Off-Duty Detective Who Shot a Gunman After Drinking Is Restored to Full Duty

I should hope so!

The right thing was done. In the end. Too bad it was even an issue to begin with. This cop did everything right. The important thing isn't if off-duty cops are drinking, it's if they do the right thing.

It's one thing if Mothers Against Drug Driving imposes it's Prohibitionist and puritanical views on our driving laws. But hands off the NYPD!

Meanwhile, in the NYPD

The brass is throwing the book at the officers involved in the Sean Bell shooting.

What's so unsatisfying about this, is that such discipline makes cops paranoid, and for good reason. What's the moral? For police, it's that if the department wants to get you (if Al Sharpton shouts loud enough), they will. Obviously the order had been given that heads must roll. But at the same time the anti-police public won't be satisfied. Anything less than jail, being fired, and perhaps a public flogging in considered a slap on the wrist.

The New York Times reports:
If the charges, known as administrative charges, are upheld, the officers could face discipline ranging from loss of pay to retraining to firing. But the internal investigation has been suspended as federal prosecutors weigh civil rights charges in the case.

If you think 31 bullets was obsessive, go for that guy. Clearly, as I have said, mistakes were made. Do I think police were criminally guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. No. Do I think punishable things may have been done. Yes.

But to charge someone with "failing to thoroughly process the crime scene"? That's bullshit. Don't go after the guys who showed up after the bullets stopped flying. The idea of crime-scene integrity is a myth. You try and preserve a crime scene with multiple shooting victims. I have. It's not easy. The O.J. trial set the bar too high.

CSI it's not. Police and paramedics have jobs to do and lives to save. Do you order your commanding officer to stay out of the scene? People and cars and belonging are searched. Somebody steps on some blood or kicks a shell casing. I know I have. And you know what, it doesn't really matter. It's policing. Policing in the real world with real people. Get real.

Police-involved shootings

For those interested in an honest police perspective on shooting (and not shooting) people, I recommend Into the Kill Zone: A Cop's Eye View of Deadly Force by professor and former police officer David Klinger. It's a lot of 1st-hand accounts of deadly force incidents. And it's good stuff. You can read an excerpt here.

Regarding Sean Bell

Clearly something wrong happened because an innocent man was killed," Peter Moskos, author of Cop in the Hood, and a professor at New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told TIME. "But that's not what the system was testing. They were testing if there was reasonable doubt. I think the verdict is fair, but it doesn't address that this man was killed. The court system is no place to address these problems.

The whole article is here.

The Sean Bell verdict came out at 3pm, Amsterdam time. At 5pm, I got a call on my temporary Amsterdam cell phone from Time Magazine (thanks to John Jay's public relations and my quick thinking wife for getting my phone number to the reporter). It was an awkward interview, because 1) I don't like talking on cell phones. And 2) I'm standing in a bar in the Leidseplein with a gypsy band busking outside. I felt a very long way away from the Queens Courthouse. I was very worried about failing to get my thoughts together and being misquoted on such a sensitive topic.

Madison Gray captured my words and thoughts perfectly (and he mentioned my book).

3 Detectives in Bell Shooting Acquitted

You heard it here first in my March 6 post.

My gut knows the police did something wrong because Sean Bell is dead. But what should a reasonable police officer have done? I don’t know. I never had to shoot my gun on duty. My gun was never the only thing between me and an SUV trying to kill me. I have doubts. As long as Justice Cooperman has some of the same doubts, the officers will and should walk free.

Wild gun fight. Police shoot bad guy. Officers shot.

This one, if the Sun is to be believed, sounds wild. Though if the Sun is to be believed, this happened in East Baltimore (you know, where bad things happen). Best I can tell it started in the Central and ended in the Northern.

Officer Anthony Jobst, 47, was in his patrol car in the first block of E. Lafayette Ave. about 2:30 a.m. when he heard gunshots and saw a white Audi speeding away. Jobst, who was joined by four other uniformed officers, drove after the Audi and followed it for about a mile to an alley in the 400 block of E. Lorraine Ave. in the Harwood neighborhood.

The Audi crashed in the alley, and the driver ran out and hid behind a brick wall. When officers approached him, the man opened fire, shooting Jobst in the foot and grazing the left leg of 27-year-old Officer Hadyn Gross, Bealefeld said.

Officers returned fire, striking the man several times in the upper torso, but the gunfight was "protracted" because he was wearing body armor enhanced with steel inserts.
...
Back at Lafayette Avenue, where shots were first fired, police found Rico Alston, 27, with two bullet wounds to the chest. Alston was taken to an area hospital.

He was in serious but stable condition yesterday, police said.

[March 19 update: 88 rounds were fired. The bad guy died Monday night. The Sun reports, "At one point, the man signaled to police that he was surrendering - but police said he used the lull in gunfire to reload the Smith & Wesson."]

The Trial in the Killing of Sean Bell

Sean Bell, an unarmed black man, should not have died. But the officers on trial won’t be convicted of anything major. The police certainly make mistakes. We all do. Like it or not, mistakes aren’t usually crimes, especially for police.

After any high-profile police shooting, there is the hope that time will reveal the truth and truth will lead to justice. This trial won’t bring truth or justice because there is no single truth.

In the Sean Bell shooting, there are as many truths as there were bad choices. On many different levels the events leading up to Sean Bell’s death were not exactly ideal police work. Yet everybody behaved rationally in their own way.

