Police opened fire on a subway platform in Brooklyn during a confrontation with an alleged fare-beater, striking the man cops said was armed with a knife, two straphangers caught in the fray, and one of the firing officers, NYPD officials said Sunday.
One of those two passengers hit by the cops’ bullets, a 49-year-old man, was hospitalized in critical condition after he was hit struck in the head, according to the NYPD.
The two officers who opened fire were assigned to patrol the Sutter Avenue subway stop in the 73rd precinct when they spotted a man skip the station turnstile and walk through an open gate toward the train platform, Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey explained at an evening press conference from Brookdale Hospital.
Ahh yes. Nothing like killing a perp and a few bystanders for a few dollars’ worth of fare. USA! USA!
I know it’s like that by headline, but they repeatedly tried to subdue him and eventually he charged at them with a knife after having said “I’ll kill you”. I don’t know I would hesitate to stop him without my gun if he suddenly ran at me with a knife. I’m just thinking survival, instinctively, and not about bystanders around me in that moment.
If a guy doesn’t pay $3, has a knife and threatens the police -> mental problem. The answer isn’t shooting but handling the situation and deescalating.
They shot because the guy charged at them with a knife, not because of the fare. OP’s thread title is deliberately misleading, in a desperate attempt to twist this into ACAB fuel.
Any bystander injuries are to be blamed on the aggressor Mr. Knifey.
The knife that mysteriously doesn’t show up on any footage and couldn’t be located after the fact?
I know better than to believe police lies. It’s all they do. ACAB, no exceptions.
Especially the NYPD
There’s a still image of the police body cam here which shows the knife.
https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/nypd-shooting-sutter-ave-subway-station-brooklyn/
Edit 4 days later: And now we have the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EaAraFPzEo
Literally knife to gun fight. (Edit: allegedly, no video [yet])
Poor guy. Wish he could’ve been treated instead of killed. Wonder if here in the US we could put mancatchers/catch poles to good use:
An example of someone ostensibly suffering a mental health crisis eventually being subdued by a large number of responders with said poles.
They chased someone into a train over 3 dollars. There is now hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical bills, possibly over a million. Because someone “stole” a 3 dollar fare.
How the police react to stuff is absolutely up for debate. This is why we stopped doing car chases.
If someone runs a red light, and a cop tries to pull them over to give them a ticket, and instead the guy jumps out of the car and tries to attack the cop with a knife and gets shot in self-defense, it is absolutely not accurate to frame that as “cop shot that guy for running a red light”.
But this is what exactly the OP is trying to do. And that’s bullshit.
Police don’t chase for red lights anymore specifically because the damage car chases were doing was out of line with the civil infraction.
Don’t see how that’s relevant to anything. A police officer walking after another person, on foot, doesn’t have the potential for collateral damage that a car chase does.
It is completely ridiculous to frame this as “police shot a man over $2.90”, when the shooting only happened after a verbal death threat, brandishing a lethal weapon, followed by an overt attempt to make good on that threat with that weapon.
Only the most ACAB-addled mind would think it appropriate to frame the events that way.
A police officer walking after another person, on foot, doesn’t have the potential for collateral damage that a car chase does.
Looks at the number of people that got shot.
Obviously that’s not true.
And all of that stuff with the weapon is based only on the police claims. The same police that won’t release the body camera footage.
Looks at the number of people that got shot.
Obviously that’s not true.
Not as a result of two people walking, but as a result of someone brandishing a knife and attempting murder in a public place. Cringe goalpost move.
And all of that stuff with the weapon is based only on the police claims.
And all of what you’re saying is based on literally nothing but your hate boner for police, lmao.
The image released shows a knife clutched in the criminal’s hand. I’m sure he was strolling around like that very innocently and cops just opened fire on him for a laugh, right?
The straw-grasping is incredible.
The same police that won’t release the body camera footage.
Like it’d matter to your type. We have extensive hard video evidence of what happened with Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha, all put online publicly mere days after the event, and there are still innumerable imbeciles claiming shit it directly contradicts happened, lol.
Based
They used more money in ammunition than the amount of money the shootout started over!
Evidence of why the “Chris Rock solves gun crime” strategy won’t work.
Chris Rock solves gun crime
Make bullets cost $5000 a piece!
A corp strats
They shot because the guy charged at them with a knife, not because of the fare. OP’s thread title is deliberately misleading, in a desperate attempt to twist this into ACAB fuel.
Unless you have evidence of that, stop spreading it.
Your prejudiced assumptions do not trump the evidence we have. The knife is on body cam.
Until they release the body cam footage, all we have is a blurry photo of someone on the ground holding a knife. As nice as that image is, it does nothing to support the claim that they were “charged at with a knife” and that is the claim people are holding you to task over (and assuming that is true, just allowing this situation to escalate to that point was inexcusably incompetent). The NYPD has been caught intentionally misleading the public with bodycam footage many times before and thus lack the credibility to be believed without evidence, especially when they are being this cagey over releasing the footage. This may very well have been the case, but until they prove it we can’t reasonably take them at their word and you damn well know it.
