History > 2015 > USA > Gun violence (I)

 Kai Kloepfer engineered a gun

with a fingerprint sensor that can be fired

only by a user with a matching print.

Photograph:

Daniel Borris for The New York Times

Smart Guns Save Lives. So Where Are They?

NYT

JAN. 17, 2015

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/18/
opinion/sunday/nicholas-kristof-smart-guns-save-lives-so-where-are-they.html 

Atlanta Police Shooting Victim

Tried to Live a Life That Mattered

MARCH 24, 2015

The New York Times

By RICHARD FAUSSET

ONCKS CORNER, S.C. — Long before two bullets from a police officer’s handgun tore through Anthony Hill’s chest, he had tattooed it with the words of advice that his grandfather regularly imparted to him in this small Southern city: “Be sensible.”

Last week, Mr. Hill’s relatives buried him in Moncks Corner. On their shirts and lapels, they had pinned photos of him, smiling and sharp, in his Air Force uniform. It was a wordless rebuke to the TV news images that had shown Mr. Hill as he wandered in his last living moments — naked, unarmed and acting in a way that alarmed neighbors — through his suburban Atlanta apartment complex.

It was March 9, a Monday afternoon. A DeKalb County Police officer, Robert Olsen, arrived on the scene, responding to a 911 call. Witnesses said Mr. Hill, an African-American, approached the officer, who is white, with his hands either up or at his sides, but he did not heed the policeman’s order to stop.

For those closest to Mr. Hill, the pain has been amplified by the fact that he had, until that last day, largely heeded his grandfather’s counsel. He had no criminal record. He had served in the war in Afghanistan. And before his death, Mr. Hill, 26, had been trying, like many other Americans, to make sense of the complex questions of race and law enforcement that have emerged since the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. In a Twitter post on Christmas Eve, he had challenged protesters not to reflexively condemn all police officers.

“If 99 of 100 officers” were on the streets “killing black men like its hunting season,” he wrote, “that still leaves 1 just doing his job. Stop w/ the generalizations.”

A state investigation of the shooting is underway. But according to friends and family, Mr. Hill had been told by doctors that he had bipolar disorder after returning from Afghanistan. They believe that his bizarre antics before the shooting — in which he removed his clothes and repeatedly jumped from a second-floor balcony — were symptoms of his illness.

In Moncks Corner, the grief and anger commingled with incredulity. Mr. Hill was the last man anyone would ever have expected to tangle with the police, they said. And he deserved better.

“To come home from Afghanistan and be killed by someone who’s supposed to protect you – that I don’t understand,” said James A. Hill, 29, Mr. Hill’s brother.

“Why would you go directly to deadly force for someone who clearly does not have a weapon?” said his father, who is also named Anthony Hill.

“I don’t hate him,” said Mr. Hill’s mother, Carolyn Giummo, referring to Officer Olsen, who has been placed on administrative leave pending the investigation by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. “I’m very disappointed in him.”

Ms. Giummo, 54, raised her son with the help of her parents, Theola and William Baylor, in Moncks Corner, a Lowcountry city of 7,900 where residents take pride in a certain racial harmony. The public high school, from which Mr. Hill graduated in 2006, is racially mixed, and students tend to segregate by areas of interest, not skin color. Over the years, Mr. Hill’s extended family came to include a number of nonblack members.

“I never thought to tell my son, ‘You’re black, you’d better look out,’” said Ms. Giummo, who is African-American.

Armed instead with “Be sensible” — his grandfather’s counsel nearly every time he left the house — Mr. Hill came of age in a world that revolved around school, family, and the weekly rhythms set by the Moncks Hill African Methodist Episcopal Church, where he sang in the youth choir and was captivated, early on, by the power of music.

In high school, he played Danny Zuko in a production of “Grease.” The summer after graduation, his mother said, he worked as an intern with a local law enforcement agency.

He tried his hand at college, but eventually dropped out to enlist, in 2008, in the Air Force. Two years later, Mr. Hill was deployed to Afghanistan. His father said he was responsible for loading ordnance into aircraft in Kandahar Province.

His Atlanta roommate, Kailien Alexander, a 23-year-old college student, said that Mr. Hill told him that he had post-traumatic stress disorder, and that he had seen children killed in Afghanistan.

“It just didn’t sit right with him,” Mr. Alexander said.

After doctors diagnosed PTSD, his mother said, he was “medically retired” from the Air Force. Later, Mr. Hill moved to Atlanta, in hopes of breaking into the music business. He worked as an intern at a recording studio, and also took odd jobs while constructing R&B tracks at home, sometimes recording in his closet with Mr. Alexander’s help.

He was open about his mental illness, even commenting about it on Twitter. The illness, his family members said, seemed to mostly manifest itself in bursts of hourslong phone conversations. But before March 9, no one had seen him fully lose control.

Mr. Alexander said that he and Mr. Hill were poor but happy, and eager to make friends in an apartment complex mostly filled by Latino families. One hot afternoon, Mr. Alexander recalled, the pair spent some of their last money on ice pops for the kids in the neighborhood.

They also closely followed the national conversation about minorities and the police sparked by the shooting in Ferguson. Mr. Alexander said that Mr. Hill was troubled by examples of over-aggressive policing. But on social media, he challenged those who would dismiss all police officers as evil, and those who sought simple definitions of heroes and villains.

“Some of us black folks have to start actually living like #blacklivesmatter but I’ll probably get called a house slave for saying so,” he wrote on March 6.

At the same time, Mr. Hill was struggling with the medication he had been given by the doctors at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Bridget Anderson, 22, Mr. Hill’s girlfriend, said he had stopped taking his medicine about 10 days before he was shot.

On the morning of March 9, Mr. Hill made his final Facebook post: “Where I once saw death i only see life.” But Mr. Alexander was with him that morning, and said that before he left for class, Mr. Hill seemed upbeat.

After the shooting, DeKalb police officials said that Officer Olsen had a Taser with him at the time of the shooting. They also said Officer Olsen had undergone training in dealing with the mentally ill. This week, the department announced that it would increase its training requirements for “critical incidents,” which include encounters with the mentally ill, but Capt. Steven R. Fore said that the change was unrelated to the shooting.

In an interview last week, Mr. Hill’s family blamed the Department of Veterans Affairs for failing to properly treat Mr. Hill, arguing that he should have had better guidance after he learned of his mental illness and retired. Officials said they could not comment on an individual case.

Ms. Giummo said that she did not think her son’s story had much to do with race. “There is a ‘black and white’ issue” in the country, she said, “But our main concern is we want to know what happened. And if he was a black officer, we’d still feel the same way.”

At Mr. Hill’s Sunday afternoon funeral, the P.A. system played Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” an oldie, but Mr. Hill’s favorite.

Sandy W. Drayton, the former pastor at Moncks Corner AME Church, referred to the officer as “the betrayer who misunderstood,” and asked God to forgive him.

Later, Mr. Drayton described death as the door that leads away from this world — away from “the racial stuff,” he said, and “the ethnocentrism” — and into “a new heaven, a new earth, a New Jerusalem.”

Atlanta Police Shooting Victim Tried to Live a Life That Mattered,
NYT, MARCH 24, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/25/us/
atlanta-police-shooting-victim-tried-to-live-a-life-that-mattered.html

A Teenager Is Killed

Near the Scene of a Brawl

Caught on Video in Brooklyn

 

MARCH 21, 2015

The New York Times

By LIAM STACK

A teenager was killed and a baby girl was injured on Saturday in separate shootings in Flatbush, Brooklyn, the police said, one of which happened across the street from a McDonald’s that was the scene of a violent brawl widely seen on social media this month.

The police said they responded to a 911 call reporting a man shot on Flatbush Avenue shortly before 4 p.m. on Saturday. They arrived to find Donel Andrew, 18, lying on the ground with a gunshot wound to the torso.

Emergency medical workers rushed him to Kings County Hospital Center, where he was pronounced dead.

Mr. Andrew was shot across the street from a McDonald’s where a fight between members of a gang known as the Young Savages took place. Video of the brawl spread rapidly on social media and helped law enforcement identify and arrest several of the young women involved in the fight.

Ten minutes earlier and less than a mile away, the police said, a one-year-old baby girl was grazed in the leg by a bullet. The shooting occurred at Foster Avenue and Rugby Road. The child was also transported to Kings County Hospital Center, where she was treated for nonlife-threatening injuries.

No arrests have been made in either case and investigations are ongoing, the police said.

A Teenager Is Killed Near the Scene of a Brawl Caught on Video in Brooklyn,
NYT, MARCH 21, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/22/nyregion/a-teenager-is-killed-near-the-scene-of-a-brawl-caught-on-video-in-brooklyn.html

Assailant Shot

at New Orleans Airport Is Dead,

Officials Say

MARCH 21, 2015

The New York Times

By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

NEW ORLEANS — The machete-wielding man who attacked officers at a security checkpoint at the New Orleans airport on Friday night and was shot by a sheriff’s deputy died on Saturday, law enforcement officials said.

The suspect, Richard White, 63, was declared dead at 4:02 p.m. Saturday, a spokesman for the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office said. Investigators had hoped to question Mr. White to find out what set off his rampage, but he appeared to have died before law enforcement officials were able to speak with him.

At a news conference at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport earlier Saturday, Sheriff Newell Normand of Jefferson Parish described the early findings of the investigation of the episode, which began with Mr. White spraying several Transportation Security Administration officers with wasp spray and then swinging a machete at others. He was then shot at least three times by Lt. Heather Sylve of the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office. Investigators said he was struck on the left side of his body, on his face, chest and thigh.

Carroll Richel, a T.S.A. supervisory officer, was wounded by one of the gunshots but appeared at Saturday’s news conference, showing a pink bandage around her upper arm and saying that she felt fine. No other officers or passengers were seriously wounded in the episode.

“We very much want the opportunity to talk to him,” Sheriff Normand said at the news conference, hours before the news came of Mr. White’s death.

Officials said that Mr. White appeared to have prepared for far wider carnage.

The sheriff said that Mr. White had dropped a shopping bag he was carrying when he began spraying insecticide on the first T.S.A. officer he encountered at the security gate. After arriving at the scene, investigators smelled gas, and they discovered inside the bag six half-pint jars filled with gasoline with cloth wicks stuffed into the tops. A gas lighter was also found in the bag, Sheriff Normand said.

Investigators searching Mr. White’s car, which had been left in front of the terminal, found several smoke bombs as well as oxygen, Freon and acetylene tanks.

