מילכיגער האט געשריבן:In Synagogue Shooting, Officers Hewed to Their Training, Officials Say
By AL BAKER and J. DAVID GOODMANDEC. 9, 2014
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It is among the most familiar calls New York City police officers answer: a person acting erratically, possibly emotionally disturbed and potentially armed.
But the young officers who confronted a man with a knife in Brooklyn early Tuesday morning, one of them fatally shooting him, had no warning that they were dealing with a “violent emotionally disturbed person.”
The officers were told only that a man had stabbed a young Israeli religious student in the head. He had done so inside Chabad-Lubavitch headquarters in Crown Heights, among the most important international sites for that branch of Judaism. For weeks, the Police Department had been on heightened alert for terror attacks after a bloody rampage left four dead last month in West Jerusalem.
The crime scene at Chabad-Lubavitch headquarters in Brooklyn. The police fatally shot a man after he stabbed a student studying there.Officer Fatally Shoots Man After Stabbing in Brooklyn SynagogueDEC. 9, 2014
Still, for several minutes, the first officer who responded, Timothy Donohue, 25, pointed his gun at the man, persuading him at one point to put down his weapon. The officer’s behavior was captured in a cellphone video, running almost from the moment he arrived at the scene.
Cell phone video captured a confrontation between police and a man who stabbed a rabbinical student at a synagogue. The man was killed after a shooting.
Only after the man, Calvin Peters, 49, grabbed the knife again and, the police said, lunged with it, was he shot by a second officer, Roberto Pagan, 29.
Unlike the death of Eric Garner, whose videotaped encounter in July with officers on Staten Island sowed outrage and protests, the encounter and video from inside the religious headquarters Tuesday brought praise from elected officials.
“Preliminarily,” Police Commissioner William J. Bratton said, “my sense is that this shooting, while unfortunate, may have been unavoidable.”
Several police officials and former New York City police officers said the encounter seemed to offer a textbook example of officers following their training.
“It looks like a training video,” said Scott Wagner, a retired detective who was part of the department’s hostage negotiation team.
The Police Department has said that its aim is to provide a deeper level of training, to imbue rank-and-file patrol officers with the kind of communication skills that might further de-escalate such encounters.
“Every time there’s a shooting, we no longer say, ‘It’s a good shoot or a bad shoot’ — it doesn’t stop there,” said Michael A. Julian, the department’s deputy commissioner for training. “We look at every shooting to see how we could have prevented it, how we could save a life.”
Though the officers could not have known whether the suspect was emotionally disturbed, they had been told he had stabbed someone and they saw him continue to make threats. Perceiving his mental state, at that moment, was less critical than preventing death or serious injury, said John C. Cerar, a former commander of the Police Department’s firearms and tactics section.
“It’s very hard — ‘We want to talk to you, we want to de-escalate the situation,’ ” Mr. Cerar said. “But we also have to be on our toes.”
Officers most likely detected that Mr. Peters — who can be heard on video asking the men in the Chabad-Lubavitch headquarters whether they want to die — was emotionally erratic, former officers said, and they seemed to follow department guidelines for treating such people.
They did not bunch up, instead seeming to spread out to form a “zone of safety” around Mr. Peters, Mr. Cerar said. They tried to control the situation, he said, by “containing him and isolating him.”
It is a tactic born of experience. In a notorious case from the 1960s, a man with a knife closed in on an officer and a sergeant, within seconds fatally wounding the supervisor before being shot dead, said Edward Mamet, a retired police captain.
Since then, he said, the department has recommended that officers keep “a minimum distance of 20 feet” from such armed people. “It’s a common scenario,” Mr. Mamet said. “E.D.P.s” — emotionally disturbed people — “with knives.”
Once the man dropped his knife, Officer Donohue showed him “good faith” by holstering his weapon, Mr. Wagner said. Former officers said that decision, in retrospect, may have been an error.
Mr. Peters grabbed the knife again. Officer Donohue, who was much closer and in danger from the knife, drew his gun again but did not fire. The moment Officer Pagan fired a single fatal shot is not captured on the video.
Later, Mr. Peters’s sister said he suffered from mental illness. Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a statement that the shooting highlighted the need for improved service for the mentally ill.
Even if the officers had known, or assumed, that they were dealing with a mentally disturbed person, they had little time to wait for trained officers from the Emergency Service Unit, Mr. Cerar said. The police said that unit was never requested.
“The cops don’t know if he is an Einstein or an E.D.P. in the moments of the encounter,” Mr. Cerar said.
לאמיך פרעגן א סימפל קוועסאן,
רוב פון די ארטיקל באציט זיך צו דעם צו זיי האבן געקענט וויסן פון פארדעם צו ער איז געווען נארמאל אדער משוגע ?
וויפיל דארף עס באמת אויסמאכן אין אזא פאל ?
ווען א מענטש דרייט זיך ארום און שעדיגט מענטשען און אלעס קומט פאר און א צייט אפשניט פון מינוטין, דארף מען האבן איין ציל, עם צו אומשעדליך מאכן ווי אמשנעלסטן אן קיין הסברים "פארוואס" ער האט צולאזט,
איז באמת דא א נפקא מינה אין די וועג וויזוי מ'הענדלט עס ?
בכלל די טאן פונעם ארטיקל מאכט עס אויסקוקן ווי די סבה פארוואס זיי זענען אומשולדיג איז וייל זיי האבן נישט געוואוסט אז ער איז ריטארדעט,
מאכט נישט קיין סענס
