Blue on Blue

by Charles Campisi

  Police shootings in the NYPD officially fall into two basic categories. If the officer followed all the rules and procedures outlined in the Patrol Guide, the shooting is deemed “within guidelines”—or in cop parlance, a “good” shooting. If he or she didn’t follow the rules, the shooting is “not within guidelines,” or a “bad” shooting, and the officer can face discipline ranging from counseling and retraining to dismissal.

  In my seventeen years as chief of IAB I was involved in the investigations of hundreds of police shootings, of which only a very small percentage were bad shootings under Department rules, which admittedly give police officers the benefit of the doubt. The rest were officially “good” shootings.

  Sometimes the good shootings were easy calls. One example, out of many, happened in 2006, when two armed men in ski masks, both career criminals, robbed a bank in Queens of $15,000 and then tried to carjack a vehicle driven by off-duty officer John Lopez. Lopez starts chasing one of the robbers down Fifty-Fifth Avenue when the robber turns and shoots Lopez in the thigh. Lopez fires back, hitting the robber twice, and then, despite being wounded, pins him down until backup arrives. They caught the other guy, too. Mayor Bloomberg called Officer Lopez a hero, which he was. As you might expect, the Department investigation concluded it was a good shooting.

  Bad shootings are sometimes pretty easy to call as well. For example, in 1998 we had an off-duty officer named William Morales who was moonlighting as a security guard at a Bronx sporting goods store. He’s playing around with his authorized off-duty gun, a revolver, and as a joke he takes some of the cartridges out of the cylinder, points the gun at another employee, calls out “Russian roulette!,” and pulls the trigger. The gun goes off, wounding the employee in the groin. Then this knucklehead makes it even worse by walking the wounded employee outside the store and trying to get him to say he’d been shot in a drive-by shooting. Predictably, the official Department shooting investigation determined that it was a bad shooting, but by then it was a moot point: Morales had already been convicted of felony assault and was fired from the Department.

  But it’s not always that easy. The truth is that a lot of “good” shootings aren’t completely good, and even some of the “bad” shootings aren’t completely bad. Police shootings often aren’t clearly defined in black and white; instead, they come in varying shades of gray.

  And one of the grayest—and saddest—“good” shootings I was ever involved in was the 1999 shooting of Amadou Diallo.

  * * *

  It’s 12:44 a.m. on a cold February night in the Soundview section of the Bronx, a low-income, high-crime residential neighborhood. Four NYPD cops in an unmarked Ford Taurus, all in plainclothes, are riding by an apartment building at 1157 Wheeler Avenue when one of them sees a man standing on the sidewalk, then moving to a stoop at the entrance of the dark vestibule that leads to the apartment building’s front door.

  The cops are members of the NYPD Street Crimes Unit, the SCU, a citywide force of about four hundred plainclothes cops whose primary mission is to flood high-crime areas and make arrests, especially gun arrests. But tonight they’re also on the lookout for a serial rapist suspected of attacking more than fifty women in Soundview as well as in other areas of the Bronx, Manhattan, and Westchester County. One of the rapist’s MOs is to surprise women in dark hallways or apartment entrances, push them inside, and then rape them at gunpoint. The rapist always wears a mask or bandanna, so the only description of him is that he’s a black man.

  The man standing in the dark vestibule is black—but then, so are most residents of this part of Soundview.

  The driver stops the unmarked police car and two officers get out of the right-side front and back doors; their shields are hanging around their necks. They walk toward the man in the vestibule, saying: Police! Can we talk to you? The man turns and seems to be trying to get inside the door at the end of the vestibule. The officers get to the stoop and call out: Stop! Let us see your hands! Without a word, the man turns to his left and with his right hand reaches into his jacket pocket—and then he pulls something small and black out of the pocket.

  Gun! one of the officers shouts. He’s got a gun!

  Forty-five minutes later the phone next to my bed starts ringing. I look at the clock and already know what’s coming. Good news can always wait until morning; the only kind of news you’re going to get at 1:30 a.m. is bad news.

  The Internal Affairs Bureau Command Center supervisor, a lieutenant, is on the line.

