Experts Weigh Officer’s Decisions Leading to Fatal Shooting of Michael Brown

In his first public interview this week, Darren Wilson, the white police officer who fatally shot an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Mo., was asked whether he could have done anything differently that would have prevented the killing.

His answer, broadcast on Wednesday, to the question from George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, was unequivocal: “No.”

But even as a grand jury decided this week not to indict Officer Wilson, the shooting of the 18-year-old, Michael Brown, has continued to raise questions about whether the officer handled the brief and deadly confrontation correctly. It also has become part of a broader national debate over police tactics and potential racial bias in policing.

And with the unusual release of the evidence presented to the grand jury, criminologists and experts in police procedure and tactics now have an extraordinarily detailed record with which to evaluate the shooting, which touched off riots in Ferguson and protests across the country.

To many experts, Officer Wilson’s actions in the confrontation with Mr. Brown — as he described them to the grand jury — were within the bounds of standard police protocol. Officer Wilson testified to the grand jury that the two struggled over his service weapon while he was still in his police vehicle, and that later, after a brief chase, he fired the fatal shots at Mr. Brown because the teenager was coming toward him in a threatening way.

But while the precise timeline and exact circumstances of the shooting may never be fully known, several law enforcement experts challenged Officer Wilson’s assessment that nothing could have been done to change the deadly course of his confrontation with Mr. Brown.

From the time Officer Wilson first encountered Mr. Brown walking with a friend in the middle of the street on a hot afternoon in August, to the point the teenager lay dead on the pavement, there were several opportunities to de-escalate the confrontation, said Eugene O’Donnell, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former New York City police officer. Mr. O’Donnell pointed in particular to the initial moments of the confrontation, when the officer and Mr. Brown are said to have struggled through the open window of the officer’s police cruiser.

“There certainly wouldn’t be a prohibition of him driving a little further along and regrouping, calling for help and thinking about nonlethal weaponry,” Mr. O’Donnell said, referring to Officer Wilson. “Just because you’re a police officer doesn’t mean you have to go into a situation headfirst.”

Officer Wilson, whose detailed, four-hour grand jury testimony was among the evidence made public this week, contends that he was caught up in a rapidly escalating confrontation that started as a routine police stop and quickly spun out of control. Mr. Brown, he said, essentially pinned him in his police cruiser, holding the door shut while punching him in the face. He said he considered an array of responses, including using pepper spray or his baton, but found them all lacking.

“The only option I thought I had was my gun,” he said, according to a transcript of his testimony.

That conclusion was confounding to Edward Davis, who retired last year as Boston police commissioner after 35 years as an officer there and in Lowell, Mass.

“There has been a significant change in the use of force by police in the 35 years I’ve been in the business — new tools like Tasers and really effective pepper sprays,” Mr. Davis said. “When you look at the whole way this situation transpired, it’s disappointing to see someone not use those intermediate tools available.”

In his testimony, Officer Wilson said that he did not have a Taser weapon with him at the time, and that he preferred not to carry one because it is large and not “very comfortable.” He said he did not use mace because it was difficult to reach and the spray could have blown back at him. His baton and flashlight, he said, were also inaccessible.

In his testimony, Officer Wilson said he never had any thought to fall back, even if only to make a tactical retreat to reassess and perhaps wait for backup officers. Part of the reason is training, experts said. In the heat of a violent altercation, police officers in many cases are trained to engage, not back down. In this case, though, human psychology may also have come into play, said Vincent E. Henry, an expert in the use of force by the police at the Homeland Security Management Institute at Long Island University.

“To back up and maybe follow him until backup arrived, in retrospect it might have been a better choice, but we don’t know that Officer Wilson saw that as a valid option,” Mr. Henry said. “Who would want to get punched in the face and then kind of say, ‘Let me just back up and follow this individual.’ A natural emotional reaction is to ratchet it up.”

In his testimony, Officer Wilson said that when he pulled his gun out, Mr. Brown reached through the window and grabbed it. That was a major escalation from which there was probably no turning back, some experts said.

“It’s a whole different ballgame,” said Fred Bealefeld, who was a Baltimore police officer for 31 years and police commissioner from 2007 to 2012. “If someone is trying to disarm a police officer or grab their weapon, that’s a felony. If someone grabs your weapon, as a cop you’re not thinking they are going to scare you with it. In my mind, every time someone tried to grab my gun in the street, they were going to try to kill me. That encounter changes everything.”

From then on, most experts said, Officer Wilson was very likely following standard police protocol in using whatever force was necessary to protect himself.

But for some experts, the shooting and the events that preceded it raised broader policy questions, particularly about how officers engage with communities they patrol. In his initial encounter with Mr. Brown and his friend in the street, Officer Wilson never exited his vehicle, voicing commands through the window of his cruiser instead.

“The notion of riding through neighborhoods yelling, ‘Get up on the curb’ or ‘Get out of the street,’ is not where you want your officers to be,” Mr. Bealefeld said. “You want them out of their cars, engaging the public and explaining to people what it is you are trying to do. Drive-by policing is not good for any community.”

In cities like Los Angeles and New York, police departments have invested huge resources into community outreach efforts, particularly in poor minority neighborhoods, with varied success. In Ferguson, where the vast majority of police officers are white and most of the residents are black, many black residents have blamed aggressive policing for creating tensions.

In September, weeks after the shooting, the Justice Department announced that it was opening a broad civil rights investigation into whether the police in Ferguson have a history of discrimination or misuse of force amid complaints of racial profiling, harassment and improper stops of black residents by police officers.

While Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said the federal investigation offered the possibility for “wholesale change,” it could take months to complete.

In Ferguson, emotions are raw as many continue to demand punishment for Officer Wilson. But Officer Wilson, in his interview this week, said he was confident he had done nothing wrong.

“I know that I did my job right,” he said.

Original Article
Source: nytimes.com/
Author: MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ and RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.