Bad Apples, February 2, 2012, Ramarley Graham, Part Two

 

In real life, on-duty police officers rarely, if ever, pull the trigger. In 2015, the NYPD’s 36,000 officers fired their weapons a total of 67 times. Before joining the SNEU, [Richard] Haste worked foot patrol and then “midnight conditions,” cruising Wakefield in an unmarked sedan in the middle of the night. Last March, Haste’s complaint record was leaked to the press. Six official complaints had been made against him: abuse during a frisking, use of physical force, use of pepper spray, and three incidents of verbal discourtesy. None of the incidents resulted in anything more than mediation. Just 7 percent of NYPD officers have received six or more complaints. But Haste argues that it would be extremely rare for a cop with 175 arrests in three years not to have complaints on his record.

Haste’s parents divorced when he was 5, and he spent most of his childhood in Pelham Bay, a white working-class neighborhood four miles southeast of Wakefield. Haste was an outsider in school, he says, but during his junior year in high school, he became an auxiliary officer with the NYPD, inspired by cultural touchstones of the ’80s and ’90s like Rambo, Top Gun, and G.I. Joe. He committed to the Marines before graduating from high school, and after two years on bases in Okinawa and California, he was honorably discharged because of an injury. He moved back to New York and was eventually accepted into the force, his dream job.

Not long after the shooting, Haste started to feel acute stress. He’d begun to be recognized in public and was receiving enough credible death threats that the NYPD installed a panic button in his home. He saw a department-appointed psychologist, but union representatives told him he couldn’t trust anybody. As Internal Affairs investigated him, his co-workers, who were also his best friends, stopped talking to him. After a brief suspension, he was assigned to the Fleet Services division in Queens, where he spent his days babysitting gas pumps. He stopped sleeping, and when he did, he saw Graham in his dreams, dead on a gurney, the scars of the medical examiner’s Y-incision on his chest.

The Bronx district attorney convened a grand jury, and on June 13, 2012, Haste’s 31st birthday, he was indicted on first- and second-degree manslaughter charges. The arraignment was the first time Constance Malcolm and Frank Graham had seen Haste in person; they wept as Haste quietly pleaded not guilty. After posting bail, he emerged from the Bronx Hall of Justice to the applause of fellow police officers, a scene that would make one City Council member wonder later to me, “Is there something about the culture of the Police Department that hardens your heart?”

Underlying that culture is an understanding that police officers who pull the trigger in the line of duty have the nearly absolute deference of the criminal-justice system. Historically, the U.S. hasn’t kept official numbers on officer-involved shootings, but it’s estimated police shoot and kill about 1,000 people a year. Philip Stinson, a former police officer and associate professor at Bowling Green State University, tracks incidents of police misconduct. According to his database, which dates back to 2005, Haste is one of only 82 on-duty officers who have shot and killed someone to be charged with murder or manslaughter. A mere 29 of those were convicted of manslaughter or a lesser charge, and just one has been convicted of murder.

…

In May 2013, nearly a year after Haste’s arraignment, the judge who presided over the grand jury called a conference and announced that the assistant district attorney had erred when he instructed jurors not to consider Haste’s “state of mind,” including the fact that Horne had told him Graham had a gun. And so the judge threw out the initial indictment. From the second row of the courtroom, Malcolm began yelling at the judge. “He killed my child. What more can you do to me?”

