History > 2015 > USA > Police (I)

A family photo of Tamir Rice from the fall of 2014.

In Tamir Rice Case,

Many Errors by Cleveland Police, Then a Fatal One

NYT

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

Cleveland Officer

Acquitted of Manslaughter

in 2012 Deaths

 

MAY 23, 2015

The New York Times

By MITCH SMITH

A Cleveland police officer who climbed onto the hood of a car and fired repeatedly at its unarmed occupants in 2012 was acquitted of manslaughter on Saturday by an Ohio judge.

The trial of the officer, Michael Brelo, played out amid broader questions about how the police interact with African-Americans and use force, in Cleveland and across the country.

Officer Brelo was one of several officers who shot at Timothy Russell and his passenger, Malissa Williams, during a chase through the Cleveland area on Nov. 29, 2012. Police officers fired 137 rounds at the car, prosecutors have said, including 49 by Officer Brelo.

Other officers stopped firing after Mr. Russell’s Chevy Malibu was surrounded by the police and came to a stop, but prosecutors said Officer Brelo climbed onto the car’s hood and fired at least 15 rounds from close range, including the fatal shots.

Mr. Russell and Ms. Williams, who were black, died of their wounds. Officer Brelo, 31, is white. Prosecutors said Officer Brelo’s actions crossed the line from justifiable to reckless when he climbed onto the car’s hood.

“We’re asking our officers, based on their training, not to be compelled by fear to kill people when there’s other reasonable, objectively reasonable, options available to you,” said James Gutierrez, an assistant county prosecutor, in closing arguments. “And there was. He wanted to kill.”

Officer Brelo opted for a bench trial before Judge John P. O’Donnell of the Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court. Defense attorneys said their client had feared for his life and believed gunfire was coming from Mr. Russell’s car. No gun was recovered, and prosecutors said Mr. Russell and Ms. Williams had been unarmed.

Officer Brelo’s trial drew protesters, who cited the case as an example of overly aggressive policing in Cleveland. Last year, the Justice Department found a pattern of “unreasonable and unnecessary use of force” within the department. The verdict came as an investigation continues into the death of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old black boy who was holding an airsoft-type gun when a Cleveland police officer shot him in November. That shooting, captured on video, has also garnered national attention and resulted in protests.

In closing arguments, Patrick A. D’Angelo, one of Officer Brelo’s lawyers, said his client believed he was under attack when he fired on the car.

“What would make him want to shoot through the windshield at another human being?” Mr. D’Angelo said. “Could it be that he was shot at? Could it be that he reasonably perceived that the occupants of the Malibu were shooting at him? That’s what all the other officers perceived. That’s what Officer Brelo perceived.”

Cleveland Officer Acquitted of Manslaughter in 2012 Deaths,
NYT,
MAY 23, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/24/us/
michael-brelo-cleveland-police-officer-acquitted-of-manslaughter-in-2012-deaths.html

Arrest Made in Washington Killings

 

MAY 21, 2015

The New York Times

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON — On a sunny Sunday afternoon in April, Savvas Savopoulos, a wealthy iron company executive well known to this city’s elite, gathered his family and friends in the backyard of his stately brick home to grill lamb on a spit and celebrate Greek Orthodox Easter. It was, one guest said, “an idyllic day.”

Now that house is a grisly murder scene. Mr. Savopoulos, his wife, 10-year-old son and housekeeper were killed there last week in a case that has transfixed Washington. Early Friday — after days of gruesome details dripped out in the news media, including a report that the family had been held captive and the child tortured — the police said they had arrested a suspect, Daron Wint, 34, who once worked for the iron company.

Mr. Wint, of Lanham, Md., was arrested by members of the Capital Area Regional Fugitive Task Force at 11 p.m. Thursday in Northeast Washington, almost 12 hours after a news conference in which police said they were searching for him in Brooklyn, where he has friends or relatives. He has been charged with first-degree felony murder while armed.

Dave Oney, a spokesman for the United States Marshals Service, said that Mr. Wint was taken into custody during a traffic stop on the 1000 block of Rhode Island Avenue N.E. in Washington. He said that Mr. Wint was a passenger in the car and that several other people riding in the vehicle were also taken into custody, although he did not know if they had been arrested or charged with any crime.

Court records show Mr. Wint has an arrest record in Maryland for offenses including assault. The police here had appealed to the public for help finding him, and had urged Mr. Wint to turn himself in.

Chief Cathy Lanier of the Metropolitan Police told reporters at the midday news conference: “What we can tell you right now is that we do believe there is a connection between this suspect in this case through the business. Right now it does not appear that it was just a random crime.”

The deaths of Mr. Savopoulos, 46; his wife, Amy, 47; their son, Philip; and housekeeper, Veralicia Figueroa, 57, have shocked the nation’s capital since their bodies were found inside the home on the afternoon of May 14.

The family’s house, an art-filled mansion located near embassies in one of the finest neighborhoods in Washington, was set afire, and their blue Porsche 911 was found burned in a church parking lot in Maryland.

The deaths set in motion a police investigation that drew in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Secret Service. Mayor Muriel Bowser told reporters here that the team had been “working on this case 24/7” to “find the perpetrators of this act of evil.”

Chief Lanier declined Thursday to discuss further details of the case or how the suspect had been identified.

But The Washington Post, citing anonymous law enforcement officials and documents related to the case, reported that the break came after the police matched DNA from Mr. Wint to evidence found on the crust of a Domino’s pizza that had been ordered to the home on the night of May 13. Police believe the victims were being held captive inside, according to The Post.

There was no sign of forced entry at the home, the police said. The authorities have not said much about how the victims were killed, other than that three showed wounds consistent with blunt force or sharp objects. But various news outlets have reported that the victims may have been bound and held captive, and that the boy may have been tortured.

The police have not said whether they know the motive for the killings. But The Post reported that on the morning of May 14, Mr. Savopoulos’s personal assistant dropped off a package containing $40,000 in cash at the home. Hours later, the home was set on fire. By the time firefighters arrived, the cash was gone, as was the Porsche, and the family and housekeeper were dead.

Mr. Savopoulos was the president and chief executive of American Iron Works, a company that supplies metals to large building projects across the region. He and his wife were active in Washington social and charitable circles. Their son attended the St. Albans School, an all-boys school next to the Washington National Cathedral that has for decades educated sons of the city’s power brokers, and is the alma mater of numerous Rockefellers, Roosevelts, Bushes and Kennedys.

According to the website Zillow.com, the couple’s home, in fashionable Woodley Park, not far from the official residence of the vice president, last sold in 2001 for $2.9 million; the family friend said it had been extensively renovated and was worth far more than that. And, the friend said, the couple owned other homes, including one on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

Philip Savopoulos was in fourth grade at St. Albans. Friends say he traveled around the country racing go-karts and was home from school, recovering from a concussion, the day before the murders occurred. Parents say the campus has been awash in grief; there have been regular services at the chapel for parents and counselors and psychologists on hand for the students.

The couple also has two teenage daughters, who were away at boarding school at the time of the killings. One is set to graduate from high school soon, a friend said. Funeral services for the family are set for June 1 at Saint Sophia Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Washington, across the street from St. Albans.

In addition to striking a deep nerve in the most elite circles of Washington, the case has also raised soul-searching questions about why, when so many people die violently in impoverished parts of the city, these murders have attracted so much intense news coverage and discussion.

“It’s utterly horrifying and deeply chilling,” said Juleanna Glover, a corporate consultant and onetime aide to prominent Republicans — including former President George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney — who was acquainted with the couple.

“Those who live in Washington expect in an urban city, in an urban environment, that there will be acts of violence,” she said. “But based on news reports, this appears to be a long-term hostage situation that involved a child. And that’s every mother’s nightmare.”
 

Al Baker and Marc Santora contributed reporting from New York. Kitty Bennett and Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on May 22, 2015, on page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: Arrest Is Reported in Washington Killings.

Arrest Made in Washington Killings,
NYT, May 21, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/22/us/
dc-police-say-daron-dylon-wint-is-suspect-in-savopoulos-killings.html

2 Police Lives Lost

Are the Focus in Mississippi

MAY 11, 2015

The New York Times

By ALAN BLINDER

HATTIESBURG, Miss. — By the time a single bagpiper marched to the front of Hattiesburg Hall on Monday afternoon, scores of law enforcement officers from across Mississippi had lined the walls of the room in a local convention center. They, along with hundreds of ordinary citizens, had come to remember two young police officers, to seek solace and, perhaps, to seek meaning.

And at a time when police officers are under extraordinary scrutiny for their conduct in cities like Baltimore and Ferguson, Mo., the meaning many found in the deaths Saturday night of Officers Benjamin Deen and Liquori Tate was in what mourners described as the good work done by the nation’s police officers in often dangerous conditions.

Waynetta Theodore, Alberta Harris and Christiena Preston on Sunday at a makeshift memorial near where two police officers were shot the night before in Hattiesburg, Miss.

“Officer Deen and Officer Tate were the watchmen on those walls,” said Gov. Phil Bryant, a former sheriff’s deputy. “They made the ultimate sacrifice to protect the people of this city — some they did not and would not ever know — because it was their job. It was their duty. It was their code.”

Later, the Rev. Dwayne Higgason, pastor of a nondenominational church here and a volunteer chaplain for the Hattiesburg Police Department, suggested that police officers were sometimes being criticized the way soldiers were during the Vietnam War.

“I believe the average person in America loves and supports police officers,” Mr. Higgason said in an interview after the service. “But it’s silent support, and I believe the time for silent support has passed. I believe it’s time for us to be vocal and say, ‘Thank you.’ ”

He added, “This is an opportunity for people to realize the importance of that.”

The memorial service came two days after the two officers were shot to death during a traffic stop, dealing Hattiesburg a type of civic trauma it had not felt since 1984, the last time a member of the city’s police force was killed in the line of duty.

And so this city of about 48,000 people turned its focus to how a rite of policing as routine as a traffic stop was also a reminder of the dangers that officers encounter daily.

“They’ve got a dangerous job,” said Thelma Wash, 77, who can see the shooting scene from her front door. “It’s really dangerous, and I’ll tell you what: If it wasn’t for cops, we wouldn’t be able to live.”

Police deaths have been rare here; the killings of Officers Deen and Tate brought the Police Department’s toll of on-duty deaths to six. The city said that it had previously lost two officers on the same day when, in 1952, Officers James Everett and M.W. Vinson Jr. were killed after responding to a burglary call.

According to records maintained by the Officer Down Memorial Page, a nonprofit that lists the names of police officers killed in the line of duty, the Hattiesburg Police Department is the only law enforcement agency in Mississippi to have twice lost two officers in a single day.

Within hours of Saturday’s shooting, the authorities arrested two people, Marvin Banks and Joanie Calloway, and charged them with capital murder. Charges against her were later reduced to accessory after the fact of capital murder, and two other people, including Mr. Banks’s brother, were charged with crimes connected to the killings, such as obstruction of justice.

But in large measure here on Monday, the suspects were ignored. Some residents said they did not know the names of the accused, nor how many people had been arrested. But they were quick to recall biographical details about the officers, like that Officer Deen was a married father of two who had patrolled with a police dog, or that Officer Tate had become a police officer less than a year ago.

Near the scene of the shooting, residents erected a memorial along a fence, filling it with balloons, flowers and American flags. At midmorning on Monday, a contingent of Hattiesburg firefighters fastened a fire service shirt to the fence, and on the ground, small wooden crosses carried the names of the officers and a simple tribute: “Served with honor.”

A corresponding tone seemed to course through Hattiesburg, from wealthy neighborhoods to communities that residents and business owners described as blighted and troubled. Although the Police Department here has been the subject of sporadic criticism through the years, many residents said that the ties between officers and the neighborhoods they patrolled were amiable.

Year after year, they said, they watched as officers died elsewhere in places like Jackson, the state capital, or New Orleans, the gritty metropolis to the southwest.

“This is Hattiesburg,” said Melvin Harrison, a barber whose shop is across James Street from police headquarters. “Nobody expects that. Nobody expects somebody to pull a gun on a cop, shoot a cop or anything.”

On the day Hattiesburg was grieving, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported that 51 law enforcement officers nationwide were “feloniously killed in the line of duty” last year, an 89 percent increase from 2013. But the F.B.I. noted that felonious law enforcement deaths had reached a record low, 27, in 2013. Between 1980 and 2014, the bureau said, the country recorded an average of 64 such deaths each year.

Officials here are not yet discussing whether any policy or training changes could come in the wake of the killings, but some experts said there was little that could be done to prepare for an assault like the one on Saturday.

“These were well-trained law enforcement officers, I can assure you,” Governor Bryant said in an interview in which he described the situation as one brought on by “someone of a very cold heart and a murderous nature.”

And during the memorial, policy talk and references to the criticisms police officers have faced across the country were mostly absent. Instead, supporters of the officers told of the men’s heroics, such as the time when Officer Tate saved a family from their burning home, and their quirks, like Officer Tate’s penchant for switching on his police siren seemingly at every opportunity.

But as the men’s survivors sat in the front row and as officers, including many from Hattiesburg, crowded into the room, pride and grief were plain.

“What leads a person to put on the uniform and a badge?” Gregory K. Davis, the United States attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi, said to mourners. “It’s more than a passion. It’s more than a profession. It’s more than the position, and it’s certainly more than a paycheck. It is a higher calling.”

A version of this article appears in print on May 12, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: 2 Police Lives Lost Are the Focus in Mississippi.

2 Police Lives Lost Are the Focus in Mississippi,
MAY 11, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/12/us/
slain-hattiesburg-mississippi-police-officers-are-memorialized.html

Thousands Honor Officer Brian Moore

in a Grimly Familiar Ritual

MAY 8, 2015

The New York Times

By MARC SANTORA

Brian Moore was born blue.

His father was police. His uncle and his cousins were also police.

On Friday, nearly a week after he was shot and killed while on patrol in Queens, Officer Moore was to be laid to rest surrounded by a sea of blue.

As the funeral procession made its way through the streets of Seaford, N.Y., on Long Island, with uniformed officers escorting the hearse carrying Officer Moore’s body, thousands more men and women in blue lined the streets in silence.

They offered a final salute to one of their own.

When Officer Moore joined the New York Police Department five years ago, it was like he was signing up for the family business. At his funeral, that family grew by tens of thousands at what was expected to be one of the largest police funerals on Long Island in decades.

But for many, the rituals and routines of the day were grimly familiar.

It has been less than five months since Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu were fatally shot in a patrol car, targeted by a disturbed young man who set himself a goal of killing police officers.

Officer Moore, 25, was not targeted because of his badge but rather died carrying out the perilous duties that come with it.

He was on plainclothes patrol on Saturday with his partner, Officer Erik Jansen, when the two saw a man walking on a sidewalk, adjusting something in his waistband. They pulled up alongside the man and asked him what he was carrying. Then, without warning, the man drew a handgun and shot Officer Moore.

“Due to these cowardly actions, a mother and father are left without their son, a sister is left without her brother, and his family and friends are left with emptiness in their hearts that can never be filled,” the Moore family said in a statement.

Both inside and outside the church, that sentiment was widely held.

Victor Galante, a retired New York City officer, said he only saw two types of people in the world: good guys and bad guys.

“There is no white or black. No blue, yellow, red, purple,” he said. “There are those who do good, and those who do bad.”

Officer Brian Moore, he said, “was a really good officer who was killed by a really bad guy.”

Banti Nath, who works near the church, said that many people in the community either worked in law enforcement or know someone who does.

“So when something like this happens, the town breaks down,” he said.

Mr. Nath, 36, said everyone in the area he knew had grieved over the death of Officer Moore and many have tried to find ways to help.

“Everyone is affected by this here,” he said. “Everyone appreciates what the young man did.”

That is true at every police funeral. But the death of a police officer has a particular resonance for the community associated with St. James.

Nearly three decades ago another young officer, Edward R. Byrne, 22, was executed as he sat in his patrol car in Queens. His funeral was held in the same church where services were held on Friday for Officer Moore.

“It’s horrible for anyone,” Diana Simonetti, a local resident, said as she struggled to hold back tears. “It’s like losing one of your own.”

On Thursday, thousands paid tribute to Officer Moore at his wake, including Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.

“He followed dad into the business,” Mr. Cuomo said. “I know a little bit about that. I followed my father into the business and there is a sense of love and respect that that shows from son to father that is louder than any words.”
Photo
Officer Moore's coffin was carried past his family before the start of the funeral. Credit Josh Haner/The New York Times

Mayor Bill de Blasio also came and spoke with officers. Unlike at the last police funeral, when scores of officers turned their backs on the mayor, there was no hint of discord on Thursday.

But with the nation engaged in a heated and sometimes bitter debate about law enforcement tactics after the deaths of several young black men at the hands of the police, the funeral was also an occasion for police officers to bond in a show of unity.

They came from across the country, including people taking part in a national Police Unity Tour.

On Saturday, they’ll ride from New Jersey to Washington D.C. to pay their respect to fallen officers during what is known as Police Week. But on this afternoon, they’re here to join their brothers in arms.

“This is our family,” Detective Omar Daza-Quiroz, a member of the Oakland Police Department in California, said. “It’s tough right now to be a police officer. The whole country is looking at us negatively.”

“But people need to come here, and see that we are normal people,” he added. “We have feelings, too.”

In a show of solidarity, homes and businesses on the streets surrounding the church were adorned with purple and blue ribbons.

“We support our police,” read one sign. “Blue Lives Matter,” said another.

A truck parked in front of the church had a digital billboard attached, flashing the American flag. Across the street, a banner laid upon a parked van read: “Thank you, God, for these brave heroes we call police officers.”

Joanne Archer, 55, went to Target and bought blue paper and string. She used it to fashion her own ribbons for the wake and funeral of Officer Moore, who, at 25, was just a year older than her daughter.

Ms. Archer, a resident of nearby Levittown, has a number of relatives and friends in law enforcement. On her own block, two of her neighbors are police officers. “Long Island is full of blue,” she said.

John Surico and Rebecca White contributed reporting.

Thousands Honor Officer Brian Moore in a Grimly Familiar Ritual,
NYT, MAY 8, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/09/nyregion/nypd-officer-brian-moore-funeral.html

Police Officer Is Shot

and Critically Wounded in Queens

MAY 2, 2015

The New York Times

By J. DAVID GOODMAN

and AL BAKER

A New York City police officer in plain clothes was shot in the face and critically wounded on Saturday in Queens after driving up in an unmarked car to question a man on the street, officials said.

The officer, Brian Moore, 25, was taken to Jamaica Hospital Medical Center, where he was listed in critical but stable condition, the police commissioner, William J. Bratton, said at a news conference at the hospital late Saturday as Officer Moore remained in surgery.

Mayor Bill de Blasio called the shooting an “unconscionable act of violence” and “a reminder of the dangers that all of our officers face every single day.”

Officer Moore was shot around 6:15 p.m. on 212th Street in Queens Village, said the police. He and Erik Jansen, both anti-crime officers, were in a car with Officer Moore at the wheel near 104th Avenue when they approached a man who was “walking and adjusting an object in his waistband” and began speaking with him, Mr. Bratton said.

Almost immediately, officials said, the suspect fired at the plainclothes officers before they could step from the car or return fire. Witnesses described hearing at least two shots, according to the chief of detectives, Robert K. Boyce. The wounded officer was rushed to the hospital by other officers.

By late Saturday, Demetrius Blackwell, 35, had been taken into custody at a house near the shooting after an intensive 90-minute search, Mr. Bratton said. “He resides on that block,” Mr. Bratton said, but was located in a home that was not his own.

Mr. Bratton described Mr. Blackwell as a man with a history of arrests — including robbery and criminal possession of a weapon — and said that he had served time in prison.

Mr. Bratton said that officers had been seeking Mr. Blackwell, who lives a block away from the site of the shooting, on 104th Avenue, to speak with him in connection with a crime, though whether he was a suspect or a witness was not immediately clear..

But it was “activity he engaged in” that drew the attention of the officers on Saturday, Mr. Bratton said, specifically the object in the waistband.

Officer Moore appeared to have been shot in the left cheek and the bullet went out the right side of his head, toward the back of the head, a law enforcement official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the fast-moving events. The wound, then, could be what is known as an “in-and-out,” the official said, meaning it might have missed critical organs, his survival a matter of inches.

Dr. Eli Kleinman, the supervising chief surgeon of the Police Department, said at the news conference that quick work by the first responding patrol car and a team of neurosurgeons had helped them confront a “life-threatening situation.”

After the shooting, officers could be seen going through the garbage outside the white-paneled home with red steps where Mr. Blackwell lives. As of late Saturday, the gun used in the shooting had not been found.

A cousin of Mr. Blackwell’s who lives near him but who declined to give her name said in a brief telephone interview late Saturday that she was just learning about the shooting: “I am just finding all this stuff out myself. I don’t know anything. All I can do is pray right now.”

For officers across the city, word of the Queens shooting spread rapidly, with many fearing the worst had again occurred. The shooting immediately evoked the December killing of two officers, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, who had been targeted for their uniforms and shot dead as they sat in their patrol car in Brooklyn. The gunman, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, posted on social media of his desire to kill police officers before coming to New York from Maryland; he killed himself shortly after.

Saturday’s shooting also came at a moment of nationwide tension between police officers and minority communities as protesters again took to the streets over the killing of Freddie Gray, an unarmed black man in Baltimore who died in police custody.

Demonstrations erupted anew across the country, including in New York City, as Mr. Gray’s name was added to the litany of names — Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice — that were shouted at demonstrations over police killings in recent months. But the account of Saturday’s shooting suggested that the officer had been wounded in the course of doing police work, not the result of a gunman bent on shooting officers, as Mr. Brinsley had been. Anti-crime officers, who address more serious crime conditions in a police precinct than ordinary 911 calls, wear plain clothes and patrol in unmarked cars.

Through Saturday evening, officers across the city traded text messages by cellphones from their foot posts and squad cars. The shooting — a burst of gunfire; officers in their car — had elements of the ambush killing in December.

