the likelihood of finding contraband was higher among whites.”

And this is the reality if the child actually survives the journey. That is if he has the internal fortitude to continue to stand with the weight on his shoulders. That is if he doesn’t find himself on the wrong end of a gun barrel. That is if his parents can imbue in him a sense of value while the world endeavors to imbue in him a sense of worthlessness.

Parents can teach children how to interact with authority and how to mitigate the threat response their very being elicits. They can wrap them in love to safeguard them against the bitterness of racial suspicion.

It can be done. It is often done. But it is heartbreaking nonetheless. What psychic damage does it do to the black mind when one must come to own and manage the fear of the black body?

The burden of bias isn’t borne by the person in possession of it but by the person who is the subject of it. The violence is aimed away from the possessor of its instruments — the arrow is pointed away from the killer and at the prey.

It vests victimhood in the idea of personhood. It steals sometimes, something precious and irreplaceable. It breaks something that’s irreparable. It alters something in a way that’s irrevocable.

We flinchingly choose a lesser damage.

But still, the hopelessness takes hold when one realizes that there is no amount of acting right or doing right, no amount of parental wisdom or personal resilience that can completely guarantee survival, let alone success.

Brown had just finished high school and was to start college this week. The investigation will hopefully clarify what led to his killing. But it is clear even now that his killing occurred in a context, one that we would do well to recognize.

Brown’s mother told a local television station after he was killed just weeks after his high school graduation: “Do you know how hard it was for me to get him to stay in school and graduate? You know how many black men graduate? Not many. Because you bring them down to this type of level, where they feel like they don’t got nothing to live for anyway. ‘They’re going to try to take me out anyway.’ ”

    Michael Brown and Black Men, NYT, 13.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/14/opinion/
    charles-blow-michael-brown-and-black-men.html

Amid Protests in Missouri,

Officer’s Name Is Still Withheld

 

AUG. 13, 2014

The New York Times

By JULIE BOSMAN

and ERIK ECKHOLM

FERGUSON, Mo. — In the five days since an unarmed young black man was fatally shot by a police officer here, the selective release of information about the shooting, and especially the anonymity granted to the officer, has stoked frustrations in this largely African-American community north of St. Louis, where residents describe increasingly tense relations with the police.

The police chief, Thomas Jackson, has repeatedly declined to identify the officer, who has been put on administrative leave. But on Wednesday, the chief did offer a new detail about the shooting, which has kindled nights of racial unrest and an unyielding police response with tear gas, rubber bullets and arrests.

Chief Jackson said that the officer who shot Michael Brown, 18, on Saturday was struck in the face during the encounter and treated at a hospital. Touching his own cheek, the chief said that a side of the officer’s face was swollen from what the police have described as a struggle in which Mr. Brown assaulted the officer and tried to take his gun — an account disputed by a witness, a friend of Mr. Brown’s who said his hands were raised when the last of several shots was fired.

Despite persistent and increasingly angry calls from the public to release the officer’s name, Chief Jackson said the officer required protection after numerous death threats had been made. Computer hackers, saying they were outraged by police conduct, now have also joined the fray.

Anonymous, the loosely organized group of international hackers, said on Twitter that it had broken into Ferguson’s municipal computer system. It released details about city workers and posted photos of Jon Belmar, the chief of the St. Louis County police who is conducting the investigation into the shooting, as well as his wife, son and daughter. It also posted his address and phone number. The group threatened to bring down city, county and federal networks if the police overreacted to rallies and protests.

On Wednesday night, scores of police officers in riot gear and in armored trucks showed up to disperse protesters who had gathered on the streets near the scene of the shooting. Some officers perched atop the vehicles with their guns trained on the crowds while protesters chanted, “Hands up, don’t shoot.” A police spokesman said that some demonstrators had thrown Molotov cocktails at officers and that some had tried to set fires. The police used tear gas on demonstrators, and some protesters said rubber bullets had been fired at them. Police said one officer appeared to have suffered a broken ankle after being hit by a brick.

The police made more than 10 arrests. Among those arrested was Antonio French, a St. Louis alderman, who had been documenting the protests on social media, his wife said on Twitter.

Chief Jackson and the St. Louis County prosecutor, Robert P. McCulloch, held news conferences on Wednesday to try to allay concerns without divulging the officer’s name or details of the investigation. Neither would say how many times Mr. Brown had been shot.

Mr. McCulloch promised a thorough investigation but refused to say how long it would take. “There is no timeline,” he said. But he added that all the evidence would be made public, whether or not there was an indictment.

Whether to identify an officer in a charged situation like a shooting has been a continual tug of war around the country, pitting the desire of police departments to protect their own against the demands of victims’ relatives and the public for accountability.

