By now, you’ve probably already heard about the NYPD shooting in a Brownsville L train subway station that left four people wounded by police fire the Sunday before last, including a person the police were confronting, two bystanders, and an officer.
Under pressure from multiple angles, including family members of bystander Gregory Delpeche — who was shot in the head and has been in critical condition since — the department released body camera footage, which indeed shows 37-year-old Derrell Mickles entering through the emergency gate and then brandishing a knife as officers Edmund Mays and Alex Wong approach him.
The two cops follow Mickles down the platform and then onto the train, telling him to drop the knife and eventually using tasers as the former approaches them. As Mickles rushes in their direction, the two begin shooting, with Mays, Mickles, Delpeche, and second bystander Kerry Gahalal getting hit with gunfire (Gahalal was initially described by the NYPD as having been “grazed,” but subsequently her lawyers have said she was hit squarely in the leg and cannot currently walk).
This sequence of events — the fare dodging, the confrontation, the knife (which officers managed to initially lose after someone took it from the scene), the aggressive brandishing — has left some officials, very much including Mayor Eric Adams, steadfast in the determination that the officers acted appropriately, under threat of physical harm. Others disagree.
Comptroller Brad Lander and Public Advocate Jumaane Williams — the other two citywide elected positions, among whom at least Lander is challenging Adams in the mayoral primary next year — joined a press conference this week to denounce the officers’ actions, saying they had other options to deal with the threat. (Some other progressive elected officials and advocacy groups have called it the cops shooting someone for fare hopping, which I think is clearly disingenuous; whatever you think of this use of force, it obviously wasn’t a result of just the fare evasion).
What this really comes down to, as it often does, is a question of what a police officers’ primary responsibility is, to whom, and who gets to or is forced to incur threat. It’s almost a sort of equation of threat dispersion: by shooting their guns at Mickles, the officers are essentially attempting to reduce the threat to their own selves but necessarily increasing the threat to everyone else in the train and on the station, who are not the targets of Mickles’ aggression but are at risk of getting hit by officers’ bullets. This attempt at threat displacement manifested in at least one totally uninvolved person being put in critical condition, which he could conceivably not pull out of (it also, obviously, didn’t work, as one officer ended up getting shot by the other anyway).
Put another way, you could say the NYPD’s calculus here is that the relative risk to them in this moment outweighs the relative risk to others, which seems a bit like an inversion of the principle of “protect and serve,” long a motto of departments around the country. As Alex Ragland summarized in a succinct post for the Georgetown University Undergraduate Law Review, this motto has been rendered increasingly toothless by successive court decisions that have left it without much legal backing. Most notorious is perhaps the Supreme Court’s 2005 decision in Castle Rock v. Gonzalez, which affirmed that police departments have no legal duty to protect the public.
This presents something of a disconnect; the public is generally told that the police are there to safeguard the public at some personal great personal risk to themselves, which is why it’s such a public-spirited profession worthy of due reverence. The police, though, are to a greater or lesser degree trained to do whatever possible to minimize harm to themselves if threatened, even if that then foists some risk onto the public. This was most infamously put into stark relief during the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas, as nearly 400 law enforcement officers from multiple local, state, and federal agencies loitered outside while a single gunman slaughtered 19 students and two teachers inside the building.
I took a look at the NYPD Patrol Guide Procedure No. 221-01 on force guidelines, for some more clarity on how officers are instructed to use firearms; the section begins by noting that “The primary duty of all members of the service (MOS) is to protect human life… In all circumstances, any application or use of force must be reasonable under the circumstances. All members of the service at a police incident must use reasonable force, employ less lethal alternatives, and prioritize de-escalation, whenever possible.”
There is a list of factors to consider when determining if force is reasonable, among which is the “immediacy of the perceived threat or harm to the subject, members of the service, and/or bystanders”; and there is a list of prohibitions, noting that officers “SHALL NOT [emphasis theirs] discharge a firearm when, in the professional judgment of a reasonable member of the service, doing so will unnecessarily endanger innocent persons.”
This seems a bit damning, in the sense that, by any possible analysis, this use of firearms endangered innocent persons and in fact might leave one dead, or certainly with some permanent damage. Obviously there was also a pretty immediate threat to the officers involved, so the question becomes, does this supersede their directive to safeguard others? And what could have they done differently?
An aggressive person with a knife can do a lot of harm, but police officers in other countries are to use physical force and numbers to neutralize this type of situation while, yes, putting themselves at some acute risk. Here, we ended up with a cop shot anyway — fortunately not in a way that was fatal or even seems particularly serious, though that was certainly a possibility — and several people injured, including the perpetrator and bystanders.
Was this approach better? I’d argue no one really ended up better off for it. But the idea of taming and protecting themselves from an unruly and dangerous populace is so ingrained in contemporary American police narratives that it’s hard to imagine things going a different way.
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