But the circumstances were more similar to those in the Bronx in January, when two plainclothes officers were shot by a suspect they had been pursuing in connection with an armed robbery. Both officers survived.

Around the scene of the shooting, helicopters circled at sunset. After dark, roads remained closed. “Right now everything’s just blocked off,” said Frank Caffey, who lives on Hollis Avenue in Queens and said he heard gunshots earlier in the evening. The neighborhood of unattached houses and fenced-in yards where Saturday’s shooting took place had struggled with crime, residents said. “This area is kind of bad dealing with that,” said Mr. Caffey.
 

Angela Macropoulos, Benjamin Mueller and Liam Stack contributed reporting. Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on May 3, 2015, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: A New York City Police Officer Is Shot in Queens, and a Suspect Is Arrested.

Police Officer Is Shot and Critically Wounded in Queens,
NYT, MAY 2, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/03/nyregion/police-officer-is-shot-in-queens.html

6 Baltimore Police Officers

Charged in Freddie Gray Death

 

MAY 1, 2015

The New York Times

By ALAN BLINDER

and RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

BALTIMORE — Baltimore’s chief prosecutor charged six police officers on Friday with a range of crimes including murder and manslaughter in the arrest and fatal injury of Freddie Gray, a striking and surprisingly swift turn in a case that has drawn national attention to police conduct.

The state’s attorney for Baltimore City, Marilyn J. Mosby, filed the charges almost as soon as she received a medical examiner’s report that ruled Mr. Gray’s death a homicide, and a day after the police concluded their initial investigation and handed over their findings. Officials had cautioned that it could take considerable time for her office to complete its own investigation and decide whether to prosecute.

In a city rocked by unrest this week, and now under curfew and patrolled by National Guard troops, Ms. Mosby’s announcement on the steps of the War Memorial downtown drew cheers from the assembled crowd while a nearby cordon of officers in riot gear looked on stonily. As word spread, people in parts of the city took to the streets in spontaneous celebration.

By nightfall a large demonstration wound its way through the streets and the scene became confrontational shortly after the curfew began with small disruptions in front of City Hall and at Pennsylvania Avenue and West North Avenue, where people blocked traffic and taunted the police. Some arrests were made and the crowds disbanded as the police and National Guard closed in.

The officers who were arrested, three white and three black, include a lieutenant with 17 years on the force, several near-rookies and a woman who had just been promoted to sergeant.

The most serious charges were brought against Officer Caesar R. Goodson Jr., who was driving the van that carried Mr. Gray to a police station after his April 12 arrest. Along with involuntary manslaughter, Officer Goodson, 45, was charged with “second-degree depraved heart murder,” which means indifference to human life.

All six officers were arrested and appeared before a judicial officer. Bail was set at $350,000 for four of the officers and $250,000 for the other two, according to court records. By late Friday, court records showed the officers had been released from jail.

The death of Mr. Gray, 25, a week after he suffered a spinal cord injury brought to a boil long-simmering tensions between the police and poor neighborhoods in this majority-black city, culminating in rioting and looting on Monday. More peaceful demonstrations continued through the week after a curfew was put in place. And the swift action by the prosecutor seemed to some to mark a turning point after months of debate and demonstrations around the country over police violence.

“The larger message, if there is one, is that we’re moving on these things,” said David A. Harris, a law professor and expert on police racial issues at the University of Pittsburgh. “We’re taking them seriously, and there’s no longer going to be any kind of slowing down and taking it to the point where people wonder, ‘Whatever happened to that?’ ”

In Washington, President Obama declined to comment on the charges directly, but said that what mattered was for the justice system to work properly. “What I think the people of Baltimore want more than anything else is the truth,” he said. “That’s what people around the country expect.”

The Gray family said it was satisfied with the charges. “We must seize this opportunity to reform police departments throughout this country,” said the family’s lawyer, William H. Murphy Jr.

The Baltimore chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police called the speed of the prosecutor politically motivated. “The actions taken today by the state’s attorney are an egregious rush to judgment,” said Michael E. Davey, the union’s lawyer. “We believe that these officers will be vindicated, as they have done nothing wrong.”

Ms. Mosby faulted the police conduct at every turn. The officers who arrested him “failed to establish probable cause for Mr. Gray’s arrest, as no crime had been committed,” she said, describing the arrest as illegal. Officers accused him of possession of a switchblade, but Ms. Mosby said, “The knife was not a switchblade and is lawful under Maryland law.”

Ms. Mosby said Mr. Gray suffered a spinal injury while being transported in a police van — and not earlier, while being arrested — and pointed to the failure of the police to put a seatbelt on him as a crucial factor.

“Mr. Gray suffered a severe and critical neck injury as a result of being handcuffed, shackled by his feet and unrestrained inside the B.P.D. wagon,” she said.

Despite repeated stops to check on Mr. Gray, the van driver, Officer Goodson, and other officers never belted him in, she said, at times leaving him face-down on the van floor with his hands behind him. Though there has been speculation that the police intentionally gave Mr. Gray a “rough ride,” intended to slam him against the metal sides of the van, Ms. Mosby did not refer to that possibility. She charged only Officer Goodson with second-degree murder, the most serious crime facing the six officers; he was also accused of manslaughter, assault and misconduct in office.

Mr. Gray’s condition deteriorated, she said, as officers repeatedly ignored his pleas for medical attention and ignored obvious signs that he was in distress. At one point, she said, when officers tried to check on him, Mr. Gray was unresponsive, yet no action was taken. He died of his injuries a week later.

Lt. Brian Rice was charged with manslaughter, assault, misconduct in office and false imprisonment. Officer William G. Porter and Sgt. Alicia White were charged with manslaughter, assault and misconduct in office. Officers Edward M. Nero and Garrett E. Miller were charged with assault, misconduct in office and false imprisonment.

As Ms. Mosby finished reading her announcement, the news began to ripple through a crowd of African-American residents and activists who had pooled around her. Edward Jenkins, 44, a motivational speaker and musician who goes by the name Voyce, approached and could hardly contain his surprise when he was told of the charges. “Are you serious?” he said.

Like many Baltimore residents, Mr. Jenkins, who grew up in Mr. Gray’s neighborhood, said he thought the announcement might put a damper on further unrest. “I think this will take some of the nervousness off of it, but they’ll still want a guilty verdict,” he said. “It means that we’re absolutely getting a start on justice.”

Standing on a nearby street corner, Renee James, 48, said, “There’s no need to go tear up the city no more.”

Her friend Antoinnette White, 53, said of the riot: “Hurting innocent people was nonsense. I cried.”

But Abdullah Moaney, 53, an information technology worker from East Baltimore, said that “peace has lost its credibility.” Seeking to justify the violence that broke out Monday, he said that “if it wasn’t for the riot,” charges would not have been filed.

Marilyn J. Mosby, the state’s attorney for Baltimore, said that Freddie Gray’s arrest was illegal and that there was probable cause to file manslaughter charges against the police officers involved. Publish Date May 1, 2015. Photo by Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times.

“This is a great day, and I think we need to realize that,” said Representative Elijah E. Cummings, Democrat of Maryland. “I think a message has been sent by our state’s attorney that she treasures every life, that she values every person.”

Elsewhere Friday, rallies celebrating May Day and calling attention to police killings of black men emerged in cities across the country, including Oakland, Calif., Seattle and Portland, Ore. In Manhattan, protesters marched from Union Square to Foley Square, some chanting, “Make them pay for Freddie Gray!”

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake of Baltimore said most of the city’s officers were good, but added, “To those who choose to engage in violence, brutality, racism and brutality, let me be clear: There is no place in the Baltimore Police Department for you.”

Mr. Gray started the fateful ride on the floor of the police van, Ms. Mosby said. A short time later, Officer Goodson “proceeded to the back of the wagon in order to observe Mr. Gray,” she said.

“At no point did he seek, nor did he render, any medical help for Mr. Gray,” Ms. Mosby said.

The president commented on the filing of homicide, manslaughter and misconduct charges against police officers in the death of Mr. Gray. By Reuters on Publish Date May 1, 2015. Photo by Doug Mills/The New York Times.

A few blocks later, he called a dispatcher to say that he needed help checking on his prisoner. Another officer arrived, and the back of the van was opened. “Mr. Gray at that time requested help and indicated that he could not breathe,” and asked twice for a medic, Ms. Mosby said. While the officers helped him onto the bench in the back of the van, she said, they still did not belt him in.

While they were there, she said, a call went out for a van to pick up and transport another person who had been arrested. “Despite Mr. Gray’s obvious and recognized need for assistance, Officer Goodson, in a grossly negligent manner,” answered that call, rather than seeking medical help, Ms. Mosby said.

At the van’s next stop, Officer Goodson met the officers who made the initial arrest, and a sergeant who had arrived on the scene. Opening the van once again, they “observed Mr. Gray unresponsive on the floor of the wagon,” Ms. Mosby said.

The sergeant, she said, spoke to the back of Mr. Gray’s head, but he did not respond. “She made no effort to look, or assess, or determine his condition,” Ms. Mosby said.

When the van finally arrived at the Western District police station and officers tried to remove him, “Mr. Gray was no longer breathing at all,” she said. A medic was summoned and found Mr. Gray in cardiac arrest. Then he was rushed to a hospital.

A. Dwight Pettit, a lawyer who handles police brutality cases in Baltimore — and worked to help elect Ms. Mosby — said her emphasis on the officers’ lack of probable cause in arresting Mr. Gray was significant. Rarely, he said, are police officers prosecuted for making false arrests — and too often, they do not worry about lacking probable cause.

He called the charges of false imprisonment “something new for police activity, which offends the constitutional rights of citizens.”
 

Alan Blinder reported from Baltimore, and Richard Pérez-Peña from New York. Richard Fausset, Rebecca White and Sheryl Gay Stolberg contributed reporting from Baltimore.

A version of this article appears in print on May 2, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Six Officers Charged in Baltimore Death.

6 Baltimore Police Officers Charged in Freddie Gray Death,
NYT, MAY 1 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/02/us/
freddie-gray-autopsy-report-given-to-baltimore-prosecutors.html

When Baltimore Burned

APRIL 29, 2015

The New York Times

 The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist

Nicholas Kristof

Conservatives have sometimes been too quick to excuse police violence. And liberals have sometimes been too quick to excuse rioter violence.

It’s outrageous when officers use excessive force against young, unarmed African-American men, who are 21 times as likely to be shot dead by the police as young white men. It’s also outrageous when rioters loot shops or attack officers.

So bravo to Toya Graham, the Baltimore mom captured on video grabbing her teenage son from the streets and frog-marching him home. The boy wilted: It must be humiliating to be a “badass” rioter one moment and then to be savagely scolded in front of your peers and sent to your room.

“That’s my only son, and at the end of the day I don’t want him to be a Freddie Gray,” Graham later told CBS News. It was of course Gray’s death, after an injury at the hands of the police, that set off the rioting.

On social media, there were plenty of people making excuses for rioters — a common refrain was “nothing else works to get attention.” But to their great credit, African-American leaders provided firm moral guidance and emphasized that street violence was unconscionable.

President Obama set just the right tone.

“When individuals get crowbars and start prying open doors to loot, they’re not protesting. They’re not making a statement. They’re stealing,” Obama said. “When they burn down a building, they’re committing arson. And they’re destroying and undermining businesses and opportunities in their own communities.”

Or as Carmelo Anthony, the Knicks basketball star who grew up in Baltimore and has invested in a youth center there, put it: “We need to protect our city, not destroy it.”

Yet as Obama, Anthony and other leaders also noted, there are crucial underlying inequities that demand attention. The rioting distracts from those inequities, which are the far larger burden on America’s cities.

That also represents a failure on our part in the American news media. We focus television cameras on the drama of a burning CVS store but ignore the systemic catastrophe of broken schools, joblessness, fatherless kids, heroin, oppressive policing — and, maybe the worst kind of poverty of all, hopelessness.

The injustices suffered by Freddie Gray began early. As a little boy he suffered lead poisoning (as do 535,000 American children ages 1 to 5), which has been linked to lifelong mental impairments and higher crime rates.

In Gray’s neighborhood, one-third of adults lack a high school degree. A majority of those aged 16 to 64 are unemployed.

And Baltimore’s African-American residents have often encountered not only crime and insecurity but also law enforcement that is unjust and racist. Michael A. Fletcher, an African-American reporter who lived for many years in the city, wrote in The Washington Post that when his wife’s car was stolen, a Baltimore policeman bluntly explained the department’s strategy for recovering vehicles: “If we see a group of young black guys in a car, we pull them over.”

Likewise, the Baltimore jail was notorious for corruption and gang rule. A federal investigation found that one gang leader in the jail fathered five children by four female guards.

Wretched conditions are found to some degree in parts of many cities, and Shirley Franklin, the former mayor of Atlanta, told me that when we tolerate them, we tolerate a combustible mix.

“It’s not just about the police use of force,” she said. “It’s about a system that is not addressing young people’s needs. They’re frankly lashing out, and the police force issue is just a catalyst for their expression of frustration at being left out.”

Whites sometimes comment snidely on a “culture of grievance” among blacks. Really? When tycoons like Stephen Schwarzman squawked that the elimination of tax loopholes was like Hitler’s invasion of Poland, now that’s a culture of grievance.

If wealthy white parents found their children damaged by lead poisoning, consigned to dismal schools, denied any opportunity to get ahead, more likely to end up in prison than college, harassed and occasionally killed by the police — why, then we’d hear roars of grievance. And they’d be right to roar: Parents of any color should protest, peacefully but loudly, about such injustices.

We’ve had months of police incidents touching on a delicate subtext of race, but it’s not clear that we’re learning lessons. Once again, I suggest that it’s time for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to step back and explore racial inequity in America.

The real crisis isn’t one night of young men in the street rioting. It’s something perhaps even more inexcusable — our own complacency at the systematic long-term denial of equal opportunity to people based on their skin color and ZIP code.

Thanks to all who tested wits with my column Sunday about numeracy and who entered my contest. The answer to the last puzzle about the dungeon is to ask either man: If I asked the other person which is the door to escape, which would he say. Then you take the other door. The two people to respond most quickly with the right answer were Ilan Ben Zion in Jerusalem, who wins a poster of Saddam Hussein liberated from Iraq, and Will Hardt, a student at Carleton College, who wins a signed copy of “A Path Appears,” my latest book with Sheryl WuDunn.

I invite you to 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 April 30, 2015, on page A31 of the New York edition with the headline: When Baltimore Burned.

When Baltimore Burned,
NYT, APRIL 29, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/30/opinion/
nicholas-kristof-when-baltimore-burned.html

Violence in Baltimore

APRIL 29, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist

Charles M. Blow

This week, Baltimore was engulfed in violent revolt as citizens took to the street in the wake of the mysterious and disturbing death of Freddie Gray after he’d been taken into police custody.

Projectiles were thrown. Stores were looted and some set ablaze. Police officers were injured.

It was ugly.

And in that moment, America was again forced to turn its face toward its forsaken and ask tough questions and attempt to answer a few.

Even Hillary Clinton stepped into the fray Wednesday, saying:

“We have to come to terms with some hard truths about race and justice in America. There is something profoundly wrong when African-American men are still far more likely to be stopped and searched by police, charged with crimes, and sentenced to longer prison terms than are meted out to their white counterparts.”

This was an aggressive speech by Clinton and a major departure from her 2008 run, when, after an embarrassing loss to Barack Obama in the Iowa caucuses, she went on the attack in New Hampshire, with ABC News reporting it this way:

“While the senator was vague, her campaign pointed out to ABC News examples of Obama’s liberal positions, including his 2004 statement to abolish mandatory minimum sentences for federal crimes.”

On Tuesday, the day before his wife’s speech, Bill Clinton had weighed in. As the Guardian reported:

“Former U.S. president Bill Clinton has called for an end to mass incarceration, admitting that changes in penal policy that happened largely under his watch put ‘too many people in prison and for too long’ and ‘overshot the mark.’”

The Guardian goes on to explain:

“In 1994 Clinton championed a crime bill that laid down several of the foundations of the country’s current mass incarceration malaise. Vowing to be ‘tough on crime’ — a quality that had previously been more closely associated with the Republicans and which Clinton adopted under his ‘triangulation’ ploy — he created incentives to individual states to build more prisons, to put more people behind bars and to keep them there for longer. His also presided over the introduction of a federal three-strikes law that brought in long sentences for habitual offenders.”

Hillary Clinton’s speech on Wednesday was indeed a remarkable and audacious one for the candidate, and went far further than many of her Republican rivals would dare to go (although there is growing bipartisan consensus around prison reform), but the unacknowledged and unexplained shift in the middle of a heated moment could quite reasonably raise doubts of sincerity or commitment to execution.

The black community in America has been betrayed by Democrats and Republicans alike — it has been betrayed by America itself. Therefore, it can be hard to accept at face value any promises made or policies articulated. History demonstrates that too many forked tongues have delivered too many betrayed covenants.

As James Baldwin put it in his essay “Journey to Atlanta”:

“Of all Americans, Negroes distrust politicians most, or more accurately, they have been best trained to expect nothing from them; more than other Americans, they are always aware of the enormous gap between election promises and their daily lives.”

Baldwin continued:

“It is true that the promises excite them, but this is not because they are taken as proof of good intentions. They are the proof of something more concrete than intentions: that the Negro situation is not static, that changes have occurred, and are occurring and will occur — this, in spite of the daily, dead-end monotony. It is this daily, dead-end monotony, though, as well as the wise desire not to be betrayed by too much hoping, which causes them to look on politicians with such an extraordinarily disenchanted eye.”

It is this disenchantment, as well as the steady beat of black bodies falling, the constant murmur of black pain and the incessant sting of black subjugation that contributed to the conflagration of rage this week in Baltimore.

You could easily argue that that rage was misdirected, that most of the harm done was to the social fabric and the civil and economic interests in the very neighborhoods that most lack them. You would be right.

But misdirected rage is not necessarily illegitimate rage.

Some might even contextualize the idea of misdirection.

The activist Deray McKesson argued this week about the violence that erupted in Baltimore: “I don’t have to condone it to understand it.”

Indeed, The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates argued quite convincingly in November that violent revolt has often been the catalyst for change in this country and that nonviolence, at least in part, draws its power from the untenable alternative of violence.

None of this promotes violence as a tactic, but rather is a fuller understanding of the contradictions of America’s current, incessant appeals for peace.

We can’t roundly condemn violent revolt now while ignoring the violent revolts that have littered this country’s history.

We can’t rush to label violent protesters as “thugs” while reserving judgment about the violence of police killings until a full investigation has been completed and all the facts are in.

We can’t condemn explosions of frustration born of generations of marginalization and oppression while paying only passing glances to similar explosions of frustration over the inanity of a sports team’s victory or loss or a gathering for a pumpkin festival.

Nonviolence, as a strategy, hinges on faith: It is a faith in ultimate moral rectitude and the perfectibility of systems of power.

But that faith can be hard to find in communities that see systems of power in which they feel they have no stake and an absence of moral courage on the part of the powerful to expand the franchise.

It has been my experience that people who feel no investment in systems of power — no belief that they have access to that power and that that power will treat them fairly — are the ones most likely to attack those systems with whatever power they think they have.

The time that any population will silently endure suffering is term-limited and the end of that term is unpredictable, often set by a moment of trauma that pushes a simmering discontent over into civil disobedience.

And, in those moments, America feigns shock and disbelief. Where did this anger come from? How can we quickly restore calm? How do we instantly start to heal?

That is because America likes to hide its sins. That is because it wants its disaffected, dispossessed and disenfranchised to use the door under the steps. That is because America sees its underclass as some sort of infinity sponge: capable of quietly absorbing disadvantage, neglect and oppression forever for the greater good of superficial calm and illusory order. And expected to do so.

No one of good conscience and sound judgment desires violence or would ever advocate for it. As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. put it, “The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy.”

But King is not the only person worthy of quoting here. There is also the quote often attributed to Zora Neale Hurston: “If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”
 

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

I invite you to join me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter, or e-mail me at chblow@nytimes.com.

Violence in Baltimore,
NYT, APRIL 29, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/30/opinion/charles-blow-violence-in-baltimore.html

What Came Before Baltimore’s Riots

APRIL 28, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

The riots that devastated urban America during the 1960s were often ignited by acts of police brutality that inflamed poor African-American communities where the police were seen not as protectors but as an occupying force. These same tensions resurfaced last year in the suburban St. Louis community of Ferguson, Mo., where riots broke out after a white police officer shot and killed Michael Brown, a black teenager. They have now erupted on a larger stage, in Baltimore, after the death of Freddie Gray, a young black man who suffered a catastrophic injury while in police custody.

President Obama has condemned as inexcusable the looting and arson that spread across the face of the city after of Mr. Gray’s funeral. But he also implied that the Baltimore Police Department had “to do some soul-searching.” Indeed it does: A well-documented history of extreme brutality and misconduct set the stage for just this kind of unrest.

Proof can be found in a meticulously reported investigation by The Baltimore Sun of lawsuits and settlements that had been generated by police-brutality claims. “Over the past four years,” the investigation noted, “more than 100 people have won court judgments or settlements related to allegations of brutality and civil rights violations.” The victims included a 15-year-old boy riding a dirt bike, a 26-year-old pregnant woman who had witnessed a beating, a 50-year-old woman selling church raffle tickets, a 65-year-old church deacon and an 87-year-old grandmother aiding her wounded grandson.

The report, published last fall, detailed what it called “a frightful human toll” inflicted by the police: broken bones, head trauma, organ failure, and even death, occurring during questionable arrests. It found that judges and prosecutors routinely dismissed charges against the victims and that city policies helped to hide the extent of the human damage. Settlements prohibited the victims from making public statements. The Sun estimated that the cash-strapped city had spent $5.7 million on settlements and $5.8 million on legal fees since January 2011.