Less than two months later, the Bronx district attorney convened a second grand jury, confident that, absent any major prosecutorial gaffe, he could secure a reindictment. The second grand jury, like the first, reflected the demographics of the Bronx, which, to Haste’s supporters, meant reindictment was inevitable. Haste testified for five hours. [Attorney] London believed his client was better prepared for his second testimony. “When they asked Officer Haste, ‘What were you thinking right before you shot the one bullet?,’ he said things like, ‘I envisioned Thanksgiving and everyone is there but me.’ ”

The grand jury declined to reindict, a decision that shocked both London and the Bronx DA’s office. Hours after the second grand jury’s decision went public, then–U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara announced that his office would review the case to see if Graham’s civil rights had been violated. Under Obama, the Department of Justice had aggressively pursued civil-rights investigations into police agencies that had exhibited patterns of abuse, but it rarely opened cases against individuals; more often than not, it took positions that strengthened officers’ right to use deadly force. A year passed without word from the DOJ. In August 2014, Constance Malcolm and Frank Graham delivered 33,000 signatures gathered in an online petition to the U.S. Attorney’s office demanding an indictment. On February 2, 2016, the four-year anniversary of Ramarley’s death, Malcolm and Graham, joined by some 50 activists, slept on the steps of the U.S. Attorney’s office in the bitter cold. Bharara agreed to meet with Malcolm, but, in early March, he told her that there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute. To make such a case against a police officer, the prosecution must prove a “willful deprivation of rights,” an extremely high burden of proof. Later that day, Bharara issued a statement: “Neither accident, mistake, fear, negligence nor bad judgment is sufficient to establish a federal criminal civil-rights violation.”

Malcolm, who moved here from Jamaica as a 13-year-old in the mid-’80s, speaks with a slight patois and occasionally slips into the present tense when talking about the past. The effect, when she talks about Ramarley, is that Malcolm’s grief isn’t lost in translation but magnified by it. “Ramarley’s actually kind of shy,” she says. She still hasn’t figured out how to respond to people who ask how many children she has, and she still lives in the apartment where her son was killed, with Chinnor and Hartley.

The family avoids speaking about Ramarley at home, but as a leader in the movement for police reform, Malcolm has found a way to talk about her son almost daily. In the week after the shooting alone, she met with politicians, Commissioner Kelly, and activists from police-reform organizations; made an appearance at Al Sharpton’s National Action Network; and led hundreds of protesters in a march to the 47th Precinct. She’s also taken to mentoring mothers of other unarmed black men killed by police, the “little girls’ group that we didn’t ask for.” After Ramarley was killed, Malcolm, who works as a nurse’s aide, took more than a year off from her job. She was diagnosed with post-traumatic-stress disorder. Chinnor, now 11, went to therapy for a while. “I don’t know if he’ll ever be a normal kid, seeing what he saw,” Malcolm says.

We talked for an hour before Malcolm calmly walked me down the hallway where Haste and Graham first encountered each other and into the “famous bathroom,” as she called it. Standing next to the bathtub, Malcolm showed me how, if Ramarley’s boot had been sticking out of the bathroom door when he died, as multiple witnesses attest, she thinks he would have been standing too far from the toilet for anyone to reasonably claim that he’d been throwing a bag of weed into the bowl. Malcolm believes that officers may have planted the weed to fortify Haste’s account.

Malcolm talks about her suspicion as an afterthought; she knows there’s no way to prove a cover-up, and even if there were, her legal recourse has all but dried up. In 2015, the city settled a civil suit with the family for $3.9 million. Malcolm calls it “blood money.” It sits in an account she says she’s never touched. After the suit was settled, with no hope of a state or federal trial, she focused on the fight to get Haste off the police force, a goal so narrow that it was mostly symbolic, as well as on getting more information about what had happened that day. She still knew shockingly little. … (Walsh 5).

In March 2016, federal prosecutors declined to file civil rights charges, closing the pathway to criminal indictment. Haste did, however, have a departmental trial this past January.

Haste’s disciplinary trial consisted of five days of testimony from 11 witnesses: NYPD investigators, inspectors, trainers and the other officers from the Street Narcotics Enforcement Unit (SNEU) he was a member of. Noticeably absent from the witness list were any civilians, including Graham’s grandmother and Dixon, the downstairs neighbor.