The motive for the attack was unclear, Sheriff Normand said. He added that Mr. White’s wife and children had been “very cooperative” and had told the authorities that there was a “mental illness component” to his behavior. However, the sheriff said officials had not learned of any past episodes that might have hinted at an outburst of violence like the one Friday. Mr. White lived in Kenner, La., the New Orleans suburb where the airport is.

The sheriff praised the actions of the officers at the scene Friday night and expressed relief that things had not turned out far worse.

“Sometimes the saying is you’d rather be lucky than good,” he said. “I think we were both last night.”
 

A version of this article appears in print on March 22, 2015, on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: Assailant Shot at Airport in New Orleans Is Dead.

Assailant Shot at New Orleans Airport Is Dead, Officials Say,
NYT, MARCH 21, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/22/us/new-orleans-airport-attacker-had-fire-bombs-officials-say.html

Man, 20, Is Arrested

in the Shooting of 2 Officers in Ferguson

 

MARCH 15, 2015

The New York Times

By MANNY FERNANDEZ

and JOHN ELIGON

FERGUSON, Mo. — A 20-year-old suspect was charged Sunday with shooting two police officers during a protest outside Police Headquarters here Thursday. Law enforcement officials said the man, Jeffrey L. Williams, claimed to have been targeting someone other than the officers and shot them by accident from inside a car.

Mr. Williams was arrested late Saturday and charged with first-degree assault in connection with the shooting, which had ratcheted up tensions between the police and protesters here. With the gunman at large, the officers guarding the police station as demonstrations continued had concerns for their safety, while protesters had criticized police officials for suggesting that the shooting was linked to them.

Discord has been simmering since Aug. 9, when a white police officer, Darren Wilson, fatally shot an unarmed, 18-year-old black man, Michael Brown, in a confrontation in the middle of a street. A grand jury declined to indict Mr. Wilson in November.
 

The arrest seemed to resolve almost none of the tension, and Mr. Williams’s motive was unclear. Prosecutors expressed skepticism at his version of events, but said he had attended the demonstration the evening of the shooting as well as previous rallies. Several protest leaders, however, quickly took to Twitter to deny that Mr. Williams was one of them, or that they had even seen him among the crowd the night of the shooting.

The authorities said Mr. Williams, who was on probation at the time of the shooting for receiving stolen property, admitted his involvement to investigators and acknowledged firing the shots. He told investigators that he had a dispute with some people outside the police station that had nothing to do with the demonstration, officials said.

“It’s possible at this point that he was firing shots at someone other than the police, but struck the police officers,” Robert P. McCulloch, the prosecuting attorney for St. Louis County, said at a news conference Sunday afternoon at the Buzz Westfall Justice Center in Clayton, Mo., the seat of St. Louis County. “He has stated that he may have had a dispute with some other individuals. I’m not sure we completely buy that part of it. But in any event, it’s possible he was firing at some other people.”

Mr. McCulloch added: “We’re not 100 percent sure that there was a dispute. That’s part of the claim right now. It’s possible that there was a dispute. It’s possible that he was targeting police officers. We just have to wait for the investigation to develop.”

By Friday, the investigation had appeared stalled. The break in the case that pointed to Mr. Williams as the primary suspect appeared to come from tips and information provided by members of the public. Investigators recovered a .40-caliber handgun they believed had been used in the shooting. Mr. McCulloch said more arrests were possible.

Ferguson’s mayor, James Knowles III, and City Council members said in a statement that they were grateful to citizens who had provided assistance, and that while they supported peaceful protesting, they would “not allow, nor tolerate, the destructive and violent actions of a few to disrupt our unifying efforts.”

In a statement from Washington, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., whose Justice Department released a scathing report that found widespread misconduct, racial bias and unconstitutional practices by Ferguson’s police department and its municipal courts, praised “the swiftness of this action.”

“This arrest sends a clear message that acts of violence against our law enforcement personnel will never be tolerated,” Mr. Holder said.

At the St. Louis address listed in court documents as Mr. Williams’s residence, no one answered the door of the blue-clapboard house, on a tree-lined street about five miles from the police station. A woman who later entered the house declined to comment. Mr. Williams, who will turn 21 in two weeks, remained in custody; bond was set at $300,000.

DeRay McKesson, who has been participating in and documenting the demonstrations on social media, said that to his knowledge, Mr. Williams was not “a regular member of the protest community in St. Louis.”

Mr. McKesson criticized the way the police handled the investigation, pointing to previous statements made by Chief Jon M. Belmar of the St. Louis County Police Department in which he called the shooting an ambush and said the shooter may have been embedded with the demonstrators. Both of those assertions have been called into question now, Mr. McKesson said.

What Chief Belmar said “was intentionally said to incite and invoke fear,” Mr. McKesson said. “This does not change the momentum of the protesters. This person was not aligned with the protest community and the values within.”

The two officers — one from the county police and the other from the nearby Webster Groves department — were standing shoulder to shoulder outside the police station Thursday shortly after midnight as part of a protective line facing demonstrators across the street. At least three gunshots came from a distance behind the demonstrators, as much as 125 yards away, the authorities said.

Demonstrators had denounced the shooting, but vowed to continue marching and protesting, saying they would not be distracted from seeking justice for Mr. Brown’s killing and for systemic change in Ferguson’s police and court system. Police officials had taken steps after the shooting to reduce the visibility of the officers securing the police station, having them stand behind parked vehicles rather than out in the open. And they had taken a more hands-off approach to the demonstrators, allowing many to occasionally block traffic in front of the police station and declining to arrest those who ignored their orders to move onto the sidewalk.

The two officers, whom the authorities have declined to name, were treated at a hospital and are recuperating at home, according to Chief Belmar. The Webster Groves officer, 32, a seven-year veteran, was shot in the face, the bullet entering under his right eye and becoming lodged behind his ear, officials said. The county officer, 41, a 14-year veteran, was shot in the shoulder, with the bullet coming out of his back.

Manny Fernandez reported from Ferguson, and John Eligon from Kansas City, Mo.

A version of this article appears in print on March 16, 2015, on page A9 of the New York edition with the headline: Suspect, 20, Is Arrested in the Shooting of 2 Police Officers in Ferguson.

Man, 20, Is Arrested in the Shooting of 2 Officers in Ferguson,
NYT, MARCH 15, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/16/us/suspect-arrested-in-shooting-of-2-officers-in-ferguson-police-say.html

Man Killed in Brooklyn Subway Station

by Ex-Correction Officer, Authorities Say

 

MARCH 10, 2015

The New York Times

By ASHLEY SOUTHALL

and J. DAVID GOODMAN

A 69-year-old retired correction officer shot and killed a man inside a Brooklyn subway station during a confrontation at the height of the evening rush on Tuesday, law enforcement officials said.

The shooting happened just before 6:45 p.m. on the mezzanine level of the Borough Hall subway station in Downtown Brooklyn, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority said. The police said the man was shot after an altercation on a train on the Nos. 4 and 5 line.

After a preliminary investigation, the police said the retired officer, who was armed with a 9-millimeter handgun in a holster, encountered two men in their 20s while riding a southbound train. The older man stepped between the men, friends who were having a conversation, the police said, at which point an argument ensued. The argument turned physical on the train, the police said, and one of the younger men spit on the retired officer.

The three men separated, and the train pulled into the Borough Hall station shortly after 6:30 p.m., the police said.

But on a mezzanine level of the station, the police said, the men encountered one another again and an argument again escalated into a physical confrontation. At one point, one of the men grabbed the retired officer from behind, the police said, and the older man pulled the gun from its holster.

At least one shot went off, the police said, striking one of the younger men in the chest. He was taken to Brooklyn Hospital Center, where he was pronounced dead. The 69-year-old man was taken in police custody to Long Island College Hospital for treatment. The other younger man, who the police say is 29, was taken to a nearby police station for questioning.

The police had not released the names of the three men Tuesday night, and no charges had been filed.

Norman Seabrook, the president of the New York City Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association, confirmed that the man who fired the gun was a former Correction Department officer and cautioned the public not to rush to a conclusion.

“I believe that we should wait until all circumstances are in before rushing to judgment,” Mr. Seabrook said.

Mr. Seabrook said there was a confrontation and the former officer was “forced to use his weapon.”

A bystander filmed part of the confrontation on a cellphone, and it was shown Tuesday night on WCBS. The video shows a taller, older man approaching a younger man and shoving him. The two briefly struggle before a gunshot is heard. It was not clear what happened right before or after the video was taken.

Witnesses described a chaotic scene at the station. After the shooting, trains briefly bypassed the station because of the police investigation, the transportation agency said on Twitter.

Nick Sonderup, 38, a creative director for an advertising firm in Manhattan, said he was on his way to meet a friend for dinner in Brooklyn Heights when he stopped at the station to buy an umbrella.

“He was giving me my change,” he said of the vendor. “I opened my umbrella and then I heard the shots.”

Mr. Sonderup said he heard two or three shots. He said he paused to consider what he had heard, then “ran like hell.”
 

Michael Schwirtz and John Surico contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on March 11, 2015, on page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: Retired Correction Officer Kills Man In Subway Confrontation, Police Say.

Man Killed in Brooklyn Subway Station by Ex-Correction Officer, Authorities Say, NYT,
MARCH 10, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/11/nyregion/man-shot-in-brooklyn-subway-station.html

Man Shot Dead by Police

After Scuffle in Wisconsin

MARCH 7, 2015

The New York Times

By ASHLEY SOUTHALL

A 19-year-old Wisconsin man was shot and killed Friday by a police officer during a scuffle inside an apartment in Madison, police officials said. The shooting prompted protests that continued on Saturday and led officials to call for restraint while the shooting is investigated.

The shooting occurred Friday evening after the police received calls for a man who had committed battery and was jumping in and out of traffic, Michael C. Koval, the Madison chief of police, said. A police officer followed the man to an apartment and forced his way in after hearing a disturbance inside, the chief said. The man then assaulted the officer, who shot the man, according to Chief Koval, who spoke at a news conference in Madison Friday evening.

The officer immediately began rendering first aid, but the man died at a hospital, Chief Koval said. The authorities did not immediately release his name, but his mother identified him as Tony Robinson, an African-American who graduated from high school in 2014.

“My son has never been a violent person,” Andrea Irwin, who identified herself as Mr. Robinson’s mother, told WKOW, a Madison television station. “And to die in such a violent, violent way, it baffles me.”

Chief Koval said he did not know if the man had been armed. Initial findings “did not reflect a gun or anything of that nature would have been used by the subject,” he said.