Baltimore residents were familiar with these and other stories of police abuse when Mr. Gray’s case fell into the public spotlight earlier this month. The police chased and apprehended him on April 12, allegedly because he had “made eye contact” with a lieutenant and then ran away. Cellphone videos of his arrest showed him being dragged into a police van, appearing limp and screaming in pain. The police have acknowledged that they delayed in calling for medical help. When he arrived at the police station, medics rushed him to the hospital, where he slipped into a coma and died a week later.

His family has said that 80 percent of his spinal cord was severed and that his larynx had been crushed. This account is at odds with a police report claiming that “the defendant was arrested without force or incident.”

The Baltimore Police Department has a particularly egregious history and has entered into a voluntary reform agreement with the Justice Department. But there is no reason to believe that it is unique in terms of its toxic relations with the people it is meant to protect.

Indeed, over the last five years, the Justice Department has opened 21 investigations into local police departments around the country and is enforcing reform agreements with 15 departments, some investigated by previous administrations.

Mr. Obama was right on the mark when he observed on Tuesday that tensions with law enforcement had simmered in African-American communities for decades and now seemed to be bursting into view once a week.

“This has been a slow-rolling crisis,” he said. “This has been going on for a long time. This is not new, and we shouldn’t pretend that it’s new.”

He also said that addressing the problem would require not only new police tactics but new policies aimed at helping communities where jobs have disappeared, improving education and helping ex-offenders find jobs. The big mistake, he said, is that we tend to focus on these communities only when buildings are burning down.
 

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

A version of this editorial appears in print on April 29, 2015, on page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: What Came Before Baltimore’s Riots.

What Came Before Baltimore’s Riots, NYT,
APRIL 28, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/29/opinion/what-came-before-baltimores-riots.html

Baltimore Riots Are Another Scar

on a City Long Battered by Neglect

APRIL 28, 2015

The New York Times

By SCOTT SHANE

BALTIMORE — The Rev. Donte L. Hickman Sr. heard about the trouble brewing on this city’s west side on Monday afternoon and instantly took to Twitter to rally his East Baltimore troops.

“I need all my men to meet me at New Shiloh Baptist Church now,” he wrote, referring to the community hub that had hosted the funeral for Freddie Gray. Days of demonstrations over Mr. Gray’s death after he sustained a severe spinal cord injury in police custody were giving way to violence and looting.

“We have to get these streets under control,” he said in the post, referring to riots in West Baltimore.

About 8:30 p.m., after an emotional meeting and march in West Baltimore that included other pastors, gang leaders and local politicians, Dr. Hickman’s cellphone rang. Back across town, next to his own Southern Baptist Church, a $16 million, half-built senior housing project and community center were ablaze. He had worked for years on the project, an extraordinary investment in a neighborhood that has suffered for years from poverty, drugs and neglect.

On Tuesday, Dr. Hickman, 43, dressed immaculately in a dark pinstriped suit, stood in front of an acre of scorched girders and charred wood. A breeze carried the acrid smell of destruction. He had stayed at the fire most of the night before grabbing three hours of sleep.

“I can’t make sense out of nonsense,” he said of the unknown arsonists. “Whoever did this was someone who didn’t understand what we were trying to do.”

The devastation, in blighted neighborhoods on both sides of town, was part of a heavy blow for Baltimore, a long-suffering city that has in recent years shown encouraging signs of a comeback. The lawlessness included the burning of a CVS and the frenzied looting of a mall, commercial institutions that mean more in poor parts of Baltimore than they might elsewhere.

Whether the disorder will be a major setback, like the far bigger riots of 1968, or a call to action — “We will rebuild,” Dr. Hickman said confidently — depends on what happens next.

Some of the city’s boosters — and the president of the United States — expressed anguish over what they portrayed as an illogical and opportunistic reaction to legitimate fury about police violence.

Interrupting a news conference with the Japanese prime minister on Tuesday, President Obama spoke passionately about Baltimore, denouncing the rioters.

“They’re destroying and undermining businesses and opportunities in their own communities that rob jobs and opportunity from people in that area,” he said.

Anirban Basu, a local economist who served on the city’s school board for six years, sounded despondent.

“Obviously, over the last 24 hours, our city has been diminished both in the world’s eyes and in our own,” he said. “There was a lot of economic damage. But the greater damage is to the future. How many retailers will want to come to Baltimore? How many conventions will stay away? How many hotel rooms will stay empty?”

Baltimore takes pride in its underdog status, Mr. Basu said, and locals get a thrill when out-of-towners visit for an Orioles or Ravens game, stroll around the harbor, and “are surprised to find out how wonderful our city is.” He said their surprise in part reflects the television portrait of the city’s woes from “Homicide: Life on the Street” and “The Wire.” The rioting will only harden that image, he said, making it more challenging to draw residents and tourists.

At the Mondawmin Mall — closed and guarded on Tuesday after looters ransacked stores and kiosks Monday — Baltimore’s mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, surveyed the damage and spoke of how hard officials had worked to bring Target to the mall and CVS to the corner of West North and Pennsylvania Avenues. The CVS was set ablaze by rioters.

“To see all of that work go up in smoke, it’s painful. It’s very painful,” she said.

But for some residents, the developments the mayor cited as achievements only emphasized the paltry prospects for poor neighborhoods.

“This is the land that time forgot,” said Aisha Snead, who grew up in West Baltimore. “They want to act like the CVS is the Taj Mahal. They have dilapidated buildings everywhere. They have never invested in the people. In fact, it’s divested. They take every red cent they can from poor black people and put it into the Inner Harbor.”

Economic indicators are watched closely in Baltimore, which has seen its base of solid, industrial jobs eroded drastically over the decades, only partly compensated by the growth of health care and higher education. Bethlehem Steel, whose plant is now an abandoned wasteland east of the city, was once the largest employer. Today it is Johns Hopkins University, which has a thriving campus on the leafy north side and a famous hospital and sprawling medical complex just a few blocks south of where Dr. Hickman’s housing project burned down.

In the years that economic transformation has occurred, the city’s population — which peaked at nearly one million in the early 1950s — has sunk to about 622,000, a result of both white and black flight to the suburbs. The drop slowed in recent years and now may be turning around, as several gentrifying neighborhoods draw young professionals. Artists graduating from the Maryland Institute College of Art are colonizing vacant buildings for studios and apartments. Churches like Southern Baptist and other nonprofit organizations are building new housing in some of the city’s toughest areas.

But heroin and cocaine addiction, and the violence that accompanies the street drug trade, remain a scourge. The homicide rate, while down since the 1990s, has stayed stubbornly high — at 34 per 100,000 people last year, it was about eight times New York City’s. Along Chester Street north of Southern Baptist and the site of Monday’s fire, teddy bears and balloons are tied to a lamppost in a tribute to a murder victim. Scores of rowhouses are boarded up.

“I’m 45 years old,” said a caller to WOLB, “and my whole life has been a state of emergency.”

In his comments on Tuesday, President Obama, who recently invited David Simon, a Baltimorean and creator of “The Wire,” to the White House to talk about the war on drugs, summed up the conditions that have proved resistant to change for decades in Baltimore.

“Without making any excuses for criminal activities,” the president said, “what we also know is that if you have impoverished communities that have been stripped away of opportunity, where children are born into abject poverty, they’ve got parents — often because of substance-abuse problems or incarceration or lack of education themselves — who can’t do right by their kids.”

He described places with “no fathers who can provide guidance to young men; communities where there’s no investment, and manufacturing has been stripped away; and drugs have flooded the community, and the drug industry ends up being the primary employer for a whole lot of folks.”

That is certainly the case in Sandtown-Winchester, the West Baltimore neighborhood where Freddie Gray grew up and was chased by the police. Life expectancy is 69.7 years, on par with Iraq and Kazakhstan. According to the 2010 census, the area was 97 percent black; more than half the households had incomes less than $25,000; and just 6 percent of adults had a bachelor’s degree or more, far below the 25 percent for the city as a whole. Unemployment was double the city average. A more recent study found Sandtown-Winchester had the highest rate in the state of residents who were incarcerated.

But the neighborhood around Southern Baptist Church is hardly better off. Dr. Hickman, the pastor, said he took the post 12 years ago and found “deterioration, dilapidation and disinvestment.” It did not surprise him; he had grown up in similar conditions in West Baltimore.

In fact, if he seemed less bitter than might be expected about the arsonists who destroyed his project, it might be explained by his own life story. Dr. Hickman said he had been raised by a single mother and expelled from three high schools before turning his life around and eventually earning two graduate degrees. He said he understood only too well the youths who decided to loot and burn.

“I was just like them,” he said. “They can’t see beyond their own materialism.”

But by midday Tuesday, Dr. Hickman was already working the phones, talking to the developers about plans to rebuild the Mary Harvin Transformation Center, as the new development is to be called, honoring a church member. He spoke about creating a work force development program, health services, life coaching, mortgage lending. He pointed to a broad field across the street that the church has acquired to build a youth center, and an abandoned laundry that he hopes to convert to more housing.

“We have a mantra,” he said. “We restore people as we restore buildings.”
 

Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Alan Blinder contributed reporting from Baltimore, and Sabrina Tavernise from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on April 29, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Riots Another Scar on a City Battered by Neglect.

Baltimore Riots Are Another Scar on a City Long Battered by Neglect,
NYT, APRIL 28, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/29/us/
baltimore-riots-are-another-scar-on-a-city-battered-by-neglect.html

In Baltimore, We’re All Freddie Gray

APRIL 28, 2015

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor

By D. WATKINS

BALTIMORE — AT the moment, what’s going on in Baltimore seems to be all about Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old black man who was viciously attacked by police officers on April 12 more or less because he looked at them. They subdued him; his spine was nearly severed, his voice box was smashed and he was hauled off in a police van, even after he requested medical attention multiple times. He died a week later as result.

But it’s not only about Freddie Gray. Like him, I grew up in Baltimore, and I and everyone I know have similar stories, even if they happened to end a little differently. To us, the Baltimore Police Department is a group of terrorists, funded by our tax dollars, who beat on people in our community daily, almost never having to explain or pay for their actions. It’s gotten to the point that we don’t call cops unless we need a police report for an insurance claim.

And it’s about more than just the cops. We’ve watched as Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, in conjunction with Police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts, spent over a week investigating what appears to be an open-and-shut case. I’d like to think that if I broke a person’s neck for no reason, I’d be charged in minutes. But the system — even when it’s run by a black mayor and a black commissioner, even when a majority of the City Council is black — protects the police, no matter how blatant and brutal they are.

I can easily skip right past the cases of innocent victims of police brutality who received a combined amount of nearly $6 million in settlements from the city over the last three years, or Tyrone West, Anthony Anderson, Freddie Gray and the more than 100 people killed by local police officers in the last decade, and dive straight into some of the random experiences I’ve had with cops because I’m black in Baltimore.

When I was 10, a group of thugs kicked in the door to my home, knocking it off the hinges, looking for drugs. They held my family and me at gunpoint for hours while they tore our house apart. When they left my mom called the cops; they arrived two hours later, treating us as if we were the crooks and complaining about writing the police reports.

When I was 12 I would play full-court basketball at Ellwood Park, on the city’s east side. One day the cops came through, saying they were looking for a robbery suspect. Suddenly about six officers entered the court from all four directions and made everyone lie on the ground, face down. A friend of mine, whom we called Fat Kevin, asked, “Why y’all treatin’ us like animals?” One of the cops shouted, “Because you are worthless!” though he also used a much more vulgar, and around here a much more common, term.

Then, when I was 14, a cop clothes-lined a kid named Rick off a moped. Rick hopped up, yelling, “What did I do?” and was instantly clubbed down by the cop and his partner. Rick’s face was badly bruised for weeks.

I can throw in stories from the years in between, or the years after, ranging from pre-K to graduate school. And whether they were marching, or torching a cop car, or cleaning up Tuesday morning, black Baltimoreans have almost all had similar stories.

The police officers in Baltimore, as in many places in the country with dense black populations, are out of control, have been out of control. One of the major reasons is that many Baltimore police officers don’t live in Baltimore City; some don’t even live in Maryland. Many don’t know or care about the citizens of the communities they police, which is why they can come in, beat us and kill us without a sign of grief or empathy.

Many other Baltimoreans feel the same way, which is why a diverse collection of protesters has taken to the streets every day since Freddie Gray’s death on April 19.

Most of the protests were peaceful. The first acts of violence didn’t occur until after a nonviolent, if agitated, protest Saturday night at City Hall. From there, a group of protesters, including myself, marched to Camden Yards, where the Orioles were playing the Boston Red Sox. As we passed a strip of bars, a group of white baseball fans, wearing both Baltimore and Boston gear, were standing outside yelling, “We don’t care! We don’t care!” Some called us monkeys and apes. A fight broke out, and people were hurt.

After that, it didn’t take much. Some people might ask, “Why Baltimore?” But the real question is, “Why did it take so long?”

The young uprisers of Baltimore have been paying attention to the peaceful protests in Sanford, Fla., Ferguson, Mo., and New York, only to be let down by the end result, over and over again.

We are all starting to believe that holding hands, following pastors and peaceful protests are pointless. The only option is to rise up, and force Mayor Rawlings-Blake to make what should be an easy choice: Stop protecting the livelihoods of the cops who killed Freddie Gray, or watch Baltimore burn to the ground.
 

D. Watkins is the author of the forthcoming books “The Beastside,” an essay collection, and “Cook Up,” a memoir.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on April 29, 2015, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: In Baltimore, We’re All Freddie Gray.

In Baltimore, We’re All Freddie Gray,
NYT, APRIL 28, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/29/opinion/in-baltimore-were-all-freddie-gray.html

President Obama Condemns

Both the Baltimore Riots

and the Nation’s ‘Slow-Rolling Crisis’

 

APRIL 28, 2015

The New York Times

By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS

and MATT APUZZO

WASHINGTON — President Obama responded with passion and frustration on Tuesday to the violence that has rocked Baltimore and other cities after the deaths of young black men in confrontations with the police, calling for a period of soul-searching about what he said had become a near-weekly cycle of tragedy.

Speaking from the White House Rose Garden, Mr. Obama condemned the chaos unfolding just 40 miles north of the White House and called for “full transparency and accountability” in a Department of Justice investigation into the death of Freddie Gray, the young black man who died of a spinal cord injury suffered while in police custody.

He said that his thoughts were also with the police officers injured in Monday night’s unrest in Baltimore, which he said “underscores that that’s a tough job, and we have to keep that in mind.”

But in a carefully planned 14-minute statement during a news conference with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan, Mr. Obama made clear that he was deeply dismayed not only by the recent unrest in several cities but also by the longstanding yet little-discussed racial and societal forces that have fed it.

“We have seen too many instances of what appears to be police officers interacting with individuals, primarily African-American, often poor, in ways that raise troubling questions,” Mr. Obama said. “This has been a slow-rolling crisis. This has been going on for a long time. This is not new, and we shouldn’t pretend that it’s new.”

He spoke as Loretta E. Lynch, the new attorney general, dispatched two of her top deputies to Baltimore to handle the fallout: Vanita Gupta, her civil rights chief, and Ronald L. Davis, her community-policing director. The unrest there and the epidemic Mr. Obama described of troubled relations between white police officers and black citizens have consumed Ms. Lynch’s first two days on the job and could define her time in office.

They have also raised difficult and familiar questions for Mr. Obama about whether he and his administration are doing enough to confront the problem, questions made all the more poignant because he is the first African-American to occupy the White House.

The president struggled for balance in his remarks. He pushed back against critics who have said he should be more aggressive in his response to questionable practices by the police, saying: “I can’t federalize every police department in the country and force them to retrain.”

Mr. Obama also made clear that he had no sympathy for people rioting in the streets, calling them “a handful of people taking advantage of the situation for their own purposes,” who should “be treated as criminals.”

And he said that law enforcement officials and organizations that represent them must also admit that “there are some police who aren’t doing the right thing.”

But he emphasized that the problem went far beyond the police, who he said are too often deployed to “do the dirty work of containing the problems that arise” in broken urban communities where fathers are absent, drugs dominate and education, jobs and opportunities are nonexistent.

The president had initially avoided commenting on the unrest in Baltimore, allowing only still photographers into the Oval Office on Monday afternoon as he held an unscheduled meeting with Ms. Lynch, thus denying reporters the chance to ask him questions about the chaos then unfurling one state away. The issue dominated Ms. Lynch’s first day on the job, and her response to it will be watched closely. As he prepared to swear her in, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said that Ms. Lynch, the first black woman in the post, was uniquely qualified to bridge the divide between minority neighborhoods and police officers clashing over the use of deadly force. Within hours, Baltimore was in flames.

Ms. Lynch’s predecessor, Eric H. Holder Jr., the first black attorney general, was the face of the Obama administration’s response to unrest in Ferguson, Mo., last year after a white police officer killed an unarmed black teenager there, and he relished the opportunity to talk about policing and race relations.

It made him a hero of the civil rights movement, but drew sharp criticism from police groups who said the attorney general did not do enough to support them.

Ms. Lynch, a career prosecutor, came into office promising to strike a new tone and planned to visit police groups this summer. But the riots in Baltimore after the death of the 25-year-old Mr. Gray have overtaken that timeline. Almost as soon as she had taken her oath, there were signs that Baltimore was about to erupt.

As mourners gathered for Mr. Gray’s funeral, the police announced that three street gangs had pledged to work together to “take out” police officers. The University of Maryland shut down its Baltimore campus early, saying it had been warned that the area could soon turn violent.

A turbulent day in Baltimore ended with rioting by rock-throwing youths and a call to end the violence by religious leaders and the mother of Freddie Gray. By Axel Gerdau on Publish Date April 28, 2015.

At the Justice Department, Ms. Lynch was met by Ms. Gupta and Mr. Davis for a lengthy update on Baltimore. It was her first meeting as attorney general, and it led to the unscheduled trip to the White House to meet with Mr. Obama.

In one meeting on Tuesday, Ms. Lynch told officials that while in Baltimore, they should meet not only Mr. Gray’s family but also the officers who were most seriously injured. “When officers get injured in senseless violence, they become victims as well,” she said, a Justice Department official told reporters.

As night set in on Monday, chaos reigned on Baltimore’s streets. Rioters burned and looted businesses. Others hurled rocks. Police officers were injured, and the police commissioner said his department was outnumbered in its own city.

Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland activated the National Guard, sending hundreds of soldiers into the city after dawn on Tuesday.

Ms. Lynch issued a statement in which she condemned “the senseless acts of violence by some individuals in Baltimore that have resulted in harm to law enforcement officers, destruction of property and a shattering of the peace in the city.”

It was a message that Mr. Obama echoed on Tuesday, as he bristled at what he argued was the news media’s habit of focusing on dramatic images of brutality and chaos rather than on what have been mostly peaceful protests in Baltimore and other cities.

“One burning building will be looped on television over and over and over again, and thousands of demonstrators who did it the right way, I think, have been lost in the discussion,” Mr. Obama said.

He said the that “overwhelming majority” in Baltimore protested peacefully and went back into the streets Tuesday to clean up after “a handful of criminals and thugs who tore up the place.” Ms. Lynch, a child of the segregated South and the daughter of a local civil rights leader, has spoken of the need for police officers — because they wield the power — to repair broken relationships. But she has also spoken repeatedly about the police as a force for good in minority neighborhoods.

A version of this article appears in print on April 29, 2015, on page A15 of the New York edition with the headline: President Condemns Both the Riots and the Nation’s ‘Slow-Rolling Crisis’.

President Obama Condemns Both the Baltimore Riots
and the Nation’s ‘Slow-Rolling Crisis’, NYT, APRIL 28, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/29/us/politics/
events-in-baltimore-reflect-a-slow-rolling-crisis-across-us-obama-says.html

Baltimore Enlists National Guard

and a Curfew to Fight Riots and Looting

 

APRIL 27, 2015

The New York Times

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

BALTIMORE — Maryland’s governor activated the National Guard on Monday and the city of Baltimore announced a curfew for all residents as a turbulent day that began with the funeral of 25-year-old Freddie Gray, the nation’s latest symbol of police brutality, ended with rioting by rock-throwing youths, arson, looting and at least 15 police officers injured.

The violence that shook the city broke out in the late afternoon in the Mondawmin neighborhood of northwest Baltimore, where Mr. Gray’s funeral had taken place. Angry residents threw bottles, rocks and chunks of concrete at officers who lined up in riot gear with shields deployed. Cars were set on fire, store windows were shattered, a CVS drugstore was looted, and the cafe inside a century-old Italian deli was destroyed. Trouble also erupted at the city’s Lexington Market.

By nighttime, the chaos seemed to be competing with a push for calm. Looters pulled junk food from convenience stores within a few blocks of police in riot gear and cars that had been set ablaze. At the same time, young men in black T-shirts from a local antiviolence group urged their neighbors to go back inside. A large fire burned in east Baltimore, consuming a partly built development project of the Southern Baptist Church that was to include housing for the elderly.

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake arrived at the scene of the blaze and said it was under investigation. “We don’t know if it is related to the riots,” she said.

Gov. Larry Hogan declared a state of emergency, and the Maryland State Police, who took command of the response, said they would ask for 5,000 law enforcement officials from the mid-Atlantic region to help quell the violence. Some National Guard units were to arrive on Monday night, with others deploying on Tuesday in armored Humvees.

In Washington, Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch, on her first day on the job, briefed President Obama, who in turn called Governor Hogan. Mr. Hogan said the president urged him to have law enforcement officers exercise restraint, and he assured the president they would. “But,” the governor added, “I assured him we weren’t going to stand by and allow our city of Baltimore to be taken over by thugs.”

City officials said schools would be closed on Tuesday for the safety of children. At City Hall, Ms. Rawlings-Blake, sounding exhausted and exasperated after days of appealing for calm, announced that a 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew would be imposed for a week beginning on Tuesday. The city already has a curfew for juveniles under age 17.

“Too many people have spent generations building up this city for it to be destroyed by thugs,” she said. “I’m at a loss for words. It is idiotic to think that by destroying your city that you’re going to make life better for anybody.” The police said that at least 27 people had been arrested.