Without civilian testimony, the NYPD shaped the entire narrative, consistently referring to Graham as “the perp” and an “imminent threat.” They cast him “walking with a purpose” and placing his hands in his waistband as suspicious, furtive, criminal behavior. The defense, multiple police witnesses and even the prosecution repeatedly suggested that Graham had been armed. Defense attorney Stuart London, contracted by the NYPD police union, insinuated that Graham was responsible for his own demise by not complying with Haste’s command to show his hands.

…

“A longstanding tradition in the police department is the ‘evolving narrative,’ which is more widely known as ‘testilying,’” said Vince Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in an interview. “[Police officers] will often tell one story to their colleagues and supervisors immediately after an incident, and another as evidence emerges that pokes holes in their original narratives.” Though the “evolving narrative” practice is widely known, says Warren, “cops are also generally considered to be more credible than other witnesses when there are discrepancies.”

Malcolm says Haste’s departmental trial was difficult for her to witness. “It was hard to sit there and listen to them talking and how they were characterizing my son…basically like he’s a thug,” Malcolm told Colorlines. “This person they were describing wasn’t my son.”

Also painful for the family was the extent to which the police narrative erased Graham’s grandmother and little brother. Family members called out, “[Patricia Hartley] is right here!” when Haste testified that he didn’t know who was in the house when he shot Graham. “I can’t take these lies!” Hartley exclaimed during Haste’s testimony.

“In the trial, you hear about Ramarley and Richard Haste, you hear nothing about my mom and my [younger] son. And they were in the house,” says Malcolm. “It was my mom that was screaming in the court, because she felt like she didn’t exist. And they were telling that story that wasn’t true.”

The erasure of civilian witnesses also meant that the danger and abuse Hartley faced were not addressed. “He could have shot [my mother,]” says Malcolm, who believes that Haste should also have faced endangerment charges. “You didn’t hear that in the trial.”

One particular absurdity may explain the court’s omissions: Haste was not facing discipline for killing an unarmed teenager. The NYPD Firearms Discharge Review Board had already determined that the shooting itself was justified, which had the effect of taking that charge off the table. He was instead tried for using poor tactical judgment leading up the fatal shot (Marlowe and Myers 5-6).

Haste said he asked [his attorney] London what had changed since May 2015, when the department had floated him a deal that opened a return to active duty. (The offer was quickly rescinded when the NYPD official who made it found out Haste was under federal investigation.) “[London’s] answer was simply, ‘They’re caving into political pressure from activist groups,’ ” Haste told me. Upset by the way tabloids had portrayed him, Haste wanted a chance to tell the public what he’d told the second grand jury, his final-frame analysis. He chose the trial.

…

Firing Haste would require some litigatory gymnastics. The NYPD needed to craft an argument that was the perfect negative of final-frame analysis, in that it would have to prove that his actions leading up to the shooting merited dismissal regardless of the consequences, as the Firearms Discharge Review Board investigation had already cleared Haste for pulling the trigger. … the NYPD chose “poor tactical judgment,” a catchall charge they could apply to any number of the choices Haste made that day. …

The departmental trial was held over five days at police headquarters late this past January, during which both the defense and prosecution picked apart everything the SNEU did wrong that day: Haste didn’t have the 20 hours of classroom training required of all SNEU members; there weren’t enough officers on duty; Haste should have been in uniform. But the heart of the department’s argument against its own officer was based on the moment Graham entered his home, which transformed Haste’s pursuit into a “barricaded job,” at which point an officer is required to call for an Emergency Services Unit. Instead, Haste chose to enter the home of a possibly armed suspect without calling for backup. Taken together, those actions, the department charged, constituted “poor tactical judgment.” The head of the Police Academy’s specialized training said that he’d never seen such egregious tactical violations. Meanwhile, Mcloughlin and Morris testified on Haste’s behalf. Morris, the team leader, backed up Haste, saying he trusted him to make the right decisions. (The NYPD asserts that blame should also be placed on Morris for failing to control his team; both he and Mcloughlin will face their own departmental trials.)