“I get why they want to protect him,” said Meko Taylor, 36, of Ferguson, who was at a protest on Wednesday. “But the people want answers. When we get answers, things will calm down.”

David A. Harris, an expert on police misconduct and accountability at the University of Pittsburgh Law School, said: “Police departments do not welcome disclosure or the input of outsiders. So when you have a problem like this, it’s hardly surprising to see that they are very reluctant to give out information.”

That reflexive, insular stance is increasingly being questioned in the courts, said Merrick J. Bobb, a Los Angeles-based consultant on police oversight. “What is happening is that in a number of jurisdictions, voluntarily or as a result of a lawsuit, the ability of police to keep the name of the officer secret has been constrained,” he said.

In Missouri, legal groups citing the state’s sunshine law, which requires government agencies to release most documents to the public, have joined with community leaders to press for information about the officer who shot Mr. Brown.

On Tuesday, the Missouri office of the American Civil Liberties Union wrote to the Ferguson and St. Louis County Police Departments requesting unredacted copies of the “incident reports” describing the death of Mr. Brown. The A.C.L.U. said it had been told by the St. Louis County police that it would not release an incident report because the investigation was continuing. Adding to the pressure, the National Bar Association, an organization of African-American lawyers and judges, also filed a records request on Wednesday with the Ferguson Police Department.

By law, police departments have three days to comply, but if they choose to withhold an officer’s name, they could argue that circumstances warrant an exception. Then the petitioning groups would have to file lawsuits.

There is no federal constitutional right, under the First Amendment, to information about government activities, including internal police reports, said Erwin Chemerinsky, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine. Rather, individual states have disclosure laws with varying degrees of bite, and the country’s thousands of law enforcement agencies have their own rules and subcultures regarding disclosures.

The inconsistency in policies, even when a freedom of information law is on the books, is illustrated in New York City. In most cases, the New York Police Department refuses to release the names of officers who have shot people, at least in the days immediately afterward. If a shooting attracts widespread attention, however, the officer’s name rarely remains a secret for long.

In the July 17 case of Eric Garner, who died after being wrestled down by the police, including one officer who apparently used a forbidden chokehold, the department did reveal the name of the officer — but after two days, and only after wide public viewing of a videotape of the fatal confrontation. By that time, the news media had already reported the officer’s name based on unnamed sources.

Mr. Harris said that while it was understandable that police officials would try to protect their officers from threats and unfair accusations, silence also had its risks. “This case is not being tried yet, but the narrative is being forged in the public arena,” he said of the Ferguson shooting. “When that goes on, information is put out selectively and withheld selectively.”

“There is real danger in that,” he said, “because ultimately law enforcement depends on the trust of the people they serve.”

On Wednesday, the St. Louis County medical examiner’s office said it would take two to three weeks to complete the autopsy of Mr. Brown, including a toxicology report, which is standard procedure in such deaths.

Suzanne McCune, a forensic administrator at the office, said that a preliminary autopsy was completed Monday and found that Mr. Brown had died of gunshot wounds, but she gave no other details. She added that Mr. Brown’s body had been released to his family. Ms. McCune said the police department would decide whether to approve the release of the report once it was complete.

Benjamin L. Crump, a lawyer representing the Brown family, said that arrangements were being made for a private autopsy to be performed in the next week or so. “The family wants an autopsy done by somebody who is objective and who does not have a relationship with the Ferguson police,” Mr. Crump said.

Trying to control protests that have sprouted up daily in Ferguson and intensified after dark, the mayor and the City Council posted a letter on Wednesday on the city website asking protesters to limit their demonstrations to daylight hours.

The police have made over 50 arrests since Sunday.

“We ask that any groups wishing to assemble in prayer or in protest do so only during daylight hours in an organized and respectful manner,” the letter said. “Unfortunately, those who wish to co-opt peaceful protests and turn them into violent demonstrations have been able to do so over the past several days during the evening hours.”

Chief Jackson said the request did not amount to a curfew.

As to the actions of Anonymous in releasing the names of department personnel, Chief Jackson said protection had been assigned to some and others had taken vacation.

Anonymous also released on Wednesday what it said were county 911 tapes from the time of the shooting on Saturday. Most initial calls seemed to be about crowd control, but the tapes also suggested that dispatchers learned from an early call that a police officer was involved. Chief Jackson said he had not heard the tapes.

Correction: August 14, 2014

An earlier version of this article misidentified the university
at which Erwin Chemerinsky is a law professor.
It is the University of California, Irvine,
not the University of California, Los Angeles.

Julie Bosman reported from Ferguson,
and Erik Eckholm from New York.
Reporting was contributed by Timothy Williams,
Joseph Goldstein and Serge F. Kovaleski from New York,
and John Schwartz from St. Louis.

A version of this article appears in print on August 14, 2014,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Anonymity in Police Shooting Fuels Frustration.

