New Bill Gets Cops Fired Up
While watching the 6:30 evening news on WPIX-TV, New York, I caught their quick rundown of stories they’d be covering once returning from commercial break. One of the stories featured was on a bill sponsored by two Brooklyn Assembly Members, Annette Robinson (D-Bedford Stuyvesant) and Darryl Towns (D-East New York) that would mandate police officers to shoot to wound rather than to kill a suspect. Patiently, I waited until the program returned from break to hear the details. They quickly reported the; who, what, when, where, why and moved on. Later in the program the matter was addressed in an editorial segment titled “Lionel” which, to sum up, is an old white guy ranting about the good old days. I found myself to be incensed by his insensitive, unsympathetic, uninformed, and irresponsible diatribe on the issue. Describing the bill as something that would require police officers “to shoot gun-wielding suspects in the arm or leg rather than shoot to kill” and declaring the people that the bill would protect to be “thugs”, he amazed me with his interpretation. In attempts to further drive home his point he highlighted the accidental fatal shootings of civilians by police officers only to note how rarely they occur stating, “The bill was intended to curb erroneous police shootings, an extremely rare event when you think of it with a police force of over 35,000 in a city of over 8 million.” and insinuating them to be necessary evils in the war against crime. Topping things off, he ended his segment with a clip of police officers carrying a casket of a slain fellow officer.
Welcome my friends, to the Spin Cycle. Reading another article on the issue in the New York Post I found similar language that reference to those who would benefit from the bill as “thugs” and the term “gun-wielding suspects”. Either ignorant minds think alike or maybe the Detective Endowment Association sent out a memo to their close friends and confidants in the media, I don’t know. The headline did read “Cops furious at ‘don’t kill’ bill”.
All I have read is what has been placed in the media spin cycle regarding the bill. I haven’t seen the bill actually posted anywhere online or in any of these articles that are critical of its language. The New York Post reported that the minimum force bill “seeks to amend the state penal codes’ ‘justification’ clause that allows an officer the right to kill a thug if he feels his life or someone else’s is in imminent danger.” And that it “would force officers to use their weapons ‘with the intent to stop, rather than kill’ a suspect. They would be mandated to ‘shoot a suspect in the arm or the leg.’ The line that states that the bill would mandate that officers shoot a suspect in the arm or leg is placed as a direct quote but in what context is it in the bill? Is it even in the bill or was it a comment made by an officer in reference to the bill? Was it a comment made by a politician in explanation of the bill? Who’s responsible for the quote? Because the quotes are placed in reference to the bill it leaves people to assume that all of the quoted comments are in the actual language of the bill, but that’s not necessarily so. This is kind of reminiscent of lawyers philosophy of not lying but instead withholding elements of the truth to manipulate opinion.
Comparing the proposal of changes that the minimum force act would implement to the actual existing penal code the New York Post posted this:
THE PROPOSAL
Section of Assembly Bill A02952
“A police officer or peace officer . . . uses such force with the intent to stop, rather than kill . . . and uses only the minimal amount of force necessary to affect such stop.”
THE CURRENT LAW
Section of state Penal Law S 35.15(2)(a)(ii)
“A person may not use deadly physical force upon another person . . . unless: he or she is . . . a police officer or peace officer or a person assisting a police officer or a peace officer at the latter’s direction.”
As also noted in the article cops are currently taught to shoot at the center of their target and fire their weapon until the threat has been stopped. The term “threat” is so ambiguous and completely at the discretion of the officer. In the case of 1999 Bronx, New York African immigrant, Amadou Diallo, cops felt “threatened” by a wallet to the extent of firing 41 shots fatally slaying an innocent man returning home from a hard day’s work. In the 2007 case of mentally ill Kheil Coppin police officers felt “threatened” by a hairbrush to the extent of firing 20 shots and fatally killing a 19 year old child that was reportedly mentally ill. Had officers been mandated to use minimum as opposed to maximum force, maybe these lives could have been spared.
The bill doesn’t disarm police officers, it doesn’t require that they use blanks; it just states that officers exercise minimal force as opposed to maximum and fatal force. In protesting this bill representatives of the New York City Police Force are essentially saying that they need a license to kill in order to effectively police.
“It’s moronic and would create two sets of rules in the streets if there is a gunfight. This legislation would require officers to literally shoot the gun out of someone’s hand or shoot to wound them in the leg or arm. I don’t know of any criminal who doesn’t shoot to kill. They are not bound by any restrictions.”
Taking a look at the language of the representatives of the police regarding this bill gives me the sense that the police are criminalizing anyone they encounter in the capacity of making an arrest in suspicion of a crime. A suspect is not a criminal until he or she is proven guilty in a court of law. It is the officer’s job to get a suspect to a court of law where he or she can be proven innocent or guilty. It is not up to our police force to act as judge, jury, and executioner.
Representatives of the police force, media outlets such as The New York Post, and personalities like “Lionel” would have people believe that it is unreasonable to ask that our officers act within the confines of the law they’ve been sworn to abide by. They want you to believe that our officers are operating in environments of such extreme lawlessness that they are in constant fear for their lives and in constant fear of criminals that want nothing more than to murder them. The fact is that these officers are operating inside of a city that is statistically safer than it has ever been and there has been only one death of an officer killed in the line of duty in New York City since 2006.