The police did not identify the officer involved in the shooting or release any details about the officer’s time on the force. Chief Koval later said the officer had suffered minor injuries from the altercation, in which he was struck in the head and knocked down.

Chief Koval said the officer had fired more than one shot, but he did not say how many times the man had been wounded.

The shooting on Friday was the third fatal shooting involving a Madison police officer since a law was adopted in April requiring police shootings to be investigated by an outside agency, according to The Wisconsin State Journal.

It happened amid a public debate over how the police use lethal force in encounters with unarmed civilians, especially African-Americans, after several highly publicized fatal police shootings. The refrain “Black Lives Matter” became the rallying cry of nationwide protests over the deaths of Eric Garner in Staten Island and Michael Brown of Ferguson, Mo., among others.

On Friday night, demonstrators gathered at the scene around a police blockade, drumming and chanting, “Black lives matter.” By Saturday morning, the crowd had dispersed, with some demonstrators moving to a downtown building that houses the Madison Police Department’s Central District. The local Young, Gifted and Black Coalition was planning a demonstration there on Saturday, according to the group’s Facebook page.

Chief Koval said it was “absolutely appropriate” for the protesters to express their feelings, but called for restraint. The shooting was being investigated by the Division of Criminal Investigation, an arm of the State Department of Justice that investigates police shootings.

Man Shot Dead by Police After Scuffle in Wisconsin, NYT,
MAR. 7, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/us/man-shot-dead-by-police-after-scuffle-in-wisconsin.html

Bullets Over Washington

MARCH 6, 2015

The New Yok Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist

Joe Nocera

In 1986, Congress passed, and Ronald Reagan signed into law, the Law Enforcement Officers Protection Act. It directed the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to ban certain types of ammunition that could pierce the body armor worn by police officers. The National Rifle Association had originally opposed the legislation — which, in fact, was one of a series of events that caused a split between the N.R.A. and most police associations — but the logic behind it was irrefutable.

“Certain forms of ammunition have no legitimate sporting, recreational or self-defense use and thus should be prohibited,” Reagan said during the signing ceremony. The House of Representatives passed the measure by a vote of 400 to 21.

When the A.T.F. wrote the regulations to outlaw “cop-killer bullets,” as they were known, the agency made an important distinction between two kinds of armor-penetrating bullets. Those that were used primarily for “sporting purposes” were still allowed, but those that could be used in handguns were banned. As a practical matter, this meant that the agency was permitting rifle ammunition on the theory that rifles represented sporting weapons. But criminals are likely to use handguns, which they can better hide on their person. Although some armor-piercing bullets were ultimately banned, the regulations were largely uncontroversial.

My, how things have changed.

One thing that has changed is the handguns. Seven or eight years ago, makers of assault rifles like the popular AR-15 began making handgun versions of these powerful weapons. These handguns use the same bullets as the assault rifles, including some that are armor-piercing. In addition, since 2011, the A.T.F. has received numerous requests from manufacturers to “exempt” ammunition they want to sell — in effect, categorizing armor-piercing handgun bullets as being primarily for sporting purposes.

Quite sensibly, the A.T.F. realized it needed to take another look at the issue of whether certain armor-piercing bullets that had long been associated with rifles were now more problematic because they could be used in these new, more lethal handguns. Agency employees met with industry representatives and law enforcement officials. And last month, the A.T.F. published a document outlining a new framework for deciding whether certain bullets that had been exempt should now be banned. One bullet in particular, widely used by AR-15 owners and described by the A.T.F. as “5.56-mm projectiles in SS109 and M855 cartridges,” would be banned under the new framework. Why? Because if used in handguns, they could kill cops.

Which, of course, leads to the second thing that has changed. Congress no longer passes bills opposed by the N.R.A., even if the intent is to save the lives of police officers. Indeed, in the Obama era, the right-wing echo chamber is quick to label even an effort as benign — and as sane — as the A.T.F.’s proposed framework as yet another example of the president abusing his authority.

The N.R.A. quickly labeled Obama a “dictator.” Pro-gun bloggers screamed about this latest assault on their Second Amendment rights. “[Obama] wants to take guns out of everybody’s hands, and if he can’t do that, he’s gonna take the bullets,” said Mr. Echo Chamber himself, Rush Limbaugh.

And Congress? This week, 239 House members — more than half of the House of Representatives — sent a letter to B. Todd Jones, the director of the A.T.F., telling him, in effect, to buzz off. (“The effects of these restrictive interpretations are untenable.”) Jones will soon be getting a similar letter from the Senate side. It is hard to imagine that the A.T.F., already under siege, thanks to its botched Operation Fast and Furious, will be able to withstand this much congressional pressure.

On Friday morning, I spoke to one of the more thoughtful House conservatives, Scott Rigell of Virginia, who had signed on to the letter. I told him I couldn’t understand why there was such a furor over armor-piercing bullets that could kill police officers. “When I first heard about this,” he said, “I was truly stunned.” He had three objections. First, the ammunition in question is widely available and has never been a problem for the police. Second, he agreed with those who said that the administration was trying to impose its “deeply held views” on the country by fiat. And third, he felt that this could be the proverbial slippery slope. “If you conclude that this round is armor-piercing, then you have opened the dam completely,” he said.

On Friday afternoon, however, I spoke to J. Thomas Manger, the chief of the Montgomery County, Md., police department, and the president of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which supports the A.T.F. effort. “Congress has asked them to make these kinds of decisions, and Congress should heed their recommendation,” he said.

When I mentioned that armor-piercing ammunition used to be called cop-killer bullets, he quickly corrected me.

“They’re still called cop-killing bullets,” Manger said. “I think every cop understands that.”
 

A version of this op-ed appears in print on March 7, 2015, on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: Bullets Over Washington.

Bullets Over Washington, NYT,
MAR. 6, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/07/opinion/joe-nocera-bullets-over-washington.html

At a Brooklyn Cherry Factory,

a Suicide and an Illicit Discovery

 

FEB. 25, 2015

The New York Times

By VIVIAN YEE

There was no sign on the former brick factory on the treeless block in Red Hook, Brooklyn, where Arthur Mondella worked. No name on the door. Nothing — other than the bright-red liquid trickling onto the sidewalk and into the gutter, and the thick scent of syrup on a summer’s day — to announce the presence of one of the country’s largest suppliers of maraschino cherries.

“Look at this building,” said Brian Connell, 68, who has lived next door to Dell’s Maraschino Cherries for nearly 20 years. “It’s totally anonymous. And then, here you see this Porsche Carrera being backed out. I say to myself, ‘The cherry business is profitable! Who knew?’ ”

Mr. Mondella’s company, which his grandfather and father founded in 1948, was indeed large and, to all appearances, profitable. But the Dikeman Street plant had some trappings the neighbors found curious. The fleet of vehicles Mr. Mondella kept in the garage, for instance, including the Porsche, a Rolls-Royce, a Harley-Davidson and a Mercedes — all pure white. The security cameras bristling from the building’s corners. The razor wire barricading its roof.

On Tuesday, Mr. Mondella, 57, shot and killed himself in his office bathroom just as city investigators were discovering that a marijuana farm lay beneath the factory. On Wednesday, investigators were still sorting through what was legal and what was not at the plant. According to one law enforcement official, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to comment on a continuing investigation, it appeared that Mr. Mondella’s employees had not known about his other operations.

A truck was dispatched to collect material, which included nearly $200,000 in cash, the official said. It was not clear by Wednesday evening how the marijuana came to be grown at the factory or how it was distributed.

The factory’s residential and commercial neighbors, many of whom said they had had no idea a cherry factory was nearby, found little to explain Mr. Mondella’s sideline business, or why he would take such an extreme step over a crime that struck many as fairly minor in a borough where the district attorney has stopped prosecuting most low-level marijuana offenses. The most controversy the factory had attracted before this came several years ago, when local bees began turning red after feasting on the cherry liquid.

“In this neighborhood it’s hard to keep a secret — except for this one,” said Pat Murano, 41, who has lived next door to the factory since 2005, occasionally complaining about the noise coming from Dell’s but rarely seeing Mr. Mondella himself.

In hindsight, the security cameras, wire and lights Mr. Mondella installed after a break-in about eight years ago seemed strange, Mr. Murano said, especially after investigators told neighbors that a large sum of money had been taken. “I didn’t think he was protecting the Dye No. 7 or his equipment,” he said.

Yet the factory seemed nothing if not successful. Mr. Mondella had expanded the plant multiple times, neighbors said, and he had bought warehouses and satellite facilities on other streets nearby. Hurricane Sandy devastated much of the rest of the waterfront neighborhood, but left the Dell’s factory intact.

He would often call Frank Manzione, a local real estate broker whom he had known since the 1990s and who sold Dell’s another property on Dikeman Street, to ask about acquiring other buildings. Mr. Mondella — described as mellow yet direct, friendly and hardworking — was one of the clients Mr. Manzione said he most enjoyed doing business with.

The last time they spoke, in December, Mr. Mondella said business was good — so good that he needed an additional 4,000 to 6,000 square feet of space.

“The man was a stand-up gentleman,” Mr. Manzione said. “He was a good family man, and a very, very good individual. I tell you, I’m at a loss. When I heard about this yesterday, I say, ‘Something’s wrong here.’ I’m flabbergasted by this whole situation.”

Beyond Mr. Manzione and a few other local business owners, Mr. Mondella seemed to keep to himself.

He did not live in the neighborhood. He bypassed the meetings and community events many local residents organized after the hurricane in 2012.

“Until yesterday, I had no idea there was a big cherry place,” said Susan Saunders, an employee at the New York Printing & Graphics shop opposite Fairway Market. “After Sandy, we went to all these meetings and got to know everybody, but not him.”

A woman who answered the phone at Mr. Mondella’s home on Wednesday said his family did not want to talk to reporters.

Mr. Mondella told Crain’s New York in January that the business was profitable, with $20 million in revenue a year and clients including T.G.I. Friday’s and Checkers.

On Tuesday, investigators from the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation and the city’s Department of Environmental Protection arrived at the plant to search for evidence relating to accusations that Dell’s had been dumping toxic substances into Red Hook’s water supply.

The investigators’ search warrant was for files, nothing more — but when they searched Mr. Mondella’s office, something else caught their attention.

“They saw this shelving unit in his office and they also smelled the whiff of marijuana,” the law enforcement official said. “They said, ‘What’s behind here?’ ”

As they prepared to return with another search warrant, Mr. Mondella excused himself to use the bathroom, where he stayed for a long time. When investigators tried to coax him out, he asked them to get his sister.