    Amid Protests in Missouri, Officer’s Name Is Still Withheld, NYT, 13.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/14/us/
    missouri-teenager-and-officer-scuffled-before-shooting-chief-says.html

The Death of Michael Brown

Racial History Behind the Ferguson Protests

AUG. 12, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

The F.B.I. may be able to answer the many questions surrounding the death of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black student from Ferguson, Mo., who was a few days from heading off to college when he was shot by a police officer on Saturday. The shooting of Mr. Brown, who was unarmed, led to three days of protest, some of it violent, and several tense confrontations between residents of the St. Louis suburban town of 21,000 and the police.

But it doesn’t take a federal investigation to understand the history of racial segregation, economic inequality and overbearing law enforcement that produced so much of the tension now evident on the streets. St. Louis has long been one of the nation’s most segregated metropolitan areas, and there remains a high wall between black residents — who overwhelmingly have lower incomes — and the white power structure that dominates City Councils and police departments like the ones in Ferguson.

Until the late 1940s, blacks weren’t allowed to live in most suburban St. Louis County towns, kept out by restrictive covenants that the Supreme Court prohibited in 1948. As whites began to flee the city for the county in the 1950s and ’60s, they used exclusionary zoning tactics — including large, single-family lot requirements that prohibited apartment buildings — to prevent blacks from moving in. Within the city, poverty and unrest grew.

By the 1970s, many blacks started leaving the City of St. Louis as well. Colin Gordon, a professor at the University of Iowa who has carefully mapped the metropolitan area’s residential history, said black families were attracted to older, inner-ring suburbs like Ferguson in the northern part of the county because they were built before restrictive zoning tactics and, therefore, allowed apartments.

As black families moved into Ferguson, the whites fled. In 1980, the town was 85 percent white and 14 percent black; by 2010, it was 29 percent white and 69 percent black. But blacks did not gain political power as their numbers grew. The mayor and the police chief are white, as are five of the six City Council members. The school board consists of six white members and one Hispanic. As Mr. Gordon explains, many black residents, lacking the wealth to buy property, move from apartment to apartment and have not put down political roots.

The disparity is most evident in the Ferguson Police Department, of which only three of 53 officers are black. The largely white force stops black residents far out of proportion to their population, according to statistics kept by the state attorney general. Blacks account for 86 percent of the traffic stops in the city, and 93 percent of the arrests after those stops. Similar problems exist around St. Louis County, where earlier this year the state chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. filed a federal civil rights complaint alleging widespread racial profiling by police departments.

The circumstances of Mr. Brown’s death are, inevitably, in dispute. Witnesses said he was walking home from a convenience store when stopped by an officer for walking in the middle of the street, and they accused the officer of shooting him multiple times when his hands were raised over his head. The police said Mr. Brown had hit the officer. State and federal investigators are trying to sort out the truth.

What is not in dispute is the sense of permanent grievance held by many residents and shared in segregated urban areas around the country. Though nothing excuses violence and looting, it is clear that local governments have not dispensed justice equally. The death of Mr. Brown is “heartbreaking,” as President Obama said Tuesday, but it is also a reminder of a toxic racial legacy that still infects cities and suburbs across America.


A version of this editorial appears in print on August 13, 2014,
on page A22 of the New York edition with the headline:
The Death of Michael Brown.

    The Death of Michael Brown, NYT, 12.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/13/opinion/
    racial-history-behind-the-ferguson-protests.html

Grief and Protests

Follow Shooting of a Teenager

Police Say Mike Brown Was Killed
After Struggle for Gun in St. Louis Suburb

 

AUG. 10, 2014

The new York Times

By JULIE BOSMAN

and EMMA G. FITZSIMMONS

The fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager Saturday by a police officer in a St. Louis suburb came after a struggle for the officer’s gun, police officials said Sunday, in an explanation that met with outrage and skepticism in the largely African-American community.

The killing of the youth, Michael Brown, 18, ignited protests on Saturday and Sunday in Ferguson, Mo., a working-class suburb of about 20,000 residents. Hundreds of people gathered at the scene of the shooting to question the police and to light candles for Mr. Brown, who was planning to begin college classes on Monday.

Mr. Brown’s stepfather, Louis Head, held a cardboard sign that said, “Ferguson police just executed my unarmed son.”

At a news conference on Sunday morning, the St. Louis County police chief, Jon Belmar, said that a man had been shot and killed after he had assaulted a police officer and the two had struggled over the officer’s gun inside his patrol car. At least one shot was fired from inside the car, Chief Belmar said.

“The genesis of this was a physical confrontation,” Chief Belmar told reporters.