It was the second time in six months that a state called out the National Guard to enforce order in a city shaken by violence after a black man died in an encounter with police. Missouri deployed the guard in Ferguson in August after a white police officer killed an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, and then again in November when violence greeted the news that a grand jury had not indicted the officer who shot Mr. Brown.
Continue reading the main story

At a late night news conference, the Baltimore police commissioner, Anthony W. Batts, noted that Ferguson is a much smaller city than Baltimore, which covers 80 square miles. “We were pulled so thin,” he said, adding, “We had opposite ends of the city pulling us at the same time.”

The police said early in the day that they had received a “credible threat” that members of various gangs, including the Black Guerrilla Family, Bloods and Crips, had “entered into a partnership to ‘take out’ law enforcement officers.” But officers kept a low profile in the neighborhood during Mr. Gray’s funeral. The police also said that a flier circulated on social media called for a period of violence on Monday afternoon to begin at the Mondawmin Mall and move toward City Hall downtown.

Warned by the police of possible violence, the University of Maryland campus in downtown Baltimore closed early, as did the Mondawmin Mall. The Orioles postponed their home game against the Chicago White Sox. The Baltimore police vowed the authorities would take “appropriate measures” to keep officers and the neighborhood safe.

“You’re going to see tear gas. You’re going to see pepper balls. We’re going to use appropriate methods to make sure we can preserve the safety of that community,” a spokesman, Capt. J. Eric Kowalczyk, said at a news conference. Fifteen police officers were injured, some with broken bones, and one was unresponsive, according to the department.

Pastor Jamal Bryant, who delivered Mr. Gray’s eulogy, came back to the neighborhood after the burial on Monday afternoon to appeal for calm. He said he would send teams of men from his church, the Empowerment Temple, to help keep the peace.

“This is not what the family asked for, today of all days,” Mr. Bryant said. “For us to come out of the burial and walk into this is absolutely inexcusable.” He said he was “asking every young person to go back home,” adding, “it’s frustration, anger and it’s disrespect for the family.”

Mr. Gray’s death on April 19, a week after sustaining a spinal cord injury while in police custody, has opened a deep wound in this majority-black city, where Ms. Rawlings-Blake and Mr. Batts — both of whom are black — have struggled to reform a police department that has a history of aggressive, sometimes brutal, treatment of black men.

Mr. Gray was chased and restrained by police on bicycles at the Gilmor Homes on the morning of April 12; a cellphone video of his arrest showed him being dragged into a police van, seemingly limp and screaming in pain. The police have acknowledged that he should have received medical treatment immediately at the scene of the arrest and have also said that he rode in the van unbuckled.

After his arrival at the police station, medics rushed him to the hospital, where he slipped into a coma and died . His family has said that 80 percent of his spinal cord was severed, and his larynx was crushed. The death spawned a week of protests that had been largely peaceful until Saturday night, when demonstrators — who had spent the afternoon marching through the city — scuffled with officers in riot gear outside Camden Yards, the baseball park. Authorities attributed the scattered violence that night to outsiders who, Ms. Rawlings-Blake said, “were inciting,” with “ ‘go out there and shut this city down’ kind of messaging.”

But the violence on Monday was much more devastating and profound, a blow for a city whose leaders had been hoping Mr. Gray’s funeral would show the nation its more peaceful side. At the New Shiloh Baptist Church, Mr. Gray lay in an open white coffin, in a white shirt and tie, with a pillow bearing a picture of him in a red T-shirt, against a backdrop of a blue sky and doves, with the message “Peace y’all.”

The service was more than a celebration of Mr. Gray’s short life; it was a call for peace and justice — and for residents of Baltimore to help lead the nationwide movement for better police treatment of black men that emerged last August after the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson.

“The eyes of this country are all on us, because they want to see whether we have the stuff to make this right,” said William Murphy, the lawyer representing the Gray family, who is a fixture in legal and political circles here. “They want to know whether our leadership is up to the task.”

Much of that leadership was seated in the pews, including Ms. Rawlings-Blake and Representative Elijah E. Cummings, Democrat of Maryland, who was one of the speakers.

Also among the mourners were Kweisi Mfume, a former congressman and chief of the N.A.A.C.P.; three aides to President Obama; and several family members of others killed by the police in various parts of the country, including Erica Garner, daughter of Eric Garner, a man who died after a police officer put him in a chokehold last year on Staten Island. She said she had come “to stand with the family of Freddie Gray. It’s unfortunate, but I feel we have a connection.” In his eulogy, Mr. Bryant spoke of the plight of poor, young black men like Mr. Gray, living “confined to a box” made up of poor education, lack of job opportunities and racial stereotypes — “the box of thinking all black men are thugs and athletes and rappers.”

“He had to have been asking himself, ‘What am I going to do with my life?’ ” Mr. Bryant said. “He had to feel at age 25 like the walls were closing in on him.”

Mr. Bryant insisted that Mr. Gray’s death would not “be in vain.” He vowed that Baltimore residents would “keep demanding justice” but also issued a pointed rebuke to the congregation, telling members that black people must take control of their lives and force the government and police to change.

“This is not the time for us as a people to be sitting on the corner drinking malt liquor,” he roared, as his voice rose and the congregation, clapping, rose to its feet. “This is not the time for us to be playing the lottery or at the horsing casino, this is not the time for us to be walking down with our pants hanging down.”

He said, “Get your black self up and change this city!” and added, “I don’t know how you can be black in America and be silent. With everything we’ve been through, ain’t no way in the world you can sit here and be silent in the face of injustice.”

But as the day went on, the mood changed. The violence appears to have begun inside the Mondawmin Mall. Erica Ellis, 23, who works in a Game Stop store there, said the mall was shut down at 2 p.m., not long after Mr. Gray’s funeral cortege left for his burial.

She said she went outside and saw a big line of police officers and hundreds of young people who started throwing rocks and bricks. But police did not respond immediately, she said. “The police officers were trying as hard as they can not to hurt the people’s children,” she said.

At the corner of North Fulton and West North Avenues, looters could be seen breaking into stores and walking out with cases of food and water while hundreds of police officers in riot gear gathered about four blocks away.

When a pair of police cruisers tried to enter the area, young men threw bottles. Several of the men wore surgical masks. Some carried baseball bats, others carried pipes. While several people held signs that said “Stop the war,” protesting peacefully, the rising chaos surrounded them: a broken-down BMW sat empty in the middle of the street, shards of glass from convenience store windows lay on the pavement and a young man carrying bolt cutters walked by.

Residents looked on aghast. Not far from the Gilmor Homes, the public housing development where Mr. Gray was first arrested, Chris Malloy, who lives in the area, said he was angry at the police and the looters — all at once.

“All they had to do was march, but they did this,” he said, sounding disgusted, as the CVS store burned nearby. “You can take stuff out of the store, but why do you have to burn it down?”

Ron Nixon, Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Stephen Babcock contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on April 28, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Clashes Rock Baltimore After Funeral; Curfew Is Set.

Baltimore Enlists National Guard and a Curfew to Fight Riots and Looting
NYT, APRIL 27, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/28/us/baltimore-freddie-gray.html

‘Lynch Mob’: Misuse of Language

APRIL 27, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist

Last week, the Baltimore police union president, Gene Ryan, compared those protesting the death of Freddie Gray to a “lynch mob.”

Freddie Gray was the 25-year-old Baltimore man who died of grave, mysterious injuries after being taken into police custody. Gray’s family, citizens of Baltimore and indeed those of the nation have questions. And yes, there is a palpable frustration and fatigue that yet another young person of color has died after an encounter with police officers.

So, there have been protests. But protests are not the same as a lynch mob, and to conflate the two diminishes the painful history of this country and unfairly slanders the citizens who have taken to the streets. Maybe Mr. Ryan is unaware not only of the history of lynching and lynch mobs in America overall, but also in Maryland itself.

For instance, according to the Maryland Historical Society Library: “Mary Denston, the elderly wife of a Somerset County farmer, was returning to her home in Princess Anne on the morning of October 17, 1933 when she was attacked by an assailant. A manhunt quickly began for the alleged perpetrator, 22-year-old African-American George Armwood. He was soon arrested and charged with felonious assault. By 5:00 pm, an angry mob of local white residents had gathered outside the Salisbury jail where the suspect had been taken. In order to protect Armwood from the increasingly hostile crowd, state police transferred him to Baltimore. But just as quickly he was returned to Somerset County. After assuring Maryland Governor Albert Ritchie that Armwood’s safety would be guaranteed, Somerset County officials transferred Armwood to the jail house in Princess Anne, with tragic consequences.”
Photo

The report continued: “Sources are conflicting regarding many of the details of the assault on Denston and the subsequent murder of George Armwood, but what is certain is that on the evening of October 18 a mob of a thousand or more people stormed into the Princess Anne jail house and hauled Armwood from his cell down to the street below. Before he was hung from a tree some distance away, Armwood was dragged through the streets, beaten, stabbed, and had one ear hacked off. Armwood’s lifeless body was then paraded through the town, finally ending up near the town’s courthouse, where the mob doused the corpse with gasoline and set it on fire.”

As Baltimore’s Afro-American newspaper reported at the time, in addition to Armwood’s blackened skin, mutilated face and missing ear, his tongue was “clenched between his teeth,” giving “evidence of his great agony before death.” It continued: “There is no adequate description of the mute evidence of gloating on the part of whites who gathered to watch the effect upon our people.”

Additionally, according to the historical society, there were 32 lynchings in Maryland between 1882 and 1931.

Perhaps Mr. Ryan had never heard the haunting rendition of “Strange Fruit” recorded in 1939 by Billie Holiday, with its plaintive lyrics shining light on the depravity of lynchings:

“Southern trees bear a strange fruit / Blood on the leaves and blood at the root / Black bodies swingin’ in the Southern breeze / Strange fruit hangin’ from the poplar trees.”

Maybe Mr. Ryan does not appreciate the irony that it was not the officers’ bodies that video showed being dragged limp and screaming through the street, but that of Mr. Gray. Maybe Mr. Ryan does not register coincidence that actual lynching often damages or cuts the spinal cord, and according to a statement by the Gray family’s attorney, Gray’s spine was “80 percent severed at his neck.”

And this is not the first protest of the killing of people of color where “lynch mobs” have been invoked.

Fox News’s Howard Kurtz accused “some liberal outlets” of “creating almost a lynch mob mentality” in Ferguson.”

Possible presidential candidate Mike Huckabee also compared Ferguson protesters to lynch mobs, as did Laura Ingraham, FrontPage magazine and an opinion piece on The Daily Caller.

In 2013, after almost completely peaceful protests the weekend after George Zimmerman was found not guilty in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, Newt Gingrich said that protesters were “prepared, basically, to be a lynch mob.”

These “lynch mob” invocations are an incredible misuse of language, in which the lexicon of slaughter, subjugation and suffering are reduced to mere colloquialism, and therefore bleached of the blood in which it was originally written and used against the people who were historically victims of the atrocities.

“Lynch mob” is the same ghastly rhetorical overreach that is often bandied about in political discussions — including in this column I wrote seven years ago. It was a too-extreme comparison then, and it’s a too-extreme comparison now.

Nothing that political partisans or protesters have done — nothing! — comes remotely close to the barbarism executed by the lynch mobs that stain this country’s history.

I invite you to join me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter, or e-mail me at chblow@nytimes.com.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on April 27, 2015, on page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘Lynch Mob’: Misuse of Language.

‘Lynch Mob’: Misuse of Language,
NYT, APRIL 27, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/27/opinion/
charles-blow-lynch-mob-misuse-of-language.html

Police Fatally Shoot Man

Said to Fire at Officers in Queens

 

APRIL 23, 2015

The New York Times

By ASHLEY SOUTHALL

A man who recently celebrated his 30th birthday was shot and killed by police officers in Queens on Wednesday night after he fired a gun inside a bar and at officers who pursued him, the police said.

The police received a call around 9:22 p.m. about a shooting inside the Irish Hillside Inn on Hillside Avenue at 168th Street in Jamaica. Officers from the 103rd and 107th Precincts answered the call, and witnesses directed them to the man, who was outside the bar and fled when the officers tried to engage him, the police said.

The man ran along 168th Street and turned right on Highland Avenue, where he was met by police officers. He stopped, faced the officers and fired several shots before turning and running again, this time down 168th Place toward Hillside Avenue, the police said. The man turned and fired at the officers a second time, and they returned fire, striking him, the police said.

The man was taken to Jamaica Hospital Medical Center and died a short time later. His name was not immediately released on Wednesday.

Investigators were canvassing the scene late Wednesday. Several police officers could be seen inside the bar shining their flashlights at shelves of alcohol and at the ceiling. About a dozen witnesses were being held inside the Yummy Fried Chicken & Pizza restaurant across 168th Street.

Sharma Ashar, 43, a local deliveryman, said he was walking down Hillside Avenue toward the bar when he heard several gunshots.

“I heard boom, boom, boom,” he said. “Maybe three or four shots. I saw the police running. I saw three or four police running. After that, a lot of cop cars came.”

No officers were wounded in the shooting, the police said.

The man, who turned 30 on Sunday, was involved in an argument inside the bar, the police said.
 

Rebecca White contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on April 23, 2015, on page A24 of the New York edition with the headline: Police Fatally Shoot Man Said to Fire at Officers.

Police Fatally Shoot Man Said to Fire at Officers in Queens,
NYT, APRIL 23, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/23/nyregion/
police-fatally-shoot-man-said-to-fire-at-officers-in-queens.html

Freddie Gray in Baltimore:

Another City, Another Death

in the Public Eye

 

APRIL 21, 2015

The New York Times

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

and RON NIXON

BALTIMORE — In life, friends say, Freddie Gray was an easygoing, slender young man who liked girls and partying here in Sandtown, a section of west Baltimore pocked by boarded-up rowhouses and known to the police for drug dealing and crime.

In death, Mr. Gray, 25, has become the latest symbol in the running national debate over police treatment of black men — all the more searing, people here say, in a city where the mayor and police commissioner are black.

Questions are swirling around just what happened to Mr. Gray, who died here Sunday — a week after he was chased and restrained by police officers, and suffered a spine injury, which later killed him, in their custody. The police say they have no evidence that their officers used force. A lawyer for Mr. Gray’s family accuses the department of a cover-up, and on Tuesday the Justice Department opened a civil rights inquiry into his death.

But as protests continued Tuesday night — with hundreds of angry residents, led by a prominent pastor and Mr. Gray’s grieving family, chanting and marching in the streets — the death has also fueled debate on whether African-American leadership here can better handle accusations of police brutality than cities like Ferguson, Mo., and North Charleston, S.C., with their white-dominated governments.

“Unlike other places where incidents like this have happened, they understand what it means to be black in America,” said City Councilman Brandon Scott, an ally of Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and a frequent critic of Police Commissioner Anthony Batts.

“They understand how something like this can get out of hand very quickly,” Mr. Scott said. “They understand the community’s frustration more than anyone else. But at the same time they also understand the opposite — they understand the need to have law enforcement in neighborhoods. So it puts them in a bind.”

This week the mayor and police commissioner have appeared repeatedly in public promising a full and transparent review of Mr. Gray’s death. On Tuesday, the police released the names of six officers who had been suspended with pay, including a lieutenant, a woman and three officers in their 20s who joined the force less than three years ago. Officers canvassed west Baltimore, looking for witnesses.

Mr. Batts turned up in Mr. Gray’s neighborhood, chatting with residents and shaking hands. And Ms. Rawlings-Blake said in an interview that she had asked Gov. Larry Hogan for help in getting an autopsy on Mr. Gray performed by the state medical examiner made public, even piecemeal, as quickly as possible. The mayor said she supported the Justice Department inquiry.

Chanting “Black Lives Matter” and “Justice for Freddie,” protesters marched Tuesday evening on the block where Mr. Gray was arrested. The Rev. Jamal Bryant asked for a moment of silence. Mr. Gray’s relatives — including his mother, her head shrouded in the hood of a sweatshirt — paused quietly.

Mr. Gray’s arrest, which was captured on a cellphone video that shows him being dragged, seemingly limp, into a police van, has revived a debate in this city over police practices.

“We have a very challenging history in Baltimore,” Ms. Rawlings-Blake said, adding that she had worked hard “to repair a broken relationship” between black residents and the police. She called Mr. Gray’s death “a very sad and frustrating setback.”

Ms. Rawlings-Blake and Mr. Batts had been talking about the problem long before the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in August spawned national protests and the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. But the officials’ actions are doing little to assuage angry residents here. Rosa Mobley says she witnessed Mr. Gray’s arrest from her bedroom window, and heard him screaming as the police dragged him into a transport van. “We got this so-called black mayor, but she don’t care nothing about us,” Ms. Mobley said as Mr. Batts pulled up in the neighborhood in a black SUV just before noon on Tuesday. “They don’t come around here. Just because we’re poor, we don’t need to be treated like this.”

Because there are no national statistics on police-involved killings, it is impossible to say whether their numbers are increasing. But the growing prevalence of cellphone and police video, coupled with heightened scrutiny by the news media and the public after Ferguson, has focused intense attention on such cases, especially when officers are white and victims are black.

The police here did not release the racial breakdown of the six suspended officers. Now the Justice Department will look into whether they violated Mr. Gray’s civil rights. Such inquiries are not unusual; in Ferguson, the department did not find Mr. Brown’s rights were violated. However, a second broader Justice Department review of the Ferguson Police Department resulted in a scathing report detailing abusive and discriminatory practices by the city’s law enforcement system.

In Baltimore, police-community tensions date at least to 2005, when the Police Department, following a practice known as “zero-tolerance policing” made more than 100,000 arrests in a heavily African-American city of then roughly 640,000 people.

In 2006, the N.A.A.C.P. and the American Civil Liberties Union sued the city, alleging a broad pattern of abuse in which people were routinely arrested without probable cause. The city settled in 2010 for $870,000, agreed to retrain officers and publicly rejected “zero-tolerance policing.” Ms. Rawlings-Blake became mayor that year.

In 2012 she brought in Mr. Batts, who had run the police department in Oakland, Calif. In 2013, he proposed that police officers wear body cameras to capture encounters like the one that injured Mr. Gray; plans are now in the works for a pilot project.

Ms. Rawlings-Blake has also eliminated a police unit that had a reputation for treating suspects harshly. Last year, she and Mr. Batts asked the Justice Department to investigate after The Baltimore Sun reported that taxpayers had paid nearly $6 million since 2011 in judgments or settlements in 102 lawsuits alleging police misconduct. That investigation is ongoing.

William Murphy Jr., the lawyer for the Gray family, said Tuesday in an interview that “the commissioner’s heart is in the right place,” and that the mayor — whose father, Pete Rawlings, was a civil rights advocate and powerful Maryland politician — “understands police brutality and the extent to which it has a cancerous effect on our society.”

But Mr. Murphy said they had inherited “a dysfunctional department” whose officers “had no probable cause” to arrest Mr. Gray, who was stopped early on the morning of April 12 after a police lieutenant made eye contact with him and he ran away. That lieutenant was one of the six officers who were suspended.

“He was running while black,” Mr. Murphy said of Mr. Gray, “and that’s not a crime.”

At a news conference Monday, Deputy Police Commissioner Jerry Rodriguez said Mr. Gray “gave up without the use of force.” Mr. Gray, who was apparently asthmatic, then asked for his inhaler, but he did not have one; he was conscious and speaking when he was loaded into the van to be taken to the police station, Mr. Rodriguez said.

In interviews on Tuesday, witnesses gave various accounts. Michelle Gross, who took cellphone video of the arrest, said she saw two officers standing over Mr. Gray as people said: “He’s just lying there? Why don’t you call an ambulance? Why don’t you get him some help?”

Another witness, Kiona Mack, who said she took the cellphone video that showed Mr. Gray being dragged into the van, said she saw officers “sitting on his back, and having his leg twisted.”

Members of Mr. Gray’s family have said he suffered three fractured vertebrae in his neck and that his larynx was crushed, according to The Baltimore Sun; Mr. Murphy, the lawyer, said Mr. Gray’s spinal cord was 80 percent severed. Those details have not been confirmed by doctors or authorities, but experts on spinal cord injury said even less obvious neck trauma could be life-threatening.

“It doesn’t necessarily take huge force to fracture or dislocate a vertebra, and have a traumatic compression of the spinal cord,” said Ben A. Barres, professor of neurobiology at the Stanford School of Medicine. “It gets worse very rapidly if it’s not treated.” And, he said, “moving the person, like lifting him into a van, or even the ride in the van, could make the injury much worse.”

The police have said they will complete their inquiry by May 1 and turn it over to the state’s attorney for Maryland, who will determine whether to bring criminal charges. Ms. Rawlings-Blake has said she will also convene an independent commission.

In Mr. Gray’s neighborhood, which is adjacent to a public housing development called the Gilmor Homes, people remembered him Tuesday as a likable young man who sometimes got into trouble with the law — Maryland court records show he had at least two arrests for drug-related charges since December.

Mr. Gray had a twin sister, and a brother who died, friends say, and he also suffered lead poisoning as a child. They are furious about his death, and particularly about police conduct.

“He wasn’t out causing any trouble,” said Roosevelt McNeil, 26, who had known Mr. Gray since Mr. Gray was a child. “He had some arrests, but he wasn’t a big drug dealer or something like that. He was a great guy over all — he didn’t deserve to be handled like that. Why won’t the cops say how they ended up going after him, from that to him having his neck broken?”
 

Jason Grant contributed reporting from Baltimore, and Richard Pérez-Peña from New York. Susan Beachy and Kitty Bennett contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on April 22, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Another City, Another Death in Public Eye.

Freddie Gray in Baltimore: Another City, Another Death in the Public Eye,
NYT, APRIL 21, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/22/us/another-mans-death-another-round-of-questions-for-the-police-in-baltimore.html

At Supreme Court,

Eric Holder’s Justice Dept.

Routinely Backs Officers’ Use of Force

 

APRIL 21, 2015

The New York Times

By MATT APUZZO

and ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON — Teresa Sheehan was alone in her apartment at a mental health center, clutching what her lawyers said was a small bread knife and demanding to be left alone. San Francisco police officers, responding to a call from a social worker, forced open the door, blinded her with pepper spray and shot her.

