The Shooting Gallery: Police Violence MEGATHREAD

[alfred russel]

I don't know how to feel that there wasn't even a mention here of the shooting at Florida State University last week, I guess no one but the shooter died so that's good.

I knew right away the shooter wasn't an FSU football player, otherwise the campus police would have never showed up to investigate.

The morning that happened, I flipped on my phone and saw the headline "3 wounded by shooter at FSU" and the first thought I had was, "Jameis Winston?"

[MadBurgerMaker]

Supposedly this is the BB gun the kid had:

[Berkut]

Looks pretty damn real to me. Jesus, what a stupid waste.

[derspiess]

Apparently the kid removed the orange device around the muzzle in order to make it look more real.

[Syt]

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/22/nyregion/new-york-police-officer-fatally-shoots-brooklyn-man.html

Officer's Errant Shot Kills Unarmed Brooklyn Man

Two police officers prepared to enter the pitch-black eighth-floor stairwell of a building in a Brooklyn housing project, one of them with his sidearm drawn. At the same time, a man and his girlfriend, frustrated by a long wait for an elevator, entered the seventh-floor stairwell, 14 steps below. In the darkness, a shot rang out from the officer's gun, and the 28-year-old man below was struck in the chest and, soon after, fell dead.

The shooting, at 11:15 p.m. on Thursday, invited immediate comparison to the fatal shooting of an unarmed man in Ferguson, Mo. But 12 hours later, just after noon on Friday, the New York police commissioner, William J. Bratton, announced that the shooting was accidental and that the victim, Akai Gurley, had done nothing to provoke a confrontation with the officers.

Indeed, as the investigation continued into Friday night, a leading theory described an instance of simple, yet tragic, clumsiness on the part of the officer. Mr. Gurley was not armed, the police said.

The episode promised to bring scrutiny to a longtime police practice of officers drawing their weapons when patrolling stairwells in housing projects.

The shooting occurred in the Louis H. Pink Houses in the East New York neighborhood. The housing project had been the scene of a recent spate of crimes — there have been two robberies and four assaults in the development in the past month, two homicides in the past year, and a shooting in a nearby lobby last Saturday, Mr. Bratton said.

Additional officers, many new to the Police Department, were assigned to patrol the buildings, including the two officers in the stairwell on Thursday night, who were working an overtime tour.

Having just inspected the roof, the officers prepared to conduct what is known as a vertical patrol, an inspection of a building's staircases, which tend to be a magnet for criminal activity or quality-of-life nuisances.

Both officers took out their flashlights, and one, Peter Liang, 27, a probationary officer with less than 18 months on the job, drew his sidearm, a 9-millimeter semiautomatic.

Officer Liang is left-handed, and he tried to turn the knob of the door that opens to the stairwell with that hand while also holding the gun, according to a high-ranking police official who was familiar with the investigation and who emphasized that the account could change.

It appears that in turning the knob and pushing the door open, Officer Liang rotated the barrel of the gun down and accidentally fired, the official said. He and the other officer both jumped back into the hallway, and Officer Liang shouted something to the effect that he had accidentally fired his weapon, the official said.

Mr. Gurley had spent the past hours getting his hair braided at a friend's apartment. Neighbors said he had posted photos of himself on an online site for models, featuring his tattoos, his clothing and his muscular frame.

He and his girlfriend, Melissa Butler, waited for an elevator on the seventh floor, but it never came, so they opened the door to the dark stairwell instead. An instant later, the shot was fired. Mr. Gurley and Ms. Butler were probably unaware that the shot came from a police officer's gun.

"The cop didn't present himself, he just shot him in the chest," Janice Butler, Ms. Butler's sister, said. "They didn't see their face or nothing."

Mr. Gurley made it two flights down, to the fifth floor, where he collapsed. Melissa Butler called 911 from a lower floor, the official said.

Officer Liang and his partner came upon Mr. Gurley and called in the injury on the police radio, saying it was the result of an accidental discharge, the official said.

Mr. Gurley was taken to Brookdale Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Following protocol, Officer Liang was relieved of his gun and his badge pending an investigation.

Commissioner Bratton called Mr. Gurley "a total innocent" and said the shooting was "an unfortunate accident." The victim was not engaged in any activity other than trying to walk down the stairs, Mr. Bratton said.

Mayor Bill de Blasio was also quick to offer his condolences to Mr. Gurley's family. "This is a tragedy," he said.