But elected officials and advocacy groups called for a full investigation and questioned the tactics of the police, who acknowledged that Mr. Brown had been unarmed. Antonio French, a city councilman in St. Louis, was at the scene of the protests on Sunday and said in an interview that more than 100 people had gathered, most of them silently standing in groups, some leaving behind teddy bears and balloons to memorialize Mr. Brown.

Mr. French said he was unsatisfied with the police department’s explanation of the shooting.

“I find it hard to believe,” he said, adding that he was disappointed with the police response in the aftermath of the shooting, which further distressed Ferguson residents and members of Mr. Brown’s family.

“It’s a textbook example of how not to handle the situation,” Mr. French said. “Ferguson has a white government and a white mayor, but a large black population. This situation has brought out whatever rifts were between that minority community and the Ferguson government.”

Esther Haywood, the president of the N.A.A.C.P. in St. Louis County, said in a statement: “We are hurt to hear that yet another teenaged boy has been slaughtered by law enforcement, especially in light of the recent death of Eric Garner in New York, who was killed for selling cigarettes. We plan to do everything within our power to ensure that the Ferguson Police Department as well as the St. Louis County Police Department releases all details pertinent to the shooting. We strongly encourage residents to stay away from the crime scene so that no additional citizens are injured.”

The police on Sunday said they were still trying to sort out the exact details, but they released what they said was the fullest account of the shooting that they could provide. Just after noon on Saturday, the police said, an officer in a patrol car approached Mr. Brown and another man. As the officer began to leave his vehicle, one of the men pushed the officer back into the car and “physically assaulted” him, according to the police department’s account.
Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story

A struggle occurred “over the officer’s weapon,” and at least one shot was fired inside the car, Chief Belmar said. The two left the car, and the officer shot Mr. Brown about 35 feet away from the vehicle, the police reported. Several shots were fired from the officer’s weapon.

The medical examiner for St. Louis County is investigating to determine how many times Mr. Brown was shot, the police said.

Chief Belmar said that the Ferguson police chief, Thomas Jackson, had called him personally and asked that his department to look into the shooting because Chief Jackson wanted an independent investigation. Chief Belmar said that the St. Louis County prosecuting attorney would determine whether the shooting was justified or charges should be filed.

As Chief Belmar spoke at a televised news conference, chants of “Don’t shoot!” and “We want answers!” could be heard from the protesters who had gathered outside the Ferguson police headquarters.

At a candlelight vigil on Sunday evening, the heightened tensions between the police and the African-American community were on display. A crowd estimated in the thousands flooded the streets near the scene of the shooting, some of them chanting “No justice, no peace.” They were met by hundreds of police officers in riot gear, carrying rifles and shields, as well as K-9 units.

Witnesses described a peaceful protest that later turned volatile, and there were scattered reports of violence. Images and videos captured on cellphones and posted on social media sites appeared to show people spray-painting and looting a QuikTrip gas station and other stores. Rioters shattered the windows of the gas station and damaged several police cars, said Brian Lewis, a spokesman for the St. Louis County Police Department.

It was not immediately clear if anyone was injured or arrested during the protests. County officials did not return calls and messages seeking comment.

Community and civic leaders pleaded for calm and to allow the investigation to run its course.

“We have to do this in a constructive manner,” Mayor James Knowles III of Ferguson said in an interview with a local Fox television station.

The officer who shot Mr. Brown has been on the force about six years and will be interviewed extensively by detectives on Sunday, the police said. They did not identify the officer involved by either name or rank.

“Any other details, including the reason as to why the encounter occurred and the initial struggle ensued, are still a part of the continuing investigation,” the police said in a statement.

Family members of Mr. Brown said that he had been walking to his grandmother’s house when the shooting occurred. His body remained in the street for some time, guarded by the police, while neighbors gathered in the area.

Police officials, fearing civil disorder, dispatched officers with police dogs to control the crowds. In response, some Twitter users posted pictures of the dogs at the Ferguson gathering on Saturday next to photos of police dogs used to control African-American crowds during the Jim Crow era.

Mr. Brown had just graduated from high school and was planning to attend Vatterott College, his mother, Lesley McSpadden, told reporters. His family has retained Benjamin Crump, the lawyer who represented Trayvon Martin’s relatives.

“You took my son away from me,” she told the television news station KMOV. “Do you know how hard it was for me to get him to stay in school and graduate? You know how many black men graduate? Not many. Because you bring them down to this type of level, where they feel like they don’t got nothing to live for anyway. ‘They’re going to try to take me out anyway.’ ”
 

Ashley Southall contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on August 11, 2014,
on page A11 of the New York edition with the headline:
Grief and Protests Follow Shooting of a Teenager.

