After Times Square Shooting, Focus Shifts to Preventing ViolentConfrontations
By Arun Venugopal <http://www.wnyc.org/people/arun-venugopal/> WNYC
News Blog August 14, 2012
The fatal police shooting of a knife-wielding man in Times Square on
Saturday has resulted in little political fallout. Police Commissioner
Ray Kelly and Mayor Michael Bloomberg have said the shooting appeared to
be justified and by the book. Instead, the focus has been on looking
ahead to a time when such violent outcomes can be reduced in frequency,
or avoided altogether.
Eugene O’Donnell, a former police officer and prosecutor who currently
teaches at John Jay College, said the NYPD needs to implement “21st
century” solutions to such confrontations.
“We’re still using bullets to stop people in situations like this,”
O’Donnell said. “It’s a crying shame that we’ve not been able to use
some of the technologies that are being experimented with in war zones
and elsewhere to allow for a non-lethal end to this.”
O’Donnell pointed to the use of “goo guns,” which are meant to
immobilize people by firing sticky foam at them, as one such 21st
century alternative. But such technology would suggest an increased
investment for the NYPD at a time when the department has been
tightening its budget.
Retired officer Joe Guagliardo defended the NYPD’s shooting of Darrius
Kennedy, but thinks the department has been compromised by a lack of
manpower on the streets.
If multiple officers had collectively confronted the “one little
pot-smoker,” he argued, rather than a single officer, Kennedy would’ve
been much less likely to have spun out of control.
Kennedy had been subjected to psychiatric evaluation in the past,
according to the police. On Saturday, the NYPD called for backup from
its Emergency Services Unit, which is trained to handle unstable
suspects, but they didn’t arrive on the scene until after officers shot
Kennedy.
Ron Honberg, the director of Policy and Legal Affairs at the National
Alliance on Mental Illness, pointed out one system that has gained
traction in recent years. Police departments in hundreds of other cities
have adopted an approach known as CIT, or Crisis Intervention Team,
which places a much greater emphasis on dealing with people with mental
illness by going through simulated confrontations, and regularly talking
to the families of emotionally disturbed persons. That’s especially
important, Honberg said, when mental health budgets are being cut.
“We ask more and more our law enforcement officers to be the first-line
responders,” Honberg noted. “So if that’s the role they’re going to
take, they need to be prepared.”
http://www.wnyc.org/blogs/wnyc-news-blog/2012/aug/14/times-square-shooti
ng-prompts-analysis/