It always takes me a day or two to pull together my reaction to a police shooting of innocents in NYC. There's always been a significant chunk of anger in the mix.
I did, however, notice the Bloomberg administration is MUCH better about dealing with the issue than Giuliani ever was or could be.
Mayor's Response to a Fatal Police Shooting a Departure From His Predecessors'
By MICHAEL COOPER
Less than 12 hours after Timothy Stansbury Jr., an unarmed 19-year-old, was fatally shot by a police officer early Saturday morning on a Brooklyn rooftop, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly announced that there appeared to be no justification for the shooting and pledged to review Police Department tactics and training.
Even as the commissioner was accepting responsibility at Police Headquarters for the shooting, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was in Bedford-Stuyvesant, going past an angry crowd to offer his condolences to the slain youth's mother, father and grandmother.
In a city where deadly encounters between police officers and minority residents like Mr. Stansbury, who was black, have often become flashpoints, administration officials said yesterday that they hoped to keep the trust of residents by leveling with them quickly.
"The public deserves to know what happened, how it happened, and what steps the administration will take to do everything in its power to prevent another tragedy from occurring,'' said Edward Skyler, the mayor's press secretary.
The Bloomberg administration's response to the shooting was a departure from the way other mayors have reacted to past police shootings in two significant respects: the administration was swift to take responsibility for it, and Mr. Bloomberg himself chose not to address the public about it at all, leaving that task to his police commissioner.
"The police commissioner is the appropriate person to explain it,'' Mr. Skyler said. "Nobody has more credibility in law enforcement issues in New York City than Ray Kelly. And he has a record of being upfront and honest.''
When Rudolph W. Giuliani was mayor, he almost always reacted to police shootings by saying that the police deserved the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes, though, he and other members of his administration went beyond that.
When an unarmed security guard, Patrick M. Dorismond, was shot and killed by an undercover police officer in 2000, Mr. Giuliani authorized the release of the victim's police record, which had been sealed because he was a juvenile at the time, and said in an interview that Mr. Dorismond was not "an altar boy.''
In fact, Mr. Dorismond was never convicted of a crime as an adult. His two arrests resulted in disorderly conduct violations for which he performed community service, and a case against him in 1987, when he was 13, was dropped.
A year before Mr. Dorismond was killed, when an unarmed 16-year-old boy was shot and wounded by a police officer in the Bronx, Mr. Giuliani's police commissioner, Howard Safir, acknowledged that the shooting appeared to be an accident but went on to question why the youth had been out on the streets after midnight in the first place.
The comparison between the two administrations, and their approaches to the delicate matter of police shootings, was on the minds of some New Yorkers yesterday.
It came up on "Open Line,'' a community affairs show on WRKS-FM, a radio station with a largely black audience. One of the hosts, Bob Pickett, praised Charles Barron, a Democratic city councilman from Brooklyn with mayoral aspirations, for getting involved in the case quickly and working with the Stansbury family to publicize it.
But he went on to praise both Mr. Kelly, who minutes earlier on the show had been questioned sharply about police procedures, and Mr. Bloomberg, a Republican. "I also think we need to say that the police commissioner and the mayor have reacted appropriately, visiting the family, expressing their outrage,'' he said.
The other host, Bob Slade, said: "This would never have happened in the previous administration, I guarantee you that. They would have figured out some way, oh you know, 'What was he doing on the roof at 4 o'clock in the morning?' ''
It is not the first time that Mayor Bloomberg has been confronted with a fatal encounter between a police officer and a victim.
Last May, Alberta Spruill, a 57-year-old city employee, died of a heart attack after police officers mistakenly raided her home and threw a concussion grenade inside it. After her death, several top police officials were reassigned, a report was commissioned into what went wrong, the use of concussion grenades was suspended and the mayor took full responsibility when he spoke at Mrs. Spruill's funeral.
"As mayor, I failed to protect someone,'' Mr. Bloomberg said.
Norman Siegel, a civil rights lawyer who often protested police shootings during the Giuliani years, when he was the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said that he was struck by the differences in the responses.
"The Giuliani administration very often with these racially charged shootings with police and residents would either defend the police or alternatively say, 'let's wait till all the facts come in,' '' he said. "Yesterday, the Bloomberg administration's reaction was unusual in the sense that they very quickly said that there appeared to be no justification for the shooting. In my years of monitoring police-community relations, I can't remember when a police commissioner made that kind of a statement.''
Still, Mr. Siegel said, he was troubled that the commissioner announced that the shooting appeared unjustified even before the investigation was completed. And he called on the city to do more to address issues involving race and the police. The officer who shot Mr. Stansbury, Richard S. Neri Jr., is white.
Mr. Kelly's statement was also criticized by the union representing police officers, the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association.
"It is absolutely wrong for Commissioner Kelly to have jumped to a conclusion when he knows the police officer involved has not had the opportunity to speak with the district attorney,'' Patrick J. Lynch, the union president, said in a statement. "This investigation should be allowed to move forward without being tainted by politics or comments by Commissioner Kelly or others.''
Mr. Kelly, though, has chosen carefully which officers to support and which cases to question. When there were three shootings by police officers last January, he held a 90-minute news conference to explain why the department believed they were justified. And when the decision by a police officer to issue a summons to a man for sitting on a milk crate raised hackles across the city, he defended the officer for trying to clean up a problem corner.
Posted by P6 at January 26, 2004 10:23 AM
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Comments
I am not hopeful that the officer will face justice. All of the evidence thus far shouts extreme mistake. But in the end, the family will have to seek a civil judgement because I doubt Brooklyn DA Hynes will bring him up on charges or a competent case for trial.
Posted by ronn at January 26, 2004 11:20 PM