“Take care of my kids,” he said. Then the gun went off.
 

Al Baker contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on February 26, 2015, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: At a Factory, a Suicide and an Illicit Discovery.

At a Brooklyn Cherry Factory, a Suicide and an Illicit Discovery, NYT,
FEB. 25, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/26/nyregion/marijuana-farm-found-at-a-cherry-business-in-brooklyn.html

Retired White Plains Police Officer

Said to Kill 2 Daughters and Himself

 

FEB. 21, 2015

The New York Times

By KENNETH ROSEN

A retired police officer in White Plains shot and killed two of his children on Saturday before committing suicide, according to a local newspaper.

Glen Hochman, 52, and two of his daughters, Alissa, 17, and Deanna, 13, were found at their Adelphi Avenue home early Saturday, according to the newspaper, The Journal News.

“The department is shocked and horrified by the news of this unfathomable tragedy,” David Chong, the commissioner of the White Plains Department of Public Safety, said in a statement to the newspaper.

Mr. Hochman was a police officer for the city of White Plains for 22 years, according to the statement.

In a statement posted on the Harrison Central School District’s website, Louis N. Wool, the superintendent of schools, called the shooting an “incomprehensible tragedy.”

In May 2014, Mr. Hochman was a recipient, along with other officers, of the Lifesaving Award through the public safety department.

The killings were first reported by News 12 in Westchester County.

Retired White Plains Police Officer Said to Kill 2 Daughters and Himself, NYT,
FEB. 21, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/nyregion/a-retired-police-officer-in-white-plains-kills-2-daughters-and-himself-reports-say.html

New York City’s

Streak of Days Without a Killing

Ends at 12

 

FEB. 15, 2015

The New York Times

By J. DAVID GOODMAN

Shot in the head as he walked home from the gym with a friend on Friday, Eric Roman succumbed to his wounds a day later.

His killing, officially recorded on Saturday, might have escaped wide notice had it not ended a streak of 12 days without a homicide in New York City, believed by police officials to be the longest such run since at least the 1990s.

Toward the end of last week, top police officials, including Commissioner William J. Bratton, began buzzing about the absence of killings. “We don’t want to jinx it,” Mr. Bratton said in a television interview on Friday. Some dared to imagine a month without a killing before immediately shrugging it off as impossible.

As criminologists and the police have long known, crime has a tendency to cluster and spike, and violence almost always ebbs in the winter. The city’s last streak of at least 10 days without a homicide also occurred in a February — as did other similar stretches — when temperatures drop.

With the temperature expected to reach a record low on Monday, this year’s streak might have lasted well into the middle of the week, one police official said ruefully on Sunday, had it not been for Mr. Roman’s killing and another death in Queens on Saturday. In that case, which has yet to be ruled a homicide, a 56-year-old man was found dead in his basement with head trauma.

Detectives were questioning a man who had credit cards belonging to the victim, whose name had yet to be officially released. The police said the man, who has no listed address, admitted to knowing the victim from doing odd jobs around the victim’s home, just east of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. He was taken into custody at a nearby gas station where he was offering to pump gas for drivers, to spare them the cold, in exchange for a few dollars.

The police were waiting on a ruling by the city medical examiner’s office on whether it was a homicide.

In the case of Mr. Roman, the confrontation that led to his death began just before noon on Friday. He and a friend were approached by two men on the sidewalk just outside Mr. Roman’s home on 89th Street in Woodhaven, according to the police.

One of the men pistol-whipped the friend, who then fled, the police said. The friend heard gunfire and returned to find Mr. Roman, 28, wounded on the steps of his home and the two men speeding off in a black Mercedes sedan, the police said.

Mr. Roman, struck in the hand, leg and head, died on Saturday at Jamaica Hospital Medical Center in Queens. No arrests have been made.

The last homicide before that was on Feb. 1, when two people were killed in separate shootings in the Bronx and Harlem.

Whatever caused the 12-day streak — luck, weather, coincidence — it bucked for a time the trend of rising shootings in the city. Through Saturday, 136 people had been shot in 117 shootings, the police said, compared with 110 victims in 100 shootings through the same period in 2014.

A version of this article appears in print on February 16, 2015, on page A15 of the New York edition with the headline: Streak Without a Killing Ends at 12 Days.

New York City’s Streak of Days Without a Killing Ends at 12,
FEB 15, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/16/nyregion/
new-york-city-murderless-streak-ends-at-12-days.html

Police Killing of Man Who Threw Rocks

Is Reviewed in Washington State

 

FEB. 12, 2015

The New York Times

By ASHLEY SOUTHALL

Investigators in Washington State were reviewing video taken with a cellphone that appears to show the fatal police shooting of a man who threw rocks at police officers before running across a crowded intersection, law enforcement officials said.

The man, Antonio Zambrano-Montes, 35, died during his confrontation on Tuesday with police officers in Pasco, who were responding to a call about a man throwing rocks at cars in a grocery store parking lot, the police said. The 22-second video, taken by a motorist, was uploaded to YouTube on Wednesday. The police said investigators were reviewing the video but could not confirm its authenticity.

At a news conference on Wednesday, Police Chief Bob Metzger of Pasco said it was unclear whether Mr. Zambrano-Montes had been armed with anything other than rocks. The independent Tri-City Special Investigations Unit is handling the investigation, he said.

In accordance with department policy, three officers who were involved in the shooting were placed on paid administrative leave during the investigation, Chief Metzger said. He identified them as Ryan Flanagan, Adam Wright and Adrian Alaniz.

The video appears to show Mr. Zambrano-Montes hurling a rock at officers over a police car stopped in the middle of the intersection, and an officer firing what appears to be a Taser in response. When Mr. Zambrano-Montes runs across the intersection, three officers pursue him. After a short chase, Mr. Zambrano-Montes stops and appears to pivot toward the officers, who then fire repeatedly as he falls to the ground. All of the officers had their guns raised, but it was unclear if all of them had fired at Mr. Zambrano-Montes or how many times he had been struck.

The police said the officers had shot at Mr. Zambrano-Montes after milder measures, including the officers’ commands to surrender and firing a Taser, failed to bring him under control. Two officers were struck by rocks, including one the size of a softball, according to the police account.

Members of the Zambrano-Montes family told The Tri-City Herald that he was a Mexican-born orchard worker who was kind and worked hard. They said they were not aware of any current mental health issues. “We just want justice,” said Erica Salazar, whom the newspaper identified as a relative. “It could have been avoided.”

Pasco is a city of 68,000 residents about 215 miles southeast of Seattle. Hispanics make up more than half the population, according to census estimates. The episode was the fourth fatal police shooting involving Pasco police officers since July, according to The Herald.

The shooting, which unfolded around 5 p.m., raised questions of whether Mr. Zambrano-Montes had posed a threat to the officers and why they had fired at the crowded intersection. Kathleen Taylor, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement that the shooting was “disturbing.”

“Fleeing from police and not following an officer’s command should not be sufficient for a person to get shot,” she said. Mr. Zambrano-Montes had been arrested for assaulting a police officer in January 2014. The police said he had thrown objects at officers and tried to grab an officer’s pistol. He pleaded guilty in June, according to court records.
 

A version of this article appears in print on February 13, 2015, on page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Police Killing Is Reviewed in a City in Washington.

Police Killing of Man Who Threw Rocks Is Reviewed in Washington State,
FEB 12, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/13/us/police-killing-of-man-who-threw-rocks-is-reviewed-in-pasco-washington.html

3 People Are Shot

at Pittsburgh-Area Mall

FEB. 7, 2015, 11:43

P.M. E.S.T.

The New York Times

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

MONROEVILLE, Pa. — Gunfire erupted at a Pittsburgh-area shopping center on Saturday evening, wounding three people, two critically, in a shooting that targeted one of the victims, police said. The mall and a hospital's emergency room were placed on lockdown as police searched for the suspect.

The shootings occurred inside the Macy's at the Monroeville Mall at about 7:30 p.m., sending shoppers running. Police went store to store to evacuate the mall, which closed for the night.

Chief Douglas Cole said two men and a woman were shot, including a man who was targeted and was struck at least once. The other two victims were bystanders caught in the line of fire, he said.

Police were looking at the mall's surveillance video as part of their investigation.

Cole said police identified a suspect, whom he described as a black male in his late teens who is between 5-foot-7 and 5-foot-9 inches tall and was wearing dark clothing. No arrests have been made.

The three victims were taken to Forbes Hospital with gunshot wounds, hospital spokesman Jesse Miller said. One was in stable condition, he said. Cole said the other two suffered life-threatening injuries.

Detectives told the hospital to lock down its emergency room until they were certain the shooter had been captured, Miller said.

Pennsylvania native and ex-NFL quarterback Terrelle Pryor tweeted that he was at the mall, a short drive east of Pittsburgh.

"Damn was just in monroeville mall and just saw 2 ppl get shot," he tweeted. "They are letting guns go in there."

Shoppers described chaos as shots rang out.

"All of the sudden we heard people screaming," Athena Coffey of Churchill told KDKA-TV, "and the next thing you see is a bunch of people, teenagers, scared to death, just exodus en masse in a way you could not believe. I grabbed my children, husband, we started screaming 'go, go, go!'"

Yvette Jackson of North Braddock was attending a birthday party at Giggles and Smiles, a fitness and fun center for children.

"We saw a lot of running, a lot of chaos," she told the Pittsburgh-Tribune Review. She said she and other patrons were locked in the store for about 45 minutes until police came and let them out.

In late December, hundreds of teenagers gathered at the mall and several fights broke out. The fights caused local officials and mall administration to agree on a plan to increase security there.

Four on-duty police officers have been stationed in the mall on Friday and Saturday evenings at the mall's request, Monroeville Mayor Gregory Erosenko said.

"I would have thought that having four officers there would have deterred any incident like we saw (Saturday)," he told the newspaper.

Weapons are banned at the mall, whose code of conduct specifically prohibits "Carrying or displaying weapons of any kind except those carried by certified law enforcement officers in the performance of their duties."

The mall, which is owned and managed by CBL & Associates Properties Inc., of Chattanooga, Tennessee, has 1.1 million square feet of shopping space. It says on its website it features more than 125 stores and eateries, anchored by JCPenney, Macy's and Barnes & Noble.

No one answered the phone at CBL offices after business hours Saturday. A mall security officer reached by telephone said he couldn't talk.

