Rookie NYPD cop Peter Liang texted his union
representative and was “incommunicado for more than six and a half
minutes” as Akai Gurley, the unarmed man he shot in the
stairwell of a Brooklyn housing project, lay dying.
Liang had been holding his gun in one hand and a flashlight in
the other as he entered an unlit stairwell when he was startled by
the noise of Gurley and his girlfriend, Melissa
Butler, entering the stairwell one floor below. Liang
claims his gun accidentally discharged, sending a ricocheting
bullet into Gurley’s chest.
The
New York Daily News reports that in the crucial
minutes following the shooting, Liang and his partner did not try
to get medical attention for the grievously wounded man and could
not be reached by either their commanding officer or the 911
dispatcher who fielded a call from a neighbor reporting
gunshots.
It gets worse. Sources told the Daily News that the
text messages revealed the officers didn’t know the exact address
of the building they were in, and that “Deputy Inspector Miguel
Iglesias, then the head officer of the local housing command,
ordered them not to carry out such patrols, known as verticals.”
Iglesias added, “I want a presence on the street, in the
courtyards—and if they go into the buildings they were just
supposed to check out the lobby.”
After the shooting, Liang was described as
“panicked” and “a crying mess,” which is an understandable
human reaction when you have just shot someone whose one false move
was taking the stairs after growing impatient with waiting for a
slow moving elevator. However, if Liang indeed texted
his union representative rather than calling for help, that
demonstrates a calculated awareness that he was in deep trouble and
his first priority was saving himself.
The Daily News cites court insiders as saying
“while the shooting may have been a mishap, the cops’ subsequent
conduct can amount to criminal liability.” A lawyer for the Gurley
family hopes the case is at least presented to a grand jury and as
Reason‘s Brian Doherty noted, political pressure is
mounting for Liang to be prosecuted. Brooklyn District Attorney
Kenneth Thompson has promised “an immediate, fair and thorough
investigation.”
In the meantime, Liang remains on “modified duty,” protected
from even an internal affairs investigation unless the D.A. presses
charges against him. In a post earlier today,
Reason‘s Ed Krayewski wrote about how police
unions, like all public sector unions, circle the wagons in a
crisis even if it means defending bad employees:
They can be fired, but not always. Many police
departments, including New York’s, have generous job protections
for police officers. These privileges, masquerading as “due
process,” protect bad cops. Defenders of public unions say it isn’t
fair to fire a public employee merely for the appearance of
impropriety, bias, or even corruption and criminality.
Serious police reform will require the cooperation of
police unions, but Republicans generally refuse to take them on,
lest they appear out of step with their “law and order” base, and
many Democrats would rather avoid being seen as opponents of any
public sector union.
In a scathing
piece on the police lobby at Vice, occasional
Reason contributor Michael Tracey
wrote:
What if their overriding mantras were something along the lines
of “serve the community” instead of “get home from your shift
alive”?The only way to change this is through difficult, tedious
governmental reform—not fancy speeches or racial sensitivity
seminars—and the police lobby will ferociously oppose such efforts
at every step.
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