Politics
Police Officer Shoots Man Who Called 911 to Report a Burglary
The victim, the police said, was carrying a knife. The shooting, which occurred after a five-second encounter, was under investigation.
It happened in five seconds. A police officer fired two shots at a 32-year-old man carrying a knife in a brightly lit hallway of a South Bronx building on Sunday evening, striking him in the torso.
The man, whom the police have not identified, was in stable condition and was expected to survive.
The police said he had called 911 to report an attempted burglary and was on the first floor of the apartment building on East 148th Street in the Mott Haven neighborhood when two officers entered the building, according to police officials and footage of the shooting, captured on a Ring camera.
What happened next — including whether a language barrier played a role in the shooting — is still under investigation, said Deputy Chief Rohan D. Griffith, who spoke about the incident at a news conference on Sunday night.
The man had dialed 911 to report that a person in an alley outside the building had attempted to steal his window air-conditioner, police officials said. Chief Griffith confirmed that there was a man in the alley close to the air-conditioner, but could not yet say whether an attempted burglary took place.
Right before the officer fired her gun, the man called out several words in Spanish, according to the video and Chief Griffith, who said the incident was also captured on the officers’ body worn cameras. It was unclear from the video what the man said.
“When he called 911, he spoke Spanish, and an interpreter was used for the call. We have to ascertain if the officers themselves understood what he was saying, and vice versa,” said Chief Griffith, the head of the Police Department’s Force Investigation Division, which analyzes cases where an officer uses his or her firearm.