3 People Are Shot at Pittsburgh-Area Mall,
FEB 7, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/02/07/us/ap-us-pennsylvania-mall-shooting.html

5 Dead, Including Gunman,

in Georgia Shooting

 

FEB. 7, 2015

9:49 P.M. E.S.T.

The New York Times

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

DOUGLASVILLE, Ga. — A man shot six people Saturday afternoon, killing four of them, including his ex-wife and several children before turning the gun on himself on a quiet, suburban street outside Atlanta, police and neighbors said.

Horrified neighbors called 911 and tended to the severely injured victims as best they could before rescuers arrived.

The shooting happened around 3 p.m. in a subdivision about 20 miles west of Atlanta, Douglas County Sheriff's Lt. Glenn Daniel said.

The shooter, whose name was not immediately released, appeared to have targeted his ex-wife and her household, including several children who tried to flee, Daniel said. Authorities did not release the names of the victims because they were still trying to contact the next of kin Saturday. Investigators believe the gunman killed himself at the end of the shooting spree.

Investigators were still trying to determine the shooter's motive and piece together what happened.

"I've been in law enforcement out here 20 years and this is the worst I've ever seen," Daniel said. He did not know when the couple divorced or if they had prior contact with police.

Teresa Carter, 59, said she heard the gunfire from inside her home but did not see what happened. Police said victims were shot inside and outside the home.

Carter said she often saw the children playing in the driveway and around the neighborhood. They enjoyed petting her dog.

"I heard shots, and I heard the girl scream," Carter said. "And then I heard four more shots."

Brandon Hallman was working on a car a few houses down when the shooting started.

"I heard a couple quick shots, you know, back to back to back. Went out there and, you know, looked and it was already over," Hallman said. "We just grabbed some towels and kind of went down there to try and help before the paramedics got here."

Another neighbor, Angela Ansah, struggled to explain to her own children what happened to their slain friends a few houses down. Ansah said some of the children targeted Saturday often came over to her house to play with her own children.

"These are children I see every day, every blessed day," Ansah said.

___

Associated Press photographer David Goldman contributed to this report. Follow Ray Henry on Twitter: http://twitter.com/rhenryAP.

5 Dead, Including Gunman, in Georgia Shooting,
FEB 7, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/02/07/us/ap-us-multiple-shot-georgia.html

To Stop Violence, Start at Home

 

FEB. 3, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributors

By PAMELA SHIFMAN

and SALAMISHAH TILLET

THE pattern is striking. Men who are eventually arrested for violent acts often began with attacks against their girlfriends and wives. In many cases, the charges of domestic violence were not taken seriously or were dismissed.

Before Tamerlan Tsarnaev was suspected of carrying out the bombing of the Boston Marathon, he was arrested for beating his girlfriend. When Man Haron Monis held 17 people hostage at a Lindt Chocolate cafe in Sydney, he had already been charged as an accessory to the murder of his ex-wife. Before George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin to death in Florida, his ex-girlfriend accused him of physically assaulting her. He faced no charges, but has been arrested twice for alleged domestic violence since 2013.

A recent study found that more than half of the 110 mass shootings in the United States between January 2009 and July 2014 included the murder of a current or former spouse, an intimate partner or a family member. Everytown for Gun Safety, the group that released the study, found a “noteworthy connection between mass-shooting incidents and domestic or family violence.”

This connection is not limited to mass shootings. An analysis of the criminal justice history of hundreds of thousands of offenders in Washington State suggests that a felony domestic violence conviction is the single greatest predictor of future violent crime among men.

With so much at stake, responding to violence against women should be a top priority for everyone. Research tells us that violence is a learned behavior.

Boys who grow up in homes with abuse and domestic violence are nearly four times more likely to perpetrate domestic violence than those who grow up in homes without it. Because violence in the home tends to be a child’s first experience of it and is often defended as either inevitable or trivial, it becomes the root and justifier of all violence.

Men who commit violence rehearse and perfect it against their families first. Women and children are target practice, and the home is the training ground for these men’s later actions.

By intervening early and stopping violence in the home, we ensure the safety of the women and children who are the first victims. We can also take steps to make it harder for perpetrators to go on to commit additional crimes, whether inside or outside the home. We could, for instance, decide that anyone who committed domestic violence could not buy or own a gun. Yet in 35 states, those convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence crimes and those subject to restraining orders can buy and carry guns. Closing these and other gaps in federal and state laws on domestic violence will save women’s lives, and by extension, many more.

And yet keeping guns out of the hands of domestic violence perpetrators is only a small part of the solution. Preventing assaults at home from happening in the first place is the key to ensuring the safety of our communities and the security of our nation.

And while some consider that problem simply too big to tackle, the truth is that we know where to look for solutions. In their landmark study published in the American Political Science Review in 2012, Mala Htun and S. Laurel Weldon looked at 70 countries over four decades to examine the most effective way to reduce violence against women. They found that the mobilization of strong, independent feminist movements was a more important force in reducing violence against women than the economic wealth of a nation, the representation of women in government or the presence of progressive political parties. Strong and thriving feminist movements help to shape public and government agendas and create the political will to address violence against women.

As activists, we see this every day. The hundreds of feminist organizations that work on this issue around this country are the best chance we have of ending the epidemic of private violence, and therefore the epidemic of public violence.

There are many small grass-roots groups that go after private and public violence at their common root. Among them are A Long Walk Home (founded by one of us), which uses art to empower young people to end violence against girls and women; A Call to Men, which mobilizes men to stand up to violence by other boys and men; and Tewa Women United, which unites indigenous women to heal and transform their communities.

Safe and democratic families are the key to ensuring safe and democratic communities. Until women are safe in the home, none of us will be safe outside the home.

Pamela Shifman is the executive director of the NoVo Foundation. Salamishah Tillet is an associate professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and a co-founder of A Long Walk Home.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on February 3, 2015, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: To Stop Violence, Start at Home.

To Stop Violence, Start at Home,
NYT, FEB 3, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/03/opinion/to-stop-violence-start-at-home.html

1 Killed and 4 Wounded as Gunman Flees

 

FEB. 2, 2015

The New York Times

By ASHLEY SOUTHALL

One person was killed and four others were wounded in a shooting Sunday night near City College, the police said.

The shooting took place around 11:15 p.m. in front of Wally’s Deli on Broadway near the corner of 135th Street. A person approached a group of people standing in front of the store and shot one man in the head, killing him instantly, the police said. The suspect began running away, but then turned around and fired more shots, striking four bystanders as they fled in the opposite direction, according to the police.

The police said officials had not identified the victim early Monday morning.

The bystanders were taken to hospitals with injuries that were not life-threatening, the police said. Two men were taken to Harlem Hospital: a 24-year-old man who was shot in his right arm and ankle, and a 22-year-old man who was shot in the back and the leg, according to officials. Two 21-year-old women with graze wounds were taken to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital.

Pablo Perez, the overnight attendant at 3357 Laundry, a few doors up Broadway from the deli, said he had just shown up for work when gunfire erupted at 11:15 p.m. He said he heard about 10 shots fired in rapid succession, and that he and customers in the store ducked and ran to a back room, from where he called the police.

When the shooting stopped, Mr. Perez said, someone screamed that there was a body in front of the laundromat. When he went to look, he saw that a man had been shot in the leg and was bleeding from the stomach, but that the man was conscious, Mr. Perez said.He said a woman emerged from a taxi, took off the man's shirt, pulled down his pants, and applied pressure to his wounds to slow the bleeding.

Another man was lying motionless in front of Wally’s Deli at 3345 Broadway. The man was not moving and there was blood everywhere, Mr. Perez said.

“I’ve never seen blood like that or heard shots like that,” he said.

On Sunday night, the police had roped off sections of Broadway between 135th Street and 137th Street as investigators canvassed the area looking for evidence.

There were no arrests early Monday morning, the police said.

Mr. Perez said the police were looking at surveillance video from security cameras at the laundromat that face the street.

He added that he has worked at the laundromat for two years and lived in the neighborhood for nine years. He said he was surprised by the violence.

“In the past, where I used to live, we heard gunshots all night and we couldn’t sleep,” he said. “But never here.”

Sandra E. Garcia contributed reporting.

1 Killed and 4 Wounded as Gunman Flees,
NYT, JAN 2, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/03/nyregion/fatal-shooting-near-city-college.html

Father Accused of Killing 3 in Queens

Is Found Dead, Police Say

JAN. 24, 2015

By BENJAMIN MUELLER

and JOHN SURICO

A 34-year-old man shot his two daughters, their mother and their grandmother in the head in their Queens home early Saturday morning and then fled to a desolate area about six miles away, where he fatally shot himself, the authorities said.

Kayla Walker, 7, was pronounced dead at the scene, as were her mother, Shantai Hale, 31, and her maternal grandmother, Viola Warren, 62. The man’s 12-year-old daughter, Christina Walker, was taken to Long Island Jewish Medical Center, where she was in critical but stable condition, the police said.

The man, Jonathon Walker, moved between the upstairs bedrooms in the two-family home as he shot each of the four victims with a .45-caliber gun, the police said. Mr. Walker then got into a silver GMC Acadia and drove to a remote area on Lefferts Boulevard, just south of the Belt Parkway in Queens, where he shot himself in the vehicle, the police said.

Robert K. Boyce, the chief of detectives for the New York Police Department, said at a briefing that Mr. Walker called a brother in Las Vegas after the shooting and told him: “What I did, I cannot come back from.”

All five people lived together in the home, which is in the Brookville neighborhood of Queens, near Kennedy Airport. The police said Mr. Walker was not married to Ms. Hale.

Christina called 911 at 5:40 a.m. to report that her sister, her mother and her grandmother had been shot, the police said. She was still conscious when the officers arrived.

Wendell Warren, 53, whose oldest sister is Viola, said he got a phone call from the police early Saturday morning. To Mr. Warren, a construction worker from Brooklyn, the news came as a shock.

Mr. Warren said Mr. Walker had always been a great father. “There were no problems whatsoever,” he said outside of the two-family house. “We will be baffled for years to come.”

Other relatives arrived at the scene throughout the cold morning, sobbing in Mr. Warren’s arms in front of the caution tape before entering the house.

Glen Roy Hibbert, 49, who lives two houses from the Walker family, said he did not understand the killings. He would often see Mr. Walker outside with his daughters, and would sometimes wave to him. Mr. Hibbert even invited him to a barbecue.

“His life seemed fine,” he said. “He always seemed happy.”

