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NYPD use deadly force on man with knife in Times Square/Flickr Photo by 24Gotham
The introduction for the New York Times‘ coverage of a police shooting in the commercially decadent hub of New York known as Times Square is the following, “When the tourists and shoppers thronging Times Square on Saturday afternoon first saw the police officers, guns drawn, confronting a knife-wielding man, many thought they had stumbled onto a movie set.” The scene, however, ended with shots being fired that killed a man who had been chased for around seven blocks. So, Times writers add, “It was quickly apparent this was no celluloid fantasy.”
Assuming that the writers did not just frame this story with such a flourish because they themselves could hardly believe that real-life violence was playing out in Times Square, there are ever so many films or shows that take the time to show the stealth and skills of our boys in blue. There are at least two hundred films shot in New York City every year now. There are around twenty primetime television shows shot in the city too so those in Times Square should be forgiven for mistaking this at first for a glimpse at a scene they would see in a coming attraction. But there are also close to one hundred instances where police “discharge” their “firearms” or shoot at those they feel pose a threat each year.
This would not be “celluloid fantasy” but nightmare reality to residents of The Bronx, which is the New York borough with the “lowest per capita income of the five” and has a “population that is 90 percent people of color.” As Don Lash wrote for the Socialist Worker, after two young black men, Jateik Reed and Ramarley Graham, were gunned down by police, “These incidents are part of a pattern of routine harassment and abuse, punctuated by regular episodes of brutality…To Bronx residents, the police resemble an occupying army.”
Watching cell phone video of the shooting, it looks like a military exercise. NYPD might as well be clearing a crowded market in Baghdad. Multiple police chase the man for blocks. They pepper-spray the man, TJ Hooker, an 51-year-old African-American man, six times, but he does not drop the knife. And, as the action reaches its climax, it is plain to see that all the man has is a “kitchen knife” yet the police fire multiple bullets. Is there not police academy training where multiple police would learn how to go in and disarm a man who is wielding a utensil of mass destruction?
The question is one of pure curiosity. The police, in this scenario, would never be found guilty in court. The “legal standard” and “Department’s expectation,” according to an NYPD report on firearms discharge statistics from 2010, is that officers be in a situation where it is “reasonable” to fire a weapon before firing a weapon. “Police officers shall not use deadly physical force against another person unless they have probable cause to believe they must protect themselves or another person present from imminent death or serious physical injury,” the standard reads. Those who “write and interpret the law” appreciate the risks police might face, the report claims.
“In Brown v.United States, 256 U.S. 335 (1921), Justice Holmes noted that “detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife,” the report notes, a legal citation that the NYPD could easily use to excuse what unfolded yesterday afternoon. In People v. Benjamin, “the New York courts found, “It would, indeed, be absurd to suggest that a police officer has to await the glint of steel before he can act to preserve his safety.” There is wide latitude for the protection of what officers like to call the “common good” through the use of force.
Paul Browne, the official spokesperson for the NYPD, told the press, “Two officers initially approached the man because he appeared to be smoking marijuana. When the officers tried to arrest the man, he stuck a marijuana cigarette in his pocket, raised the knife over his head and started to put on a blue bandanna.” So, not only is this another incident of police violence in New York, but it was another melee in the War on Drugs.
It is illegal to smoke marijuana in public in New York so the police would not be doing anything inappropriate by approaching the man. However, assuming that he was really smoking a marijuana cigarette and that is not what the NYPD is saying because it is one of the few things they could say to make the shooting seem “reasonable,” the man posed no threat to anyone until he was approached by police. The raising of a knife and putting on of a bandanna signifies a fear of police, which may have stemmed from the fact that he had been arrested for marijuana possession seven times before. He could have had a mental illness. He was taken to Bellevue hospital for observation once before because he was knocking down garbage cans in Times Square. He also could have had other drugs in his blood at the moment.
The marijuana could have been directly causing the paranoia. Shouldn’t officers have been prepared for sudden movements in a crowded area? Should we be asking what if the man had pulled out a gun instead of a knife? Or, maybe, we should be surprised the police did not shoot him sooner because, who knows what he was about to pull out? After all, the Times reported in 2008, “In 77 percent of all shootings since 1998 when civilians were the targets, police officers were not fired upon, although in some of those cases, the suspects were acting violently: displaying a gun or pointing it at officers, firing at civilians, stabbing or beating someone or hitting officers with autos, the police said. No one fired at officers in two notable cases — the 1999 shooting of Amadou Diallo and the 2006 shooting of Sean Bell.”
Back to the suggestion that tourists in Times Square thought this was a movie production, film director Peter Bogdanovich said after the shooting at a screening of Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado, “There’s a general numbing of the audience. There’s too much murder and killing. You make people insensitive by showing it all the time. The body count in pictures is huge. It numbs the audience into thinking it’s not so terrible.” He said, “It’s too easy to show murders in movies now. There are too many of them, and it’s too easy. There is a general lack of respect for life, because it’s so easy to just kill people.”
A possible explanation for why the reaction of some Americans to this action would be more voyeuristic than fearful? A statement that might help one understand why cell phone cameras would come out and people would begin to wonder if they had just become unwitting extras in an upcoming blockbuster? [Note: Again, police violated the public's right to record and confiscated someone's phone who had captured video of the violence.]
Film critic Roger Ebert wrote in 1968 in an essay on violence in film, which has a troubling resonance today, “I have no way of knowing whether violence is more common in films today, but it seems to have become more explicit and brutal. Even more disturbing is the new attitude toward violence in many films. No longer is violence exclusively a force of evil. Now it is tolerated as a means toward good ends as well.”
