NEW YORK (AP) – Police-reform activists, who have come to expect disappointment any time an officer is accused in a killing, expressed surprise Friday over the conviction of a patrolman who shot an unarmed man in a housing project stairwell but said they don’t necessarily see the case as a turning point in the national debate over police accountability.
“It’s definitely movement in the right direction,” said Lumumba Bandele, a demonstrator who attended nearly every day of the patrolman’s trial. But, he added, “It’s not a victory in the larger scale of having made significant advances. We have a backlog of cases that have yet to be investigated, much less indicted.”
A jury in Brooklyn on Thursday found rookie Officer Peter Liang guilty of manslaughter in the 2014 death of Akai Gurley. Liang and his partner were on a patrol in the public housing development when Liang, who had drawn his weapon, fired a shot. The bullet ricocheted and struck the 28-year-old Gurley, who was walking down the stairs with his girlfriend. Liang said he had been startled by a noise and the shooting was an accident.
It was the first time in a decade a New York Police Department officer was held responsible for a line-of-duty killing. The outcome stood in stark contrast to many other cases around the country in which police have been accused of killing unarmed black men and boys.
A grand jury in Cleveland declined to indict a police officer who shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who had been playing with a pellet gun outside a recreation center. A grand jury declined to indict an officer in the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Jurors in Baltimore couldn’t agree on a verdict for an officer accused of manslaughter in the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray, who suffered a fatal injury while riding in the back of a police van.