http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/05/ny...-say.html?_r=0
Just after 3 a.m. on Sunday, the pop of gunshots cut through the air. Two rookie police officers — barely a month out of the Police Academy, and now on foot patrol in the Bronx — hurried toward the sound.
They headed east on East 151st Street to find a chase unfolding, one person running down the middle of the street, another following with a handgun. The officers ordered the second figure to drop his gun. Instead, another shot rang out.
One of the officers fired a single shot. The bullet struck the gunman in his lower left jaw, killing him.
The suspect, Shaaliver Douse, was believed to be part of a youth gang on East 169th Street called the Nine. He lived at a nearby housing project, and court records showed he had been caught with a gun at least once before; his last brush with the law involved his arrest on a charge of attempted murder, after a rival gang member was shot in May. All this, the police said, at age 14.
The shooting of Shaaliver appeared to fall within the guidelines for using deadly force, police officials said. Nonetheless, the shooting seemed to frame the uneasy confluence of issues that the Police Department constantly grapples with in high-crime neighborhoods like Shaaliver’s: the youth gangs that still run roughshod over parts of the Bronx; the prevalence of illegal guns on the streets; and the waves of rookie officers sent in to patrol those streets each year.
It also served to stir resentment of the police among some in Shaaliver’s neighborhood, including the boy’s aunt, Quwana Barcene, 35, who compared her nephew to Trayvon Martin in Florida.
“Him, Trayvon Martin, it’s never going to end,” she said. “A child. Fourteen years old. Fourteen years old. Gone. Shot in the head. By police.”
At a news conference Sunday, Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly acknowledged that Shaaliver had been the youngest person he could recall being shot by the New York police. He offered condolences to the teenager’s mother for the death of “her son of just 14 years of age,” he said.
“Regardless of the circumstances,” he said, “this is a crushing blow to any parent.”
But the circumstances justified the shooting, he said, showing a pair of videos. In the first, a figure who Mr. Kelly said was Shaaliver can be seen approaching a group of several men, including one who Mr. Kelly said was Shaaliver’s target.
Shaaliver can be seen raising a weapon and firing three shots, Mr. Kelly said; the group then scatters. A second video, taken around the corner, showed the next moment: the target running fast around the corner in the middle of the street, a bullet flying past him and slamming into a wall on the far side in a puff of smoke. Mr. Kelly said that after the teenager was ordered to drop his gun, he fired again, though it was unclear whether he was aiming for the fleeing man or the officers.
“I think they did what we would expect officers of any experience level to do,” Mr. Kelly said, noting that officers were trained to “shoot to stop,” not simply to wound. He said the shooting officer, who is white, is 26; his partner, who is black, is 27. Shaaliver was black.
The officers had been assigned to the Bronx as part of the Police Department’s Operation Impact, which matches rookie officers with more seasoned ones to patrol areas with especially high crime rates. City officials have credited the program with helping to reduce crime. But it has long drawn suspicion from civil liberties groups, who say flooding crime-ridden areas with officers has also swelled the number of unwarranted police stops, breeding suspicion and antagonism in some communities.
At Shaaliver’s housing project, the Gouverneur Morris II Houses, his friends gathered to support his parents. “This is unreal, how the police get away with murder,” his aunt, Ms. Barcene, said. “They get away with murder.”
A gun had been confiscated from the teenager in the past year: He was arrested on a charge of criminal possession of a weapon in October. He pleaded not guilty and had another court date scheduled for later this month, according to Bronx court records. He had also been charged with attempted murder in May, when a 15-year-old member of the Lyman Place crew was shot in the shoulder. Those charges were dropped after the victim and a witness stopped cooperating, a city official said on Sunday.
Investigators are now looking into the possibility that Shaaliver had been chasing another member of a rival gang on Sunday, the official said.
He was to start his sophomore year at Alfred E. Smith Career and Technical High School in the South Bronx in the fall, his aunt said. An only child, he had been raised mainly by his mother, though he saw his father often. And lately, his mother said, he was less wayward. She had told a neighbor, Cynthia Blount, 49, that she was thinking of moving them away from the neighborhood’s negative influences.
“She said he started becoming good,” Ms. Blount said. “I don’t know what happened. And now this happened.”
Looks like New York's SAFE ACT is working out so well
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Originally Posted by Schuetzenman
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