  Chief, he says, we’ve got some MOSs (Members of the Service) involved in a shooting in the Bronx. The subject, a black male, is DOA. Four SCU guys involved. Looks like they fired a total of more than forty shots. And, Chief? It looks like the guy was unarmed.

  Oh, Lord. It’s important for me—for everyone—not to draw any conclusions before we get all the facts. But just from what I’ve heard so far—forty shots or more, man dead, no weapon—I’m guessing that this is going to be both a tragedy and a firestorm.

  As it turns out, I guessed right.

  I make sure the Command Center lieutenant has pulled the personnel records of the four officers involved and that he gives them to the investigators from IAB’s Group 9, the Night Watch, to take to the scene. Already been done, the lieutenant says.

  Ten minutes later I’m in my Department car, heading for the scene. I don’t necessarily have to be there; my Group 54 Force Group guys and the Bronx Borough Shooting Team that responds to any shooting in the Bronx all know what they’re doing. But I know this is going to be an important IAB case, and I want to get a feel for the scene.

  When I get there the shooting scene is swarming with detectives interviewing neighbors, crime scene investigators and ballistic specialists collecting evidence, and patrol supervisors and senior borough commanders keeping things under control. Even though it’s the middle of the night, there’s a small crowd of spectators gathered behind the yellow police tape, staring silently.

  The man’s body has already been transported to the hospital, where he’s been officially pronounced dead. The four officers involved in the shooting have had their guns impounded as evidence and been taken to the hospital for observation. That’s SOP. There’s a pool of blood in the vestibule, and the vestibule and the sidewalk in front of the apartment building are covered with clear plastic cups, each placed over an expended cartridge casing or bullet fragment by the crime scene investigators. There are literally dozens and dozens of clear plastic cups; it looks incongruously like the aftermath of a college kegger party. Investigators will soon determine that the four officers fired a total of forty-one shots, nineteen of which hit the dead man.

  The IAB Night Watch Group leader hands me the personnel files on the four officers, and I go through them in the glow of the portable lights that have been set up to illuminate the scene.

  Officer Edward McMellon, age twenty-six, with the Department for five years, has had five complaints against him with the Civilian Complaint Review Board, none of them substantiated; Officer Sean Carroll, thirty-five, also on the job for five years, has three unsubstantiated CCRB complaints; Officer Kenneth Boss, twenty-seven, who has seven years on the job, has three unsubbed complaints; and Officer Richard Murphy, twenty-six, has four years on and no complaints. Three of the officers are relatively recent members of the SCU; only Carroll has been with the unit for more than two years.

  One thing stands out: three of the four officers have been involved in shootings before. In 1997 Boss fatally shot a man who was brandishing a shotgun in the East New York section of Brooklyn; in fact, the Brooklyn DA’s office still hasn’t closed that investigation. McMellon shot and wounded a man holding a 9mm pistol seven months earlier, but the investigation found the shooting to be within guidelines. Carroll was cleared after firing a round at an unidentified suspect in the Bronx—the shot missed—the previous August.

  As I said, the vast majority of NYPD officers will never fire their weapons at a person during their entire career, s
o this is pretty unusual. But these guys are in SCU, which is a highly active unit that makes about 40 percent of all the gun arrests in the city; it attracts cops who are aggressive and like to make arrests, and when you’re making gun arrests the chances that you’ll be involved in a shooting are far higher than if you’re answering phones in a precinct house. Still, it’s something to keep in mind.

  And there’s one other thing. In a perfect world it wouldn’t matter, but in this world it does: While the dead man is black, all four officers are white.

  According to the neighbors, who are already being interviewed by detectives, the dead man is Amadou Diallo, age twenty-two, an immigrant from the West African nation of Guinea who has been in the city for a little over two years. They say he’s a pious Muslim who doesn’t drink or smoke; a quiet, unassuming man who works as a street peddler in Manhattan, selling socks, gloves, videotapes, and imitation designer watches—“Rodexes”—on Fourteenth Street. His background check shows no criminal record.