    Grief and Protests Follow Shooting of a Teenager, NYT, 10.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/11/us/
    police-say-mike-brown-was-killed-after-struggle-for-gun.html

Coroner Is Said to Rule James Brady’s Death

a Homicide, 33 Years After a Shooting

 

AUG. 8, 2014

The New York Times

By NICK CORASANITI

WASHINGTON — The death this week of James S. Brady, the former White House press secretary, has been ruled a homicide 33 years after he was wounded in an assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan, police department officials here said Friday.

Officials said the ruling was made by the medical examiner in Northern Virginia, where Mr. Brady died Monday at 73. The medical examiner’s office would not comment on the cause and manner of Mr. Brady’s death.

“We did do an autopsy on Mr. Brady, and that autopsy is complete,” a spokeswoman said.

Gail Hoffman, a spokeswoman for the Brady family, said the ruling should really “be no surprise to anybody.”

“Jim had been long suffering severe health consequences since the shooting,” she said, adding that the family had not received official word of the ruling from either the medical examiner’s office or the police.

The ruling could allow prosecutors in Washington, where Reagan and Mr. Brady were shot on March 30, 1981, by John W. Hinckley Jr., to reopen the case and charge Mr. Hinckley with murder. The United States attorney’s office said Friday that it was “reviewing the ruling on the death of Mr. Brady” and had no further comment.

Mr. Hinckley was found not guilty in 1982 by reason of insanity on charges ranging from attempted assassination of the president to possession of an unlicensed pistol. The verdict was met with such outrage that many states and the federal government altered laws to make it harder to use the insanity defense. Mr. Hinckley, now 59, has been a patient at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington since the trial.

There is no statute of limitations on murder charges, but any attempt to retry Mr. Hinckley would be a challenge for prosecutors, in part because he was ruled insane, said Hugh Keefe, a Connecticut defense lawyer who taught trial advocacy at Yale University.

“They’re dead in the water,” Mr. Keefe said. “That’s the end of that case, because we have double jeopardy. He was tried; he was found not guilty based on insanity.”

But George J. Terwilliger III, who was the assistant United States attorney in Washington when he wrote the search warrant for Mr. Hinckley’s hotel room, said there might be grounds for a new trial.

“Generally, a new homicide charge would be adjudicated on its merits without reference to a prior case,” said Mr. Terwilliger, who became a deputy attorney general under the elder President George Bush and is now in private practice. “The real challenge here would be to prove causation for the death.”

Mr. Hinckley’s lawyer, Barry W. Levine, acknowledged new charges were possible, but said the possibility was “far-fetched in the extreme.”

“There’s nothing new here that happened,” he said.

News of the medical examiner’s ruling was first reported by the NBC station in Washington.

Reagan, a Secret Service agent and a District of Columbia police officer were wounded in the shooting, but Mr. Brady was the most seriously injured. He was shot in the head, damaging the right section of his brain.

After the shooting, Mr. Brady and his wife, Sarah, became leading advocates for gun control and pushed legislation requiring background checks. In 1993, President Bill Clinton signed the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act into law, which required background checks and waiting periods for prospective handgun purchases.

“Twelve years ago, my life was changed forever by a disturbed young man with a gun,” Mr. Brady said from his wheelchair at the bill signing. “Until that time, I hadn’t thought much about gun control or the need for gun control. Maybe if I had, I wouldn’t have been stuck with these damn wheels.”
 

A version of this article appears in print on August 9, 2014, on page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: Coroner Is Said to Rule Reagan Aide’s Death a Homicide, 33 Years After a Shooting.

    Coroner Is Said to Rule James Brady’s Death a Homicide,
    33 Years After a Shooting, NYT, 8.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/09/us/
    james-brady-s-death-ruled-a-homicide-police-say.html

Taking a Bullet, Gaining a Cause:

James S. Brady Dies at 73

 

AUG. 4, 2014

The New York Times

By JAMES BARRON

James S. Brady, the White House press secretary who was wounded in an assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan and then became a symbol of the fight for gun control, championing tighter regulations from his wheelchair, died on Monday in Alexandria, Va. He was 73.

His family confirmed the death but did not specify a cause.

On the rainy afternoon of March 30, 1981, Mr. Brady was struck in a hail of bullets fired by John W. Hinckley Jr., a mentally troubled college dropout who had hoped that shooting the president would impress the actress Jodie Foster, on whom he had a fixation. Mr. Hinckley raised his handgun as Reagan stepped out of a hotel in Washington after giving a speech.

“What I was, I am not now,” Mr. Brady said in 1994. “What I was, I will never be again.”

What Mr. Brady became was an advocate of tough restrictions on the sale of handguns like the $29 pawnshop special that Mr. Hinckley had bought with false identification. “I wouldn’t be here in this damn wheelchair if we had common-sense legislation,” Mr. Brady said in 2011.

