Blue on Blue

by Charles Campisi

  In January 2004 a Housing cop named Richard Neri Jr. was checking a rooftop at a public housing project in Bed-Stuy when a nineteen-year-old unarmed black man named Timothy Stansbury suddenly appeared in a rooftop doorway. Startled, the cop fired his drawn weapon a single time, mortally wounding Stansbury. The cop told a grand jury that it was an accident, that he was sorry, and the grand jury declined to indict him. Later, after our investigation, the shooting was ruled “out of guidelines” and Officer Neri was suspended for thirty days and placed on modified duty, with no gun.

  There were other controversial shootings, too many of them, including the Ousmane Zongo case I already mentioned. But the most controversial, the one most often compared with the Diallo shooting, was the Sean Bell case.

  In November 2006, Bell, who was to be married the next day, is holding a bachelor party at a Queens strip joint called Club Kalua that was being investigated by NYPD undercover detectives and their backup team for alleged prostitution and drug dealing. One of Bell’s friends gets into an argument, and a black undercover detective inside the club, Detective Gescard Isnora, says he heard the friend tell someone else to “get the gat”—meaning a gun. As Bell and his two friends leave, Isnora steps out of his undercover role, retrieves his gun and shield from his car, and follows them to Bell’s car, a Nissan Altima that’s parked nearby. Isnora says later that when he tries to stop the car, Bell tries to run him over before crashing into a fence. As Isnora approaches the car, he shouts out “Gun!” and starts firing. Four of his backups also start shooting; together they fire fifty shots, leaving Bell dead and his two friends wounded. No gun is found in the car.

  As expected, the Bell shooting prompts outrage and demonstrations and denunciations of the trigger-happy NYPD in the press. Most of the protesters and commentators compare it to the Diallo case, another example of an unarmed black man shot down in a barrage of police bullets.

  But the Sean Bell case isn’t the Amadou Diallo case. Although the results were the same—an unarmed man shot dead—from a police standpoint, the Bell case was worse. The Diallo tragedy occurred because of some cops’ misjudgments in a few brief seconds; the Bell shooting occurred because of some cops’ misjudgment over the course of minutes.

  I was on vacation when the Bell shooting happened, but my XO called and told me that the shooting didn’t look good from a Department policy point of view. I immediately flew back and when I looked at the reports the IAB Force Group had put together, I saw what he meant. Not only had an unarmed man been killed and two others wounded, but the cops involved had made some serious procedural mistakes—starting with Detective Isnora stepping out of his undercover role.

  Isnora and two other detectives were indicted by a grand jury on charges ranging from first-degree manslaughter to second-degree assault, but they were acquitted of all counts in a nonjury trial. After the US Justice Department decided not to prosecute on federal charges—which took months—seven cops, including the lieutenant who was supposed to be supervising the undercover investigation at the club, were brought up on Department charges that the shooting had violated Department policies. After a trial before the Deputy Commissioner for Trials, the shooting was declared “out of guidelines,” and Detective Isnora was fired and three others were forced to retire or resign.

  It’s like I said: Police guns are double-ended weapons: They can kill and maim at one end, and they can end careers at the other.

  I wish I could tell you that someday there will be no more fatalities from officer-involved shootings, in New York City or anywhere else. And maybe someday we will have Star Trek–style “phasers” that will reliably put a suspect down without killing or seriously injuring him—although even then I suspect there will be some deaths, just as there are with the Tasers we have today.

  But until then, as long as criminals have guns, cops will have to have guns, too. And sometimes they’ll have to use them.

  When they do, when cops do have to fire their weapons, in most cases it will be a trained reflex, a decision made in a half-second or less, with no time to think about it or consider the terrible potential consequences. But if any good cop does have time to think before he fires his gun, if he has time to consider what can happen in even an officially “good” shooting, in virtually every case I can tell you what that cop will be thinking.

  He’ll be thinking:

  Please, God, don’t make me have to shoot this guy.