About 6:45 p.m. on Friday, the mayor, accompanied by his wife, Chirlane McCray, and Mr. Bratton, arrived at the Red Hook East Houses to visit the home of Mr. Gurley's domestic partner, Kimberly Michelle Ballinger, 25.

They spent a little more than 10 minutes there and left without making any comment.

Earlier, Mr. Bratton said that whether an officer should draw his weapon while on patrol when there was no clear threat was a matter of discretion.

"There's not a specific prohibition against taking a firearm out," he said, adding, "As in all cases, an officer would have to justify the circumstances that required him to or resulted in his unholstering his firearm."

The president of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, Patrick J. Lynch, declined to say anything about the officer, but commented on the conditions of stairwells in projects, including the setting of the shooting.

"The Pink Houses are among the most dangerous projects in the city, and their stairwells are the most dangerous places in the projects," he said. "Dimly lit stairways and dilapidated conditions create fertile ground for violent crime, while the constant presence of illegal firearms creates a dangerous and highly volatile environment for police officers and residents alike."

The Brooklyn district attorney, Kenneth P. Thompson, issued a statement that questioned the condition of the lighting in the stairwell.

"Many questions must be answered, including whether, as reported, the lights in the hallway were out for a number of days, and how this tragedy actually occurred," Mr. Thompson said.

Neighbors said darkened stairwells were nothing new in the Pink Houses. "The staircases from eight down are dark," said Mattie Dubose, a resident. "If you want to walk in them, you need an escort."

The Police Department is still dealing with the fallout over the death of Eric Garner, a Staten Island man who died after a confrontation with the police in July. The department sought to defuse tension on Friday both by naming the officer in the shooting — an unusual step — and by noting repeatedly that the victim was blameless.

At City Hall, aides to the mayor were well aware of the imminent decision by a grand jury on the police shooting in Ferguson and the charged atmosphere that the death of an unarmed black man can create.

The mayor and Mr. Bratton conferred by telephone several times on Friday morning. Deputy Commissioner Benjamin B. Tucker spoke with the Rev. Al Sharpton about the shooting and the city's response. The chief of the Police Department's community affairs bureau, Joanne Jaffe, went to Mr. Gurley's home in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and was with relatives when his young daughter was told of her father's death.

Ms. Ballinger, the mother of Mr. Gurley's young daughter, and his sister, Akisha Pringle, were scheduled to appear with Mr. Sharpton at an event on Saturday.

"She's got to explain to her 2-year-old old why her father did not pick her up from school today and why he was not home to play with him as is their routine," Kirsten Foy of the National Action Network, Mr. Sharpton's organization, said after meeting with the family.

The officer's future is unclear beyond an expected interview he will give to police superiors. It was not known whether he could face criminal prosecution.

"The cops have tremendous leeway with self-defense cases, but less leeway with a case like this," said Eugene O'Donnell, a former prosecutor who teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan. "A life was lost, and you are going to have to account for it."

A similar shooting occurred in January 2004, when Officer Richard S. Neri Jr. killed Timothy Stansbury Jr., 19, on a roof at the Louis Armstrong Houses in Brooklyn. A grand jury declined to indict Officer Neri after he gave emotional testimony that he had unintentionally fired; he was startled, he said, when Mr. Stansbury pushed open a rooftop door in a place where drug dealing was rampant.

On Friday night in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, a next-door neighbor of Officer Liang described him as cautious and helpful. "He wouldn't mess around or do anything out of the ordinary," said the neighbor, Ronald Chan, 24.

When Mr. Chan learned about the shooting, he said he was shocked and could not believe someone as cautious as his neighbor could have been involved.

"I think it was an honest mistake, because safety first," he said. "Why would he do that? It sounds like an accident."

Honest accident that could happen to everyone, or a rookie who fucked up?

[11B4V]

The shooting, at 11:15 p.m. on Thursday, invited immediate comparison to the fatal shooting of an unarmed man in Ferguson, Mo. But 12 hours later, just after noon on Friday, the New York police commissioner, William J. Bratton, announced that the shooting was accidental and that the victim, Akai Gurley, had done nothing to provoke a confrontation with the officers.
Indeed, as the investigation continued into Friday night, a leading theory described an instance of simple, yet tragic, clumsiness stupidity on the part of the officer. Mr. Gurley was not armed, the police said.

The episode promised to bring scrutiny to a longtime police practice of officers drawing their weapons when patrolling stairwells in housing projects.