Mr. Brady and his wife, Sarah, campaigned for a bill that Congress passed 12 years after the shooting. The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, as it was known, ushered in background checks and waiting periods for many gun buyers. The Bradys also pressed for the restoration of a federal ban on assault weapons, which expired in 2004.

They issued statements calling for renewed restrictions after episodes like the school shooting in Newtown, Conn., in 2012. Last year, after Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York pushed a gun-control bill through the state legislature, the Bradys appeared in a commercial thanking Mr. Cuomo for, as Mrs. Brady put it, “leading the way.” Mrs. Brady said they had been asked to record the commercial by Mr. Cuomo’s sister Maria Cuomo Cole, a friend of hers.

Mr. Brady returned to the White House occasionally. In 2011, he spoke briefly with President Obama — whom he endorsed in 2008 — on the 30th anniversary of the assassination attempt. Mr. Brady wore a blue bracelet with Representative Gabrielle Giffords’s name on it and told reporters that he had shown it to the president. Ms. Giffords had been wounded a few weeks earlier in a shooting in Tucson that left six people dead and 12 others wounded.

Mrs. Brady said that the president agreed with “everything that we are for,” but that he had told them the process in Washington took time. She said Mr. Brady had told the president, “It takes two years to make Minute Rice.”

The Bradys later sent recommendations to a White House task force on preventing gun violence, calling for universal background checks. They also recommended safety programs for the nation’s gun owners; Americans own almost 300 million firearms.
Continue reading the main story

After 32 people were killed in shootings at Virginia Tech in 2007, the Bradys supported a bill that closed a loophole that had allowed the gunman to buy weapons even though he had earlier been committed to a mental hospital. President George W. Bush signed the measure into law in January 2008.

When he was pressing for the Brady bill, Mr. Brady dismissed as “lamebrain nonsense” the National Rifle Association’s contention that a waiting period would inconvenience law-abiding people who had reason to buy a gun. The idea behind the waiting period was to give the seller time to check on whether the prospective purchaser had a criminal record or had lied in supplying information on the required documents.

Mr. Brady said that five business days was not too much to make purchasers wait. Every day, he once testified, “I need help getting out of bed, help taking a shower and help getting dressed, and — damn it — I need help going to the bathroom. I guess I’m paying for their ‘convenience.’ ”

As the Bradys worked the phones, shoring up supporters, opposition to the bill softened in Congress in the wake of a surge in gun-related violence across the nation and public opinion polls showing crime and violence to be top priorities among voters. On Nov. 30, 1993, President Bill Clinton signed the Brady bill into law, with Mr. Brady at his side in a wheelchair.

Still, the Brady bill made it to the White House only after an intensive series of negotiations in the Senate. Eventually, Republicans agreed to a vote in exchange for Democratic assurances of future modifications.

“How sweet it is; how long it took,” Mr. Brady said on the way to the signing ceremony. The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence estimated the restrictions in the Brady bill have blocked two million gun purchases.

Advocating gun restrictions was not the role Mr. Brady had envisioned for himself when he became the White House press secretary in 1981. He was clearly proud of having what he called, with equal parts seriousness and humor, “the second-most challenging job in the free world.”

He had a reputation as a Washington insider. He was also known for his wisecracks, though they sometimes boomeranged on him. As Reagan’s director of public affairs and research during the 1980 presidential race, he was barred from the campaign plane for a week. The offense: He and another Reagan aide had shouted, “Killer trees, killer trees!” while flying over a forest fire. The remark was a not terribly subtle reminder that Reagan had once identified trees as a major source of air pollution.

On his 84th day at the White House, he followed Reagan to a midday speech at the Washington Hilton. As they stepped out into the rain afterward, Mr. Hinckley pulled out his .22-caliber revolver and fired six shots in less than two seconds, hitting the president in the chest and lower right arm and Mr. Brady above one eye.

They were taken to George Washington University Hospital, where one team of doctors operated on Reagan while another operated on Mr. Brady. He remained hospitalized for nine months, and after he was discharged he returned for physical therapy every day. He could manage only a few steps at a time, and sometimes he would blank out. A year or so later, when he started trying to write his name, it would come out JIMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.

As for the gunman, “maybe he’ll be out on the streets someday soon,” Mr. Brady said in the authorized 1987 biography, “Thumbs Up,” by Mollie Dickinson. “I can’t remember things, I’m here at the hospital every day. Wouldn’t you be depressed?”

Mr. Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity in 1982 and has been confined to a Washington mental hospital since, although he has been allowed to travel to his family’s home in Williamsburg, Va.

Mr. Brady filed a civil suit against Mr. Hinckley, and 14 years after the shooting, Mr. Hinckley agreed to give Mr. Brady and two other victims the profits made from selling his life story. Mr. Brady and the others — Thomas K. Delahanty, a former District of Columbia police officer, and Timothy J. McCarthy, a former Secret Service agent — stood to divide up to $2.9 million selling book and movie rights about Mr. Hinckley.