On March 24, a Friday, Haste was told that the judge had recommended dismissal, and O’Neill planned on following through with her recommendation. That Sunday, Haste submitted his resignation. …

Last year, Haste graduated from Pace with a bachelor’s degree in liberal studies, with a concentration in criminal justice, and he has applied to jobs at federal and local law-enforcement agencies; a few have called him back. He believes Malcolm has every right to be angry and always felt that she deserved an open investigation, one in which he was free to answer any questions she had for him. But he stands by his final-frame analysis — even if the department that trained him, that shaped his worldview in the course of that training, has forsaken him. Haste still thinks pulling the trigger was the right thing to do. Ramarley Graham no longer shows up in his dreams.

The day after Haste resigned, Malcolm held a press conference outside police headquarters in downtown Manhattan. She stepped up to the microphone wearing a gray scarf and a white T-shirt that said WHERE IS MY JUSTICE? above a picture of Ramarley’s face. She had gotten some version of the accountability she had sought — after all, Haste was off the force, disgraced, and there was a credible argument to be made that it was Malcolm’s own activism that forced the issue. Yet the closure she imagined a resolution would bring seems, if anything, farther away than ever. Federal suits against the officers who killed Garner and Rice are now being handled by a Justice Department that has already moved to cut back the Obama administration’s police-reform initiatives. Still, Malcolm needs to believe that her son’s life force didn’t stop when and where that hollow-point bullet did. “This was the perfect case to show us that our young men and women matter,” she said, looking out at the crowd. “Ramarley’s life matters” (Walsh 6-8).

What makes Graham’s case endemic is what it says about the NYPD’s culture. The family’s civil suit notes street stops increased seven-fold between 2002 and 2012, disproportionately targeting non-White neighborhoods. When it came to bias influenced by race, gender and age, “Ramarley fit to a tee.”

Allegations of racial bias were substantiated in the landmark 2013 decision in Floyd v. the City of New York, which found that the NYPD had a pattern of racial profiling and used monthly quota systems to push cops to conduct stops, searches and summons. Graham’s civil suit surfaced one method that officers used to fulfill their quotas—a practice known as “next up.”

“The defendants engaged in a system or practice wherein officers would rotate arrests and who would catch them. That way all members of the ‘team’ would meet their numbers,” the lawsuit states, continuing that, “On February 2, 2012, at approximately 3:00 p.m., Haste was ‘next up.’”

“Quotas and how they are incentivized have the effect of generating police activity even when none is called for,” says CCR’s Warren. Even worse, says Warren, is that “next up” encourages team members to compete. “Incentives like this create solutions in search of problems. And the ‘problems’ are members of Black and Brown communities.”

Adding to the dangerous backdrop of Graham’s fatal shooting was what a 2015 investigation by the city’s Office of the Inspector General described as a “vague and imprecise” use-of-force policy and officers who were not sufficiently trained to de-escalate situations.

The study named race as a factor in who was on the receiving end of the NYPD’s use of force. Over half of complaints about excessive force were from Blacks, who represent less than a quarter of the city’s population. And, in more than 35 percent of substantiated complaints of unwarranted excessive force, the NYPD failed to discipline the cops responsible.

Police unions also contribute to the corrosive climate. In a January 13, 2017, investigative report, Reuters found that 82 cities hold police union contracts that protect officers with complaints lodged against them. In 46 of those cities, including New York City, the protection involves erasing disciplinary records. NYPD officers who undergo a disciplinary trial resulting in a verdict other than “guilty” may petition to have their record expunged after two years.

All this plays into a culture of policing where, according to the civil suit, police officers felt that they were free to conduct baseless stop-and-frisks, enter civilians’ homes without probable cause, use unnecessary and excessive force, intimidate witnesses, and engage in a conspiracy, or “blue wall of silence,” to file false reports or give false statements. Cops, alleged the suit, used catchall phrases such as “furtive movements,” or “displayed what appeared to be a gun” to justify unconstitutional conduct that went unpunished by their supervisors.