Mark Kippins, 13, a neighbor, said he used to ride his bicycle alongside Christina and Kayla as their families mingled on the sidewalk.

“She was a cool person,” he said of Christina, speaking by phone on Saturday.

John Surico contributed reporting.

Father Accused of Killing 3 in Queens
Is Found Dead, Police Say, JAN. 24, 2015
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/25/nyregion/3-are-killed-including-7-year-old-girl-in-queens-home.html

In Tamir Rice Case,

Many Errors by Cleveland Police,

Then a Fatal One

 

JAN. 22, 2015

The New York Times

By SHAILA DEWAN

and RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

CLEVELAND — It began with a swap: one boy’s cellphone for another’s replica of a Colt pistol.

One of the boys went to play in a nearby park, striking poses with the lifelike, airsoft-style gun, which fired plastic pellets. He threw a snowball, settled down at a picnic table and flopped his head onto his arms in a perfect assertion of preteen ennui, a grainy security video shows.

Then, with the gun tucked away, he walked to the edge of the gazebo. He might have been wandering aimlessly, or he might have been attracted by the sight of a squad car barreling across the lawn.

Seconds later, the boy lay dying from a police officer’s bullet. “Shots fired, male down,” one of the officers in the car called across his radio. “Black male, maybe 20, black revolver, black handgun by him. Send E.M.S. this way, and a roadblock.”

But the boy, Tamir Rice, was only 12. Now, with the county sheriff’s office reviewing the shooting, interviews and recently released video and police records show how a series of miscommunications, tactical errors and institutional failures by the Cleveland police cascaded into one irreversible mistake.

And in death last November, Tamir joined Michael Brown, a teenager fatally shot by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner, a Staten Island man who died after being placed in a chokehold by an officer, as touchstones for protests of police violence against unarmed black people across the nation. Their names were chanted by demonstrators again on Monday in Martin Luther King Jr. Day marches.

Because of multiple layers in Cleveland’s 911 system, crucial information from the initial call about “a guy in here with a pistol” was never relayed to the responding police officers, including the caller’s caveats that the gun was “probably fake” and that the wielder was “probably a juvenile.”

What the officers, Frank Garmback and his rookie partner, Tim Loehmann, did hear from a dispatcher was, “We have a Code 1,” the department’s highest level of urgency.

When the officers raced into action, they took a shortcut that pointed their squad car straight into the park, pulling up so close to Tamir that it made it difficult to take cover, or to use verbal persuasion or other tactics suggested by the department’s use-of-force policy.

Within two seconds of the car’s arrival, Officer Loehmann shot Tamir in the abdomen from point-blank range, raising doubts that he could have warned the boy three times to raise his hands, as the police later claimed.

And when Tamir’s 14-year-old sister came running up minutes later, the officers, who are white, tackled her to the ground and put her in handcuffs, intensifying later public outrage about the boy’s death. When his distraught mother arrived, the officers also threatened to arrest her unless she calmed down, the mother, Samaria Rice, said.

Officers Garmback and Loehmann did not check Tamir’s vital signs or perform first aid in the minutes after he was shot. But Officer Garmback frantically requested an emergency medical team at least seven times, urging the dispatcher to “step it up” and to send medical workers from a fire station a block away. It would be eight minutes before they arrived.

The shooting fit into a broader history of dysfunction at the Cleveland Division of Police. Two weeks after Tamir’s death, the Justice Department released a scathing report accusing the department of a pattern of excessive force for which officers were rarely disciplined, and pressed the department to accept a federal monitor. Just a year before, in 2013, an investigation by the state attorney general found “systemic failure” in the department.

It also highlighted shortcomings in the department’s vetting process for recruits. Police records show that Officer Loehmann was hired without a review of his file at a previous department, where he resigned after suffering a “dangerous loss of composure” during firearms training.

The Cleveland police department and mayor’s office declined to comment for this article.

For Cleveland residents, the shooting highlighted another longstanding problem: The department’s community policing programs had been whittled down to a token effort, a result of cuts a decade earlier that might well have made a life-or-death difference to Tamir. A sign on a telephone pole yards from where he was shot down still advertises a police mini-station in the nearby recreation center where he played basketball. The station is long gone.

“If there was one there,” Councilman Jeffrey Johnson said, “he would have known Tamir, because Tamir was a regular, and he would have heard the call and gone out there and said, ‘Tamir, what are you doing?’”

A Real-Looking Toy

Before leaving his mother’s apartment on that gray Saturday, Nov. 22, Tamir went through one of her drawers to find a plaything: her cellphone.

He was known as a boisterous, friendly boy. At school, where he had a good attendance record, Tamir was often in trouble, classmates said, mainly for his pranks: He was deft with a whoopee cushion and liked to reseal his empty milk carton to tempt the unsuspecting.

“He was bad, but like in a funny way,” said Deovaunté Hotstetter, a 10-year-old schoolmate. “I can’t remember what was so funny, but there was cussing in it.”

Deonte Goldsby, 21, a relative, said Tamir, the youngest of four, would take care of his smaller cousins at family gatherings, chasing them or playing with their action figures and dolls. With adults, he was well-mannered, using ma’am and sir and offering to fetch sodas from the refrigerator.

Cudell Commons, where Tamir was shot, was the geographic center of his daily life. The park is flanked on one side by the recreation center where Tamir, who stood 5-foot-7, played basketball, boasting, “You can’t check me!” when he scored. On the other side stood his school, Marion C. Seltzer Elementary, where the calendar is printed in five languages and the bulletin boards teach children to distinguish stereotypes from reality.

An older friend told Tamir that he could take the cellphone, whose service was locked, to a store and make it work, Tamir’s mother said. Tamir asked if he could hold the friend’s airsoft pistol while he was gone. He seemed delighted in the novelty of the replica.

“His mother didn’t allow him around guns whatsoever, toy guns, water guns,” Mr. Goldsby said. “She knows about things like this. She knows that somebody would mistake it for a real gun.”

In this case, the replica was a few years old, and the orange safety tip, intended to distinguish it from a pistol that fired real bullets, had been removed or had fallen off. Just as his mother had worried, Tamir wound up in the park waving what looked very much like a real weapon.

 

A Lifelong Police Interest

The 911 caller was calm, pausing to exchange pleasantries with the dispatcher before getting to the point: A male in Cudell Commons was pointing a pistol at people and scaring them. The gun was “probably fake,” he said twice before signing off, and its wielder was “probably a juvenile.”

Officer Garmback, 46, who had joined the force in 2008, was at a nearby church when the call came. With him was his partner, Officer Loehmann, 26, hired just eight months before.

Officer Loehmann had grown up in Parma, a largely white suburb of Cleveland, but he commuted 30 minutes to an all-male, Roman Catholic high school on the city’s east side, Benedictine, where many of the students were minorities.

People who knew Officer Loehmann there recalled him as quiet and serious, active in the band and the German Club. The Rev. Gerard Gonda, the school’s president, said Mr. Loehmann had a solid record at Benedictine, where as a junior he was in Father Gonda’s theology class. “He had a very low-key personality, and I would say kind of a gentle personality,” Father Gonda said.

The Rev. Anselm Zupka, who taught Officer Loehmann at Benedictine and was also his confirmation sponsor at his local parish, said “Timmy” had embraced his Catholicism to an extent that Father Zupka suggested to him that he might want to enter the monastery.

But the teenager had other ideas. “He was always interested in police work, because that’s what his father did,” Father Gonda said.

Officer Loehmann had long wanted to emulate his father, Frederic, who served in the New York Police Department for 20 years before becoming a federal marshal. So in 2011, he earned a bachelor’s degree in criminology and sociology from Cleveland State University, according to his personnel file, and the next year, he went to work for the police in Independence, Ohio.

But there, according to police records, he had emotional problems related to a girlfriend. At a shooting range, he was “distracted and weepy,” a supervisor said. One of his supervisors concluded that Officer Loehmann “would not be able to substantially cope, or make good decisions,” during stressful situations. After six months, the department allowed him to resign.

Officer Loehmann stayed in the Cleveland area, where he took private security jobs. He continued to apply for local law enforcement jobs but was not hired until the Cleveland police gave him a chance, in March 2014. The department never reviewed his Independence personnel file.

Officer Loehmann did well, graduating from the Cleveland Police Academy with a score of 98.8. He was assigned to a district on Cleveland’s west side, which included the poor, blighted neighborhood around Cudell Commons.

 

Episodes of Abuse

By the time Officer Loehmann was hired, the department was already struggling with a host of problems that had begun at least a decade before.

In 2004, city leaders laid off 250 officers to help close a budget gap. That trimmed the force 15 percent, to about 1,500 officers, seriously hurting community policing and closing mini-stations.

Over the next two years, the city’s violent crime rate leapt by double digits. It has since declined from that peak, but the city is still more violent than it was in 2004, according to F.B.I. data, even as violent crime has continued to drop across Ohio and the country.

As the police department was shrinking, it came under increasing criticism for excessive use of force. The Justice Department began an investigation prompted by police shootings that led to an agreement in 2004 calling for the city to tighten its guidelines for the use of force and to improve its documentation of those incidents. But many reforms were not maintained, according to the recent Justice Department report.

Episodes of abuse continued to surface. In 2011, a helicopter video captured police officers kicking Edward Henderson in the head even though he was spread-eagled on the ground. None of the officers admitted to wrongdoing, and none were fired, though the video showed them “kicking his head like a football,” said David Malik, a prominent civil rights lawyer who won a $600,000 settlement for Mr. Henderson, who suffered a broken facial bone.

Mr. Malik said the city’s discipline and arbitration system heavily favored officers, making it difficult to punish misconduct. “It’s a culture of no consequences,” said Mr. Malik, who has filed or investigated potential lawsuits against the Cleveland police on more than 100 occasions.

Nearly two years after the assault on Mr. Henderson, more than 60 police cruisers and one-third of the city’s on-duty force engaged in a high-speed chase after officers mistook a car’s backfiring for gunfire. It ended when officers killed the two unarmed occupants by firing 137 rounds into their vehicle.

The episode prompted an investigation by the state’s attorney general, Mike DeWine, a Republican, that found systemic breakdowns in communication and supervision in the department.

“When everybody violates the rules,” Mr. DeWine said in an interview, “the cops are not the problem. You’ve got a culture problem, you’ve got a command-and-control problem, you’ve got a management problem, which goes way past those guys.”

The deadly chase also spurred calls for a new Justice Department investigation. Released in December, that study found a pattern of excessive force, suggesting that the police were often hostile with residents and were rarely held accountable for misconduct.