It was the kind of violent police confrontation that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has frequently criticized in Cleveland, Albuquerque, Ferguson, Mo., and beyond. But last month, when Ms. Sheehan’s civil rights lawsuit reached the Supreme Court, the Justice Department backed the police, saying that a lower court should have given more weight to the risks that the officers faced.

At the Supreme Court, where the limits of police power are established, Mr. Holder’s Justice Department has supported police officers every time an excessive-force case has made its way to arguments. Even as it has opened more than 20 civil rights investigations into local law enforcement practices, the Justice Department has staked out positions that make it harder for people to sue the police and that give officers more discretion about when to fire their guns.

Police groups see Mr. Holder as an ally in that regard, and that pattern has rankled civil rights lawyers, who say the government can have a far greater effect on policing by interpreting law at the Supreme Court than through investigations of individual departments.

“There is an inherent conflict between people at the Justice Department trying to stop police abuses and other people at the Justice Department convincing the Supreme Court that police abuses should be excused,” said Ronald L. Kuby, a Manhattan civil rights lawyer.

To some extent, conflict is built into the system. The Justice Department’s core mission is law enforcement. It oversees the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, among others. In every administration, it is in the government’s interest for federal agents to have as much leeway, and as little liability, as possible.

“It’s natural that the instinctive reaction of the department is to support law enforcement interests, even when a particular case may have compelling facts for the individual defendant,” said Neal K. Katyal, a former acting solicitor general in the Obama administration. He said the Justice Department had a duty to tell the court what effect a ruling could have for federal law enforcement agencies.

When police abuse cases make it to the Supreme Court, even if they have nothing to do with federal agents, the Justice Department often weighs in. Last year, the department sided with police officers in West Memphis, Ark., who shot a driver and passenger 15 times, killing them at the end of a chase.

John F. Bash, a Justice Department lawyer in that case, told the justices that “there is some level of reckless driving in response to a police pursuit that authorizes the use of deadly force.” What was certain, he added, was that the officers were entitled to qualified immunity, which shields them from civil rights lawsuits. The Supreme Court unanimously agreed.
Continue reading the main story

Every such victory makes it harder for citizens to prevail when they believe they have been mistreated by police officers. It also adds obstacles for the Justice Department’s own civil rights investigators when alleging police misconduct. That has led to some tense debates inside the department, current and former officials say, as the government’s civil rights and appellate lawyers discussed when the department should weigh in, and on which side. Those debates have led the Justice Department to take more nuanced positions than government lawyers might have otherwise, the officials said.

“Law enforcement officers are routinely called upon to face grave dangers and to make often-unheralded sacrifices, and the law must give them the room to make real-time judgments to protect public safety,” said Emily Pierce, a Justice Department spokeswoman. “At the same time, building trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve and protecting human life and human dignity requires accountability for law enforcement officers. The department recognizes — and is committed to striking — that balance.”

Mr. Holder has called the civil rights division the crown jewel of the department, and it has rarely had such a high profile. Even before it garnered national attention with a scathing rebuke of the Ferguson Police Department after the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white officer last summer, the division issued similar reports on other departments, including those in Seattle, Albuquerque, Newark and New Orleans.

Those efforts, along with deeply personal remarks from Mr. Holder about racial profiling, have drawn criticism from police officers who say he has not supported them. But Darrel W. Stephens, the executive director of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, said many officers probably did not know how often Mr. Holder’s Justice Department stood with them at the Supreme Court. “He’s sincere,” Mr. Stephens said. “He is supportive of the police.”

Private civil rights lawyers, though, have been frustrated that the Justice Department’s aggressive stance in civil rights reports does not extend to its positions before the Supreme Court. “A report can have an impact on a department for a time,” said Gary Smith, the lawyer for the driver in the Arkansas case. “But case law touches every officer in every department in the country.”

Eventually, he predicted, police departments facing civil rights investigations will challenge the Justice Department on its apparently contradictory positions. “You’re telling the Supreme Court it’s O.K., and you’re doing this to us?” Mr. Smith said.

When Justice Department lawyers argue before the Supreme Court, they typically draw fine distinctions and avoid outright contradictions. But such cases can send seemingly mixed messages. For example, the civil rights division said in December that police officers in Cleveland were too quick to use force against mentally ill people. For support, it cited the federal appeals court decision in the case of the mentally ill woman in San Francisco — the same decision that Justice Department lawyers would argue against a few months later.

Similarly, the Justice Department criticized the sheriff in Franklin County, Ohio, in 2010 for using stun guns on inmates while they were handcuffed and posed no threat, or when they committed minor rule violations. In a Supreme Court case to be heard later this month, the Justice Department has sided with Wisconsin jail officials who used a stun gun on an inmate after he was handcuffed and taken from his cell for refusing to remove a piece of paper covering a light fixture in his cell.

The Justice Department sees those cases as evidence not of conflict but of how its lawyers strike a balance. In the Sheehan case from San Francisco, despite siding with the police, they argued that officers must make some accommodation for a person’s mental illness when making an arrest. And in the Wisconsin case, they agreed with the inmate about the legal standard needed to prove abuse, even as they again supported the police.

For Mr. Holder, altering the department’s approach to police abuse cases would amount to a major policy change, one that F.B.I. agents and other federal investigators would surely oppose, said William R. Yeomans, an American University law professor who served in senior roles in the civil rights division during the Clinton administration. So when tensions arise, protecting federal agents almost always wins. “Obviously it’s a problem,” he said. “The institutional interests in support of law enforcement are very powerful and very real.”

Because of that history, Steven R. Shapiro, the legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, said it was unfair to criticize Mr. Holder’s tenure too harshly. The Justice Department has always advocated its law enforcement authority, he said. And the A.C.L.U. often opposes those efforts. But he said no administration had done more to curb police abuses or to force a national debate over the issue.

“Civil rights has a voice at the table more often and more prominently under this administration than in previous administrations. It’s not merely symbolic,” he said. “To the extent there is dissonance, we’re noticing the dissonance because the civil rights voice is more prominent than in the past.”

At Supreme Court, Eric Holder’s Justice Dept. Routinely Backs Officers’ Use of Force,
NYT, APRIL 21, 2015
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/22/us/at-supreme-court-holders-justice-dept-routinely-backs-officers-use-of-force.html

The Violent Legacy of Chicago’s Police

 

APRIL 21, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Rahm Emanuel inherited a Police Department with a history of serious misconduct when he became mayor of Chicago four years ago. Mr. Emanuel tried to break with the past on Wednesday when he co-sponsored a proposal in City Council that would provide reparations to scores of people who were systematically tortured by the police during the 1970s and ’80s under the infamous police commander Jon Burge.

On the same day, in a separate case that is still fresh in the public’s mind, the Council awarded $5 million to the family of Laquan McDonald, a black teenager who was shot 16 times by a police officer in October. The shooting spawned a federal investigation, rattled public trust and raised troubling accusations of a police cover-up. The Council’s decision to pay was made before a lawsuit was filed, but this cannot be the end of the case. The city needs to release a police dash-cam video of the shooting that it has withheld on grounds that releasing it might interfere with the federal investigation.

The shooting of Mr. McDonald, who was 17, brought back bitter memories of the days when Mayor Richard J. Daley and the Police Department ruled Chicago with an iron hand. Between 1972 and 1991, lawyers say, about 120 mainly African-American men were picked up by Mr. Burge’s “midnight crew,” shocked with cattle prods, beaten with telephone books and suffocated with plastic bags until they confessed to crimes. Mr. Burge was ultimately fired in 1993 after he was linked to a torture case. Statutes of limitation protected him from charges of abuse, but, in 2010, he was sentenced to four and a half years in prison for perjury and obstruction of justice.

The reparations plan will provide substance abuse treatment, counseling and other services to Burge victims and their immediate family members, as well as free tuition at city colleges. The plan also includes a formal City Council apology and a permanent memorial recognizing the victims. The case will be included in eighth and 10th grade history classes in city public schools. In addition, a $5.5 million fund will be created to provide financial reparations to individuals with a credible claim.

Settlements like these are necessary and justified, but they are also a serious drain on Chicago’s precarious finances at a time when the city is closing schools and mental health clinics. According to a 2014 study by the city’s Better Government Association, the government has spent more than $500 million on claims related to police misconduct in the last decade alone.

These losses underscore the failings of a Police Department that cannot seem to shake its lamentable past and, to this day, is poorly trained, poorly managed and ruled by an ingrained culture of hair-trigger violence. Over the last seven years, Chicago police have killed more 120 people. Mr. Emanuel described the reparations plan as a way to bring a dark chapter of the city’s history to a close. But, even as he spoke, federal and state investigators were combing the city for information about the McDonald shooting.

Last October, a spokesman for the police union said that officers shot the teenager because he refused drop a knife he was carrying. Witnesses have said that he was moving away from the officers and was shot while lying on the ground.

A lawyer for the family who had viewed a police video taken at the scene told the Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mary Mitchell last week that Mr. McDonald was not menacing the officers or running when he was shot and that the officer continued to fire once the young man had fallen. He further asserted that 86 minutes of surveillance video taken by security cameras at a Burger King restaurant near the scene of the shooting had gone missing and that Chicago detectives had visited the restaurant.

The city has declined to release the police video because of the continuing investigation. But that’s a flimsy excuse. The public deserves to see this evidence, and the longer the delay the greater the suspicion against a department that has a history of violating the public’s trust.

A version of this editorial appears in print on April 21, 2015,
on page A22 of the New York edition with the headline:
The Violent Legacy of Chicago’s Police.

The Violent Legacy of Chicago’s Police,
NYT, APRIL 21, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/21/opinion/the-violent-legacy-of-chicagos-police.html

Baltimore Suspends 6 Police Officers

in Inquiry in Death of Freddie Gray

 

APRIL 20, 2015

The New York Times

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

BALTIMORE — Six police officers have been suspended and officials said Monday that they were changing police procedures as they investigated the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who was rushed to the hospital with a severed spinal cord after being chased and tackled by officers.

With the city on edge after days of protests that continued Monday evening, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and Police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts appeared at a news conference and appealed for continued calm. Mr. Batts said the Police Department would wrap up its inquiry on May 1, though investigators said they still do not understand precisely how — or when — Mr. Gray was injured.

“We have no evidence — physical, video or statements — of any use of force,” the deputy police commissioner, Jerry Rodriguez, said at the news conference. “He did suffer a very tragic injury to his spinal cord, which resulted in his death. What we don’t know, and what we need to get to, is how that injury occurred.”

Mr. Gray died Sunday, a week after his arrest. Witnesses captured parts of his encounter with the police on a cellphone video, in which screams can be heard as officers drag him into a transport van. An autopsy showed no wounds, except for the severed spinal cord, and the videos do not show the police acting forcefully.

Mr. Batts, however, conceded that officers had been slow to recognize that Mr. Gray, who apparently had asthma, needed medical attention; before he was put in the van, he asked for his inhaler, which he did not have with him.

“We should have probably asked for paramedics” sooner, the commissioner said. He added that his department had already begun changing policies governing the transport of suspects, and the care of people who require medical attention while in police custody.

The officers involved were suspended with pay pending the outcome of the investigation.

The death of Mr. Gray came amid growing national outrage over police treatment of black men, and questions about why officers are so rarely prosecuted. In Michigan on Monday, a police officer in the Detroit suburb of Inkster was charged with mistreatment of a prisoner and assault, both felonies, in connection with a January traffic stop in which he hauled a man out of his car and repeatedly punched him in the head. Also on Monday, a Los Angeles police officer was charged with assault under the color of authority against a black man who had surrendered to the police and was lying on the ground.

Here in Maryland, where both Ms. Rawlings-Blake and Mr. Batts offered condolences to the Gray family, Mr. Batts said his department would refer its findings to the state’s attorney for Baltimore, Marilyn J. Mosby, for possible prosecution. Ms. Mosby said in a statement that her office had “dedicated all its existing resources to independently investigate this matter to determine whether criminal charges will be brought.”

Police officers filed court documents on Monday saying Mr. Gray had been arrested “without force or incident.” The documents show that Mr. Gray had been carrying a switchblade, but Ms. Rawlings-Blake said she wanted to put to rest any rumors that this was the reason officers pursued Mr. Gray.

“We know that having a knife is not necessarily a crime,” the mayor said.

According to a detailed timeline presented Monday by the deputy commissioner, Mr. Rodriguez, a police lieutenant made eye contact with Mr. Gray shortly before 8:40 a.m. on April 12 in a neighborhood on the west side of the city known for drug dealing. When Mr. Gray ran away, three officers on bicycles pursued him; they caught him and restrained him on the ground.

Mr. Gray “gave up without the use of force,” Mr. Rodriguez said, adding that an officer took out his Taser but did not use it. Mr. Gray then asked for his inhaler, but was conscious and speaking when he was loaded into the van to be taken to the police station.

On the way to the station, the van made at least two stops — including one in which Mr. Gray was taken out and placed in leg shackles after the driver complained he was “acting irate in the back,” Mr. Rodriguez said. After Mr. Gray arrived at Baltimore’s Western District station, police officers called medics, who took him to a hospital.

The police also released a video, taken from a building near the scene of the arrest, though it showed little; the footage comes from a closed-caption television system run by the city.

Mr. Gray’s family has not spoken in public. But the lawyer for the family, William Murphy Jr., has disputed the police account and accused the authorities of trying to cover up their actions.

“There’s a lot of missing information,” Mr. Murphy said in an interview, adding that he was still awaiting medical records, a copy of the autopsy report and officers’ audio transmissions.

Maryland court records show Mr. Gray was arrested in December and March on drug charges, including possession of heroin, but Mr. Murphy said that history was irrelevant. Neighbors said Mr. Gray had occasionally worked in construction.

Outside the Western District station on Monday night, in the neighborhood where Mr. Gray grew up, angry residents confronted a phalanx of officers, roughly half of them black, demanding to know why Mr. Gray had not been given medical help sooner.

“Why would you put someone in a paddy wagon who needs medical help?” a man who identified himself only as Antonio yelled at the officers. “You’re supposed to call an ambulance.”

For Ms. Rawlings-Blake and Mr. Batts, both of whom are African-American, the death and protests pose a particular challenge; the mayor recently issued a “call to action” to ease black-on-black crime and improve the lives of young black men in a city where relations between the police and black residents have in the past been tense.

“This is a very, very tense time for Baltimore City, and I understand the community’s frustration,” the mayor said. “I understand it because I’m frustrated. I’m angry that we are here again, that we have to tell another mother that her child is dead. I’m frustrated not only that we are here, but we don’t have all of the answers.”
 

A version of this article appears in print on April 21, 2015,
on page A10 of the New York edition with the headline:
Six Officers Suspended in Baltimore After a Death.

Baltimore Suspends 6 Police Officers in Inquiry in Death of Freddie Gray,
NYT, APRIL 20, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/21/us/
baltimore-officials-promise-investigation-into-death-of-freddie-gray.html

A Police Shot to a Boy’s Back in Queens,

Echoing Since 1973

APRIL 16, 2015

The New York Times

It was 1973, long before anyone could imagine hashtag declarations of solidarity and protest, the kind of message to the world that today might read, #IamCliffordGloverInTheFourthGrade.

No one could pull out a phone to make a video of Clifford Glover, a 10-year-old running from a plainclothes police officer with a gun who had just jumped out of a white Buick Skylark in Jamaica, Queens, on a spring morning in 1973.

“I am sure a camera would have helped, but the ballistics were clear,” Albert Gaudelli, a former Queens prosecutor, said this week. “The bullet entered his lower back and came out at the top of his chest. He was shot T-square in the back, with his body leaning forward. He was running away.”

That bullet killed Clifford Glover. Its trajectory — through a family, a neighborhood, a generation — can be traced to this day, in injuries that never healed, in a story with no final word. When a black man named Walter Scott was shot by a white police officer in North Charleston, S.C., on April 4, a cellphone video made by a passer-by showed that Mr. Scott was also running away when he was killed and that he was not, as the officer claimed, carrying a police Taser.

“With all this killing and stuff,” said Pauline Armstead, a sister of the dead boy, “they need to go back to Cliffie Glover.”

Clifford, a black boy, had been shot by Officer Thomas Shea, a white man, who said he had tried to question him and his stepfather because they fit the descriptions of cab robbers. They ran. The officer said he fired when Clifford, in flight, pointed a gun at him, which the mortally injured boy had then managed to toss or hand to his stepfather.

In the hours and days that followed the shooting, armies of investigators scoured the streets and sewers, pored over court records and arrived, without warrants, to search the homes of Clifford’s family and relatives.

“Guys were trying to help Shea, and coming up with all kinds of stuff,” said Mr. Gaudelli, who was the chief homicide prosecutor in Queens at the time. “Someone showed up with a starter’s pistol, but as soon as you pressed them on it, they folded. There was no gun.”

People in Jamaica rose in protest; the streets were blocked with heavy construction equipment owned by a black contractor. Mr. Shea became the first police officer in nearly 50 years to be charged with committing murder while on duty.

“Shea says that the kid turned and appeared to have a gun,” Mr. Gaudelli said. “That’s what got him indicted: The ballistics made Shea a liar.”

But not, apparently, a murderer, at least in the eyes of the jury of 11 white men and one black woman who found him not guilty. Afterward, many of the jurors joined Mr. Shea and his lawyers at a Queens Boulevard restaurant to celebrate. They told reporters it was possible Mr. Shea had been telling the truth about seeing a gun.

That same day, word of the verdict reached a baseball field on the grounds of the South Jamaica Houses, known locally as the 40 Projects. Eric Adams, who was then a 13-year-old from the neighborhood, was waiting to bat.

“We were playing a Long Island team that happened to be all white,” said Mr. Adams, who became a police officer and is now the Brooklyn borough president. “When the news came out, about 200 people emerged on the field. They just took the baseball bats and started beating the white players, chanting, ‘Shea got away.’ ”

Later, Mr. Shea would be fired despite a rally by police officers and the pleas of his lawyer, Jacob Evseroff, who said his client was needed on the force “to protect us from the animals who roam the streets of New York.”

The Long Island baseball team had come to Queens as part of “an interracial, inter-neighborhood thing,” Mr. Adams said. “It was their first visit.” The Jamaica team tried to stop the assault but could not. “That was all the outrage,” he said, adding that “because of what happened, a lot of our guys quit the team, never played baseball again.”

For his generation of black boys and girls, Mr. Adams said, the verdict “brought a lot of despair.”

The year after Clifford Glover died, the number of shots fired by officers declined by nearly half. (In 2013, the number of shots fired was 248, the fewest since the Police Department began keeping detailed records in 1971; at the peak, in 1972, officers fired 2,510 bullets.)

Because Mr. Shea had spoken freely with his superiors, the largest police union began a campaign urging its members not to talk after a shooting until a union lawyer had arrived.

For Clifford’s family, his death changed everything.

“They wrote that we were poor,” Darlene Armstead, a younger sister, said this week. As she and three other siblings, Kenneth, Pauline and Patricia Armstead, described the household this week, the family may not have had much money, but before Clifford’s killing, it was sound.

Darlene’s father, Add Armstead, who was Clifford’s stepfather, went to work every morning at a junkyard.

The family had dinner each night at the same time, around one table, Ms. Armstead said, then watched cowboy shows on television. On summer weekends, neighborhood children feasted in the backyard on watermelon laid out on a door, covered by a sheet, that rested on two clean garbage cans. Add Armstead and his brothers enjoyed cigars and burgers.

“My father taught us structure,” Darlene Armstead said.

She had to make beds. One brother had to clean the yard and bring out the garbage. Clifford, a fourth grader at Public School 40, went with his stepfather on weekends to the junkyard, carrying his own little wrench.

On the morning of April 28, 1973, a Saturday, Add Armstead woke Clifford before dawn so they could be at the yard to move cranes into place for a delivery. They walked a few blocks along New York Boulevard — known today as Guy R. Brewer Boulevard — when an unmarked car pulled alongside them. Mr. Armstead, carrying wages that he had been paid the day before, said he and Clifford ran, afraid that they were going to be robbed. Hearing shots, he flagged down a patrol car, not realizing that Clifford had been felled.

Mr. Shea testified that he did not realize that Clifford, who stood just five feet tall and weighed less than 100 pounds, was a child. After the shooting, prosecutors said, Mr. Shea’s partner, Walter Scott, was recorded on a radio transmission saying, “Die, you little,” adding an expletive. Mr. Scott — who by coincidence has the same name as the man killed in North Charleston — denied it was his voice.

Clifford’s death sent his mother, Eloise Glover, into a tailspin.

“My mother turned on my father — ‘Did you have a gun, they said you had a gun,’ ” Darlene Armstead said. “It caused them to break up. My mother lost her mind.”

The family received a settlement from New York City that, in the memory of the children, came to about $50,000, most of which the mother lent to local churches but never got back.

“My mother didn’t want no one to know when she going outside,” Ms. Armstead said. “She always used the back door.”

Ms. Armstead recalled sleeping nights on chairs in hospital emergency rooms while her mother was being treated, and living off restaurant handouts. “She was going to pay this guy to board up the house and she would pay him to bring the food to us,” she said.

The children went to foster care and group homes. One brother was in a psychiatric institution for about 10 years. Her mother, who had diabetes, died in 1990 at age 54.

Add Armstead died in 2005, at 83. “They put guns on him; they said he had guns at work, at home,” Kenneth Armstead said. “To demonize him would help Shea’s story.”

Mr. Shea, who moved out of the state after his marriage broke up, could not be reached. “I’ve lost it all,” he told the author Thomas Hauser, whose 1980 book, “The Trial of Patrolman Thomas Shea,” is a comprehensive account of the episode.

The defense lawyer, Mr. Evseroff, said a video would have changed nothing. “The case was resolved as a result of a trial,” he said.

For Mr. Adams, the quick termination of the South Carolina police officer in the shooting this month of Walter Scott was a positive step.