Nancy Reagan, the former first lady, recalled in a statement released Monday how she and Mrs. Brady spent the hours after the assassination attempt. Mrs. Reagan said they “sat together in a tiny room near the emergency room at George Washington University Hospital, trying to comfort each other while we both were gripped with unspeakable fear.”

“The bond we established then was unlike any other,” she added.

Thinking of Mr. Brady, Mrs. Reagan said, “brings back so many memories — happy and sad — of a time in all of our lives when we learned what it means to ‘play the hand we’re dealt.’ ”

James Scott Brady was born on Aug. 29, 1940, in Centralia, Ill., the only child of Dorothy and Harold Brady, a railroad yardmaster. James Brady grew up to be a train enthusiast with fond memories of the times he had sat in the engineer’s lap and run a switching locomotive.

Before graduating from the University of Illinois in 1962, he served as the president of the campus Young Republicans and the district governor of the state Young Republicans organization. He entered the University of Illinois law school that fall, and in 1963, he was chosen for a summer internship at the Justice Department in Washington. To cover his expenses, he also sold encyclopedias door to door and collected empty soft-drink bottles, redeeming them for the small change he got from the deposits.

Eventually, he quit law school, tried accounting (but gave it up) and earned a doctorate in public administration at Southern Illinois University. He returned to Washington, where he worked for three federal agencies, the House of Representatives (as a communications consultant) and Senators Everett M. Dirksen of Illinois and William V. Roth Jr. of Delaware before he signed on with Reagan.

After the shooting, he also served as the chairman of the National Organization on Disability, a nonprofit group that advocates better conditions for handicapped people, and as a spokesman for the National Head Injury Foundation.

Besides his wife, Mr. Brady’s survivors include a son, James Scott Brady Jr., and a daughter, Melissa Brady Camins, from his first marriage to Susan Beh Camins, which ended in divorce. Mr. Brady lived in Alexandria.
Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story

Mr. Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor, in 1996, and in 2000, Mr. Clinton presided at the renaming of the room in which White House news briefings are held. It became the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room.

Later, one of the organizations with which the Bradys were associated changed its name from Handgun Control Incorporated to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. Another, the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence, became the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Mr. Brady was an honorary trustee of both groups.

Mr. Brady — who said he did not remember much about the day he was shot — said over the years that he had remained concerned that guns were still available to people with mental problems like Mr. Hinckley.

“He scares me,” Mr. Brady told CBS News in 2006, “because he doesn’t have 52 cards in his deck. He didn’t the day that he shot at us. He got six rounds off and hit four of us.”

But when Mr. Brady was asked if he was bitter toward Mr. Hinckley, he said, “Well, it’s not classy to be bitter, and I try to be classy.”

Correction: August 4, 2014

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of the article misspelled, in one instance, the surname of the congresswoman who was wounded in a shooting in Tucson that left six people dead. She is Representative Gabrielle Giffords, not Gifford.

A version of this article appears in print on August 5, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Taking a Bullet, Gaining a Cause.

    Taking a Bullet, Gaining a Cause: James S. Brady Dies at 73, NYT, 4.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/05/us/politics/
    james-s-brady-symbol-of-fight-for-gun-control-dies-at-73.html

James S. Brady,

Symbol of Fight for Gun Control,

Dies at 73

 

AUG. 4, 2014

The New York Times

By JAMES BARRON

James S. Brady, the White House press secretary who was wounded in an assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan and then became a symbol of the fight for gun control, championing tighter regulations from his wheelchair, died on Monday in Alexandria, Va. He was 73.

Jennifer Fuson, a spokeswoman for Mr. Brady’s organization, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, confirmed the death.

On the rainy afternoon of March 30, 1981, Mr. Brady was struck in a hail of bullets fired by John W. Hinckley Jr., a mentally troubled college dropout who had hoped that shooting the president would impress the actress Jodie Foster, on whom he had a fixation. Mr. Hinckley raised his handgun as Reagan stepped out of a hotel in Washington after giving a speech.

Reagan, a couple of paces from his limousine, was hit, as were a Secret Service agent and a District of Columbia police officer. But it was Mr. Brady, shot in the head, who was the most seriously injured. The bullet damaged the right section of his brain, paralyzing his left arm, weakening his left leg, damaging his short-term memory and impairing his speech. Just getting out of a car became a study in determination.

“What I was, I am not now,” Mr. Brady said in 1994. “What I was, I will never be again.”

What Mr. Brady became was an advocate of tough restrictions on the sale of handguns like the $29 pawnshop special that Mr. Hinckley had bought with false identification. “I wouldn’t be here in this damn wheelchair if we had common-sense legislation,” Mr. Brady said in 2011.