  Chapter 7

  * * *

  EXCESSIVE FORCE

  It’s four o’clock on a Saturday morning in August 1997, but the crowd outside the Club Rendez-Vous in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn still isn’t ready to give up on Friday night. The music and dance club is a popular spot with Brooklyn’s tightly knit Haitian community, and hundreds of people have shown up to hear a Creole pop band called the Phantoms play the Haitian dance music known as compas. But when the music stops and the club closes at three a.m. the crowd streams out onto the sidewalk in front, still pumped up and rowdy.

  Two women in the crowd get into a screaming fight—it’s a “You slut! Stay away from my man!” kind of thing, rendered in Creole, a combination of French, English, Spanish, and African languages—and other club patrons crowd around them, some trying to intervene, some just to watch. Fights are not an uncommon occurrence at the Club Rendez-Vous, and neither are gunshots; six months earlier a sudden spray of gunfire through the front window killed one of the club’s bouncers. As the fight between the two women escalates, one of them gets her dress torn off, and she stands there almost naked, screaming.

  Then the cops wade in.

  The half dozen cops at the scene are from the midnight shift at the 70th Precinct, the Seven-Oh, and they’re all wearily familiar with the Club Rendez-Vous. Several of the cops start pushing their way through the crowd to break up the fight and disperse the spectators. While the crowd jeers, one of the cops pushes a man to the ground, which angers a thin, thirty-year-old Haitian immigrant named Abner Louima. Louima, who has a wife and a child and who works as a security guard at a water and sewage treatment plant, thinks the cops are being too rough. Louima starts shouting at the cop, and the two get into a shoving match. Then somebody—not Louima—sucker punches the cop in the head. He goes down, briefly, the crowd starts to scatter, and some other cops grab Louima and take him to the ground and put him under arrest. They rear-cuff him and then two cops put him in the back of a patrol car and start heading back to the precinct.

  On the way they meet up with the cop who got hit in the head outside the Club Rendez-Vous, who’s in another two-man car. He gets out, looks at Louima lying in the back of the other patrol car and mistakenly identifies him as the man who hit him. Enraged, he starts beating the handcuffed Louima with his fists and a police radio; Louima later says the other three cops also beat him with their fists.

  At the precinct, Louima is charged with disorderly conduct, obstructing government administration, resisting arrest, and third-degree assault. While he’s being searched his belt is removed, and his black pants start slipping down as he’s standing at the front desk. After they finish processing the arrest, one of the cops starts walking Louima toward the holding cells. His pants have slipped down around his ankles now, so he’s shuffling, still rear-cuffed. But instead of taking Louima left toward the cells, the cop turns right, heading toward the bathroom, where another cop is waiting.

  Forty-two hours later, at eleven p.m. on Sunday, I get a call at home from the supervisor of the IAB’s four-to-midnight call-out team, a captain. The call-out teams respond immediately to any serious incidents, twenty-four hours a day, and the captain is calling from Coney Island Hospital. He and his team have been investigating a report that came into the Command Center that afternoon.

  The captain tells me they’ve got an arrestee from the Seven-Oh that the EMTs brought in early Saturday morning, a guy named Louima—pronounced Loo-EE-ma. He’s got severe internal injuries, with punctures in his small intestine and bladder and
a perforated colon.

  And, Chief? the captain says. The guy’s in a lot of pain and pretty heavily sedated, but he’s saying that the cops did it. He told the nurses that some cops at the Seven-Oh took him into the bathroom at the precinct and rammed a stick, a toilet plunger or something, up his rectum.

  I’m not sure that I’m hearing him right.

  Wait a minute, I say. He’s saying that cops did that to him?

  Yeah, Chief, the captain says. We’re still talking to people, we’ll know more in an hour or two. I’ll call you back.

  Well, I’ve been a cop for a long time, and in IAB for several years now. So if you tell me that some cops are involved in what looks like a bad shooting, or that some cops are accused of beating a prisoner, giving him a tune-up in an interrogation room, or that cops have been shaking down drug dealers, I can believe it. I don’t like it, but I can believe it.

  But when you tell me that NYPD police officers engaged in a brutal, sadistic, almost medieval torture of a prisoner inside a precinct house, that they shoved a stick up a prisoner’s rectum and inflicted massive internal injuries, I’m going to need some pretty good evidence to convince me. Like I said, I’ve been a cop a long time, and I’ve never, ever heard of anything like this.