“Officers use excessive force against individuals who are in mental health crisis or who may be unable to understand or comply with officers’ commands, including when the individual is not suspected of having committed any crime at all,” the report said.

Cleveland and the Justice Department have agreed to work toward a consent decree that would tighten use-of-force policies and subject the department to oversight by a monitor.

Critics of the force cite hiring standards that require only a high school diploma or equivalent at a time when many big-city departments require some college, and its failure to adequately analyze use-of-force and arrest data in ways that have become standard at many departments.

Detective Steve Loomis, the president of the largest local police union, disputed the idea that the system for resolving complaints against officers favored the police. But he acknowledged problems in the department, including what he said was understaffing and low compensation that forced many officers to take second jobs to make ends meet.

 

Waiting for Answers

In the weeks since Tamir’s death, the city and its police department have come under mounting pressure to explain not only the shooting, but also its aftermath, with the officers failing to provide first aid as Tamir lay bleeding. Not until an F.B.I. agent who happened to be nearby arrived four minutes after the shooting did anyone tend to the boy.

Though the department’s use-of-force policy requires officers to “obtain necessary medical assistance” for injured people, it does not explicitly call for them to perform first aid. Walter Madison, a lawyer for Tamir’s mother, said it would be ludicrous to believe that officers would not immediately perform first aid on a wounded comrade.

Henry Hilow, a lawyer representing Officer Loehmann, said the officers had followed protocol by calling for E.M.S., saying, “They were doing the best they could to get medical attention” for Tamir. He also defended the officers’ tactics in the moments before the shooting, saying they had positioned their cruiser to prevent Tamir from running into the recreation center, where they thought he might endanger people. They tried to stop farther away, but the car skidded, Mr. Hilow said.

Echoing the defense of the police department after the shooting, Mr. Hilow also said the officers had seen Tamir pull the pellet gun out of his waistband moments before Officer Loehmann shot him, an account that is difficult to verify with the low-quality security video. He said the officers had shouted at Tamir to drop the gun and show his hands before their squad car came to a stop.

The department has begun taking some steps to address its problems. It says it will review personnel files of all new hires. A city inquiry may also examine the dispatch system, in which, Detective Loomis said, the person who took the 911 call did not relay the caller’s caveats to the dispatcher.

Yet Mayor Frank G. Jackson, a Democrat in his third term, has insisted there is no “systemic failure” in the department, and has steadfastly resisted calls for the resignation of two top advisers who oversaw the department during the period studied by both the state and the Justice Department.

Ms. Rice, 38, is awaiting explanations, and an apology. “Nobody has come to knock on my door and told me what happened,” she said. “Somebody has to be held accountable.”
 

A version of this article appears in print on January 23, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Many Errors by Cleveland Police, Then a Fatal One.

In Tamir Rice Case, Many Errors by Cleveland Police, Then a Fatal One,
JAN 22, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/23/us/in-tamir-rice-shooting-in-cleveland-many-errors-by-police-then-a-fatal-one.html

Smart Guns Save Lives.

So Where Are They?

JAN. 17, 2015

The New York Times

SundayReview | Op-Ed Columnist

Nicholas Kristof

BOULDER, Colo. — JUST after Christmas, Veronica Rutledge of Blackfoot, Idaho, took her 2-year-old son to a Walmart store to spend holiday gift cards. As they strolled by the electronics section, according to news reports, the toddler reached into his mom’s purse and pulled out a handgun that she legally carried. He pulled the trigger once and killed her.

The previous month, a 3-year-old boy in Washington State was shot in the face by a 4-year-old. Earlier, a 2-year-old boy in Pennsylvania shot and killed his 11-year-old sister.

About 20 children and teenagers are shot daily in the United States, according to a study by the journal Pediatrics.

Indeed, guns kill more preschool-age children (about 80 a year) than police officers (about 50), according to the F.B.I. and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

This toll is utterly unnecessary, for the technology to make childproof guns goes back more than a century. Beginning in the 1880s, Smith & Wesson (whose gun was used in the Walmart killing) actually sold childproof handguns that required a lever to be depressed as the trigger was pulled.

“No ordinary child under 8 years of age can possibly discharge it,” Smith & Wesson boasted at the time, and it sold half-a-million of these guns, but, today, it no longer offers that childproof option.

Doesn’t it seem odd that your cellphone can be set up to require a PIN or a fingerprint, but there’s no such option for a gun?

Which brings us to Kai Kloepfer, a lanky 17-year-old high school senior in Boulder, Colo. After the cinema shooting in nearby Aurora, Kloepfer decided that for a science fair project he would engineer a “smart gun” that could be fired only by an authorized user.

“I started with iris recognition, and that seemed a good idea until you realize that many people firing guns wear sunglasses,” Kloepfer recalls. “So I moved on to fingerprints.”

Kloepfer designed a smart handgun that fires only when a finger it recognizes is on the grip. More than 1,000 fingerprints can be authorized per gun, and Kloepfer says the sensor is 99.999 percent accurate.

A child can’t fire the gun. Neither can a thief — important here in a country in which more than 150,000 guns are stolen annually.

Kloepfer’s design won a grand prize in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. Then he won a $50,000 grant from the Smart Tech Challenges Foundation to refine the technology. By the time he enters college in the fall (he applied early to Stanford and has been deferred), he hopes to be ready to license the technology to a manufacturer.

There are other approaches to smart guns. The best known, the Armatix iP1, made by a German company and available in the United States through a complicated online procedure, can be fired only if the shooter is wearing a companion wristwatch.

The National Rifle Association seems set against smart guns, apparently fearing that they might become mandatory. One problem has been an unfortunate 2002 New Jersey law stipulating that three years after smart guns are available anywhere in the United States, only smart guns can be sold in the state. The attorney general’s office there ruled recently that the Armatix smart gun would not trigger the law, but the provision has still led gun enthusiasts to bully dealers to keep smart guns off the market everywhere in the U.S.

Opponents of smart guns say that they aren’t fully reliable. Some, including Kloepfer’s, will need batteries to be recharged once a year or so. Still, if Veronica Rutledge had had one in her purse in that Idaho Walmart, her son wouldn’t have been able to shoot and kill her.

“Smart guns are going to save lives,” says Stephen Teret, a gun expert at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “They’re not going to save all lives, but why wouldn’t we want to make guns as safe a consumer product as possible?”

David Hemenway, a public health expert at Harvard, says that the way forward is for police departments or the military to buy smart guns, creating a market and proving they work.

An interfaith group of religious leaders is also appealing to gun industry leaders, ahead of the huge annual trade show in Las Vegas with 65,000 attendees, to drop opposition to smart guns.

Smart guns aren’t a panacea. But when even a 17-year-old kid can come up with a safer gun, why should the gun lobby be so hostile to the option of purchasing one?

Something is amiss when we protect our children from toys that they might swallow, but not from firearms. So Veronica Rutledge is dead, and her son will grow up with the knowledge that he killed her — and we all bear some responsibility when we don’t even try to reduce the carnage.
 

I invite you to visit my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook and Google+, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on January 18, 2015, on page SR11 of the New York edition with the headline: Smart Guns Save Lives. So Where Are They?.

Smart Guns Save Lives.So Where Are They?,
JAN. 17, 2015,
NYT,
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/18/
opinion/sunday/nicholas-kristof-smart-guns-save-lives-so-where-are-they.html

Standing Up to the N.R.A.

JAN. 16, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Gov. Rick Snyder of Michigan rebuffed heavy lobbying by the National Rifle Association and vetoed a patently dangerous gun measure Thursday that would have compounded the risks for women caught in domestic abuse cases. The measure, quietly passed by the Republican Legislature at the behest of the gun lobby, would have allowed gun permits for abusers in domestic violence and stalking cases — even those under a court-issued restraining order — if judges neglected to issue an explicit ban.

Under current law, denial of a gun license is automatic for abusers in domestic violence and stalking cases. Mr. Snyder, a Republican, firmly upheld that law with his veto, forthrightly declaring, “We simply can’t and won’t take the chance of exposing domestic abuse victims to additional violence or intimidation.”

With his veto, which gun safety proponents must hope is a harbinger of more N.R.A. defeats, the governor stood as the rare Republican leader willing to buck the powerful gun lobby’s statehouse clout and political threats. Mr. Snyder had been heavily petitioned by both the gun lobby and leaders of gun safety groups, who have been increasingly focused on statehouses as potentially more responsive than Congress to act against gun violence, which claims tens of thousands of lives each year.

Mr. Snyder focused on explosive family situations in explaining his veto. “It’s crucial that we leave in place protections for people who already have endured challenges and abuse,” Mr. Snyder said.

Women living with a gun in the home are more than twice as likely to be murdered than those with no gun on the premises, according to a study in the journal Annals of Emergency Medicine. Women in the United States are 11 times more likely to be murdered by guns than women in other high-income countries, according to Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, a group that worked against the measure in Lansing.

The gun proposal was attached as a bargaining chip to a road funding bill last month in the closing midnight hours of the legislative session. “You can make a mountain out of a molehill,” Senator Mike Green, the measure’s Republican sponsor, callously commented when asked by The Detroit Free Press if domestic abuse victims should be alarmed. They certainly should be in a state where the number of concealed-weapon permits has leapt from 100,000 in 2001 to nearly 600,000 last year.

Proponents pathetically tried to sell the measure as a safeguard for domestic abuse victims, since it also said that they, too, could qualify for a pistol permit for self-defense. An additional gun is always the N.R.A.’s panacea for the nation’s troubles.

A version of this editorial appears in print on January 16, 2015, on page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: Standing Up to the N.R.A..

Standing Up to the N.R.A.,
NYT,
JAN 16, 2015
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/16/
opinion/standing-up-to-the-nra.html

Mourners Pay Respects

to Wenjian Liu,

Officer Slain in Brooklyn

JAN. 3, 2015

The New York Times

By COREY KILGANNON

and JEFFREY E. SINGER

A cold rain pelted the long, blue line of police officers that stretched for blocks outside the Aievoli Funeral Home in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn on Saturday.

They were there, most of them standing stoically, without raincoats or umbrellas, for the wake for Officer Wenjian Liu, who was fatally shot along with his partner, Officer Rafael Ramos, on Dec. 20 while the two sat in their patrol car in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Among the first to arrive were hundreds of officers from the 84th Precinct, where both men had been assigned. They streamed out of a nearby church in their dress blue uniforms, marching in unison, their white-gloved hands swinging in metronomic rhythm as they headed into the funeral home in pairs.