Hmm, was there an expectation for the officer to employ deadly force....doesnt sound like it.

The shooting occurred in the Louis H. Pink Houses in the East New York neighborhood. The housing project had been the scene of a recent spate of crimes — there have been two robberies and four assaults in the development in the past month, two homicides in the past year, and a shooting in a nearby lobby last Saturday, Mr. Bratton said.

IMO fucking irrelevant.

[Kleves]

The Grand Jury has reached a decision which they will be releasing later today, presumably so that rioters and police have time to get ready.

[CountDeMoney]

Honest accident that could happen to everyone, or a rookie who fucked up?

Like I have said so many times before, there is an erosion of the concept of continuum of force and going straight for the unnecessary brandishing of the firearm, and it is not reinforced enough by immediate supervision.  Twenty years ago, if you fucked up, guess what:  your sergeant's ass got as chewed out as much as yours, and he or she made sure that didn't happen again.  I'm not seeing that level of supervisory control anymore.  You don't have accidental discharges if your weapon is still in your holster.

Peter Liang, 27, a probationary officer with less than 18 months on the job

He'll be sorry he ever raised his right hand for the job.  And why the fuck is he on his own at only 18 months?  You had your Field Training Officer glued to your ass for the first 2 years here.    Good thing about probationary period is that the department can fire you without going through all the CBA nonsense.

Mr. Gurley had spent the past hours getting his hair braided at a friend's apartment.

What, you got a problem with ethnic hair care, Syt Stahlhelm? 

[CountDeMoney]

The Grand Jury has reached a decision which they will be releasing later today, presumably so that rioters and police have time to get ready.

Should've waited for a blizzard.

[CountDeMoney]

I don't know how to feel that there wasn't even a mention here of the shooting at Florida State University last week, I guess no one but the shooter died so that's good.

I knew right away the shooter wasn't an FSU football player, otherwise the campus police would have never showed up to investigate.

The morning that happened, I flipped on my phone and saw the headline "3 wounded by shooter at FSU" and the first thought I had was, "Jameis Winston?"

Winston would've only hit two to make the spread.   


Anyway, friends tried to help the shooter.  Even when they're acting psycho enough for people's Spidey Senses to go, "Hey, this cat ain't right", nobody does anything anyway.

FSU shooter's friends tried to get help for him months before the shooting
Tampa Bay Times 11/21/14

When she met him in the parking lot, the sight of him jarred her. Gone was the dapper, carefully dressed man who had taken her on dates for most of the past year.

He was gaunt, haggard, disheveled and wild-eyed. He wore a borrowed T-shirt and a pair of too-small running shorts. He was barefoot. He had thrown away his shoes, he told her, because he was sure they were bugged by the cops who were following him.

Standing there in Las Cruces, N.M., Danielle Nixon listened as the man who would open fire in a Florida State University library begged her for the wrong kind of help. Myron May said he needed her to rent him a car, so he could slip out of town unnoticed.

By this point, on Oct. 8 — six weeks before May would walk into the Strozier Library on the FSU campus, level a handgun and start shooting, wounding three — May's friends had tried at least three times to get him the care he desperately needed. Every time, they were told, he didn't qualify for that care.

In interviews with the Tampa Bay Times on Friday, May's friends described their frustrations over the past three months with the area's mental health care system, one that couldn't save May despite desperate pleas from loved ones who watched him dissolve into paranoia before their eyes.

"You have to commit a crime to get the help you need. Why isn't it the reverse?" said Kimberly Snagg, a Houston lawyer who described May as one of her best friends. "This could have been avoided. The entire thing."

•••

Six months into his job as a prosecutor in the Dona Ana County District Attorney's Office in New Mexico, May couldn't concentrate.

The 31-year-old had become so distractible, he told his friends, that he had decided to see a psychologist. He emerged from the appointment with prescriptions for an antidepressant and an attention deficit drug, which he took faithfully until, about three weeks later, he suffered a panic attack at work.

When another attack followed a week later, he returned to his psychologist and had his medication adjusted, said Nixon, a doctor. May was on a combination of Wellbutrin and Vyvanse — drugs that, in rare cases, can cause paranoia.

By late summer, May had begun acting strangely, his friends said. He was worried his neighbors were watching him. He heard them talking about him through the walls of his apartment.

It was alarming to his friends, but it was nothing, they said, compared to what was still to come.