Since the tragic death of Officer Russel Timoshenko in 2007, the lone officer killed in that time span by gunfire in the line of duty at the hands of someone other than a fellow officer, there has been many deaths at the hands of members of the NYPD police force. At least four of those deaths were shrouded in uncertainty over the events leading up to and causing the loss of what is to be presumed as innocent lives. In 2006 there was the fatal shooting of Sean Bell, an unarmed black man on his wedding night in which police felt “threatened” to the extent of firing 50 rounds at his SUV after reportedly hearing someone say they were going to get a gun.
In 2007 there was the fatal shooting of a teenager named Khiel Coppin, in which officers felt “threatened” enough to fire 20 rounds after mistakenly confusing his hairbrush for a gun. Darryl Battle, a 20 year old man, was fatally shot to death by police in 2008 after police claimed he cornered them with a kitchen knife nearly a foot long. Reportedly only 6 ft away from Battle the officers found they had no alternative but to fire a fatal shot into Battle’s chest in order to “stop the threat”. At a distance of 6 feet the officers found it impossible to aim for his arm or leg.
In 2008 two brothers, Dwayne David, 22 and Keyshawn Forde, 21, were shot dead after officers reportedly claimed they had fired into a crowd outside of a Brownsville night club. According to the officers account as reported by the Daily News “They identified themselves as police, but the brothers ignored calls to drop their guns and charged forward, police said”. Contrasting the officer’s reports of the two brothers charging forward was an autopsy revealing the brothers to have been shot in the back. Maybe Dwayne David, and Keyshawn Forde were guilty of firing into a crowd outside of a Brownsville night club, maybe they weren’t. We’ll never know because neither got the opportunity to stand trial and be proven guilty or innocent.
Aside from the deaths of innocent citizens there were at least 3 deaths of police officers at the hands of other police officers in New York City, which I am aware of. One being Omar J. Edwards, a black police officer who was slain by his fellow officers while chasing a suspect out of uniform. Cops mistook Edwards for an armed assailant fatally shooting him three times in the left arm, side, and back; injuring his heart, left lung, and piercing his chest until the “threat was stopped” after reportedly shouting “Police, Drop it” and seeing Edwards turn while armed in their direction. The shooting deaths of officers Christopher Ridle( 2008) and Eric Hernandez (2006) by their fellow officers were also hailed as tragic cases of mistaken identity. Perhaps had they shot to wound they would have been able to save the lives of their fellow officers. This brings us to a total of SEVEN lives lost at the hands of the New York Police Department in the time span of 4 years.
The presence of a suspect in possession of a firearm isn’t always an admission of guilt or a cause for fatal force even if a suspect fails to comply with an officer’s command to drop his weapon. As stated in a New York Times article on racial bias and police shootings, “[the] failure to comply is often simply the rapid turning of the head and body to determine the source of the verbal command” referred to as “reflexive spin.” According to that same article “the last killing of a white off-duty officer by an on-duty colleague in a mistaken-identity case in the United States happened in 1982.”
In all of these examples the victims were black or Hispanic. As a black man I face a different reality in relation to the police than white citizens. When I’m walking home from work in the middle of the night and a police car approaches me I am fearful. I am fearful because there is a strong possibility that those officers may mistake my wallet, hairbrush, key-chain, or cell phone for a weapon and I could be fatally shot. Police officers want us to believe that because they are police officers that when they encounter an armed suspect it’s logical for them to assume that that suspect has intentions of doing them harm and because of that “threat” they want us to permit them to “shoot and kill” any suspect they encounter that they “believe” to be armed. The cases I have highlighted in this article support that in many instances what the officers “believe” is wrong and leads to the deaths of the innocent.
A recent report by the New York Times highlighted research headed by Christopher E. Stone, the Guggenheim professor of criminal justice at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, which exposed racial bias as playing a role in police shootings. According to that New York Times article “Research reveals that race may play a role in an officer’s instantaneous assessment of whether a particular person presents a danger or not.” And “Inherent or unconscious racial bias plays a role in ‘shoot/don’t-shoot,’ decisions made by officers of all races and ethnicities.” Currently by law officers have the right to shoot and kill any person they deem to be a threat. What the research highlighted in the New York Times showcases is that what officers perceive to be a threat isn’t always “a gun wielding suspect” or “thug” but at times simply a reaction to the complexion of someone’s skin.
Allow me to paint a picture. I am a black man on my home from a night job at 12am in the morning. I live in a crime infested Bronx community where my life is in constant danger. In fact, I live not too far from where police officers fatally fired 41 shots into Amadou Diallo. Because of the dangers I face in my community I am carrying a loaded fire arm that I am registered and licensed to carry. A cop approaches behind me. He shouts for me to stop and turn to face him. I turn. As I turn I see the officer reach for what I assume to be a gun. I think of Amadou Diallo, Patrick Dorismond, Sean Bell, and the many black men that have fallen victim to police gunfire; fearful that I may be facing the same fate I fire a shot fatally killing the officer. Due to my circumstances and my belief of the level of “threat” that I faced, are my actions justified? Borrowing from one of the undocumented policies of our NYPD Police force, It’s better to have a trial by twelve than be carried by six.
The treatment of this bill will give insight into the value that New York legislators place on the lives of their minority citizens. I urge and encourage all who have marched in protest of police brutality and the lost lives of the innocent to show just as much due diligence in getting out and supporting this bill.
Update:
I found the bill. It’s Assembly Bill A02952 here’s the link to it http://assembly.state.ny.us/leg/?default_fld=&bn=A02952&Summary=Y&Actions=Y&Memo=Y&Text=Y
by Gif
