In Minneapolis, police shooting raises a familiar outcry — why?
Answers remain elusive a week after woman’s death
By John Eligon, Vivian Yee and Matt Furber
MINNEAPOLIS — There was something bad going on in the alleyway behind the house, she told her fiancé on the phone, someone who sounded as if she was in distress, maybe a rape. It was past 11 p.m., and most people on Washburn Avenue were furled in their beds.
Except Justine Damond, alone at home with the noises, her anxiety creeping into the loud Las Vegas casino where her fiancé had answered the phone.
They had met five years ago, when they lived 9,000 miles apart, beginning a courtship at first halting and then headlong. Now the wedding dress was ordered, the suit bought, the invitations sent, the ceremony set for an August weekend in Hawaii. But on Saturday night, July 15, they were separated again.
Her fiancé, Don Damond, told her to call 911. They stayed on the phone until she said police had arrived. Stay put, he told her. Call me back, he told her.
“I have played this over in my head over and over,” Damond said Friday in his first interview since that night. “Why didn’t I stay on the phone with her?”
The events of the next few minutes will be anatomized and argued over and, maybe, at some point, contested in court. But this much is established: As the squad car she had summoned slid down the alley, Justine Damond went up to the police officers inside, one of whom, for reasons still unknown, fired his gun, hit her in the abdomen and killed her.
Even to Americans now used to dissecting police shootings, the circumstances were an odd jolt: a black Somali-American officer, firing at a white Australian woman among the garages and green compost bins of an unremarkable strip of Midwestern concrete.
In Australia, where Damond, 40, grew up, there was agony and disbelief, the prime minister voicing bafflement, the tabloids in full cry. In the United States, there were questions about the officer’s failure to turn on his body camera, about firearms procedures and about the role race played in how officials responded. On Friday, the Minneapolis police chief was forced to resign. Fear of ambush
A year after a police officer in a Twin Cities suburb fatally shot Philando Castile, a 32-year-old black driver whose dying moments were streamed by his girlfriend on Facebook, some of the same questions have pursued the shooting of Damond.
What led Noor to fire his weapon? The loud noise the other officer said he had heard? Fear of an ambush, as his partner’s lawyer has implied?
At this point, almost everything is conjecture.
Neither officer had his body camera turned on, leaving investigators and the public blind, a fact that the Minneapolis mayor, Betsy Hodges, has called “unacceptable.”
Noor, whose record included three civilian complaints and a lawsuit over his treatment of a woman while performing a mental health checkup, has declined to speak with investigators.
Both officers have been placed on leave, and Friday, the mayor forced the police chief, Janeé Harteau, to resign.
It was an abrupt end to a contentious tenure as chief, during which Harteau faced criticism over her handling of other police shootings, including the killing of a black man, Jamar Clark, that led to weeks of protests.
Activists also have questioned why city officials moved so decisively in this case to condemn the shooting, compared with other police shootings in which the victims were black.
But as in other cases, prosecutors may find it difficult to make a case against Noor if he argues that he believed he was in danger.
A 1989 Supreme Court decision, Graham v. Connor, held that officers’ actions had to be judged by whether force was reasonable given what the officer knew at the time.
“There is this huge misunderstanding in this country about the rules surrounding police officers’ use of deadly force,” said Jim Bueermann, a former Redlands, Calif., police chief who is now the president of the Police Foundation, a research group. “People just say, if a person was unarmed, why would an officer have shot him or her?”
In fast-moving situations, police protocol often leaves little room for error. Dangers of job
Bueermann said he believes many officers are quicker to pull their guns than they would have been a decade or two ago.
“There is constant messaging to police officers about the dangers of their jobs,” he said. “There’s a really common adage in policing: It’s better to be tried by 12 than carried by six.”
He also questioned whether Noor might have accidentally discharged his weapon — a far more common event than many people realize, he said.
What made this shooting particularly bizarre, to veteran police officers, was that Noor fired at close range past his partner. Many officers would be furious or unnerved if a partner shot across them in any situation short of being attacked, said Vernon J. Geberth, a former New York City police commander and the author of “Practical Homicide Investigation,” a widely used textbook.
The officer’s partner might well be thinking, “You could’ve shot my head off,” Geberth said.