In damage control

NYC police defend actions as unrest over shooting simmers

POLICE seeking to quell simmering anger over their shooting of a mentally disturbed black man on a New York City street released a montage of security videos yesterday that showed him minutes earlier thrusting a metal object that looked like a gun into the faces of several people — including a woman holding the hand of her child.

A final video snippet showed the man raising the object in a two-handed shooting stance as police arrived, the edited video frozen just before officers unleashed 10 shots that left 34-year-old Saheed Vassell dead. His weapon turned out to be nothing more than an Lshaped section of pipe.

The shooting in Brooklyn on Wednesday evening prompted two nights of protests among many who felt police should have known that Vassell, a fixture in the Crown Heights neighbourhood, had emotional problems.

But Mayor Bill De Blasio didn’t lay blame on the officers, who were not from the local precinct and were passing through at the time.

He said they had no information that the person they were confronting was mentally ill. “It’s a tragedy because a man with a profound mental health problem ... was doing something that people perceived to be a threat to the safety of others,” Mr de Blasio said at a news conference shortly before the images and a transcript of 911 calls were released.

“What we have seen from the images that are publicly available, people in the community thought he had a wea- pon and was aiming it at residents,” the mayor said. “That’s the kind of calls, multiple calls, that NYPD received. According to the transcripts, one caller to 911 reported that Vassell ‘looks like he’s crazy but he’s pointing something at people that looks like a gun’.

“Where is the gun?” a dispatcher asked one caller.

“His hand,” the caller replied.