A policeman is felled by friendly fire.
Here’s the story in a nutshell:
An off-duty police officer was jumped at a White Castle by 6 guys. They have this on film from the WC’s security camera. Afterwards he supposedly found one of the guys, had him on the ground and drew his gun on him.
Two police officers show up. According to witnesses they ordered him to drop his gun 3 times. The off-duty cop does not identify himself or drop his gun. Understandably, he gets shot.
Now comes the part where the NYPD are assholes. They rush to the hospital where he is having life-saving surgery, illegally gain access to his blood work and release his blood alcohol content to the media.
The article linked above questions why blood alcohol was taken. I should think an operating surgeon would need to know this. The part that the National Latino Officers Association is having a problem with was exactly how the police got their hands on his blood results and why they released it to the public, according to an interview with their spokesman on the news this morning.
Why, oh why are they trying to besmirch a fellow cop? It makes you wonder what all they’ve done to others in the past.
I’m not sure that that discredits the NYPD as a whole, but those particular cops deserve some serious prison time. The press should be held accountable as well.
I don’t know that they are trying to besmirch Officer Hernandez. He was off-duty and had done nothing illegal. NY Newsday covered the release as one of several reasons why Officer Hernandez might not have been able to hear and understand the the command to drop his weapon. Also, in no account that I’ve seen or read does Officer Hernandez identify himself to the arriving officers as a fellow police officer. NY Newsday does say that the person that Officer Hernandez was threatening was there trying to help him, and was not one of the assailants, but I haven’t read other source that corroborates that.
Blame first starts with the hospital employee who leaked this info to the cops. Assuming that it was leaked and not stolen, that is.
But I could imagine when a gaggle of uniformed officers are demanding to see some records, its easy to forget about HIPAA. As much as I’d like to be angry at the hospital, I can’t seem to muster up the rage.
This is a sad story. The cops were probably trying to cover their ass by using the guy’s blood alcohol level as some type of justification for their response. And who knows? Maybe it was relevant. But instead of letting the appropriate investigative process determine that, they decided to handle it their own way. Ethics and lawfulness be damned.
Now they are going to get in much more trouble than they would have had they just let things be.
I just read the NY Times (“The Times”) story, to get some cross-reference with NY Newsday’s (“Newsday”) version.
Newsday credits an anonymous police source with stating the .10 BAC. The Times goes with eyewitness accounts and police reports, stating that Officer Hernandez was drunk.
Neither story credits an official police release with release BAC.
Given the feeding frenzy nature of journalists, all it takes is one person to mention .10 BAC before many outlets hop on and it becomes engraved in the public mind. I dot think this information would have become public legally, given time. It’s an officer-involved shooting, and if there was any sort of proceeding, the facts would be made public. However, the timing of the leak reflects poorly on the NYPD, especially when there were enough witnesses to establish Officer Hernandez’a sobriety.
Of note, the name of the shooter is Officer Alfredo Toro, presumably also Hispanic. Unlike the 1994 shooting of undercover Officer Desmond Robinson, it will be very hard to prove any sort of racism.
I’m guessing that their motivation for trying to cover their asses is because they have no faith in the “appropriate investigative process” - that’s why I’d risk my job to prove I had a reason for acting the way I did.
The dude was drunk and was pointing his service weapon at a guy. A guy who had nothing whatsoever to do with the beating, according to the NY Daily News and NY Times. There are also witnesses claiming he looked drunk, and he was at White Castle at 5am after a night clubbing, you connect the dots.
When you’re out drinking, I presume you aren’t supposed to be packing heat. I have a BIG problem with the way he handled that situation. Yeah, he was beaten up, but he pulled out a gun to deal with it after the fact. He pointed it at a guy, while drunk, without knowing for sure he was involved. Even if the guy WAS involved, that gun should not have come out. Not when you’ve been drinking. Major league fuckup, that could have gotten a guy killed for nothing more than going to White Castle at the wrong time.
AFAIC he should no longer be allowed to have a pistol, and shouldn’t be on the force anymore, should he pull through OK.
I have to second the tone of this post. You don’t get drunk and carry a gun, gun ownership carries with it responsibilities. If you have the legal right to carry a gun with you in public either through your status as a law enforcement officer or because you hold a concealed-carry permit, that also carries with it responsibilities.