“That mayor said: ‘You know what? It has just gone too far,’ ” Mr. Adams said. “The pathway of Shea’s bullet physically stopped when it hit Clifford Glover, but the emotional pathway probably still continues to this day.”

A Police Shot to a Boy’s Back in Queens, Echoing Since 1973,
NYT, APRIL 16, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/17/nyregion/
fired-at-queens-boy-fatal-1973-police-shot-still-reverberates.html

South Carolina Police Shooting

Seen as Crime Strategy Gone Awry

 

APRIL 9, 2015

The New York Times

By ALAN BLINDER

and MANNY FERNANDEZ

NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. — It was after dark about five years ago, on a downtrodden strip of this city, when Alicia Delesline stopped trusting the police in the place where she had lived her entire life.

Ms. Delesline, 48, was walking to a store when she did something pedestrians do all the time: She suddenly changed her mind, and turned around to go elsewhere. Her movement caught the attention of a police officer, who stopped her and accused her of changing directions because she had seen the authorities farther ahead.

“They just rolled up and bothered me for no reason and searched me,” she said Thursday. “They serve and protect when they feel like serving and protecting. But when they feel like harassing, they do that.”

Ms. Delesline, who is black, is but one person in this city of 104,000 who has experienced the effects of a police campaign that began as an effort to rid North Charleston of its label as one of the country’s most dangerous cities in 2007.

The aggressive tactics by North Charleston’s mostly white police force, including frequent stops of drivers and pedestrians for minor violations and an increased police presence in high-crime, mostly black areas, have led to a decrease in violent crime.

But to many here, the strategy came at a high cost and provides a disturbing context to the police shooting here last weekend that has set off outrage throughout South Carolina and across the country. A white police officer was shown on a bystander’s video shooting and killing an unarmed black man after he fled from a traffic stop for a broken taillight on Saturday. The man, Walter L. Scott, 50, was shot in the back by the officer, Michael T. Slager, 33, who has been charged with murder and whose dismissal was announced by city officials on Wednesday.

Aside from the furor over Mr. Scott’s death, North Charleston has been something of a window onto many of the policing issues playing out nationally.

It saw an era of stepped-up enforcement under former Police Chief Jon R. Zumalt, and an effort to improve relations between the police and residents under the current chief, Eddie Driggers. And it has been a reminder of how much improving policing is a matter of personal decisions, rather than just policies, as the victim’s brother experienced at the crime scene Saturday in a moment of compassion from Chief Driggers.

Black residents, merchants and former residents said police officers have been harassing and racially profiling African-Americans in North Charleston for years, though some of their reports could not be independently verified. They accused officers of assaulting them with Taser stun guns for no reason and of using aggressive tactics after stopping them or pulling them over for minor offenses. Rhonda Smith, who runs a bail bonds agency, spoke of twice writing bonds for black defendants arrested for not having horns on their bicycles.

City officials deny allegations of widespread police misconduct and racial profiling, and they have defended their efforts to lower crime. Mr. Zumalt, who retired in 2013 after leading the police force for more than a decade, drew harsh criticism from some black residents. But in a letter to the mayor, he described his work as a success.

“I leave you with a proud and professional police agency that has reduced crime and gained the trust and respect of the people that live and work in your city,” Mr. Zumalt wrote.

A few months before Mr. Zumalt announced his retirement in 2012, Mayor R. Keith Summey told Charleston’s Post & Courier newspaper that it made sense for the police to focus on black communities, because 83 percent of all people arrested were black. “When you look at that, where do you put your major patrols?” Mr. Summey was quoted saying. “The majority doesn’t feel picked on. The majority feels safer.”

And unlike Ferguson, Mo., where a scathing Justice Department report said the police and local courts used the justice system as a way to raise revenue, North Charleston was not focused on gaining more money from fines, records indicate.

Still, at a news conference on Wednesday, Mr. Summey, mayor for more than 20 years, said city officials would begin “looking for ways to develop a closer working relationship with the individual communities.”

City records show that Mr. Slager, who joined the Police Department in 2010, was the subject of a complaint over use of force in September 2013. In that episode, according to city records, Mr. Slager was investigating a burglary when he used his Taser device to stun a man who the authorities said did not comply with directions. Mr. Slager was cleared of wrongdoing. Police officials upheld a complaint against Mr. Slager this year, after a woman said he refused to write a report in a harassment case.

In video provided to The New York Times, a police officer in North Charleston, S.C., is seen shooting an apparently unarmed man after a scuffle following a traffic stop. Publish Date April 7, 2015.

Located just up Interstate 26 from Charleston, a haven of tourism and commerce along the South Carolina coast, North Charleston is a city of competing identities. Some neighborhoods are suburban sanctuaries filled with palmetto trees, late-model cars and spotless restaurants. Others are deeply impoverished, where blocks are dominated by pawn shops and convenience stores.

The poverty rate here — more than 23 percent — is 5.3 percentage points higher than the rate statewide. But much of the talk here is about the crime and the policing strategies intended to combat it.

Rashard Brown, 30, said he had been pulled over twice in less than two months, including one instance when an officer trailed him for about three miles. “If I broke down on the side of the road with a flat tire, he’d ride right past like he didn’t even see me,” he said. “But if I look like I’m riding clean and I’ve got a lot of money, next thing you know you’ve pulled me over and you stick your head in the car, smell and see what’s going on and see if you see anything.”

Doris Brown, who lives in Charleston but owns a hair salon in North Charleston, said she, too, was pulled over for a broken taillight but believed she may have been stopped because she was a black woman driving a luxury car. “After I left, my friend went behind and there was nothing wrong with my taillight,” she said. “Everything was working with my car, so I felt as though I was being profiled.”

Anthony Scott, whose brother Walter L. Scott was killed by a police officer in North Charleston, S.C., on Saturday, talked about the shooting in an interview with The Associated Press. By Associated Press on Publish Date April 8, 2015. Photo by Chuck Burton/Associated Press.

Residents said they are reluctant to file formal complaints, although the number of complaints soared after the police crackdown began. In 2008, Brian Knite Yates, an Army sergeant who is black, was driving to his house to pick up his wife and ill daughter when he was pulled over by a white officer.

When Mr. Yates told the officer he did not have his driver’s license with him, the officer asked him to step out of the vehicle and then twisted his arm and told him he was under arrest, according to a lawsuit Mr. Yates filed against the city and the police. Mr. Yates claimed in court documents the officer used a Taser gun on him three times, although Mr. Yates did not put up a struggle. The case is likely to go to trial in federal court within months.

Some residents have credited Chief Driggers with helping to calm tensions, even as others angrily demanded answers from him at a news conference on Wednesday. An Episcopal deacon, Chief Driggers once served as the department’s chaplain.

After the shooting on Saturday, Mr. Scott’s older brother, Anthony Scott, 52, went to the crime scene. He stood taking pictures of his brother’s covered body with his phone when police officers and detectives approached. Three of them surrounded him, telling him to turn over his phone, he said.

“So, are you going to kill me, too, now?” Mr. Scott said he asked them.

He eventually handed them his phone. Hours later, Chief Driggers arrived, returned Mr. Scott’s phone and offered his condolences.

“The chief was very kind, very kind,” Mr. Scott said. “He was very gentlemanly, very different from the way everyone else was acting. Everyone else — it was eerie how they were acting. They were cocky.”

Alan Blinder reported from North Charleston and Manny Fernandez from Houston. Frances Robles and Ben Rothenberg contributed reporting from North Charleston. Andrew W. Lehren contributed research from Washington, and Sarah Cohen from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on April 10, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Residents Trace Police Shooting To a Crime Strategy Gone Awry.

South Carolina Police Shooting Seen as Crime Strategy Gone Awry,
NYT, APRIL 9, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/10/us/south-carolina-police-shooting-seen-as-crime-fighting-gone-awry.html

The Walter Scott Murder

 

APRIL 8, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

The horrifying video of a white police officer in North Charleston, S.C., shooting and killing an unarmed black man — while the man is running away — may still come as a shock to many Americans. But this heinous act, which the officer tried to explain away by claiming that he feared for his life, strikes a familiar chord in communities of color all across the United States.

The case underscores two problems that have become increasingly clear since the civic discord that erupted last year after the police killed black citizens in New York, Cleveland and Ferguson, Mo. The first, most pressing problem is that poorly trained and poorly supervised officers often use deadly force unnecessarily, particularly against minority citizens. The second is that the police get away with unjustly maiming or killing people by lying about the circumstances that prompted them to use force.

The shooting death of Walter Scott on Saturday would have passed into the annals of history unremarked upon had a bystander not used a cellphone to document what happened after Mr. Scott encountered the police officer, Michael Slager, after a routine traffic stop.

Mr. Slager subsequently reported by radio that he had shot Mr. Scott after Mr. Scott wrestled away his electronic stun gun. The video, provided to The New York Times by the Scott family’s lawyer, shows a different story. The video begins in the vacant lot, apparently moments after Officer Slager fired his stun weapon at Mr. Scott. The two men tussle, an object that may have been the stun gun falls to the ground and then Mr. Scott turns to run away. He appears to be 15 feet to 20 feet away and fleeing when the officer fires eight times. Later in the video, the officer runs back toward the place where the initial scuffle occurred and picks up something from the ground and drops it near Mr. Scott’s body.

As The Times noted on Tuesday, police reports say that officers performed CPR and delivered first aid to Mr. Scott. But the video suggests that they were in no rush to help. For several minutes after the shooting, the mortally wounded man remained face down with his hands cuffed behind his back. A second officer arrives, puts on medical gloves and attends to Mr. Scott but is not shown performing CPR. As sirens are heard, a third officer arrives, apparently with a medical kit, but he also is not seen performing CPR. Stunned by Mr. Scott’s death, a brother is left to ask: “How do you lose your life at a traffic stop?”

Mr. Slager was charged with murder on Tuesday and subsequently fired by the North Charleston Police Department. The swiftness of the charge was encouraging. The F.B.I. and the Justice Department, which has opened several civil rights investigations into police departments under Attorney General Eric Holder Jr., is also investigating. On its face, the officer’s conduct seems inconsistent with rulings by the Supreme Court, which has held that officers can use deadly force against a fleeing suspect only when there is probable cause that the suspect “poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.”

Police departments all over the country clearly need to do a better job of training on how to de-escalate encounters with citizens and explaining when and how deadly force can be used. To get a handle on this problem, Congress must compel local police departments to report to the Justice Department all instances in which officers are fired upon or fire their own weapons at citizens. During the 1990s, Congress enacted legislation that was intended to aid the collection of data on officer-involved shootings. But many local governments do not provide the data because reporting it is optional. Mr. Holder was on the mark in January when he described this state of affairs as “unacceptable.”

Better tracking of shooting data is, of course, important. But states and local governments need to understand that the growing outrage over wrongful death cases, like the one in North Charleston, undermines trust in law enforcement and presents a clear danger to the civic fabric. The country needs to confront this issue directly and get this problem under control.
 

A version of this editorial appears in print on April 9, 2015, on page A28 of the New York edition with the headline: The Walter Scott Murder.

The Walter Scott Murder, NYT, APRIL 8, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/opinion/the-walter-scott-murder.html

Video of Walter Scott Shooting

Reignites Debate on Police Tactics

 

APRIL 8, 2015

The New York Times

By MATT APUZZO

and TIMOTHY WILLIAMS

WASHINGTON — Nothing has done more to fuel the national debate over police tactics than the dramatic, sometimes grisly videos: A man gasping “I can’t breathe” through a police chokehold on Staten Island, a 12-year-old boy shot dead in a park in Cleveland. And now, perhaps the starkest video yet, showing a South Carolina police officer shooting a fleeing man in the back.

The videos have spurred calls from statehouses to the White House for more officers to attach cameras to their uniforms. While cameras frequently exonerate officers in shootings, the recent spate of videos has raised uncomfortable questions about how much the American criminal justice system can rely on the accounts of police officers when the cameras are not rolling.

“Everyone in this business knows that cops have been given the benefit of the doubt,” said Hugh F. Keefe, a Connecticut lawyer who has defended several police officers accused of misconduct. “They’re always assumed to be telling the truth, unless there’s tangible evidence otherwise.”

In the fatal shooting in South Carolina, the most compelling evidence, provided by a bystander with a camera phone, was shaky and at times unfocused. But the video clearly showed the officer, Michael T. Slager, firing eight times as Walter L. Scott, 50, tried to flee after a traffic stop. The officer had said that he fired amid a scuffle, when Mr. Scott seized his stun gun and the officer feared for his safety.

“Without the video, we wouldn’t know what we know,” said Matthew R. Rabon, a college student who joined a demonstration on Wednesday outside City Hall in North Charleston, S.C., where Officer Slager now faces a murder charge. “And what we know here is really significant: It’s the difference between an officer doing his job and an officer killing a man in cold blood.”

Many cities have installed cameras in their police cruisers for years, and some — an estimated 25 percent of departments that responded to a 2013 survey — require so-called body cameras. Those numbers are dwarfed by the millions of Americans who carry camera-equipped cellphones. As cameras become ubiquitous, the digital video is likely to become a go-to source of impartial evidence in much the same way that DNA did in the 1990s.

Video evidence is not new, of course; the tape of officers beating Rodney King in 1991 helped ignite the Los Angeles riots after the officers were acquitted. When departments began installing dashboard cameras in the 1990s, many officers opposed it. But they quickly concluded that the recordings often cleared them of wrongdoing after citizen complaints. “For the most part, unless you are behaving badly, those things are going to back you up,” said David Harris, a University of Pittsburgh law professor who studies police practices.

Many officers similarly opposed efforts to videotape confessions, but that resistance has been fading in recent years. Police organizations have endorsed the practice, and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. recently required the F.B.I. to start taping interviews.

But cellphone videos taken by bystanders tend to make many police officers uncomfortable, because they have no control over the setting and often are not even aware they are being filmed until later. Though the courts have held that people have a constitutional right to record the police, those who do are frequently challenged by officers.

While investigating the Police Department in Ferguson, Mo., after a deadly police shooting last summer, the Justice Department found that officers there were enraged to discover people taping them.

As an example, a Justice Department report cited a traffic stop in which a Ferguson officer told the driver’s 16-year-old son not to videotape him. The confrontation escalated, the officer wrestled the phone away from the teenager, and everyone in the car was arrested “under disputed circumstances that could have been clarified by a video recording,” the report said.

Cellphone videos have captured police officers pushing and slapping a homeless man in Florida and shooting a man who threw rocks at officers in Washington State. In February, two Pelham, N.Y., officers retired after a video contradicted their account of an arrest of a black man.

“The ability to record has gotten so prevalent that police can no longer count on their account to be the truth,” Mr. Harris, the Pittsburgh professor, said.

The increase in cellphone cameras is one reason many police unions do not oppose requirements that officers carry body cameras, said Chuck Wexler, the head of the Police Executive Research Forum in Washington. “The big push for body cameras has been driven in part by the sense that citizens have their phones and can record, and it was only part of the whole story,” he said.

“We are very used to being videotaped,” said Lt. Mark Wood, the executive officer in the operations division of the Indianapolis Police Department, where the department is testing body cameras. “We are under the impression that we are always being videotaped, because we probably are.”

Data is still spotty, but an early study in Rialto, Calif., suggests that when officers carry body cameras, they are less likely to use force. Similar studies in Mesa, Ariz., and in Britain showed that citizen complaints also decreased.

North Charleston, a city of about 100,000 people, has ordered about 100 body cameras, but its officers are not yet using them. Mayor R. Keith Summey said Wednesday that he had ordered 150 more “so that every officer that’s on the street in uniform will have a body camera.”

Marlon E. Kimpson, a South Carolina state senator who represents North Charleston and helped push for financing for the cameras, said he hoped they would help calm tensions between residents and officers. He said he believed a body camera would have prevented Saturday’s shooting. “I don’t believe the officer would have behaved the way he did had he been wearing a body camera,” he said.

Even without the video, it is likely that other forensic evidence would have raised questions about Officer Slager’s account. The coroner found that Mr. Scott was shot several times in the back, and forensic examiners can typically tell whether someone was shot at close range in a scuffle or from a distance. Nevertheless, the dramatic video pushed the shooting into the national spotlight. Eddie Driggers, the North Charleston police chief, told reporters Wednesday that he was sickened by the video.

Chris Fialko, a criminal defense lawyer in Charlotte, N.C., said that while the ubiquity of video had changed the dynamic between the police and citizens, jurors still viewed police officers as credible, even when faced with incriminating video.

Mr. Fialko said he once represented an officer in a case where a dashboard camera had captured the officer slamming a man, who appeared to offer no resistance, to the ground. The officer testified in his own defense.

“Video can lie,” Mr. Fialko recalled saying in his closing argument. “The cop is the one out there, hearing what the guy is saying and smelling the guy and seeing his sweat, and he is acting based on years of experience.”

The jury, Mr. Fialko said, acquitted the officer.

Correction: April 8, 2015

An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of a college student who attended a demonstration on Wednesday. He is Matthew R. Rabon, not Rabo.

Matt Apuzzo reported from Washington, and Timothy Williams from New York. Alan Blinder contributed reporting from Charleston, S.C.

A version of this article appears in print on April 9, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: CITIZENS’ VIDEOS RAISE QUESTIONS ON POLICE CLAIMS.

Video of Walter Scott Shooting Reignites Debate on Police Tactics,
NYT, APRIL 8, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/us/video-of-fatal-shooting-of-walter-scott-reignites-debate-on-police-use-of-force.html

In South Carolina,

Shot in the Back as He Ran

APRIL 8, 2015

The New York Times

 The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist

Charles M. Blow

I am truly weary, deep in my bones, of writing these columns about the killings of unarmed people of color by the police. Indeed, you may be weary of reading them. Still, our weariness is but a dim shadow that falls near the darkness of despair that a family is thrust into when a child or parent or sibling is lost, and that family must wonder if the use of deadly force was appropriate and whether justice will be served.

And so, we can’t stop focusing on these cases until there are no more cases on which to focus.

Which brings me to the latest case, a truly chilling one: A video shows an apparently unarmed 50-year-old black man, Walter L. Scott, running away from an officer after an incident during a traffic stop in North Charleston, S.C.

The officer, Michael T. Slager, fires his weapon eight times, striking Scott in the back, upper buttocks and ear.

According to The New York Times:

“Moments after the struggle, Officer Slager reported on his radio: ‘Shots fired and the subject is down. He took my Taser,’ according to police reports.”

But The Times continues:

“Something — it is not clear whether it is the stun gun — is either tossed or knocked to the ground behind the two men, and Officer Slager draws his gun, the video shows. When the officer fires, Mr. Scott appears to be 15 to 20 feet away and fleeing. He falls after the last of eight shots.

“The officer then runs back toward where the initial scuffle occurred and picks something up off the ground. Moments later, he drops an object near Mr. Scott’s body, the video shows.”

In fact, the video appears to dispute much of what the police reports claim.

Scott, of course, dies of his injuries.

After the video surfaces, the officer is charged with murder and fired from the police force. In a news conference, the mayor of the city, Keith Summey, says of the incident: “When you’re wrong, you’re wrong. And if you make a bad decision, don’t care if you’re behind the shield or just a citizen on the street, you have to live by that decision.”

But even the phrase “bad decision” seems to diminish the severity of what has happened. A life has been taken. And, if the video shows what it appears to show, there may have been some attempts by the officer to “misrepresent the truth,” a phrase that one could also argue may diminish the severity of what is alleged to have happened.

This case is yet another in a horrifyingly familiar succession of cases that have elevated the issue of use of force, particularly deadly force, by officers against people of color and inflamed the conversation that surrounds it.

And it further erodes an already tenuous trust by people of color in the police as an institution. CBS News polling has shown that a vast majority of blacks believe that the police are more likely to use deadly force against a black person than a white person (zero percent believe the inverse.) This is not good for the proper function of a civil society.

As a Sentencing Project report put it last year: “Racial minorities’ perceptions of unfairness in the criminal justice system have dampened cooperation with police work and impeded criminal trials.”

And the police are needed in society, so if you don’t trust them, whom do you call when help is truly needed?

This case has also refocused attention on the power of video evidence and is likely to redouble calls for the universal implementation of police body cameras (the video in this case came from a witness). What would have happened if video of this incident had not surfaced? Would the officer’s version of events have stood? How many such cases must there be where there is no video?

But I would argue that the issue we are facing in these cases is not one of equipment, or even policy, but culture.

I would submit that cameras would have an impact on policy and culture, but that a change in culture must be bigger than both. It must start with “good cops” no longer countenancing the behavior of “bad cops.” It will start with those good cops publicly and vociferously chastising and condemning their brethren when they are wrong. Their silence has never been — and is certainly no longer — suitable. We must hear from them, not necessarily from the rank-and-file but from those higher up the ladder.

One of the most disturbing features of the Department of Justice’s report on the killing of Michael Brown by Darren Wilson was the number of witnesses who said that they were afraid to come forward because their version of events contradicted what they saw as community consensus.

But isn’t the unwillingness, or even fear, of “good cops” to more forcefully condemn bad behavior just the same glove turned inside out?

As Radley Balko wrote in the February 2011 issue of Reason magazine, “For all the concern about the ‘Stop Snitchin’  message within the hip-hop community, police have engaged in a far more impactful and pernicious Stop Snitchin’ campaign of their own. It’s called the Blue Wall of Silence.”

This case also highlights once again the issue of police forces not being representative of the communities they serve. As The Times pointed out:

“North Charleston is South Carolina’s third-largest city, with a population of about 100,000. African-Americans make up about 47 percent of residents, and whites account for about 37 percent. The Police Department is about 80 percent white, according to data collected by the Justice Department in 2007, the most recent period available.”

And yet there is a vicious cycle of mistrust — re-enforced by cases like this — that helps to make diversifying police forces difficult. As the International Business Times put it in August, law enforcement agencies “are often hard pressed to find black applicants. Recruiters want to fill their ranks with officers of all backgrounds, experts say, but cultural biases put them at a disadvantage.”