This is the police culture that prompted Haste and his colleagues to tail Graham, kick down his door and fatally shoot him. It is the same culture that Malcolm encountered watching Haste testify without observing any sign of remorse. “That was his opportunity to say, ‘I’m sorry,’ and he never really did that. Instead, he justified killing my son,” she told Colorlines (Marlowe and Myers 7-8).

Works cited:

Marlowe, Jen and Myers, Amy. “ 1 Teen, 6 Cops, 1 Bullet and 5 Years of a Black Family Screaming for Justice.” Colorlines, April 12, 2017. Net. https://www.colorlines.com/articles/1-teen-6-cops-1-bullet-and-5-years-black-family-screaming-justice

Walsh, James D. “The Bullet, the Cop, the Boy.” New York Magazine Intelligencer, June 2017. Net. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/06/ramarley-graham-nypd-shooting.html

Bad Apples. February 2, 2012, Remarley Graham, Part One

A few months before his big brother, Ramarley Graham, was shot to death by a New York Police Department (NYPD) officer, 6-year-old Chinnor Campbell was being bullied in school. His 18-year-old brother showed him how to put up his hands to defend himself and demonstrated how to punch using a pillow. “You’ve got to fight back, or people will keep bullying you,” Ramarley coached.

Their mother, Constance Malcolm, says these lessons were typical of their relationship: “Ramarley would take him to the park, pick him up from school, just do what a big brother would do with his little brother.”

Chinnor didn’t have his big brother’s guidance for much longer. On February 2, 2012, a White NYPD officer named Richard Haste entered Graham’s Bronx apartment and fired a fatal shot into his chest. He was only feet away, as was their maternal grandmother, Patricia Hartley.

Graham would be turning 24 today (April 12) if Haste and his colleagues had not followed him home from a bodega they were surveilling, kicked in the door and fatally shot him.

Local media have covered Graham’s case consistently, due in large part to his family’s sustained activism. But his shooting did not receive the level of nationwide attention that later police killings of Black men and boys would. Graham was slain 2 1/2 years before the Ferguson protests would place a renewed spotlight on police violence and direct action against it. That quirk of time means that many people don’t know who he is (Marlowe and Myers 1).

Ramarley Graham was born on April 12, 1993 to Constance Malcolm and Franclot Graham in The Bronx, New York. At the time of his death he was a student at the Young Scholars Academy of The Bronx where he aspired to travel the world and become a veterinarian. Graham died on February 2, 2012, at the age of 18 after being shot by a New York Police Department officer in his grandmother’s bathroom.

Ramarley Graham was spotted adjusting the waistband of his pants during a NYPD narcotics squad surveillance of a bodega near his home. Officers assumed Graham was concealing a gun. When plainclothes officers approached Graham, they reported that he ran to the home of Patricia Hartley, his grandmother, a few blocks away. Surveillance footage from outside the front entrance to Hartley’s building, however, shows Graham calmly walking up to the door and entering without urgency.

The same surveillance footage shows two officers running up to the building with their guns drawn just moments after Graham enters. As the two officers try to force their way through the locked door, other NYPD officers gained entrance through the rear of the building and opened the front door. One officer ran upstairs to Hartley’s apartment and broke down the door without a search warrant or announcing that he was a police officer.

Plainclothes Officer Richard Haste then ran into the apartment and discovered Graham in the bathroom attempting to flush a bag of marijuana down the toilet. Without any orders to comply, Graham was shot once in the chest in front of his little brother, Chinoor Campbell, and grandmother. Haste later reported that Graham reached into his waistband for a gun but no weapon was found in the Hartley apartment. Twenty minutes after the shooting, Graham was removed on a gurney from Hartley’s home by police officers. His family suspected he had already died but he was officially pronounced dead at 3:53 PM at the Montefiore Medical Center.

Patricia Hartley was arrested, detained, and questioned by NYPD about the series of events that occurred in her home for seven hours at the local precinct after watching her grandson, Graham, die at the hands of Haste. Graham’s body was also misidentified after his death, which prevented his parents from seeing his body for four days after his murder.

