New fear caught oN tape
Wednesday after responding to the 911 calls reporting a man on the street pointing a gun.
“You saw how quickly that transpired,” said Boyce. “These officers didn’t have much time. When you’re presented with an immediate threat, it is different from being able to step back and talk.”
Boyce noted that seven of the eight NYPD line-of-duty deaths since he became chief of detectives in 2014 involved people with some kind of mental illness.
“Every situation is different,” said Boyce when asked if lethal force was the right response to a mentally ill suspect threatening officers. “It depends on each incident — not easy to say, policywise.” Vassell was killed on the streets where he was a familiar figure, known to many in the neighborhood.
Locals described him as a man seen constantly around the Brooklyn neighborhood, hanging out with friends or doing odd jobs in local businesses.
Security video shot in the seconds before his death showed him wielding a silver metal piece that resembled a gun — and pointing it at several pedestrians, including a woman walking handin-hand with a small child.
Before police opened fire, Vassell pointed the shiny piece of metal at the arriving officers, extending both his hands in a combat-style stance.
The video released Friday was about a minute longer than the clip release a day earlier, and captured Vassell’s frenetic final few minutes alive.
Additional transcripts of the three 911 calls, including two made before the shooting were also released, with one woman heard screaming and crying as she spoke with the emergency operator.
“He’s coming back!” she yells. “He’s coming back. He’s crossing the street! Oh my God.”
A second caller, after reporting that Vassell was “pointing something at people that looks like a gun,” was still speaking with the 911 dispatcher when the cops started shooting.
“Lay down, lay down baby,” the woman tells her daughter at the sound of gunfire. “Let me grab my daughter, my daughter is in the street. Come, come over here. Come. You didn’t see the crazy guy?”
The third caller was unsure if the man she saw had long hair, short hair or tattoos. She was sure of just one thing: He was carrying a weapon.
“Yeah, he have (a) gun,” the woman told the dispatcher.
“Where is the gun?” the dispatcher asked. “Where is it?”
“His hand,” the woman replied.
The dead man’s family acknowledged that Vassell, the father of a 15-year-old son, refused to take medication for his condition.
Susan Herman, NYPD deputy commissioner for collaborative policing, said police were trying to eliminate the stigma of mental illness and steer people to treatment facilities.
The cops are “trying to come up with other alternatives where the Police Department is really the last resort and not the first resort,” she said.
“But we always have to make a distinction between an immediate, urgent, life-threatening situation and one where you can reflect upon a variety of options.”