Mr. Brady and his wife, Sarah, campaigned for a bill that Congress passed 12 years after the shootings. The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, as it was known, ushered in background checks and waiting periods for many gun buyers.

    James S. Brady, Symbol of Fight for Gun Control, Dies at 73, NYT, 4.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/05/us/politics/
    james-s-brady-symbol-of-fight-for-gun-control-dies-at-73.html

Censorship in Your Doctor’s Office

AUG. 1, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributors

By PAUL SHERMAN

and ROBERT McNAMARA

WHEN a doctor asks her patient a question, is the doctor engaged in free speech protected by the Constitution? If you think the answer is obvious, think again. According to a recent decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, everything a doctor says to a patient is “treatment,” not speech, and the government has broad authority to prohibit doctors from asking questions on particular topics without any First Amendment scrutiny at all.

The case, Wollschlaeger v. Governor of Florida, concerned the constitutionality of the Florida Firearm Owners Privacy Act. That 2011 law threatens doctors with professional discipline if they ask patients whether they own guns or record the resulting information in a patient’s files when doing so is not “relevant” to a patient’s medical care.

What may or may not be relevant is unanswered by the statute. Reasonable people can disagree on whether those questions are necessary to provide effective medical care. Opponents of Florida’s law, including the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, believe that asking patients about gun ownership is a legitimate means of promoting public health by giving doctors the opportunity to share firearms-safety tips. Proponents of the law, the National Rifle Association among them, believe that whether a person owns guns is none of his doctor’s business.

The N.R.A. may well be right. Many patients probably prefer not to discuss their gun ownership with their doctor, just as others may not want to discuss their sexual activity or alcohol intake, particularly if they believe the doctor’s inquiries are motivated more by a political agenda than by medical necessity. But the First Amendment generally doesn’t let the government outlaw the asking of annoying questions. Instead, people can refuse to answer or decline to associate with those who insist on asking such questions.

The theory behind Florida’s law, by contrast, is that patients faced with questions about guns will be too cowed by their physician’s power and prestige to talk back or even just find a different doctor. That’s hardly a flattering view of gun owners, whom we generally believe to be made of sterner stuff.

Nevertheless, it is a theory a three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit found persuasive. By a 2-to-1 vote, it concluded that when doctors ask questions of their patients, those questions constitute medical treatment wholly outside the First Amendment. As the majority argued, medical treatment “may begin with an inquiry (‘Do you smoke?’), followed by a recommendation and some amount of counseling (‘You should quit smoking because smoking has been shown to cause cancer’).” And none of that, apparently, is “speech.”

While some of our fellow Second Amendment advocates may be tempted to celebrate this ruling, it is, at most, a symbolic victory for gun rights. And it comes at the cost of a serious and dangerous defeat for the First Amendment.

Indeed, it’s hard to overstate the sweeping effect of this rule. Imagine if tobacco companies successfully lobbied for a law that prohibited doctors from asking patients whether they smoke. Some doctors may want to know so they can conduct lung examinations, while others may just want to urge their patients to stop. But everyone should recognize that a law outlawing a simple question infringes on speech.
Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story

Fortunately, the line of argument followed by the 11th Circuit has been rejected by the United States Supreme Court. In 2010, the court considered the constitutionality of a federal law that made it a crime to give expert advice — including even legal advice — to designated terrorist groups. Although the government defended the law by arguing that such individualized advice was conduct rather than speech, the court rejected that argument.

Despite this clear rule, government officials in Florida and across the country argue that normal First Amendment rules don’t apply to licensed occupations — a position that is serving as cover for increasingly broad-ranging censorship.

The Texas state veterinary board, for example, has used a rule that prohibits licensed veterinarians from dispensing veterinary advice about an animal they have not examined. This silences vets who use the Internet to advise pet owners who would otherwise lack access to veterinary care. Even people giving ordinary advice aren’t safe. Last year, the Kentucky Board of Examiners of Psychology sent a cease-and-desist letter to the newspaper columnist John Rosemond, claiming that his widely syndicated parenting column was the unlicensed — hence criminal — practice of psychology. Is Dear Abby next?

The ruling by the 11th Circuit panel is another dangerous step in this censorial direction, and it must not be allowed to stand. If the 11th Circuit does not grant a rehearing before the entire court and reverse the panel’s ruling, the Supreme Court should grant review and make clear that the protections of the Second Amendment do not trump those of the First Amendment.
 

Paul Sherman and Robert McNamara are lawyers at the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on August 2, 2014, on page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: Censorship in Your Doctor’s Office.

    Censorship in Your Doctor’s Office, NYT, 1.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/02/opinion/
    censorship-in-your-doctors-office.html