Richard Haste

In 2012, a grand jury voted to indict Haste, but the indictment was tossed out due to a prosecutorial mistake. A second grand jury declined to indict Haste, allowing him to walk free. After further investigation during a departmental trial in March 2017, Haste was found guilty on all charges and turned in his badge and gun before Deputy Commissioner of Trials, Rosemarie Maldonado, asked Police Commissioner, James O’Neill, to fire him. Although Haste is no longer employed by NYPD, many people are still fighting to see justice for Ramarley Graham (White 1-2).

Ramarley Graham often picked up his 6-year-old half-brother, Chinnor, from school. At home, Graham would help Chinnor with his homework, show him how to do push-ups, and teach him to defend himself from kids who picked on him for being soft. (Ramarley was gentle, too, his friends told me, so he knew how that went.) They’d watch Animal Planet, play video games, or go to the park. But that February 2, Patricia Hartley, the boys’ grandmother, went to get Chinnor instead. Graham was with his friends, Jahmoy McKenzie and Travis Breckenridge, at McKenzie’s house. They smoked a little weed and, knowing McKenzie’s mother would be home soon, moved on, stopping at a bodega. Then Graham headed home to change — he had plans to see girls later.

Wakefield hangs above the city about as far north in the Bronx as one can go before crossing into Westchester. It’s a largely West Indian neighborhood where businesses on White Plains Road, the main thoroughfare, proudly display the Jamaican flag. It was along that avenue, under the elevated tracks of the 2 and 5 trains, that officers Tyrone Horne and Andrew Jarvis first saw something they regarded as suspicious. They were part of a Street Narcotics Enforcement Unit, staking out corners and trap houses. By 2012, most of the city’s precincts had eliminated their SNEUs, as street deals had declined, but not in the 47th Precinct; the department thought that a SNEU could still make “quality arrests” in the North Bronx. Sitting in a parked Lexus, Horne and Jarvis, who are both black, watched three black male teenagers walk into and then quickly out of a bodega.

According to internal documents from the NYPD’s Firearm Discharge Review Board investigation obtained by New York, Horne was the first to see what he thought was the butt of a gun sticking out from one teen’s waistband. Later, Horne would tell investigators that Graham looked suspicious because he’d been “walking with a purpose,” and Jarvis would confirm that he saw a gun. They relayed the sighting to the others on the team before following the teens up White Plains Road.

Sergeant Scott Morris, the officer in charge of the SNEU, was sitting in an unmarked sedan a few blocks away. Morris asked Horne and Jarvis to confirm what they had seen. “I definitely see the gun,” came Horne’s reply, according to another officer’s statement. “It’s under his shirt.”

Haste, then 30, perked up when he heard Horne say “gun.” In a series of interviews, Haste described the incident and subsequent fallout to me in great detail. He was parked nearby at the steering wheel of the “p-van” (prisoner van), a 12-passenger Ford Econoline. Haste, who had been in the SNEU for just two months, had worked in the 47th Precinct since graduating from the Police Academy three years earlier and had impressed his superiors by racking up 175 arrests. He told me that he chose to join the SNEU after learning the department didn’t have much use for a white guy as an undercover cop. For the same reason, Haste rarely manned the SNEU’s observation post — he’d stick out too much — and when he did, he’d dress as an MTA employee. Mostly he drove the p-van.

Excited to make an arrest, Haste drove toward Graham. Halfway down a residential street, Haste and his partner, John Mcloughlin, stopped the van and ran at the teenager, who had peeled off from his friends. Video surveillance taken from a camera outside Graham’s building shows him glancing over his shoulder in Haste’s direction before quickly walking into the house. Even before the door closes, Haste, dressed in a blue NYPD windbreaker, runs toward him. But by the time he gets to the door, it’s locked. Haste tries to kick in the door, but it doesn’t budge. A few minutes later, the first-floor tenant lets Haste in through the back door. Haste and Mcloughlin climbed up to the second floor, where Haste said he knocked before his partner kicked in the door to Graham’s apartment.

