Shootings call for de-escalation focus
In the wake of a pair of shootings in the past week by Connecticut police officers, the public has been told that it needs to exhibit patience as the facts are uncovered. Only serious, methodical investigations can uncover what really happened, and the process must be allowed to play out.
All that is true. It’s also true that every incident of this type must be taken seriously, and protesters are right to demand not only justice, but that such incidents do not become routine.
The first case happened Tuesday, April 16, when a Hamden police officer and a second officer from Yale University fired at a vehicle stopped near Dixwell Avenue and Argyle Street in New Haven around 4:20 a.m. Twenty-two-year-old Stephanie Washington suffered non-life-threatening injuries.
According to state police, Hamden police had been investigating a report of an armed robbery at a nearby gas station, and identified a vehicle they believed was involved. Officers have said they fired after the driver of the vehicle — identified as 21year-old Paul Witherspoon — “exited the vehicle in an abrupt manner,” and failed to show his hands.
In Wethersfield, according to police, a shooting
took place at 6 p.m. Saturday after authorities attempted to pull over an 18-year-old driver, reportedly because his license plates didn’t match the car he was driving. Police said the driver instead pulled away and, when officers stopped him a second time, he drove his car at the officers.
The driver, Anthony Jose Vega Cruz, suffered two gunshot wounds to the head and died Monday night. The officer who pulled the trigger has not been identified but has been placed on administrative leave pending an investigation.
The Wethersfield police chief has termed his death “a tragedy.”
In both cases, much of the official account has been disputed. Video evidence can be contradictory, and only a thorough investigation, as has been undertaken in both cases, can establish what happened with any degree of certainty.
But while investigations proceed, it is not too much for the public to ask for more assurances — assurances that black drivers, as in New Haven, will not be targeted more than others; and assurances that gunfire will not be a responding officers’ first resort.
Police officers face an extraordinarily challenging job. Their lives are on the line every day. They are also welltrained to determine when using deadly force is necessary and when it is not. Asking members of the public, who do not have such training, to deescalate a situation puts the burden in the wrong place.
“What’s really unacceptable in every one of these cases is that the means for de-escalating are not used,” John Selders, co-founder of Moral Monday CT and bishop of Amistad United Church of Christ in Hartford, told The Hartford Courant. “We get gunfire for simple traffic violations.”
Investigations are necessary. Respect for police, along with a renewed focus on de-escalation, must be part of any solution.
Video evidence can be contradictory, and only a thorough investigation, as has been undertaken in both cases, can establish what happened with any degree of certainty.