Let’s recall the situation, it’s late night/early morning, outside of a strip joint, where you had just gotten into an argument with someone. Then a guy, who was hanging out in the club, pulls a gun on you, starts yelling, and his buddy blocks you in with his van. This is not exactly trying to run a cop over during a traffic stop.
Similar to the Virgina “stolen pancakes” case, the officer was instrumental in escalating the situation then used deadly force to resolve it. In contrast to Virginia, these guys hadn’t even broken a single law before the cop drew his gun.
Well, they’ve obviously gone against their department’s SOP, so they definitely aren’t 100% in the right. However I do consider a car a pretty lethal weapon, and have seen motor vehicles used very effectively as an intentional lethal instrument personally, and they do a pretty good job at killing people. Personally I won’t hold it against the police officer too much that they forgot the rule book while being repeatedly rammed by a car (if that’s what happened.) FWIW if it ends up the driver was drunk too, I’ll have a lot less sympathy for him either way. No, drunk driving doesn’t warrant being killed, but if the choice is a drunk driver being shot versus a drunk driver killing some one else I know which I’d prefer.
I’d have to know more about the situation before I passed judgment. Was there another reasonable way they could have stopped the car from ramming in to them? WERE they trying to stop the ramming car, or was the car ramming them in response to gunfire? The linked article also is very vague on when gunfire began. It says:
That isn’t a clear chronology to me. Did they start shooting at the men and then the men tried to ram them with their car? Or did the cops start shooting at them after being rammed? That’s an important distinction to me and I’m not clear either way.
FWIW’s I think the departmental policy that you should never fire on a charging vehicle is bollocks. I’d firmly support any policy that says you should never fire on a charging vehicle if you have any other means of escape, that makes sense. But never, under no circumstances? I don’t like that one bit.
What if the police were in a vehicle themselves? Being repeatedly rammed and without any way to get out? Under such a scenario department policy could be a death sentence, requiring the officers to calmly sit there as their car is violently smashed in to over and over again until the attacked decides to stop or the police officers are killed or severely wounded in one of the collisions.
No. The main reason is that it is the driver trying to harm you. It may not be easy to see if there are any other potentionally innocent people in the car also. It is very hard to be sure that any bullets you shoot at a moving car will hit only your target.
What makes you say this? I heard it on TV reports the night it happened (NBC4).
Martin, there is no clear chronology yet. Like the Virginia case, it will take months before the general public finds out the ‘official’ word on what happened. My fear is that there were several police witnesses who weren’t shooters, and I don’t trust the NYPD’s Blue Wall of Silence.
There’s no reason to get too in depth about this old can of worms, but in the Alexandria case that department does allow shooting at a vehicle if the police officer feels it necessary to save their life and they don’t have the ability to move away.
The passengers in the car FWIW were quoted in the official investigation and several of them confirmed the police side of the story, that the car was a major threat to the officer. Several other uninvolved persons who witnessed the event also supported the police (even though these persons who witnessed the event had in fact had a run in with that officer right before.)
No offense, but if they were white guys, why would Al Sharpton be involved? I mean, really. He’s a Black leader, not some kind of all around activist. I mean, sure it would be nice if he got involved, but I don’t see that as being his responsibility. His main purview is racial injustice, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The Anti- Defamation League hasn’t spoken out about this; are they racist or something? What about the Catholic Civil Rights League? Or The Council on American Islamic Relations? Why aren’t they getting involved???
Because it has nothing to do with the issues they deal with. Just like it would have nothing to do with Al Sharpton if a white guy had been killed.
Just to give you an idea of what a use of force policy is like I will use the example of the New Jersey AG’s use of force policy as it pertains to vehicles.
It of course is not the same as the one in New York but gives some of the reasons why there are tighter restrictions on shooting at vehicles. From this PDF.
I think I read that they cuffed and shackled two of the wounded men before medical treatment arrived. I guess that’s less lethal than shooting them while they’re down. But it’s weird to shackle a guy with three holes in him who can’t get up.
Is there any likelihood that in the crowded, noisy club, potentially with lights strobing and bass pulsing, the undercover (not in uniform) officer’s “showing them his badge and announcing himself” was missed, misheard, or misunderstood?
Was the police car marked or unmarked?
Did these guys have any real chance to identify the police, or did they just see angry armed men yelling at them?
A lot of what’s been tossed out in this thread and in the press seems to assume the citizens saw and clearly identified police, then tried to run from them, then tried to run over them. Having personally seen people in loud, badly-lit clubs try to communicate but have total misunderstandings, I am a lot less certain.
Yep, this is pretty much my feeling on the subject.
In an ideal world, we would be able to believe the accounts of experienced law enforcement officers. Unfortunately, there’s just too much history in which officers in situations like this don’t tell the whole truth, and the NYPD is well known, as you say, for its wall of silence. Also, as the article “A Police Officer in Disbelief” shows, even officers intending to tell the truth might not have remembered exactly what happened.
It’s really not clear, from all the articles, exactly what happened that day. It’s even less clear what the shooting victims thought was happening. After all, while the first officer to draw his gun claims to have identified himself as a cop, the fact is that these cops were undercover, and that it’s entirely possible that the guys in the car saw only his gun, and didn’t know he was a cop. In that situation, i think i’d step on the gas and try to run him down too.
Like the Virginia incident that we discussed some time back, i’m going to wait for the full incident investigation and report before drawing any conclusions about this one.
I am confused. Even if the Police officer first identified themselves and then the driver stepped on the gas, how is **50 bullets ** in any way, shape or form anything remotely reasonable?
We do not know if the police officers did everything correct up to the point of shooting or very little correct. We do know they used what appears to be blatant excessive force in violation of two NYPD rules.
When i said i was going to wait for the full report, i was thinking about the question of whether the guys in the car had known they were dealing with police officers, or whether they just thought it was thugs with guns.
It seems to me that, no matter what else the official report find about the initial identifications and the lead-up to the shooting, there would have to be some very strange circumstances indeed to justify the amount of force that was used.
But i would be willing to cut the police a little more slack if the victims were, indeed, knowingly trying to run down a bunch of cops.
What is the point in the media playing up the fact that this guy was about to married to his sweetheart, and mother of his kids? What does that have to do with anything? All that does is increase the negative reaction to an already volatile situation. If this guy was an unemployed virgin with no friends, how does that change the facts of the case? Same shit when a child dies and the local newscaster starts the story off with “Little Johnny was going to be a fireman when he grew up…” as if the death would be less tragic if he was going to grow up and become a male prostitute? Something fucked up happened which is bad enough on its own, you don’t need the media adding fuel to the fire with irrelevant bullshit.
It’s not irrelevant to them. The news media is just part of bigger corporations. It’s all about selling soap. This is an angle they can run with and have people want to watch. Besides the unemployed virgin got what he deserved.
That is nothing but our news media being our news media. They need the angle to make a bad situation even more news worthy. Why report just the facts, when you have factors that easily push more buttons for more people?
While the situation is sad, I had to give a chuckle at the nod to sterotype displayed by the picture of the driver and his family. Both the mother and son have huge smiles, and the guy is giving his “tough” stare.
People, This is a bad event. One person is dead, a few others are critical. Several cops careers are over and a few of them are probably going to jail as a result. That being said, this event is starting to be promoted by some unelected ‘community-leaders’ like a riot flash-point and I really don’t appreciate that.