  The Borough Shooting Team detectives are fanning out to search for possible witnesses and my Group 54 investigators are doing the same. They don’t find any eyewitnesses to the shooting, but they find several “earwitnesses,” people who heard it happen. They distinctly remember hearing someone shout “Gun!” or “He’s got a gun!” followed by a fusillade of gunfire; their statements are recorded. The next night our investigators will do an “anniversary canvass” at the same time of night to see if there are any witnesses who saw something but left before investigators arrived, and a week later, on the next Thursday, they’ll do the same to see if there’s someone whose job or routine puts them in the area at that time. Before it’s over, IAB and Shooting Team investigators will question hundreds of people in the case.

  But four people we don’t question are the four cops who fired the shots.

  That’s something that surprises, and sometimes outrages, people who don’t understand how the legal system works. You’ve got four cops who fire forty-one shots at an unarmed man, hitting him nineteen times and killing him, and the NYPD doesn’t even ask them any questions? You’re protecting those cops! It’s a cover-up!

  No, it’s not. As investigators, we’d like nothing better than to question the officers who fired the shots. And we certainly have that authority. We can sit those cops down at a so-called GO-15 hearing—the same kind of hearing I had with the Field Internal Affairs Unit after the Christmas tree incident back in 1978—and order them to tell us what happened. And if they refuse to answer, or if they lie, we can suspend them from the Department and ultimately dismiss them.

  But remember what I said about GO-15 hearings? According to the courts, those are compelled statements, given under threat of termination, which means that anything the cop tells us can’t be used against him in a criminal case. And if anything he tells us leads prosecutors to new evidence against him, they can’t use that, either, because it’s what lawyers call “fruit from the poisoned tree.”

  In fact, in every police shooting or serious misconduct case that could result in criminal charges, I always call the District Attorney’s Office and ask if they want us to GO the officer. And every time they say: Good Lord, no! That’s the last thing we want you to do! That could totally screw up the case!

  Yes, I know it’s inconvenient. But there’s this thing called the Fifth Amendment—and it applies to cops like anybody else.

  Still, even though we can’t interview the cops involved, we find out what happened to Amadou Diallo. The ballistics guys track the bullet paths and the bullet fragment paths, and figure out which bullets came from which cop’s gun. The earwitnesses tell us what they heard, or didn’t hear. The supervisors who immediately came to the scene tell us what the officers said and did after the shooting—and we can legally use those statements.

  And even the four cops tell us their side of the story—indirectly. Within a few hours, the officers’ lawyers or PBA reps will come up to us and say something like, It could be that Officer A thought the man had a gun, and it could be that Officer B said that he was in fear for his life, and it could be that Officer C was trying to protect his fellow officers from being shot . . . We can’t use any of that against the officers, and neither can prosecutors if it comes to a criminal trial, which in this case it will. But it gives me the information I need to write a preliminary report on what happened.

  This is what happened.

  Officer Carroll, at the top of the stoop, shouts, He’s got a gun! Carroll thinks the gun is pointing at McMellon, and almost simultaneously he and McMellon start firing; the vestibule lights up with muzzle flashes. McMellon is stepping backward as he fires, and then he tumbles backward down the stoop steps to the sidewalk; from the ground he keeps firing into the vestibule, emptying his 9mm semiautomatic—sixteen shots in all. Bullets are ricocheting off the metal front plate of the apartment building door, making it seem as if rounds are being fired out from the vestibule, not just into it. Carroll, seeing McMellon fall backward, thinks McMellon has been shot by Diallo. He backs away from the vestibule, also firing his 9mm semiautomatic until it’s empty—another sixteen shots in all. Meanwhile, Officer Boss is out of the car, hears the gunfire, sees McMellon fall, thinks he’s been shot; he sees Diallo in the dark vestibule with his arm extended, and then Boss fires five shots. Officer Murphy also sees McMellon fall; he runs toward the vestibule and fires four shots at Diallo. All of this takes less than ten seconds; nineteen of the shots hit Diallo.