And lastly, there remains a disturbing desire to find perfection in a case, to find one devoid of ambiguity, as if police interactions with the public are not often complicated affairs in which many judgments are made in quick order by all involved and in which a tremendous amount of discretion is allowed to be exercised.

Tuesday on CNN, the North Charleston police chief, Eddie Driggers, was asked the question that is always circling cases like this like a condor: whether he thought race played a role in what happened. His was a diplomatic and humane response: “I want to believe in my heart of hearts that it was a tragic set of events after a traffic stop.” He continued, “I always look for the good in folks, and so I would hope that nobody would ever do something like that.”

I, too, would hope that nobody would ever do something like that, but it seems to me that the end of the line has come for hoping alone. Now is the time for fundamental change: not just in one particular case or with one particular officer, but also systemically. (The President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing has already recommended some policy changes.)

And now is the time for not only considering the interplay of race and power in these cases, but also the ability to register and respect humanity itself. That requires a change of culture.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

In South Carolina, Shot in the Back as He Ran, APRIL 8, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/opinion/charles-blow-walter-scott-video-south-carolina-shooting-michael-slager.html

South Carolina Officer

Is Charged With Murder

in Black Man’s Death

APRIL 7, 2015

The New York Times

By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

and MATT APUZZO

WASHINGTON — A white police officer in North Charleston, S.C., was charged with murder on Tuesday after a video surfaced showing him shooting in the back and killing an apparently unarmed black man while the man ran away.

The officer, Michael T. Slager, 33, said he had feared for his life because the man had taken his stun gun in a scuffle after a traffic stop on Saturday. A video, however, shows the officer firing eight times as the man, Walter L. Scott, 50, fled. The North Charleston mayor announced the state charges at a news conference Tuesday evening.

The shooting came on the heels of high-profile instances of police officers’ using lethal force in New York, Cleveland, Ferguson, Mo., and elsewhere. The deaths have set off a national debate over whether the police are too quick to use force, particularly in cases involving black men.

A White House task force has recommended a host of changes to the nation’s police policies, and President Obama sent Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to cities around the country to try to improve police relations with minority neighborhoods.

North Charleston is South Carolina’s third-largest city, with a population of about 100,000. African-Americans make up about 47 percent of residents, and whites account for about 37 percent. The Police Department is about 80 percent white, according to data collected by the Justice Department in 2007, the most recent period available.

“When you’re wrong, you’re wrong,” Mayor Keith Summey said during the news conference. “And if you make a bad decision, don’t care if you’re behind the shield or just a citizen on the street, you have to live by that decision.”

The shooting unfolded after Officer Slager stopped the driver of a Mercedes-Benz with a broken taillight, according to police reports. Mr. Scott ran away, and Officer Slager chased him into a grassy lot that abuts a muffler shop. He fired his Taser, an electronic stun gun, but it did not stop Mr. Scott, according to police reports.

Moments after the struggle, Officer Slager reported on his radio: “Shots fired and the subject is down. He took my Taser,” according to police reports.

But the video, which was taken by a bystander and provided to The New York Times by the Scott family’s lawyer, presents a different account. The video begins in the vacant lot, apparently moments after Officer Slager fired his Taser. Wires, which carry the electrical current from the stun gun, appear to be extending from Mr. Scott’s body as the two men tussle and Mr. Scott turns to run.

Something — it is not clear whether it is the stun gun — is either tossed or knocked to the ground behind the two men, and Officer Slager draws his gun, the video shows. When the officer fires, Mr. Scott appears to be 15 to 20 feet away and fleeing. He falls after the last of eight shots.

The officer then runs back toward where the initial scuffle occurred and picks something up off the ground. Moments later, he drops an object near Mr. Scott’s body, the video shows.

The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, the state’s criminal investigative body, has begun an inquiry into the shooting. The F.B.I. and the Justice Department, which has opened a string of civil rights investigations into police departments under Mr. Holder, is also investigating.

For several minutes after the shooting, Walter L. Scott remained face down with his hands cuffed behind his back.
The Supreme Court has held that an officer may use deadly force against a fleeing suspect only when there is probable cause that the suspect “poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.”

Officer Slager served in the Coast Guard before joining the force five years ago, his lawyer said. The police chief of North Charleston did not return repeated calls. Because police departments are not required to release data on how often officers use force, it was not immediately clear how often police shootings occurred in North Charleston, a working-class community adjacent to the tourist destination of Charleston.

Mr. Scott had been arrested about 10 times, mostly for failing to pay child support or show up for court hearings, according to The Post and Courier newspaper of Charleston. He was arrested in 1987 on an assault and battery charge and convicted in 1991 of possession of a bludgeon, the newspaper reported. Mr. Scott’s brother, Anthony, said he believed Mr. Scott had fled from the police on Saturday because he owed child support.

“He has four children; he doesn’t have some type of big violent past or arrest record,” said Chris Stewart, a lawyer for Mr. Scott’s family. “He had a job; he was engaged. He had back child support and didn’t want to go to jail for back child support.”

Mr. Stewart said the coroner had told him that Mr. Scott was struck five times — three times in the back, once in the upper buttocks and once in the ear — with at least one bullet entering his heart. It is not clear whether Mr. Scott died immediately. (The coroner’s office declined to make the report available to The Times.)

Police reports say that officers performed CPR and delivered first aid to Mr. Scott. The video shows that for several minutes after the shooting, Mr. Scott remained face down with his hands cuffed behind his back. A second officer arrives, puts on blue medical gloves and attends to Mr. Scott, but is not shown performing CPR. As sirens wail in the background, a third officer later arrives, apparently with a medical kit, but is also not seen performing CPR.

The debate over police use of force has been propelled in part by videos like the one in South Carolina. In January, prosecutors in Albuquerque charged two police officers with murder for shooting a homeless man in a confrontation that was captured by an officer’s body camera. Federal prosecutors are investigating the death of Eric Garner, who died last year in Staten Island after a police officer put him in a chokehold, an episode that a bystander captured on video. A video taken in Cleveland shows the police shooting a 12-year-old boy, Tamir Rice, who was carrying a fake gun in a park. A White House policing panel recommended that police departments put more video cameras on their officers.

Mr. Scott’s brother said his mother had called him on Saturday, telling him that his brother had been shot by a Taser after a traffic stop. “You may need to go over there and see what’s going on,” he said his mother told him. When he arrived at the scene of the shooting, officers told him that his brother was dead, but he said they had no explanation for why. “This just doesn’t sound right,” he said in an interview. “How do you lose your life at a traffic stop?”

Anthony Scott said he last saw his brother three weeks ago at a family oyster roast. “We hadn’t hung out like that in such a long time,” Mr. Scott said. “He kept on saying over and over again how great it was.”

At the roast, Mr. Scott got to do two of the things he enjoyed most: tell jokes and dance. When one of Mr. Scott’s favorite songs was played, he got excited. “He jumped up and said, ‘That’s my song,’ and he danced like never before,” his brother said.
 

Ben Rothenberg contributed reporting from North Charleston, S.C. Kitty Bennett and Sarah Cohen contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on April 8, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Officer Is Charged With Murder of a Black Man Shot in the Back.

South Carolina Officer Is Charged With Murder in Black Man’s Death,
NYT, APRIL 7, 2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/08/us/south-carolina-officer-is-charged-with-murder-in-black-mans-death.html

The Beating of Floyd Dent

MARCH 30, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist

Charles M. Blow

“He was beating me upside the head,” Floyd Dent, a 57-year-old longtime autoworker told a gaggle of reporters last week, according to The Detroit Free Press. “I was trying to protect my face with my right arm. I heard one of them say, ‘Tase the M...F.’ ”

Dent was describing what he experienced in a horrifically violent dashboard camera video that shows Inkster, Mich., police officers pulling him over, dragging him from his car, punching him 16 times in the head and tasing him three times, while he lay bloody and struggling on the ground, before arresting him.

According to the website for a local NBC News affiliate: “Police said they first saw Dent’s car through binoculars while watching an area known to have drug activity. They followed Dent’s car and said he didn’t make a complete stop at a stop sign. Police said that when they turned on their flashing lights, Dent didn’t immediately pull over.”

Furthermore: “Police said they ordered Dent to put his hands up, but they could only see one. Police said Dent yelled ‘I’ll kill you’ at the officers. Dent’s attorney, Greg Rohl, said there’s no audio of the alleged threat.”

Finally: “Police said Dent refused to put his hands behind his back. Dent said he thought he was being choked to death and tried to pull the officers’ arms away from his throat. One of the officers said Dent bit him on the arm, and that’s why he started punching Dent. Police said the force was needed to restrain Dent. The officer who said he was bit did not seek medical attention or photograph the bite marks.”

According to The Free Press, “Police initially charged him with assault, resisting arrest and possession of cocaine, insisting they found cocaine beneath the passenger seat of his Cadillac. Dent says police planted the drugs at the time of his arrest. An Inkster district court judge, after reviewing the tape, tossed the assault and resisting charges, but Dent faces an April 1 hearing on the drug charge.”

Dent’s lawyer says the drugs were planted by the officer who punched him, William Melendez. And there is video that the lawyer claims backs up the allegation. As a reporter at the local NBC News affiliate describes it: “In the video, the officer seen throwing the punches, William Melendez, is seen pulling something from his pocket that looks like a plastic baggy with something inside it. Melendez testified in court police found a baggy of crack cocaine under the passenger seat of Dent’s car.”

It should be noted that, according to the local NBC News affiliate website, Dent said a blood test showed no drugs in his system.

It should also be noted that, according to The Free Press, Melendez, who federal investigators in 2003 said “was known on the street as ‘Robocop,’ ” “has been involved in 12 lawsuits related to his conduct as an officer over the years, including similar allegations in a civil rights suit now pending in federal court.”

Those lawsuits allege, “among other things, that he planted evidence, assaulted people in their homes, fabricated police reports and wrongly arrested people.”

A December CBS News poll found that 84 percent of blacks and 33 percent of whites believe that the police in most communities are more likely to use deadly force against blacks. Just 2 percent of whites, and 0 percent of blacks, believe the police are more likely to use such force against whites.

(Fifty-seven percent of whites and 10 percent of blacks said they thought race did not affect the use of deadly force.)

And it is important to register where the most recent cases are centered.

As Isabel Wilkerson, author of the monumental book “The Warmth of Other Suns,” put it in a January New York Times essay titled “When Will the North Face Its Racism?”: “High-profile cases of police brutality have recently come to be associated with the North rather than the South. And it is in the South that two recent cases of police shootings of unarmed black people resulted in more vigorous prosecution.”

She concluded: “If the events of the last year have taught us anything, it is that, as much progress has been made over the generations, the challenges of color and tribe were not locked away in another century or confined to a single region but persist as a national problem and require the commitment of the entire nation to resolve.”

So much about Dent’s case is troublesome, and so he has become the latest touchstone in our coalescing conversation about the intersection of police forces and communities of color, particularly in the parts of this country that African-Americans fled to in search of a better life.

I invite you to join me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter, or e-mail me at chblow@nytimes.com.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on March 30, 2015, on page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: The Beating of Floyd Dent.

The Beating of Floyd Dent, NYT, MARCH 30, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/30/opinion/
charles-blow-the-beating-of-floyd-dent.html

Manhunt Is Underway

After Police Officers Are Shot in Ferguson

MARCH 12, 2015

The New York Times

By JOHN ELIGON, SHAILA DEWAN

and RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

FERGUSON, Mo. — The police conducted a manhunt in this tense and battered city on Thursday in search of whoever shot two police officers as they worked at a protest after the resignation of the chief.

The shooting just after midnight on Thursday morning, described as “really an ambush” by Chief Jon Belmar of the St. Louis County Police Department, was denounced by all sides in the continuing conflict over law enforcement here after the death, at the hands of the police, of an unarmed black teenager last summer, and the police crackdown on the ensuing protests.

By Thursday night, relative calm had returned to the streets as clergy members and activists gathered for a candlelight prayer vigil that paired condemnations of the officers’ shootings with support for nonviolent protests. About 100 protesters later marched outside the Ferguson Police Department, but by midnight, with a light rain falling, most of the demonstrators had cleared the way, and the streets were largely quiet. The police said no one had been arrested — neither protesters, nor suspects.

Earlier, police SWAT units surrounded a house a few blocks from the scene of the shooting, and officers climbed onto the roof and broke through a vent to gain access. The police took in three people from the house for questioning and released them hours later.

The three, Iresha Turner, who lives at the home, and her friends Martez Little and Lamont Underwood, said they had attended the protest but had nothing to do with the shootings. Ms. Turner and Mr. Underwood said they fled from the protest to Ms. Turner’s house when the shots were fired, and Mr. Little said he came to Mr. Turner’s home later and was also detained.

Ms. Turner said her 6-year-old son had been traumatized by the search and the implication that his mother might have something to do with the crime.

“I have to live here,” said Ms. Turner, who identified herself as a single mother. “I have no help. I’m a good woman.”

Mr. Underwood speculated that someone might have seen him and Ms. Turner speeding away from the protest scene and reported it to the police.

On Thursday, the St. Louis County Police Department and the Missouri State Highway Patrol assumed responsibility for security in Ferguson, just as they did after the unrest following the shooting of the teenager, Michael Brown Jr., by a white police officer, Darren Wilson. A grand jury did not indict the officer, and the Justice Department also declined to bring charges.

The two police officers were shot shortly after midnight during a protest in front of the police station after the chief, Thomas Jackson, announced his resignation. His departure was the most recent in a shake-up of the city’s most senior administrators after a recent Justice Department report that described a city that used its legal system to generate revenue, in the process violating constitutional rights and disproportionately targeting blacks.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. denounced the shootings as “heinous and cowardly attacks.”

“This was not someone trying to bring healing to Ferguson,” Mr. Holder said at a news conference in Washington.

Community organizers extended sympathy to the officers who were shot, while trying to keep the focus on their own longstanding complaints.

“As frequent victims of violence, we certainly understand the pain of these senseless acts,” said the Rev. Traci Blackmon of Christ the King Church of Christ in nearby Florissant.

Gov. Jay Nixon visited, his motorcade rolling past the site of the shootings that he called, in a statement, “cowardly and reprehensible.”

The shootings came at a vulnerable time, just as the city was making “good-faith steps,” as Mr. Holder put it, to restore faith in its criminal justice system. In a statement, the City of Ferguson said it was “diligently working to make systematic changes necessary to instill confidence,” but added, “We cannot continue to move forward under threats of violence and destruction.”

With the issue of police shootings bringing political polarization, Mr. Holder, who has been at the forefront of the effort to bring change to Ferguson’s policing, came in for some criticism.

“There’s an atmosphere of unbalance here,” Rudolph W. Giuliani, a former mayor of New York, said on Fox News, blaming the Justice Department for emphasizing the faults of the Ferguson Police Department without saying that the officer who fatally shot Mr. Brown last August “did exactly what he should do.”

Witnesses and the St. Louis County police chief described the scene after two officers were shot on Thursday during a protest that began only hours after the police chief in Ferguson, Mo., resigned.

The late-night protest on Wednesday started as a celebration of Chief Jackson’s resignation, but also as a call for more action.

“Not just Jackson, we want Knowles, Ferguson has got to go!” the demonstrators yelled in reference to James Knowles III, the mayor.

When the shots echoed through the crisp air, striking the two officers, demonstrators and police officers hit the ground. Many people ran for cover, and police officers clad in riot gear dragged their wounded comrades to safety.

“We’re lucky by God’s grace we didn’t lose two officers last night,” Chief Belmar said at a midmorning news conference. It was clear that the police were the targets, he said.

Based on the sound of the shots and the officers’ wounds, he said, the weapon was a handgun, not a rifle.

The officers who were shot were standing side by side, part of a cordon from multiple police departments, keeping protesters away from the police station. There had been as many as 69 officers in the evening, dwindling to about 50 at the time of the shooting, Chief Belmar said.

One of the wounded officers was from the Webster Groves Police Department. He is 32 and a seven-year veteran of the force. The other was from the St. Louis County Police and is 41 with 14 years’ experience, the county police said. Both were treated at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis.

The younger officer was shot in the cheekbone, just below his right eye, and the bullet lodged behind his right ear, Chief Belmar said. A bullet struck the other officer in the right shoulder and exited his back on the right side. No officers returned fire. The officers were released from a hospital Thursday morning.

Chief Belmar said that people had a right to protest peacefully, but also that “there is an unfortunate association with that gathering” and the shooting.

Witnesses among the demonstrators denied any link to the shootings, saying that they believed the shots originated from the top of a hill about 220 yards directly opposite the station. Chief Belmar did not specify a location but estimated the distance at 125 yards.

“There’s just no way anybody I know did that,” said Bob Hudgins, a protester who is running for City Council. “Nobody’s happy about this today.”

The Brown family, in a statement from its lawyer, denounced “the actions of stand-alone agitators” who tried to derail the protests. “We reject any kind of violence directed toward members of law enforcement,” the statement said. “It cannot and will not be tolerated.”

Chief Belmar said the shooting realized his worst fears over the months of unrest since Mr. Brown’s killing. He drew a parallel to the fatal shooting in December of two New York City police officers, Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, by a man who said he was enraged by killings by the police, including Mr. Brown’s.

“We were very close to having happen what happened to N.Y.P.D.,” Chief Belmar said.
 

John Eligon reported from Ferguson, and Shaila Dewan and Richard Pérez-Peña from New York. Mitch Smith and Jack Healy contributed reporting from Ferguson.

A version of this article appears in print on March 13, 2015, on page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: Manhunt Is Underway After Police Officers Are Shot in Ferguson.

Manhunt Is Underway After Police Officers Are Shot in Ferguson, NYT,
MARCH 12, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/13/us/ferguson-police.html

Holder Weighs

Dismantling the Ferguson Police Dept.

 

MARCH 6, 2015

The New York Times

By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS

and RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

WASHINGTON — Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. vowed a firm response on Friday to what he called “appalling” racial misconduct by law enforcement officials in Ferguson, Mo., suggesting he was prepared to seek the dismantling of the police force there if necessary.

“We are prepared to use all the powers that we have, all the power that we have, to ensure that the situation changes there,” Mr. Holder told reporters here after returning from Columbia, S.C., where he appeared with President Obama at a town hall-style meeting at Benedict College. “That means everything from working with them to coming up with an entirely new structure.”

Asked if that included dismantling the police force, Mr. Holder said: “If that’s what’s necessary, we’re prepared to do that.”

His remarks came after two police supervisors in Ferguson resigned after being linked to racist emails turned up by a Justice Department investigation.

The two supervisors, Capt. Rick Henke and Sgt. William Mudd, left the force on Thursday, the city’s information office said Friday. A third employee, Mary Ann Twitty, clerk of the Municipal Court, was fired on Wednesday for her role in the emails.

Officials did not say whether any of the three actually wrote the emails, or whether other employees were involved in writing or forwarding them.

Captain Henke had been with the Ferguson Police Department since 1979, and was acting police chief for several months in 1997 and 1998. Last fall, he led a “night muster” formation of officers from other departments assigned to protect Ferguson’s Police Headquarters.

In a scathing report released Wednesday, the Justice Department concluded that the Ferguson Police Department had been routinely violating the constitutional rights of its black residents.

Sergeant Mudd had been with the Ferguson police for more than two decades. In 1992, he was involved in a courthouse shootout with a man who had killed his wife and wounded several other people. He and other officers who shot and wounded the gunman were hailed as heroes.

In a scathing report released on Wednesday, the Justice Department’s civil rights division described the Ferguson police and Municipal Court as a system whose primary function was to make poor black people pay as many fines and fees as possible for petty offenses, real or invented. It called the system and some of its people racially discriminatory, and the police brutal.

Though not identified by name, a court clerk was mentioned in the Justice Department report as routinely dismissing tickets for friends. “Your ticket of $200 has magically disappeared!” read one email from the clerk to a friend. “It’s gone baby!” the clerk wrote to another.

Investigators reported that they had found racist jokes and comments in email exchanges among police and court supervisors, but did not identify them or say how many people were involved. The report cited a handful of the emails, but said there were many more.

“Our investigation has not revealed any indication that any officer or court clerk engaged in these communications was ever disciplined,” the report said. “Nor did we see a single instance in which a police or court recipient of such an email asked that the sender refrain from sending such emails, or any indication that these emails were reported as inappropriate. Instead, the emails were usually forwarded along to others.”

One of the messages said President Obama would not be in the White House for long, because “what black man holds a steady job for four years.” Another email depicted the president as a chimpanzee, and one contained a picture of bare-chested African women, with the caption, “Michelle Obama’s High School Reunion.”
 

Julie Hirschfeld Davis reported from Washington, and Richard Pérez-Peña from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on March 7, 2015, on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: Holder Weighs Dismantling the Ferguson Police Dept.

Holder Weighs Dismantling the Ferguson Police Dept., NYT,
MAR. 6, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/07/us/two-ferguson-police-supervisors-linked-to-racist-emails-resign.html

Los Angeles Police Kill Man

in Confrontation Caught on Video

MARCH 2, 2015

The New York Times

By ASHLEY SOUTHALL

A man suspected of robbery was shot and killed by the police in Los Angeles on Sunday during a confrontation that was captured on video in a downtown homeless encampment.

The four-minute video of the fatal encounter and its aftermath was taken by a bystander and uploaded to Facebook. The video starts with the man swinging his arms at four police officers who have him surrounded on a sidewalk lined with tents.

An officer drops his nightstick and rains punches on the man, knocking him to the ground. The officer then straddles the man, who continues to struggle as two more officers arrive.

In the video, a woman standing nearby picks up the nightstick and appears to aim it at the officers. Two officers wrestle her to the ground and place her in handcuffs.

While the remaining officers struggle with the suspect, the buzzing sound of a Taser can be heard and the officer straddling the man is heard saying, “Drop the gun.”

The officer repeats the command three times before a shot is fired, followed by four more rounds. Two officers can be seen with their weapons drawn as the man lies motionless on the sidewalk.

The man was pronounced dead at a hospital, Sgt. Barry Montgomery of the Los Angeles Police Department said at a news conference. The man was not identified by the police on Sunday.