Sean Bell left a club and thought a black man with a gun was a robber. Bell drove away, hitting the gunman in self-defense. An undercover officer fired in self-defense when a drunk man he thought was armed hit him with his vehicle. The officer’s partners fired when they thought they were being fired on from the vehicle.

It only takes one bullet to kill. While the number of shots fired makes the headline, what matters is why police shot at all. The first shot, combined with adrenaline and danger, often causes other officers to shoot. This is the so-called “contagion effect.”

Police aren’t supposed to shoot at or from moving vehicles. But police are trained to shoot when they think their life is in danger. If that threat exists for 10 seconds, they will fire for 10 seconds. When I was a police officer, my gun held 17 rounds, two more than allowed in New York City. I could fire 50 rounds in 15 seconds. I was trained to reload quickly and “get back in the game.” If you don’t like that, change the training or change the gun. But don’t blame police officers.

This trial has become a symbol for race and policing in New York City. Are police too quick to see young African-American men as threats? Would so many shots be fired if Bell and his friends were white? Perhaps not, but police kill white people too. You just don’t hear about it because there is no white version of Al Sharpton.

It’s unfair to unload three centuries of American racial discrimination and police mistreatment onto the backs of these three police officers, especially when two happen to be black. The shame is that short of vigils and riots, our society has no ritualized way to atone for collective sins.

Sean Bell isn’t on trial. Society isn’t on trial. The New York Police Department isn’t on trial. Three men are. Conviction would mean the loss of their jobs and freedom. But a guilty verdict won’t bring Sean Bell back to life. And acquittals won’t return the police officers’ lives to normal.

Despite the police cliché, “better to be judged by twelve than carried by six,” police don’t want to be judged by twelve. Police, often for good reason, don’t trust city juries. The officers want a bench trial so their fate is in the hands of a Queens judge rather than a Queens jury.

Judges are better at deciding cases on facts rather than prejudice and personal experience. Of course judges, especially senior white judges, have fewer reasons to have prejudice against police officers. This senior judge, Justice Cooperman, is certainly no cop hater, but he’s also no pushover. Cooperman actually tried, convicted, and imprisoned two police officers in 1986.

Still, beyond a reasonable doubt is a tough legal standard to prove. Was there a need to shoot in the first place? Was a threat still present when the last shot was fired? If the answer is yes or even maybe—anything but a strong no means no conviction.

My gut knows the police did something wrong because Sean Bell is dead. But what should a reasonable police officer have done? I don’t know. I never had to shoot my gun on duty. My gun was never the only thing between me and an SUV trying to kill me. I have doubts. As long as Justice Cooperman has some of the same doubts, the officers will and should walk free.

Police kill white people, too

But you usually don't hear about it. I call this the Al Sharpton effect. There is no white version of Al Sharpton.

As the trial of the officers involved in the Sean Bell killing begins, I've been thinking more about police-involved shootings and race. Given media reports, it certainly seems like police only kill black people. But I know this isn't true.

I did a little research. According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports from 2000 to 2004, police-involved “justifiable homicides” kill about 350 people a year, 99 percent by shooting. Virtually all police-involved killings, most for good reason, are categorized as justifiable. Of those killed by police, 32 percent are black and 64 percent are white. While the percentage of blacks killed is high compared with the black percentage in America (13%), it is low compared with other indicators of violence, such as the percentage of homicide victims and offenders believed to be African American (both 48%).

Perhaps it is more useful to compare police-involved shootings with those killed by non-police officers. Among “justifiable homicides” by regular citizens—about 210 a year—African-Americans are 40 percent of those who kill and 56 percent of those killed. Compared with these numbers, police seem restrained in their use of force toward the black community.

Of course the numbers do not tell us the race of innocent people killed. And numbers are no solace to the family of any victim of police bullets.

The untimely death of Khiel Coppin

An unarmed man was killed by police Monday in Brooklyn. Here's the New York Times account. This isn’t going to start any riots. Trust me. By all reasonable accounts, this was a “good” shooting.

It always sounds bad to describe the shooting of an unarmed man as “good,” but in police parlance, “good” and “bad” shootings aren’t a moral judgment as much as a way of saying that the shooting was justified by regulation and law.

A man comes at police saying he's armed and going to shoot while holding something under his shirt? He gets shot.

When a man says he has a gun, police have every right to believe him.

Maybe this was suicide by cops. Maybe the man just needed to take his meds. I don't blame the cops. But there is another problem. An one of my students said, "they got another one."

The greater problem is that another unarmed black man was killed by police. It’s not just this one case. It does keep happening. That’s why people get upset. Maybe this one was justified, maybe the last one, too. And the one before that. But can they really *all* be justified? That’s the greater question.

Police occasionally kill innocent unarmed white people as well. But you probably never hear about it. It never becomes national news. There’s no Al Sharpton for white folk. Maybe there should be.

It usually goes without saying, but cops don’t put on their uniform hoping they’ll shoot somebody that day. No cop wants to be involved in a shooting. Sometimes it just happens (luckily it never happened to me).

The problem with individual police-involved shootings is that any criminal trial becomes symbolic of greater issues of history, race, and justice in America. That’s not fair to those on trial. But we, as a society, don’t have any better of discussing and dealing with these issues. That’s the greater problem.