  Then a couple hours later the captain calls back.

  Chief, the captain says, I know this is hard to believe. But it looks like this really happened.

  Before I head into the office—no sleep tonight—I make sure we’ve got enough people on the case. We’ve got an IAB team at the hospital, another on its way to the Club Rendez-Vous. And there’s another team of a half dozen IAB investigators on their way to the 70th Precinct, a drab, three-story granite building on Lawrence Avenue.

  Except that as far as IAB is concerned, the Seven-Oh Precinct isn’t a precinct anymore.

  It’s a crime scene.

  * * *

  Police work is often brutal. But there’s a big difference between brutal police work and police brutality.

  Case in point: It’s the summer of 1982, I’m a sergeant in Manhattan Traffic, and my driver/partner and I catch a call over the radio about an EDP on Thirty-Fourth Street near Herald Square. When we get there we see this guy on the sidewalk, a white male, six-three or -four, maybe two hundred forty pounds, completely naked except for boxer shorts. The guy is covered in a sweat-sheen, and he’s literally got foam coming out of his mouth; it’s pretty clear that he’s dusted, meaning he’s on angel dust, PCP, which can cause bizarre and violent behavior.

  One other unusual thing about this guy: He’s got a uniformed foot post cop hanging onto each arm—and he’s swinging those two cops around like they’re on the Tilt-a-Whirl at Coney Island.

  So I run up and Mace the guy square in the face—Mace is just a form of tear gas—but it doesn’t even faze him. He keeps swinging around and around and finally one of the cops on his arms goes flying backward onto the sidewalk.

  So I grab the now-free arm and my partner grabs a leg, but the guy’s so sweaty and slippery that it’s hard to hold on; it’s like one of those greased pig contests at the old county fair. All we want to do is get this mope down so we can put handcuffs on him, but he’s not having it. He’s not fighting us, exactly, he’s not throwing punches or kicks, he’s just resisting, squirming and twisting and grunting. Now the cop on the sidewalk has crawled over and grabbed the guy’s other leg, so we’ve got a cop on each arm and each leg. Then another patrol car with two more cops shows up, and one of them jumps on the guy’s back. Five cops we’ve got on this guy, and we still can’t control him. Meanwhile, a crowd is gathering to watch, and we can hear them start: Five cops! On one guy! Why don’t you cops fight fair?

  So finally the sixth cop, the only one who doesn’t have a piece of this guy, because there’s no more pieces to grab, takes out his baton. He side-strokes the guy across the shins—whack!—which makes a sound like a baseball bat hitting a tree trunk, and then again—whack! We can hear the onlookers gasp at the sound of it.

  And that does it. The guy cries out in pain and then sinks to his knees—he’s hurting, but not seriously injured—and we get him facedown on the sidewalk and cuff him, then we roll him over on his side. You don’t want to leave a cuffed suspect facedown, because with some people, particularly heavy ones with underlying medical conditions, it can cause asphyxiation. Then we all stand there, bent over, exhausted, gasping for breath, eyes burning from the Mace, two of the cops bleeding from being scraped on the sidewalk, while people in the crowd are muttering: Why’d ya have to hurt him? That’s police brutality!

  Well, yeah, it was brutal. It was brutal on the perp, and it was brutal on us. But like I said, morally and legally it wasn’t police brutality.

  The law allows—in fact, it requires—a police officer to use reasonable force, including the intentional infliction of pain, to gain compliance to a lawful order or to stop a threat of bodily injury or death to another human being, the cops themselves included. Depending on the circumstances, the level of force can range from simply touching a suspect—grabbing him by the arm—all the way up to shooting and killing him. Of course, the key word here is “reasonable.” A cop can’t shoot a guy just because he won’t turn around to be handcuffed; just as obviously, you can’t expect a cop to gently grab the arm of a guy who’s waving a knife.