Thousands of police officers in various shades and styles of uniform stood, some for hours, outside the funeral home, a squat, tan-brick building on 65th Street.

They had come from cities like Los Angeles, Boston and Chicago, and also from small towns.

“We’re all brothers in this line of work,” said Captain Bill Smith of the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office in Georgia, which had sent a contingent of motorcycle officers up for the weekend. Their powerful bikes were parked outside the funeral home.

The killing of the two officers was big news at home, said Cherokee County Deputy Sheriff Dave Wooldridge. There was never a question that they would travel to New York to pay their respects. “We all bleed blue,” he said.

Mayor Bill de Blasio arrived around 1 p.m. with Police Commissioner William J. Bratton. The two men entered the funeral home to salutes from a group of police officials at the entrance. It was a different reception from the one the mayor received last weekend, when groups of officers turned their backs when the Mr. de Blasio’s image appeared on screens outside a Queens church as he delivered the eulogy for Officer Ramos.

On Friday, Mr. Bratton distributed a memo to police officers citywide in which he urged them not to repeat the gesture at Officer Liu’s funeral on Sunday, where Mr. de Blasio is scheduled to deliver the eulogy.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, whose father, Mario M. Cuomo, died on Thursday, also came to pay his respects.

“Today is not the day for my dad,” the governor said to reporters. He added, “Today is about the Liu family.” Plans call for Officer Liu’s funeral to include a Chinese ceremony led by Buddhist monks, then a traditional police ceremony and a burial at Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn.

Officer Liu, 32, had been on the police force for seven years and had gotten married just two months before he died. He emigrated from China some 20 years ago, learned English and aspired to be a police officer while in high school. He served in the 72nd Precinct’s auxiliary unit before becoming an officer.

Utility poles along 65th Street were adorned with ribbons and posters in tribute to the Police Department and to Officer Liu.

The funeral arrangements for Officer Liu had been delayed so that relatives from China could get the documents needed to travel to the United States. In interviews, some of those relatives recalled that he had enjoyed going fishing with his father and would bring back plenty of fish to share with friends and neighbors.
Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story
Continue reading the main story

Most of those at the wake said they did not know Officer Liu. Police officers in attendance — many of them affiliated with Asian-American law enforcement associations from around the country — said they had come to show support for a fellow police officer killed in the line of duty.

“He’s a brother in blue, a fallen brother, and we’re here to pay our respects,” said Officer Al Kim of the Chicago Police Department.

Civilians spoke of seeing news reports about the shooting, and of wanting to show their appreciation for Officer Liu.

“I didn’t personally know him, but I could see from the news reports how hard he worked to serve,” said Nancy Lam of the New York City Housing Authority’s Chinese-American Association. “He was very helpful and devoted, and it’s the least we can do, to come out and show our support.”

Behind her was Lauren Henrich, 21, a college student who lives nearby. She said one of her friends was a police officer who briefly worked with Officer Liu and “said he was awesome man, very down to earth.”

Inside the funeral home, people filed past a poster showing Officer Liu with a detective’s gold shield superimposed over his chest — a reflection of the posthumous promotions to detective, first grade, that he and Officer Ramos received.

The mourners paused briefly in front of the coffin, in which Officer Liu’s body was laid out in his police uniform. Members of his family sat in front of the coffin near a table set with fruit and other food, as offerings.

In another room, Chinese mourners performed a typical ritual, folding pieces of paper known as joss into shapes resembling gold ingots. Uniformed police officers fed the joss into a roaring fireplace next to an altar that held burning incense and a photo of Officer Liu, toward which many bowed three times.
 

Thomas Kaplan contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on January 4, 2015, on page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: Mourners Pay Respects to the Second of Two Officers Slain in Brooklyn.

Mourners Pay Respects to Wenjian Liu, Officer Slain in Brooklyn,
NYT,
3.1.2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/nyregion/mourners-pay-respects-to-wenjian-liu-officer-slain-in-brooklyn.html

Fight on Guns

Is Being Taken to State Ballots

 

JAN. 2, 2015

The New York Times

By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

WASHINGTON — The gun control movement, blocked in Congress and facing mounting losses in federal elections, is tweaking its name, refining its goals and using the same-sex marriage movement as a model to take the fight to voters on the state level.

After a victory in November on a Washington State ballot measure that will require broader background checks on gun buyers, groups that promote gun regulations have turned away from Washington and the political races that have been largely futile. Instead, they are turning their attention — and their growing wallets — to other states that allow ballot measures.

An initiative seeking stricter background checks for certain buyers has qualified for the 2016 ballot in Nevada, where such a law was passed last year by the Legislature and then vetoed by the governor. Advocates of gun safety — the term many now use instead of “gun control” — are seeking lines on ballots in Arizona, Maine and Oregon as well.

“I can’t recall ballot initiatives focused on gun policy,” said Daniel Webster, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research. “There wasn’t the money.” Colorado and Oregon approved ballot measures on background checks at gun shows after the Columbine school massacre in 1999, but the movement stalled after that.

The National Rifle Association, which raises millions of dollars a year largely from small donors and has one of the most muscular state lobbying apparatuses in the country, is well attuned to its foes’ shift in focus. “We will be wherever they are to challenge them,” said Andrew Arulanandam, the group’s spokesman.

The new focus on ballot initiatives comes after setbacks in Congress and in statehouses. After the 2012 mass shooting of schoolchildren in Newtown, Conn., President Obama’s effort to pass a background-check measure never got out of the Democratic-controlled Senate. Although 10 states have passed major gun control legislation, not only in Connecticut and New York but also as far away as Colorado, more states have loosened gun restrictions.

Candidates who backed gun control mostly lost in the midterm elections, even after groups spent millions on their behalf. The last setback came in December when Martha McSally, a Republican, prevailed in a razor-thin recount over Representative Ron Barber, Democrat of Arizona. Mr. Barber was wounded in the 2011 shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, and lost even though Ms. Giffords’s PAC, Americans for Responsible Solutions, spent more than $2 million in the race.

Gun control groups say that although they are still dwarfed by the N.R.A., they have more money and are involved in more grass-roots activism than ever before. The N.R.A. was even heavily outspent in the Washington State referendum.

The advocacy groups have recast their cause as a public health and safety movement, and are homing in on areas where polling has shown voter support, like expanded background checks and keeping guns out of the hands of people with domestic violence convictions, restraining orders or mental illnesses.

Some of those provisions have gained steam even in heavily Republican-controlled state governments, like those in Louisiana and Wisconsin.

“Things that people feel are most doable politically right now are connected to domestic violence,” Mr. Webster said. “There is a lot of uptick on that issue even in red states and states with a lot of guns.” In the past two years, 11 states have passed such legislation.

Closing loopholes on background checks for gun owners is an area Americans support far more than steps like curbs on assault weapons or limits on magazine sizes. A recent Pew survey, for instance, showed that 52 percent of respondents said they believed it was more important to protect gun ownership rights. That figure was up from 29 percent in 2000. Still, in a 2013 poll, Pew found that nearly 75 percent of respondents supported background-check expansions.

Gun control advocates believe that ensuring background checks for the majority of gun buyers is the foundation of all other existing laws. “The reason voters support these laws is the same reason the movement supports these laws,” said Laura Cutilletta, a senior lawyer for the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. The same-sex marriage movement has been a model for advocates of new gun restrictions. As with gay marriage, background-check expansions enjoy far broader public support in polls than among elected officials, and they affect state residents immediately.

“The arc of the marriage-equality movement started in the federal government, and got them the Defense of Marriage Act,” said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety, the gun control group backed by Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City. “Then they went to the states and showed that if you can get the majority of the public on your side state by state, that will influence the courts and Congress in the end.”

Their efforts have emboldened some governors and lawmakers, largely, but not exclusively, in solidly blue states. What is more, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy of Connecticut and Gov. John W. Hickenlooper of Colorado — both Democrats who pushed through a series of tough gun laws in their states after the Newtown massacre — won re-election. Two Colorado Democrats who strongly supported that state’s gun control package were booted from office in a special election in 2013. But the Democratic Party regained the seats in November.

Last month, Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia, which has been the source of many illegally obtained guns in other states, proposed the restoration of the state’s limit on handgun sales to one a month to slow the “iron highway,” a nickname for gunrunning up Interstate 95 to states to the north. He would also seek mandatory background checks on gun sales at firearm shows, and end issuing gun permits to anyone restrained under domestic violence orders of protection.

“I own three guns,” said Mr. McAuliffe, a Democrat. “I love to take my three boys hunting. This is not gun restriction, this is anticrime. I couch it in economic terms.”

The prospects for his gun proposals did not look great out of the gate. The governor “knows refighting the one-gun-a-month battle will not be productive,” Thomas K. Norment Jr., the Republican majority leader of the Virginia legislature, said in a statement.

For gun control groups, money is not the problem it was only recently. Contested ballot-initiative programs cost somewhere between $5 million and $15 million, said Pia Carusone, a senior adviser to Ms. Giffords’s group.

It has raised roughly $30 million for all political activities, including the Washington State initiative, over the past two years. And Mr. Bloomberg has spent millions of dollars on everything from research to political campaigns to the Washington referendum, and is prepared to continue to do so.

Gun rights groups plan to meet them head-on. “The terrain gets a lot harder for him,” Mr. Arulanandam, the N.R.A. spokesman, said of Mr. Bloomberg.

The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence — along with other advocacy groups — is evaluating which states among the 17 that allow ballot initiatives are the best spots to pick for the next fight; Maine, Arizona and Oregon, should their legislatures not take action, are widely viewed as the three with the most potential for gun control advocates.

In Washington, those who pushed the ballot measure through say they will begin a campaign to get the State Legislature to pass measures to keep guns from those with mental illnesses, children and people with a record of domestic violence. Opponents of gun control, for their part, went to the courts this week to challenge the new background-check requirements.

As with the same-sex marriage movement — as well as efforts by some conservative groups to weaken unions and to make abortions more difficult to obtain — the efforts of both gun rights advocates and advocates for gun restrictions demonstrate a fading faith that legislative remedies are to be found in Congress.

“Whether it’s on guns or immigration or tax reform, clearly Washington is broken,” Mr. Feinblatt said. “You have to influence the federal government at the state.”

A version of this article appears in print on January 3, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Fight on Guns Is Being Taken to State Ballots.

Fight on Guns Is Being Taken to State Ballots,
NYT, 2.1.2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/03/us/
gun-control-groups-blocked-in-washington-turn-attention-to-states.html