I’m not necessarily sure that carrying a gun around while drunk is more dangerous to society than driving while in a drunken stupor, but they are definitely at least equivalently “bad.”
As a police officer he should have known better than an average citizen about all of these things.
I don’t necessarily think he should be removed from the force, but he definitely needs to be disciplined.
Aside from that, man I gotta say that’s one crappy night. First you get the crap beat out of you by six guys, then you get shot three times.
I don’t understand the “tone” of both cheese and Martin’s posts. Nobody, including me, the media and anybody else in this thread ever said the shooting was not justified. So the both of you can save that defensive, outraged “tone”.
The part that was NOT justified was the NYPD getting and releasing blood test results. Would you like to use your righteous tone on that aspect of the pitting?
Our tone was we expect police officers not to be packing heat if they’re going to be drunk and getting into drunken brawls on the streets while off-duty.
Yeah, there was some minor deviation from the topic presented by yourself, but deviation from the original topic to a certain degree is fairly common here.
From the NYT: But an official with knowledge of the investigation said that Officer Hernandez had been drinking before the shooting and had patronized at least three bars in the Bronx before arriving at the White Castle. The official said that a blood test at the hospital clearly showed he had been intoxicated, and that investigators were examining the possibility that his intoxication and the beating he sustained had slowed his responses when the officers ordered him to drop his weapon.
This “official” had the blood results and released them to the media. Or leaked them to the media. Either way, no amount of blaming the victim will change that.
I’m not “blaming” the victim one way or another. However, from what I’ve read it appears the officers probably had good cause to shoot him, no one is really debating that.
I also give no support to the NYPD for publicizing the fact that the guy was drunk, and it sounds like they may have more or less strong-armed the hospital to get that information.
None of this affects the fact that I still think a police officer should know better than to get sloshed and stumble around the streets with a gun.
Apologies for the hijack. I had actually thought about starting my own Pit Thread on this incident after reading one of Rodriguez’s family members slamming Toro for being “quick” on the trigger. Some of that unused pit material made it into your thread.
Back on topic… If it was me who got drunk, in a brawl, drew my gun, and got blasted by a cop, do you think the NYPD would have the right to get my blood test results? As evidence so that they can throw my ass in jail once I get better? Or, at least as evidence in their own internal investigation of the shooter to ensure it was justified?
Seems like business as usual, as far as I can tell. I would be surprised if blood alcohol tests were NOT done and given to the police as part of their investigation. Maybe our legal eagles or police officers can weigh in with hands on knowledge, but I’d think this sort of test, and the giving of results to authorities, would be fairly standard when there’s a shooting.
Ugh, I mixed up names in my post. Hernandez is the cop one of his family members complained about Toro. Rodriguez was one of his attackers, no word from his family yet.
Yeah, not sure what I was thinking. The victim actually does deserve the blame for getting shot, it happened because he drew his gun on someone, and caused police to think he was getting ready to kill another person. When asked to drop his gun he either refused to heed the order, didn’t hear it, or was unable to understand it because of his being drunk.
The issue isn’'t so much they they got the blood tests, that happens in several criminal cases (though usually you need a warrent.) The bigger issue is that it was leaked to the media, which is a large violation of patient confidentiality. And also te possibility that the other officers are so keen on making it seem like they were fully jusitifed before there is much of an investigation (if indeed they were the ones who got the blood results without a warrent and released them
0, rather than just let the investigation run its course.
If they got that blood test legally, I don’t think there is anything even remotely wrong with releasing the results to the press.
A guy ran a red light and killed a girl a couple of days ago on the Upper East Side, the first thing you hear is that he was drunk. The police legally obtained his BAC, and publicized it. Nobody complains about that because he’s a drunk driver who killed someone.
The police get this person’s BAC legally (work with me for a moment), and publicize it, all of a sudden we’re talking about rights violations. If they don’t have the right to publicize legally obtained data from their investigations, the NYPD should be shut down today, because they do it constantly.
If they got his BAC illegally, that’s another story, but I can’t imagine a situation where they would be denied a warrent for it, it’s clearly a critical piece of information for the investigation of a serious incident.