The gunning down of a man in Times Square by police, for witnesses, may be just that kind of violence—violence toward good ends. The Times writers suggest the episode people saw seemed legitimate, not out-of-place. Had a film production been unfolding, there would have been no shock that Hollywood has become so good at creating illusion for the screen. People would have resumed shopping and there would be no story to write.
15 Comments
According to the Times account, witnesses
So, there are three men, two quite large from the newspaper photo, plus the walls along the sidewalk, but somehow cutting off the man’s movements (as I should think they’d have been working on from the start), using whatever batons they’re now issued, even the darn tasers, these things just could not be done?
The police have a license to kill and rarely pay a price for illegal actions. I saw a report recently where a handcuffed man in the back seat of a police car supposedly committed suicide by shooting himself. The militarization of the police is just another example of the expanding security state.
“To Bronx residents, the police resemble an occupying army”
that is the best and most accurate description of the police dept posture, and the attitudes of individual cops in the Bronx and in city neighbords like the Brox, everywhere across the US. City cops are (still) mostly white, and more and more (not less) are recruited from somewhere else – rural upstate NY or from the midwest,even Canada for example. Even when they are coming in from the nearby suburbs, the effect is the same. As the country splits more extremely into the wealthy and the rest of us, the at-work dynamic turning police departments into armies of occupation becomes more severe and more obvious.
Kevin, you quote film director Peter Bogdanovich, but he is not a psychologist or a sociologist. His opinions are no more valid than yours or mine.
As to the rest of your article, having worked at a psychiatric hospital where frontline staff often took down violent, psychotic patients and never used weapons, why haven’t police departments developed procedures to trap and disarm people with knives. They almost always kill them (see Eleanor Bumpers).
This happened in Baltimore several years ago. The person killed was a 17 year, metally ill person, whos caretaker and only means of support -his father – had died a few days earlier. He was walking around a busy lightrail stop with a knife. he hadnt threatened anyone and was 0 threat to the 10 heavilly armed and armored BCPD officers who shot him to pieces.It nearly caused a riot that day, since he was poor and Black and killed in a poor and mostly Black neihborhood. – hundreds of people, including myself, watched it happen. The officers were not removed or disciplned, the need for special procedures for such cases was not even discussed.
Book Salon up with Daniel Altman’s Sabatoge: How the Republican Party Crippled America’s Economic Recovery hosted by Maureen Tkacik
I quote Bogdanovich to make a cultural and unscientific point. I note that in your comment you do not take issue with my use of Ebert’s commentary. Additionally, the writing centers on nightmare not being “celluloid fantasy.” That framing makes it acceptable to quote a filmmaker instead of a psychologist or sociologist. Additionally, I do not understand your implicit suggestion that Bogdanovich’s analysis of society is flawed or amateurish because he is not someone who makes these observations for a living. What does he say that you think a professional would not say or might say better?
Kevin, OT but I thought you might appreciate this piece about the USGs increased focus on domestic insurrection.
Got me wondering… with increased use of overseas drones and an increased acceptance of US war-making (due to decreased likelihood of US casualties)… is the MIC now looking for a new “revenue source” and ramping up domestic efforts?
Wouldn’t surprise me in the least if some members of the MIIC have actually had the conversation.
The answers are simple: some say we live in a police state, and some say the police are violent pussies and cowards who enjoy bullying, torturing and killing the citizenry at the slightest hint of disobedience or questioning.
As I mentioned in a comment on this article in the Times, the operative word to me was “fusillade.” How many police officers need to fire how many bullets to constitute a “fusillade?” About a million years ago when I lived in NYC my across-the-hall neighbor was a pathologist who did the autopsy on a 70 year old woman who had been killed in her apartment, with multiple shotgun blasts (the cops said one, he counted enough pellets to prove multiple) because she pulled a knife on them. I’d sooner trust a rabid dog than a NYC (or Savannah, for that matter) cop at this point.
I thought this was the very situation tasers were originally intended for. But I suppose since now tasers are meant to be used on mentally disabled people, children, the elderly, speeders, and jay walkers, then obviously someone with a knife is too dangerous for a taser and needs to be gunned down.
All across our or what was our country, the police are out of control and almost never held accountable. Laws are meant to control us, not them.
I’m amazed not to have thought of this case earlier, but Marion’s post reminded me of the NYPD killing of Gidone Busch, another case where it seems that enough manpower to have handled a situation without killing was present. The article mentions that Busch’s mother filed suit against NYPD in the matter; according to the wikipedia article in Gidone’s name, she decided to drop the suit after several years of legalistic runaround.
While googling up articles on the Busch case just now, I could remember no part of his name, so I started with terms involving “hammer,” his supposed weapon. That lead me to a raft of articles telling a bizarre story from just a few weeks ago, in which a tourist in City Hall Park was assaulted by a man with a hammer, and the police had a different response from either recently in Time Square or a decade-plus ago in Brooklyn. Very odd story.
A former high school classmate of mine suffered from mental illness. He took to hanging around a Catholic church on Chicago’s southwest side, which apparently irritated the priest there. According to the newspaper account I read, the priest knew my classmate was mentally ill so I presume he informed the police when he called them. When two cops showed up, my classmate panicked and broke an aerial off a car. The cops claimed that he was waving the aerial around and because of this, because they claimed it was a deadly weapon, they shot and killed him. Both my classmate and the cops were white. The cops never faced any repercussions, not even a reprimand. This all happened many years ago.
I was appalled when I read about what happened but what upset me even more was the reaction of those I told. All of the nice, white, liberal or liberal-leaning, college-educated people I worked with thought this killing was entirely justified. This tolerance and, in some cases, praise for police violence goes back a long way.
The entire political argument of the United States has moved further and further to the right. “Liberals” everywhere are taking conservative positions on many things. Don’t be surprised. It is quite sad, though.