On Sunday evening, the police said they were investigating what had prompted the shooting. A witness told The Los Angeles Times that the man had reached for an officer’s weapon.

The Los Angeles Police Department said it had received a call about a robbery inside a tent in the Skid Row section of downtown. When the officers arrived, they found the suspect, who was uncooperative and tried to fight them, Sergeant Montgomery said.

The police said they were aware of the video on Sunday, but did not say how many officers had been involved in the shooting or how many had fired their service weapons. Sergeant Montgomery said the officers had used a Taser before the man was shot. No police officers were injured during the fight, he said.

“It’s going to be a long investigation, and we will get to the bottom of it,” Sergeant Montgomery said.

In the video, immediately after the shooting, bystanders can be heard yellng profanity at the officers and asking why the police had resorted to lethal force.

The man was killed in a part of downtown Los Angeles known for violence and a large number of homeless people, who are allowed to pitch tents in the area between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m.

Witnesses who knew the man told a local television station that he was homeless and mentally unstable.

“He had a lot of mental issues,” Tonya Edwards said in an interview with KTLA.

Of the area, she said, “It’s like a melting pot for everybody that needs help.”

Los Angeles Police Kill Man in Confrontation Caught on Video, NYT,
MAR. 2, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/02/us/los-angeles-police-kill-man-in-confrontation-caught-on-video.html

Indictment of New York Officer

Divides Chinese-Americans

FEB. 22, 2015

The New York Times

By VIVIAN YEE

In Chinatown in Manhattan, it is the ultimate feel-good holiday: a time for joy, for festive red bunting and for stocking up on dumplings and rice-flour cake. Discord and heavy thoughts, according to custom, can wait until after the Lunar New Year.

But even as Phil Gim, a businessman in Whitestone, Queens, sent holiday greetings to friends and relatives in China through WeChat, a popular social media app, he found himself preoccupied with grimmer news. Churning through WeChat was a torrent of messages denouncing the indictment this month on manslaughter charges of Peter Liang, the Chinese-American police officer whose ricocheting bullet killed an unarmed black man, Akai Gurley, in a housing project stairwell in November.

The shooting came as the country awaited the decisions of grand juries weighing charges in the deaths of two other unarmed black men: Michael Brown, who was shot and killed by the police in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner, who died on Staten Island after an officer placed him in a chokehold during a confrontation. Now, Mr. Gim and others said that with the Brooklyn grand jury’s decision to indict Officer Liang, he “is being sacrificed for all the injustices that happened.”

“The climate is crying out for the indictment of a police officer,” Mr. Gim said last week at a restaurant in Flushing, Queens, where he and other supporters of Officer Liang had gathered for dim sum.

For Chinese immigrants in New York City and elsewhere, recent events have provided an opportunity for a rare public reckoning with one of their adopted country’s most volatile fault lines. Though Officer Liang and one of the two New York officers killed in an anti-police ambush in December shared a Chinese heritage, Chinese-Americans have so far figured little in the debates over police misconduct and racial injustice that have roiled the country.

Now Chinese-Americans, too, find themselves divided.

Some have hesitated, reluctant to find politics or racial discrimination in the indictment of Officer Liang. Others have hailed the charges against him as a means of improving relations between the police and all minorities. But for some, the indictment is nothing less than the scapegoating of a young officer whose parents may have to live without their only son — and a call to arms for a minority group that has never been as politically active as blacks or Hispanics.

“We don’t want to be pushed around anymore, or picked on anymore,” Mr. Gim said. “We’re going to fight back.”

Mr. Gim and his lunchmates first met on WeChat after the death of Officer Wenjian Liu, who was shot in December. Now they are reaching out to the Chinese-language press, contacting lawyers to advise Officer Liang and planning a protest march in New York, a city with the largest Chinese population outside of Asia. An online petition opposing the indictment that was started in California by a member of the Chinese-American community has garnered more than 100,000 signatures.

To say that Officer Liang has been singled out misses the bigger picture, those leaders argue. Asians have also suffered at the hands of police officers, they say, and it is time for them to join the chorus of black and Latino voices calling for reform.

“Peter Liang being Asian only means that all cops need to be held accountable, regardless of skin color,” said Cathy Dang, the executive director of CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities, an advocacy group in New York that works with Asian immigrants from several countries. “We should use this indictment as fuel for us to organize even harder to hold the white officers who’ve killed accountable.”

Councilwoman Margaret Chin, a Democrat who represents the Chinatown neighborhood, also called for Officer Liang to be indicted, saying the filing of charges would be a step toward reforming a police force that she said has unfairly targeted Asians as well as blacks and Latinos.

Officers have not had nearly as many fatal encounters with Chinese, she and other Chinatown leaders acknowledged. The last one to attract attention in New York was the fatal shooting in 1995 of a 16-year-old boy, Yong Xin Huang, who was playing with a pellet gun in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. Two decades before that, Chinatown residents marched on City Hall to protest the alleged police beating of Peter Yew, an engineer who had been a bystander at the scene of a traffic dispute.

“Let the judicial system take its course,” Ms. Chin said in an interview. “We can reform the whole system so everyone can get equal treatment.”

In some ways, Officer Liang’s case seems all too easy to slice along racial lines. Like Mr. Gurley, the shooting victim, the Brooklyn district attorney, Kenneth P. Thompson, is black; the judge who oversaw the officer’s arraignment, Justice Danny K. Chun of State Supreme Court, is Korean-American. After Justice Chun granted the prosecutors’ request to release the officer on his own recognizance, Mr. Gurley’s aunt spat out: “Asian judge!”

Even so, Ms. Dang said she hoped to encourage Asian-Americans to find common cause with blacks. Her group had previously called for the indictments of the officers involved in the deaths of Mr. Garner and other unarmed black men.

“When the Peter Liang case happened, it did make it a little more complicated to navigate between our different communities,” she said, adding, “I actually think there’s a growing investment in the organizing, especially by young Asian-Americans.”

The community leaders rallying around Officer Liang say they sympathize with Mr. Gurley’s family. But Officer Liang’s parents — who work in a restaurant and a garment factory and speak almost no English — are vulnerable as well, they said.

To them, second-degree manslaughter is too harsh a charge for what they say was a mistake. They accuse Mr. Thompson, a Democrat who has criticized law enforcement practices that affect minorities disproportionately, of bowing to political pressure after the officer linked to Mr. Garner’s death was not indicted.

“We all know this is a rookie cop who doesn’t know all the ropes,” said Doug Lee, a former chairman of the Chinese Cultural Association of Long Island. “We all know he was in a dangerous environment. Why did he charge a rookie cop with manslaughter, with the obvious intent of throwing him in jail?” He added, “This is a vicious attack on the family, and this is a vicious attack on the Chinese community.”

Mr. Thompson has said that the maelstrom that has lumped the Garner, Brown and Gurley cases together had no bearing on the grand jury’s decision. Asked to address the backlash from Chinese residents after Office Liang’s indictment, he said: “That’s baseless. What we did is we followed the evidence. It did not matter to us, the race or ethnicity of the officers.”

If Officer Liang’s indictment has prompted a political awakening of sorts for some, it has failed to stir passions in the working-class Chinese enclave within Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, where the Liangs live.

As garment factory workers, appliance salesmen and waitresses along 18th Avenue in the neighborhood reached the end of the workday one evening last week, many said they had not followed the case. Most who were familiar with it declined to attach any political significance to the officer’s indictment, insisting it was not their place to do so. “This is something for the courts to decide,” Amy Chen, a bakery worker, said. “They’ll be fair.”

Among the few who disagreed was Vivian Tan, 47, a former garment worker who was buying buns for Lunar New Year from Ms. Chen and, like her, spoke in Mandarin. “The light was off. It was just too dark. You couldn’t see anything,” she said of the dim stairwell in the Louis H. Pink Houses where the shooting occurred. “There’s no possibility that he killed him on purpose.”

Yet Ms. Tan would not go further. “It’s not discrimination,” she said. “It’s just unfair in general, because it was a mistake.”

Several said that the indictment would stem the growth in the number of Chinese-Americans who have joined the Police Department in recent years.

Bona Sun, one of those who is backing Officer Liang, said the news of his indictment had almost immediately prompted “heated debates” in her social circle about whether Chinese parents should continue to support their children in becoming officers. Of the more than 2,100 Asian-Americans within the department’s uniformed ranks — about 6 percent of the total — roughly half are Chinese-American, police statistics show.

That figure has grown tenfold in the last 25 years. That it is not bigger, she said, is both a cause and a symptom of how little mainstream political power her community can claim.

“We are very vulnerable,” she said. “We don’t speak up.”

Jia Guo and Jeffrey E. Singer contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on February 23, 2015, on page A15 of the New York edition with the headline: In City, Indictment of an Officer Divides Chinese-Americans.

Indictment of New York Officer Divides Chinese-Americans, NYT,
FEB. 22, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/23/nyregion/in-new-york-indictment-of-officer-peter-liang-divides-chinese-americans.html

Killing in Washington State

Offers ‘Ferguson’ Moment for Hispanics

Pasco Police’s Shooting of Rock Thrower
Draws Comparisons to Michael Brown Case

 

FEB. 16, 2015

The New York Times

By JULIE TURKEWITZ

and RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

PASCO, Wash. — Members of the Zambrano family began arriving here three decades ago, picking apples in nearby orchards. Over time they have become part of the fabric of this harvesting town, growing to more than 50 and settling in tiny candy-colored homes, some ringed by white picket fences.

Then, last week, one of their own was killed by the police, his death caught in a video that has sped around the Internet. Antonio Zambrano-Montes, 35, is shown running from three Pasco officers. He turns and swings his hands upward, before he is felled by a spray of bullets, his body slamming the concrete. He had been throwing rocks at cars and police officers.

It was the third killing by the Pasco police since July, and the video has brought international attention, with a flurry of online commenters criticizing the use of force against a man without a gun or a knife, making comparisons to the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.

It has drawn condemnation from the president of Mexico and multiple investigations, including inquiries by a task force of local police agencies, by the county coroner and by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. An official from the United States attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Washington has also called community leaders, assuring them that the shooting will get a thorough review, which may include an examination of police training and whether it played a role.

But here in Pasco, a city of 68,000 that is 56 percent Hispanic, the public killing has pierced the immigrant enclave, spurring protests that have attracted hundreds and highlighting a division between the city’s increasingly Latino populace and its power structure — the police, the city government — which remains largely white.

While many Hispanics have found work and stable, if not particularly affluent, lives here, the killing has drawn attention to their lack of clout. And, as with blacks in Ferguson, it has intensified feelings among Hispanics that they remain second-tier residents, despite their deep roots here, defined by the many Latino shops that now dominate the main thoroughfare, Lewis Street.

“They had him like a deer, hunting him,” said Maria Paniagua, 41, a resident with six children. “What happens when one of my kids gets in a jam and runs. Will they shoot him down?”

Though Latino workers have been here since at least the 1960s, attracted by jobs gathering fruit and asparagus in the region’s vast fields, few have moved into law enforcement or city government. Of the city’s 68 officers, 14 are Hispanic. A dozen officers speak Spanish fluently, and some residents cite language barriers that complicate interactions with the police. The City Council has one Latino member. The five-member school board, which oversees a system that is 70 percent Latino, typically has one or two Latino members, but this year has none.

“People are finally getting their feelings out through this whole Antonio issue,” said Alicia Coria, 18, a former neighbor of Mr. Zambrano-Montes’s who moderated a recent protest, guiding a sea of Latino residents through local streets, signs and fists held high. “The Hispanic community is finally trying to have the power.”

All three officers involved in last week’s shooting have been placed on paid leave. One of them, Adrian Alaniz, a Pasco native, is Hispanic.

The shooting has caused soul-searching among some city officials, who, even as they urge the residents to wait for the results of an investigation, say the protests have uncovered anger bubbling below the surface.

“This was about more than just Antonio,” said City Manager Dave Zabell, who took over the job last August. “It’s part of a community emerging,” he continued, “and frankly, it’s welcomed.”

Mr. Zambrano-Montes was raised in Michoacán, Mexico. He came to the United States about a decade ago to work in the orchards, said family members, who described him as both caring — guiding newly arrived relatives — and troubled. His wife obtained a protection order against him several years ago, they said, alleging that he had abused her. She, along with their two daughters, eventually moved to California. Mr. Zambrano-Montes was in the country illegally and did not speak English.

He was 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.

In recent months he was out of work and appeared increasingly depressed and disoriented, his aunts and cousins said, after falling from a ladder in an apple orchard and breaking both his wrists. Then, in January, he was trapped in a house fire where he was renting a room, which burned his belongings.

“What I know is that he was alone, that his wife had left him, that he couldn’t see his daughters,” said his cousin Pedro Farias, 32. “I don’t know what his reasons were” for throwing rocks at the police, “but I know all of this affected him.”

There are some Hispanics who hold prominent positions in Pasco. Saul Martinez is a council member. Eight of 20 Pasco schools are headed by Latino principals.

And the Police Department said that it had worked to recruit Hispanic officers in recent years, recognizing the need to reach the group. An Explorer program is one of several recruitment efforts. Intended to train residents ages 14 to 21 in police practices, it has 15 enrollees, all but two or three of whom are Hispanic, said Capt. Ken Roske.

Still, despite deep roots here, Hispanics have struggled to break into the city’s highest echelons. Community leaders cite several reasons, including apathy, lack of English skills and education, and the fact that many Latinos are not citizens and cannot vote.

“There are so many barriers, not only linguistic but psychological, that act like an obstacle,” said Gabriel Portugal, 61, a former vice principal who came to Pasco from Mexico in the 1970s. He is now part of a community group called Consejo Latino, which lobbies the municipality for changes that will help immigrants and their children.

The video has been a near constant presence here in recent days, played repeatedly on television news in crowded taco shops and bakeries, each time drawing the gaze of those perched over plates of pupusas or pan dulce. Reyes Juarez, 54, said that she had slept little since viewing it, imagining her own son gunned down each time she shuts her eyes.

“It’s like having the badge gives you the right to take the life of a Mexican,” she said.

The killing of Mr. Zambrano-Montes has also drawn attention to past accusations of police misconduct. One officer involved in the shooting, Ryan Flanagan, was a defendant in a 2012 lawsuit in which he was accused of using excessive force in 2009 against Maria Davila-Marquez, then 30.

According to the lawsuit, Ms. Davila-Marquez was walking to pick up her children from child care after work when Officer Flanagan stopped her, somehow confusing her with a teenage suspect. When she requested an interpreter, he refused, said her lawyer, Vito de la Cruz. Another officer arrived, he said, and Ms. Davila-Marquez’s hands were twisted behind her back and her face was shoved onto the hood of the hot car, causing burns.

The police chief exonerated both officers, saying their conduct was appropriate, Mr. De la Cruz said. The city settled the suit for $100,000.
 

Julie Turkewitz reported from Pasco, and Richard A. Oppel Jr. from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on February 17, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: After Taped Police Killing, Hispanic Voices Rise.

Killing in Washington State Offers ‘Ferguson’ Moment for Hispanics,
FEB. 16, 2015, NYT,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/17/us/
killing-in-washington-state-offers-ferguson-moment-for-hispanics.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

In New York City,

a Toll Is Newly Felt

as Asians Rise in the Police Ranks

 

JAN. 3, 2015

The New York Times

By DAVID W. CHEN

Officer Peter Liang is the rookie who fatally shot an unarmed man, in what police officials said was an accident, in the stairwell of an East New York, Brooklyn, housing project.

Lt. Philip Chan is the veteran officer who suffered a broken nose after being punched during a protest on the Brooklyn Bridge.

And Officer Wenjian Liu was one of the two policemen who were gunned down in their patrol car in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.

Within the last few weeks, Asian-American officers have been in the middle of a series of wrenching incidents involving the New York Police Department. Their front-line roles are more than just coincidence: They testify to a little-noticed but significant surge in their ranks.

Twenty-five years ago, there were just 200 Asian-American officers in New York City. Now there are more than 2,100 in uniform, or six percent of the total, police statistics show. The percentage of academy graduates, moreover, has jumped to 9 percent, from 4 percent, in the last decade.

Many arrived in the United States as children and grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan working alongside their parents in restaurants or garment factories. And a good number say they chose law enforcement because of the allure of a steady Civil Service job, a less-heralded career path than the legal, medical and engineering tracks that many immigrant families — especially those coming from wealthier and better-educated backgrounds — aspire to.

“Even though the elites get all the attention, this is the group that’s comparable to most other immigrants and migrants that have entered into the American workplace,” said John Kuo Wei Tchen, a New York University historian who is a co-founder of the Museum of Chinese in America. “This is the working man’s opportunity to move up the ladder.”

Asian-Americans are now assigned to all precincts, not just ethnic enclaves such as Chinatown; Flushing, Queens; and Sunset Park, Brooklyn. But with critical mass has come, invariably, more risk.

Officer Liu is believed to be the first Chinese-American to be killed in the line of duty in the city. Last year, Officer James Li survived after being shot in the legs on a bus in Brooklyn.

About half of the department’s Asian members are Chinese, reflecting the composition of the city’s overall Asian population. But even with their growth, Asians are still underrepresented in the department relative to the 15 percent of city residents who identify themselves as Asians, census figures show. By comparison, 10 percent of the Los Angeles Police Department’s officers and 13 percent of that city’s population are Asian.

But barriers abounded a generation ago. The department’s 5-foot-8 height requirement for men — overturned by litigation in the 1970s — disqualified an untold number of candidates, especially those who hailed from Hong Kong and southern China, where the men are typically shorter. And few immigrants had law enforcement or military roots; if anything, many, accustomed to repressive governments in China and Taiwan, were suspicious of authority.

One veteran officer in Chinatown, who moved to New York from Guangdong province when he was 10, said that while his parents were open-minded about his career choice, many of their friends disapproved. He remembered his parents’ friends alluding to a common axiom, which roughly translates as “Good sons don’t become public officials.”

“Few would become cops,” said the officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. “But now more and more.”

Other skeptics included the New Yorkers the officers were trying to protect.

“Some people refused to be arrested by me, even when I showed them the badge,” said Thomas N. Ong, who retired in 1999 as a detective and is now a private investigator. “They’d say things like, ‘You’re a cop? There are Chinese cops? I didn’t know Chinese were cops.’ ”

The police had all but adopted a laissez-faire attitude toward Asian-dominated neighborhoods, “thinking that the Asians had their own way of doing things,” said Peter Kwong, a Hunter College professor who has written several books about Chinatown.

“There’s a long history of frustration,” he said. “When you complained they would say we don’t know the community, we don’t know the language. And since Asians didn’t vote, there was no pressure on the police to be proactive.”

Even today, with the increased Asian presence on the force, language remains a barrier. Chinese officers, particularly older ones, tend to speak Cantonese or Mandarin, and not the Fuzhou dialect that has become more prevalent in working-class areas like Chinatown and Sunset Park. Tensions also persist over neighborhood issues like enforcement of street-vending rules and police vehicles taking up precious parking spaces in Chinatown, which abuts Police Headquarters and court buildings.

But the department has moved to integrate its ranks far more quickly than, say, the Fire Department, after aggressive recruiting and community-relations efforts. Protests in Chinatown alleging police brutality in the 1970s, as well as intensifying gang violence in the 1980s, accelerated that endeavor, Professor Kwong said.

Another breakthrough came in 1984, when Hugh H. Mo was appointed as deputy police commissioner of trials, and became the highest-ranking person of Asian descent in city government. He gladly posed for a recruiting poster.

Years after Mr. Mo, a former prosecutor, left office, he said, “I ran into these parents who came up to me and said, ‘Mr. Mo, my son is a cop, and they say it’s because of you.’ ”

The recruitment effort extended beyond the five boroughs. Robert May, a retired Port Authority of New York and New Jersey police officer who is president emeritus of the New Jersey Asian American Law Enforcement Officers Association, said that New York police officers would attend his group’s events, and try to convince members to take the city’s written test. Several did.

Detective Ong was one of about a dozen officers who founded the Asian Jade Society, a police fraternal group, in 1980. By 1994, when the group held its annual banquet, there were 300 members. A few years ago, the group exceeded 1,000 dues-paying members.

“We envisioned that it was going to grow, but to grow to 1,000 in my lifetime?” Detective Ong said.

The story of Officer Ben Hoo Wong, who works out of the 109th Precinct in Flushing, is typical.

Mr. Wong, 42, emigrated from Taishan in 1991 with his parents and two older siblings. After working in a garment factory and spending a year at LaGuardia Community College, he became a Postal Service employee — another popular Civil Service option — because his parents wanted him to land a “good, stable government job,” he said. But he also volunteered to be an auxiliary officer, because “since I was a young child, my parents said I needed to help people.”

After some budget cuts at the post office, Mr. Wong said, he applied to the Police Department and graduated from the academy in 2010 as the oldest new officer, at 38, in his class. Since then, he has routinely handled situations requiring a Chinese-speaking officer. He says he is inspired by how many Asian-Americans have become department supervisors.

If Mr. Wong embodies the current generation, then Yishan Tu, a 23-year-old native of Pingtung, in southern Taiwan, may well represent the future.

When Ms. Tu’s family moved to Queens eight years ago, her father, a schoolteacher, could find work only as an assistant to a real estate agent. But, she said, the family scraped by thanks to government and community help, and she attended public schools.

The call to public service may have been stoked by friends, also immigrants, who joined the military. So with her family’s blessing, she eyed a similar avenue — the police — because she thought her Mandarin and Taiwanese skills would be in demand. She passed the written test last year, and is now waiting for her chance while working as a double-decker-bus tour guide in Manhattan.

“I want to give back,” she said. “I’m going to be one of the good guys.”

Jeffrey E. Singer contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on January 4, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Toll Newly Felt as Asians Rise in Police Ranks.

In New York City, a Toll Is Newly Felt as Asians Rise in the Police Ranks,
NYT, 3.1.2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/nyregion/in-new-york-city-a-toll-is-newly-felt-as-asians-rise-in-the-police-ranks.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