  The law also demands that once compliance and control have been achieved, or the threat to human life has been stopped, all use of force against the suspect has to stop—immediately. Any additional use of force, whether it’s to punish a suspect for his resistance or just because the cop is having a bad day, is excessive force, and it’s illegal, and it can get a cop seriously jammed up.

  All of which sounds very neat and tidy and easy to understand. But when a cop is confronting a violent EDP on a sidewalk, or a wife-beating husband on a domestic call, or even a guy with an open warrant who has decided he just doesn’t want to go to jail tonight, it’s a little harder to determine exactly where the line is between “reasonable” and “unreasonable,” or whether the perp on the ground has really ceased resisting or if he’s just resting up to take another run at you.

  What many people don’t seem to understand is that in almost every instance, it’s the suspect, not the cops, who determines the level of force that’s used against him. For example, a compliant suspect who follows orders to turn around and put his hands behind his back can probably expect the minimum level of force—that is, a cop puts on the cuffs and searches him and puts him in the back of a sector car, being careful to shield the suspect’s head so he doesn’t bump it. If every suspect did that, if everyone involved in a confrontation with a cop did exactly what the cop told him to do, excessive-force cases would drop to virtually zero.

  But too often they don’t do that. Sometimes they’re drunk, sometimes they’re high, sometimes they’re just pissed off. So they fight, they spit, they claw, they bite, they kick, they punch. And even if, like the dusted guy on the sidewalk by Herald Square, they’re only resisting—twisting, squirming, refusing to give up—the cops still have to make the arrest. The only alternative is to say: Well, okay, sir, it’s apparent that you don’t really want to go to jail tonight, so we’re just going to let you go—but please do us a favor and don’t beat the hell out of your girlfriend again tonight, okay?

  But the public doesn’t want us to do that. The public—and the girlfriend—wants us to take that guy to jail.

  So how do we do that? How do we make a guy go to jail when he really, really, really doesn’t want to?

  Every NYPD cop has had training in using his or her hands and feet and police baton against a resisting suspect. At the Academy they teach recruits various self-defense and compliance moves—the wrist hammer lock, the thumb in the armpit move, the side-stroke with the baton or, more recently, the telescoping baton known as an ASP, and so on. They also teach recruits what not to do: never baton-stroke a suspect in the head, never leave an unresisting handcuffed suspect faced
own, never use a chokehold or sleeper hold that can deprive a suspect of oxygen or blood to the brain and possibly cause death. There’s a lot of emphasis on when, how, and how much force a cop can use.

  But we have to be realistic. We don’t have thirty-six thousand Chuck Norrises out there. We can’t turn every cop into a professional-level martial artist, able with one deft move to flip a suspect facedown on the floor, ready for cuffing. Maybe Mr. Spock on Star Trek can use the Vulcan Nerve Pinch to gently render someone unconscious, but if Spock tried that on a violent suspect on the streets of New York City he’d probably wind up getting beaten to death—or at the very least he’d get sued, since sleeper holds are prohibited.

  Of course, there are other ways to subdue a resisting suspect. The NYPD and other police departments across the country have adopted various types of specialized, nonlethal or less than lethal takedown equipment to get barricaded or resisting subjects under control: net guns that can wrap a suspect up, handheld water cannons to knock him down, beanbag shotguns, pepper spray or OC (oleoresin capsicum), Tasers.

  And all that specialized equipment is fine, if you have the time to use it and if it’s available—which it often isn’t. As I said earlier, because of concerns about their potential lethality—unfounded concerns, in my opinion—in 2014 the NYPD only had about six hundred Tasers, and they were only issued to specialized units like ESU and to some patrol sergeants and lieutenants.

  But the truth is that most of the time, if a suspect is resisting arrest, it winds up in a flat-out brawl, with one or two or three cops rolling around with a flailing suspect on a sidewalk or in a filthy stairwell in a high-rise. Later, from the perspective of a nice, clean, air-conditioned courtroom, with the “victim” all spiffed up in a new suit with his attorney at his side, it may be easy for civilians who’ve never been in a fight before to decide that, yes, the cops used too much force, that they gave the guy one too many baton strokes after he stopped resisting. But it’s not so easy when you’re in the stairwell or on that sidewalk.