More people died from police gunfire last year than during any previous year of the Bloomberg administration, the report found. Those deaths, however, came amid only a slight increase in the number of people hit by police gunfire, 30 last year compared with 28 in 2011.
The shootings included some of the most high profile in recent years, including that of Ramarley Graham, an unarmed 18-year-old killed by an officer inside a private home in the Bronx and the killing of two armed suspects in separate confrontations with the police in Midtown Manhattan last summer.
One of those Midtown shootings, in front of the Empire State Building, also resulted in nine bystanders being struck by police bullets and fragments, the report found. In total, the report lists 10 bystanders struck by police bullets fired at suspects and another four people struck, one fatally, when an officer’s gun discharged unintentionally.
Despite the increase in deadly shootings and officers struck by bullets, no officers were killed during confrontations with suspects, according to the 74-page document, an annual report covering each instance in which members of the New York Police Department discharge their weapons, regardless of the reason.
The report documents those times – 24 in 2012 – when officers opened fire on dogs, as well as the eight times officers ended their own lives with service weapons. A total of 105 incidents were included in the report, of which 54 were in the course of what the department describes as “adversarial contact” with a suspect.
Those instances are most heavily scrutinized by the department and most thoroughly documented in the report, which describes at length the legal context for the use of deadly force as well and the policy for New York Police Department, which “represents an even more stringent guideline.” (For example, state law permits officers to open fire to protect property or stop a suspect who is using a car as a weapon; the Police Department’s guidelines do not.)
In most instances, the report found, the suspects were armed and the officers were within guidelines to open fire. Of the 60 officers who shot their weapons in such situations last year, more than a third fired only once and nearly three-quarters fired five times or fewer.
A total of 331 rounds were fired last year, a slight increase over 311 the year before. The report observes, however, that the 2012 total was inflated by one lengthy shootout in which 84 shots were fired by officers at a suspect after a killing in Washington Heights.
For the third straight year, the report found, uniformed officers were more likely to be involved in shootings than those in plainclothes.
Of the internal department investigations into adversarial shootings that had been completed by the time of the report, 89 percent were found to be within guidelines. The report said one officer had been found to have violated the department’s procedures and been disciplined, though no details were provided.
There were 13 officers shot in 2012; not all of those episodes involved the police returning fire and so were not documented in the report. The number of officers shot annually had ranged between three and 10 officers shot over the past decade; the last time it exceeded 13 was in 1997 when 27 officers were shot, including four who were killed by gunfire.
The report mentions, but does not detail, the chilling shooting of Officer Kevin Brennan, shot in the head at close range by a suspect early last year; his survival and recovery were described at the time as a “miracle” by city officials.
Yahoo Local News – New York Times
http://newyork.greatlocalnews.info/?p=17619
via Great Local News: New York http://newyork.greatlocalnews.info
No comments:
Post a Comment