They have a picture of a knife
That they cannot produce.
The police lie. We’ve caught them lying so many times now that they don’t get the benefit of the doubt much less some higher credibility.
“We will be working through the timeline of today, but make no mistake, the events that occurred on the Sutter Avenue station platform are the results of an armed perpetrator who was confronted by our officers doing the job we asked them to do," Donlon said.
Could we maybe not ask police officers to escalate minor and petty conflicts all the way up to shooting everyone in the immediate vicinity?
Schrodingers pig.
The cop shot an innocent bystander in the head but also shot another cop. Until trial, he is both a bad guy with a gun and a good guy with a gun.
Imagine the 2 by standards suing the department getting and 6 million dollars. Because shooting a guy for jumping a turn style worth 2.90.
This is a joke they need to take that money out of the police officers pension.
qualified immunity says there’s no specific law or statute saying you can’t fire indiscriminately into a crowd of people whilst attempting to “apprehend” someone suspected of not paying their $2.90 subway fare… so they’ll be let off with a warning and a nice long paid vacation. Maybe the victims will get some token amount…
Oh wait, you didn’t even mention the cops getting punished, I guess it’s just a given at this point that they won’t be. We see a headline these days about cops shooting innocent people and we can’t suspend disbelief long enough to even imagine the cops getting punished.
America!
Not only that, the fare skipper will be charged with all the bloodshed.
Why hasn’t the city released the full body cam footage?
This is like an unfunny onion article. The fact that there can be civilian casualties in NYPDs war on fare jumpers is just shameful. It’s not for the money. They spend $150 million a year to recover $100k. Beyond an embarrassment.
Such a reaction is insane, in other countries they would be prosecuted, right?
In other countries they’d just put in fare gates you couldn’t jump.
I am waiting for former cop PR man Adams’ defense of the cops with bated breath.
It sounds like the guy had a knife and threatened to use it. It also sounds like the cops tried to taze the guy first, but it didn’t work.
We can argue whether the cops really needed to shoot the guy. But they weren’t shooting at a fare evader, they were shooting at a guy with a knife who also happened to jump the turnstile.
I’d argue that the real problem is that the cops didn’t know how to de-escalate the situation without shooting. It’s like the tazer was their only “non-lethal” option, and when that didn’t work, they panicked. (I could also believe that they were simply incompetent, and couldn’t work the tazer properly.)
Do we actually know if he had a knife? Initial reporting was that the police knew he had a knife because he refused to take his hands out of his pockets. While he did threaten them, it was contingent upon them continuing to follow them. He did not actually attack them until after multiple officers attempted to tase him. Furthermore, so what if he had a knife? As far as we’re aware, he’s got a second amendment right to keep and bear arms. Being armed isn’t an excuse to be killed by cops because you are generally explicitly allowed to be armed.
All in all:
- We don’t know he’s armed
- We don’t know his intentions
- He didn’t immediately attack anyone
- While he did threaten them he made no indication that he intended to follow through until he was attacked
- He continued to try to leave the situation until he was attacked
- The police attacked him first
- He didn’t have a gun
- 4 people were shot by the police;
he was killed(this seems to have been erroneously reported earlier. He is now reportedly in critical condition), an officer and 2 bystanders were wounded - No one was stabbed
While that is textbook escalation, it really doesn’t seem like they shot him cause he had a knife. They shot him (and 3 others) cause he didn’t care about their authority and they couldn’t let the guy that was already on the train go. And all that came about because he tried to skip a fare that costs around the same amount as the bullets fired.
The guy only threatened to use the knife after they stopped him for turnstile jumping. If the New York subway didn’t have turnstiles (the L.A. subway doesn’t), most people would still pay their fares. Most people understand that their fares keep the trains running. There was no need for this. At all.
I should say that there are transit cops that check tickets in L.A. If you don’t have one, all they do is escort you out of the station. And this is the LAPD we’re talking about.
The LA subway has turnstiles. Most people don’t pay. I’d watch maybe 2/3rds of people skip payment by using the wheelchair/bike turnstile. They would do it in front of cops.
They are starting to enforce fares again though.
If they have turnstiles, that is something they added since I lived there a decade ago.
They have the simple waste-high turnstile at every subway stop. At above-ground locations they don’t have these. They have been there for 15 years or longer.
There are no full height “man trap” turnstiles if that’s what you’re talking about.
I took the train from NoHo to downtown or Long Beach all the time and I do not remember turnstiles. In fact, I remember wondering where they were the first time I did it.
Noho as of this summer now requires you to tap to unlock the turnstile to exit too. They are expanding this to other red/B line stops.
DTLA 7th/Fig has definitely always had turnstiles.
