Report Documents a Rise in Fatal Shootings by the City’s Police Officers
A knife-wielding man shot dead by New York police officers in the doorway of his Harlem apartment. An officer struck by a bullet in the base of his skull. A marked police van rattled by seven bullets as a group of officers sat inside.
Those episodes and others described in an annual Police Department report on police shootings, released on Tuesday, provided a detailed look at the surge last year in the number of people killed by police bullets and the number of officers shot by suspects.
In 2012, city police officers shot and killed 16 people, an increase from nine in 2011 and the highest number seen during the Bloomberg administration, according to the report. Thirteen officers were wounded by gunfire in the line of duty in 2012, a number not reached since the late 1990s; none died.
The police shootings included some of the most publicized in recent years, including that of Ramarley Graham, an unarmed 18-year-old killed by an officer inside a home in the Bronx, and the killing of two armed men last summer in separate confrontations with the police in Midtown Manhattan.
But the Police Department on Tuesday was quick to point out that the number of fatal shootings involving officers had declined in 2013, as it issued preliminary figures for police shootings so far this year. The 2013 report is not expected until October.
As of Monday, seven people had died from police gunfire, said John J. McCarthy, the department’s chief spokesman. The total includes an encounter in Brooklyn on Monday in which a uniformed officer fired five shots at a man who the police said lunged at him with a knife. At this point last year, the police had shot and killed 15 people.
Six officers have been wounded, none fatally, by bullets so far this year, Mr. McCarthy said.
The man killed in Brooklyn on Monday, identified as 22-year-old Rexford Dasrath of Bushwick, was said by the police to have been emotionally disturbed at the time of the sidewalk shooting, around 3 p.m.
That description also characterized two of the people killed in 2012 — including Mohamed Bah, who stabbed two officers during a standoff at his apartment — and at least four others fired on by officers, according to the report.
The number of people shot was up only slightly in 2012, to 30, from 28 in 2011. But more of the shootings ended in death.
One of the shootings in Midtown, in front of the Empire State Building, also resulted in nine bystanders being struck by police bullets and fragments, the report said. In total, the report lists 10 bystanders struck by police bullets fired at suspects and four people struck, one fatally, when an officer’s gun discharged accidentally.
The report, which runs 74 pages this year, is an accounting of each instance in which members of the New York Police Department discharge their weapons. It does not include the names of those wounded or killed by officers, or of the officers involved. The department does not release the names of officers involved in shootings.
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 person.
Those instances are the most heavily scrutinized by the department and the most thoroughly documented in the report. The laws covering the use of deadly force are described at length in the report, as well as the department’s own policy, which “represents an even more stringent guideline.” (For example, state law permits officers to open fire to protect property or stop a person who is using a car as a weapon; the Police Department’s guidelines do not.)
In most instances, the report said, the people shot 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.
Of the internal department investigations into adversarial shootings in 2012 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 had been disciplined, but no details were provided.
There were 13 officers shot in 2012; not all of those shootings involved the police returning fire and so were not detailed in the report. The number of officers shot annually had ranged from three to 10 over the past decade; the last year it exceeded 13 was 1997, when 27 officers were shot, including four who were killed by gunfire.
The release of the firearms report coincided with the Police Department’s release of the latest quarterly compilation of stop-and-frisk activity, which showed a continued drop in the number of documented street stops, to 21,187 during the months of July to September, from more than 105,000 in that period the year before. About 12 percent of those stops resulted in arrests, roughly twice the rate seen during all of 2012.
www.nytimes.com/2013/11/20/nyregion/police-report-shows-increase-in-fatal-shootings-by-new-york-officers.html?_r=0