•••

May told his friends that the officers at the Las Cruces Police Department laughed at him when he showed up on the morning of Sept. 7 to make a bizarre report: Someone was watching him through a camera hidden in his apartment. And he was hearing voices coming in through the walls as he bathed.

May left the Police Department that day and went to a shooting range, where friends had gathered for a bachelor party.

As they squeezed off rounds at the targets, May seemed agitated, they recalled. He told them he wasn't sleeping because of his neighbors' constant spying. Their voices were keeping him up at night, he said. What he really wanted was to get a gun and take revenge on them.

He was ready to buy one that day, he said. His friends talked him out of it.

•••

Unsettled now, May's friends contacted his psychologist's office. They said they told her that May was paranoid, that he was hearing voices, and that he had talked about buying a gun and getting even with his neighbors.

The psychologist made an appointment with May, they said, met with him for about an hour and then declared him to be fine. Nixon and the others were frustrated.

Not long after that day, May called a friend, a law enforcement officer at a local agency, sounding paralyzed with fear. May was sure that other shoppers were secretly observing him. He was afraid of what they might do to him. He asked his friend to escort him home.

A day or two later, he voluntarily checked himself into Mesilla Valley Hospital, a mental health center. Finally, his friends thought, he was in a position to get some serious medical care.

•••

He got out four days later. Soon after, on Oct. 5, he was acting more erratic than ever before. Telling no one beforehand, he drove his black Chevy SUV nine hours to Denver. Then he turned around and drove back.

He made frantic phone calls to his friends from the road. The police were on to him, he said. His hotel room in Denver was bugged, so he had to flee. There were black cars following close behind. He would be a millionaire when he brought to justice the crooked cops who were persecuting him. Stopping for food or sleep was not an option, he said. He drove straight through the night.

•••

Responsible for caring for May's Great Dane, Lil' Bit, during one of May's sudden absences, his friends let themselves into his apartment and found a new pill bottle among his prescriptions, they said.

It was Seroquel, a powerful antipsychotic. The prescriber worked at Mesilla Valley Hospital. Together the friends got on the phone with her and laid out the whole story, describing the voices, the cameras, May's fear of persecution, his desire for a gun, his wish to have revenge.

"She listened and then she ended it by saying, you know, 'I can't really do anything,' " Nixon said. " 'He needs to come back on his own.' "

•••

On Oct. 7, two days after his trip to Colorado, May was driving the streets of Dona Ana County. He pulled into a sheriff's substation and dialed Snagg's number. He told her he couldn't take it; he was turning himself in. He went to the desk to surrender, but the woman there told him he wasn't wanted on any charges. Snagg could hear snippets of the conversation through her cellphone. She said she asked May to hand the woman the phone. Snagg said she told the woman that May was a lawyer in the midst of a severe mental breakdown. "I implored her, please do not let him leave," Snagg said. She asked the woman to detain May, to get him some help. "The response was, 'My child has a program that starts in a few minutes, and it's 4:58, and I don't have time.' " Snagg said.

While Snagg was talking to the woman, May got in his SUV and drove away.

•••

That night, May showed up at Nixon's house uninvited. He was rambling incoherently, according to a police report that describes the incident. Nixon told officers with the Las Cruces Police Department she was afraid for May's safety.

The officers told her they would check on him. But they couldn't find him when they arrived. They knocked on the door to apartment 1403, according to their report.

May lived in 1407.

[Ed Anger]

I'm shocked FSU had a library.

[DGuller]

Knock it out of his hand with a Bat Boomerang from his Bat Utility Belt.  What can't those things do.

No shit.

But, my sympathy to DG and Marty for being so ignorant.

My sympathy to you for being so dumb.

[11B4V]

Knock it out of his hand with a Bat Boomerang from his Bat Utility Belt.  What can't those things do.

No shit.

But, my sympathy to DG and Marty for being so ignorant.

My sympathy to you for being so dumb.

Your such a nice guy.

[Razgovory]

About 20 minutes now.

[jimmy olsen]

Saw this posted elsewhere, pretty spot on I think. Definitely makes sense to announce this at night if you want to delegitimize the protesters.

So many reasons that protests are worse-off in the dark. The more I think about it, the worse it seems.

It's harder to document, most cameras see less. It's more attractive to looters, and harder to differentiate between looters and protesters. People are inclined to think of "the good kind of free-speech protest" as happening during the day. Signs and placards aren't as visible.