Long Beach has not had turnstiles.
The guy only threatened to use the knife after they stopped him for turnstile jumping.
I should say that there are transit cops that check tickets in L.A. If you don’t have one, all they do is escort you out of the station. And this is the LAPD we’re talking about.
The first step to “escorting you out of the station” is stopping you, is it not?
My whole point is that the cops didn’t get belligerent until he pulled the knife. It also sounds like he might have boarded a train with the knife out, too. (It was the L train, though, I’m sure the riders have seen worse.)
They didn’t start shooting because he jumped the turnstile. I bet if he didn’t have a knife they would have just wrote him a ticket and made him leave.
You dont think your LA cops would have treated their fare evader a bit differently if he pulled a knife?
Yes, stopping you to say, “can I see your ticket?” If the person without a ticket runs, where are they going to run to? Back on the train that just left? They can’t do that. Out of the station? That’s where they were going to be taken anyway. It’s not worth the cops’ time in L.A. like it apparently is in New York.
Again, this shit doesn’t happen there.
But it sounds like the guy said “I’m gonna kill you if you don’t stop following me”, then hopped on the train with the knife out. You think the cops in LA would have let him do that?
You show me when this sort of situation has ever happened in L.A.
Because believe me, there are plenty of crazies with knives in L.A. too.
Didn’t it literally just happen there like two weeks ago when LAPD TSD used force against someone evading fare and they ran, jumped onto the tracks, and were then electrocuted and run over by a train?
LA metro rail has yearly ridership of a little less than 62 million.
NYC has yearly ridership of over 1.3 BILLION.
These aren’t remotely the same systems.
Yes, let’s look to the LAPD for better policing practice. Wow.
That was my point though. Even the LAPD isn’t this bad.
cops said was armed with a knife
You know they lie to cover their own asses, right?
Yes, but this time their body cams seem to have worked. Amazing how that happens when it shows things that can justify the cop’s story?
And yet they didn’t release the footage. Either there’s no knife or the behavior of the police was outrageously incompetent. If they were justified they’d be tripping over themselves to show it.
It only happened yesterday, if the footage backs up the cop’s story it will get released eventually.
if the footage backs up the cop’s story it will get released eventually.
So it won’t?
Big IF
Mayor Eric Adams, who also attended the briefing, described the knife-wielding man as a “career criminal” with over 20 arrests.
Is that true? Is it relevant? Idk. But it’s in the article.
It’s as relevant as Kyle Rittenhouse murdering a registered sex offender.
In both cases, there is no possible way the person firing the gun could have known that.
Hey now, when Kyle Rittenhouse crossed state lines to take pot-shots into a crowd of protesters, he paid every toll and observed every traffic ordinance. How can you possibly compare Rittenhouse to this turnstile jumping barbarian?
I was comparing Rittenhouse to the cops. Do keep up.
Meanwhile corporations steal billions through white collar crime and the police do nothing. Nearly all blue collar crime is due to poverty and white collar crime creates more poverty. If police really wanted to stop crime they’d be pouring over corporations accounting to find the stolen money.
If police really wanted to stop crime they’d be pouring over corporations accounting to find the stolen money.
Sounds like dirty authoritarian big government communism to me.
Well it’s obvious there’s none of that in New York so they’re stuck chasing $3 fare dodging
Are the NYPD still carrying guns with a 12 pound trigger pull? Why can’t they aim for shit?
I know the amount in this situation is ridiculously low… but is there an acceptable amount where shooting would have been justified? How much money should it take for a cop to be able to open fire on a suspect? $50? $100? $1000? 10,000? 1,000,000? What’s the cut-off?
How much money should it take for a cop to be able to open fire on a suspect?
Broadly speaking, the police shouldn’t be using lethal force unless someone’s life is at risk.
But that gets us to the “we think he might have had a knife” excuse, which is just taken at face value as Carte Blanche to do as thou wilt.
The escalation of force from “jump a turnstile” to “four police trying to surround and tase the suspect” is more tied back to the $2.90 cost. Had they simply shouted after the guy as he fled, nobody would be in the hospital right now. Instead, they went Commando Mode, and bystanders paid the price.
You are suggesting the death penalty for theft. No.
I’m not suggesting it, the post title is suggesting it. They mention the $2.90 fare, as if to show what a pitifully low amount of money they were killed over, which suggests that had it been over a more reasonable sum of money, maybe the shooting would’ve been more understandable. Maybe had it been in the process of stealing a $100 million Van Gogh it would’ve been different.
1,000 dollars is generally grand theft, a felony, and thus liable to the fleeing felon rule in some states.
If you mean morally, then no amount is worth killing over as long as there’s a robust safety net in place. In olden times losing money to thieves could mean literally starving. At which point it’s you versus them. In modern times there’s not really that friction for most of us.
Naturally, follow the rules, or the cops start shooting /s
