Lessons of a shooting

Albany County District Attorney David Soares was right not to prosecute Ellazar Williams, who at 19 has suffered more than his share for a bad choice. Unfortunately, that’s the best one can say of the official handling of a case that has damaged police relations with Albany’s minority community.

Yes, hindsight is a luxury neither Mr. Soares nor the Albany Police Department had over the past five months. But they did have a long history of mistakes and successes by law enforcement to inform them. Now they become a lesson themselves.

Certainly, Mr. Williams, left paralyzed from a police gunshot, should not have run from officers who responded Aug. 20 to a 911 call of a “man with a gun.” But it was still the duty of police to employ all their training and experience in pursuing him. Whether they did remains an open question. Amplifying the doubt is a lack of sufficient transparency from the outset.

The questionable handling of this episode began in a courtyard behind 395 Elk St., where police say Detective James Olsen shot Mr. Williams on the belief he had a gun. He didn’t. He had a knife, according to police.

Then the department failed to promptly detail how the shooting unfolded, planting the inevitable question in people’s minds: Why not?

The missteps continued on through the filing of criminal charges against Mr. Williams, even amid questions about how a man shot in the back posed a threat in the first place.

They continued on through Mr. Soares’ office’s simultaneously handling the case against Mr. Williams and the potential case against the detective he needed to work with to prosecute Mr. Williams.

And on through having a grand jury consider whether to indict Mr. Olsen before Mr. Williams’ case was resolved — which left Mr. Williams unwilling to testify to the grand jury.

And on through the clearing of Mr. Olsen by the grand jury, followed by defense attorneys’ public release of a video that appears to show Mr. Williams running away from the officer when he was shot.

And on through Mr. Soares’ lack of candor about his own view of whether the shooting was justified or not.

All this raises the questions that inevitably arise in situations like this when answers aren’t fully forthcoming: Did police protect their own? And is a district attorney’s office that relies on good relations with police to fight crime able to handle this fairly?

Candor from the outset might have helped avoid those doubts. So would a process similar to what New York state now does when unarmed civilians are killed by police — an investigation by the attorney general’s office rather than the local prosecutor. Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Attorney General Letitia James should consider whether that process should be expanded to include nonfatal but questionable incidents like this.

An outside, fully independent investigation may have found nothing different here. But the outcome might have been far different, with a public not left to wonder whether justice was done.