Above the law

Five years after Police Officer Brendan Thompson, flanked by partner Herbert Davis, shot and killed Kawaski Trawick in his Bronx home, the NYPD has announced neither will face any discipline. This is a mistake on top of more mistakes that started with the mistake of shooting this man. There are many technical and legal considerations to parse in an incident such as this, involving reaction times, departmental liability, union wrangling, case law and so on. These can too easily be deployed to bury what is ultimately the only real underlying question: Was Trawick dying from the police entering his home uninvited the correct outcome to the situation? The answer should clearly be no.

While the two officers were cleared of any criminal charges, Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark concluded that Thompson’s “use of deadly physical force was not justified.”

The Civilian Complaint Review Board recommended that Thompson lose his job and face administrative charges. That was a fair finding and we agreed that Thompson should have surrendered his shield and his weapon.

But the lawyers around Commissioner Eddie Caban said that the CCRB had missed the statute of limitations and therefore its recommendation was moot, even though the CCRB probe was delayed due to the NYPD’s own slowness in providing the information, particularly the critical body-worn camera footage.

With that option gone, (wrongly we should add) the only course for any discipline available to Caban was if Thompson had violated a criminal standard (but the Bronx DA had already set that aside). So there will be no repercussions for this death, not even a suspension or being docked vacation days.

So justice is denied in this case, but the NYPD has a new agreement that body-worn camera footage will in the future be handed over to the CCRB within 90 days of such a request. If that had been in force earlier, the CCRB recommendation for the firing of Thompson would likely have been timely and hopefully accepted by the commissioner.

As for Kawaski Trawick, shot dead in his home, it was not his responsibility to de-escalate the situation. That was the job of the trained police officers, who failed. He is dead due their actions.

As we asked and answered above: was this the correct outcome to the situation?

The more experienced cop at the scene, Herbert Davis, counseled against his partner Thompson using a Taser, which spiraled into Thompson using his handgun for the fatal shots.

Trawick was struggling with his mental health and was behaving erratically, but that the 32-yearold Black man was seen by the system as less than human was memorably exemplified by officers’ offhand response to the question of whether anyone was hurt, captured by body cam footage “Nobody. Just a perp.”

So Trawick died when he shouldn’t have. And the man who wrongly took his life will not be disciplined, not because discipline is unwarranted, but for technical reasons.

This would be bad enough if it were an outlier, but it’s not; the NYPD, entrusted with being the public’s protector, seems allergic to anything resembling accountability for missteps and culture problems, with commissioners refusing to impose even slap-on-thewrist punishments for documented violations.

Hopefully next time, there won’t be so many mistakes.