  It’s a clear case of what experts call “contagious shooting,” the tendency of cops in a confused shooting situation to start firing their weapons because their partners are firing their weapons, and then their partners keep firing their weapons because their partners are now firing their weapons. As I said, police policy is to continue firing until the threat is stopped, and in a cop’s eyes, if your partner is still firing, the threat must still exist. Often a cop in an officer-involved shooting won’t even know how many rounds he fired. When we eventually talk to him, he’ll swear that he only fired three or four rounds, but when you check the gun you see that every round is gone, that he fired until the gun went “click!” The cop isn’t lying; he knows you’ve got his gun and the expended cartridge casings, that the ballistic guys have been able to look at the extractor marks on the casings and match them to his gun. He knows we know exactly how many rounds he fired, and that lying would be both pointless and stupid. He just truly doesn’t know how many shots he fired.

  We try to train “contagious shooting” out of them, on the FATS machine and other training scenarios, try to teach them how to stay calm, assess the situation, stay in control—which is easy enough on the shooting range. The problem is that the FATS machine isn’t shooting bullets back at them—and no cop ever gets shot at enough on the job to get used to it.

  As the sound of gunfire drifts away, Carroll approaches Diallo, who is lying on the floor of the vestibule; he’s still moving but close to death. Carroll reaches down to pick up the “gun” lying near Diallo’s right hand—but it’s not a gun, it’s a wallet, a black wallet. It could be that Diallo, who spoke halting English, brought out the wallet to show his ID, or maybe he thought the cops weren’t cops at all, but robbers, and he was giving up what little cash he had. We can never know.

  Seeing the wallet where he expected to find a gun, Carroll kneels next to Diallo in the vestibule, saying: Oh my God! Please don’t die! Boss radios for “a bus and a boss, forthwith!”—meaning he needs an ambulance and a supervisor immediately.

  When the ambulance and the backup units arrive, Amadou Diallo is already dead, and all four officers are in a state of near shock. Carroll is crying, Murphy, too; Boss sits in the back of a sector car, unable to speak.

  That’s not unusual. I’ve seen cops after shootings who cried, screamed, beat their fists on the pavement, gone catatonic. Once when I was in Manhattan Traffic, I got flagged down by a truck driver who says there’s a guy with a gun on Lafayette Street, he’s sure it’s a
.45, he was in the military, he knows guns. Sure enough, it’s a guy in a wheelchair who’s waving a .45 around, obviously an EDP, and a cop is drawn down on him, screaming at him to drop the gun, knowing that if the guy in the wheelchair points the .45 at him or at a citizen, he’s going to have to fire. Finally the guy tosses the gun—it’s a replica .45, not a toy but a plastic replica, it looks absolutely real—and after it’s over I find the cop sitting on the curb between two parked cars, throwing up between his knees into the gutter. And between spasms he’s saying: I almost shot him, I almost shot him. He’s saying it over and over.

  One thing I’ve never seen cops do after they’ve shot somebody is laugh, or cheer. Sure, maybe later, when it turns out that the guy they shot was an armed murderer-rapist who shot at them first, and after the police commissioner has pinned an NYPD Combat Cross or Medal for Valor on them, maybe then, being cops, and to show how tough they are, they’ll laugh and high-five it with their buddies at the bar. But most won’t. No cop will ever shoot and kill enough people that it becomes routine, and if they ever entertained any Walter Mitty–style fantasies about heroically shooting down bad guys, those disappear before the echoes from the last shot of their first shooting fade away. As I said, in any shooting there are just too many things that can go wrong—for the cop.

  So are the cops on Wheeler Avenue crying for Amadou Diallo, or are they crying for themselves? I can’t tell you what’s in their hearts at that moment. But they know that they’ve all fired multiple shots at a man who did not have a weapon, leaving him dead. And soon enough they’ll know that the man they killed wasn’t a rapist or a perp lurking in a strange doorway, that he wasn’t a drug slinger with a long record, that instead he was simply a decent man with no criminal record who was standing on his own front steps, and they’ll know that no one’s ever going to pin a medal on their chests for what happened this night. They’ll know that even if they did what they thought they had to do to save their partners’ lives, the bottom line is that in a city already racked with racial divides and tension, they have shot and killed a completely innocent black man.