Inside, Haste saw Graham at the end of a narrow hallway. Gun drawn, Haste said he yelled blanket commands: “Police!” “Show me your hands!” According to Haste, Graham, with his hands in his waistband, hurried into the bathroom while yelling, “Fuck you, suck my dick.” Haste approached the bathroom and peered in to see Graham facing him with his hands still in his pants. Haste says he yelled, “Gun!” and pulled the trigger. He doesn’t remember seeing Graham fall to the floor. Haste also never saw the teenager throw pot — which is what newspapers would report he’d been reaching for in his pants — into the toilet (a bag was found in the bowl). All he remembers is Mcloughlin yanking on the back of his bulletproof vest and yelling, “Are you hit?” Haste tensed his muscles. He was fine. As another officer escorted him out, with Graham’s blood on his khaki pants, Haste passed Morris, whose eyes searched Haste’s face for an explanation. “I thought he was reaching,” Haste said, according to Morris’s statement.

Haste told me that one of his first thoughts after pulling the trigger was Shit, I’m jammed up, copspeak for police who are sidelined. Still unsure if Graham was dead or alive, Haste knew he was about to be overwhelmed by an investigation. And he was: A member of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association approached Haste and told him to talk to Horne, who was suddenly unsure if he’d said he saw a gun or he thought he saw a gun. Horne’s equivocation floored Haste, but he feared talking to him would be a red flag for the Internal Affairs Bureau. He did it anyway. “I made it very clear: ‘I’m not here to tell you what you did or you didn’t see,’ ” Haste says he told Horne. “ ‘All I’m saying is that we all heard the same thing as far as I know. If you’re afraid of saying what you saw, you say something you believed to be a gun.’ ” Multiple people told me Horne — who declined interview requests — would continue to argue that he’d always said he “thought” he saw a gun and distance himself from Haste more than the other SNEU members. By then, Haste knew Graham hadn’t been reaching for a firearm, but he was sure the NYPD would find one in the apartment. After two days of searching, the only gun recovered was a toy replica out back (Walsh 2-4).

In a 2013 civil suit against the City of New York, Graham’s grandmother gave her account of the shooting and its immediate aftermath. His mom provided additional details to Colorlines in a January 2017 telephone interview. Here is their version of what happened:

Hartley had just brought Chinnor home from school and was in the living room while he changed out of his school clothes. She heard commotion outside their apartment and walked toward the front door to see what was going on. Graham was behind her.

Hartley jumped back, and Officer Haste, gun drawn, ran toward her and Ramarley. The grandmother maintains that neither she, nor her grandsons heard police identify themselves or issue any warning. Graham retreated to a hallway bathroom, but moments later, Haste shot him.

Malcolm says that her mother initially believed she was the one who had been shot. “She tell me she look at her chest area and didn’t see any blood,” Malcolm recounted in her Jamaican lilt. “She remember that Ramarley was behind her, but when she looked behind her, she didn’t see him. She looked down, and that’s when she saw him. His head was into the bathroom, his legs were hanging out the bathroom.”

Hartley screamed, “Why did you shoot him? Why you kill him?” and Haste pushed the 85-pound woman backward into a vase, warning her to “get the f**k away before I have to shoot you, too!”

Hartley attempted to make a phone call, but a female cop whom Hartley hadn’t seen enter the apartment twisted her arm behind her back. A male officer grabbed her by the neck, pushed her into a chair and threatened to handcuff her if she moved. Hartley saw her grandson’s legs “moving and trembling,” but when she tried to approach him, police pushed her back.

After the fatal incident, police took Hartley and Chinnor, who was wearing only a red T-shirt and his underwear, outside in the winter cold. Officers then drove Hartley to the 47th Precinct leaving her surviving grandson with a downstairs neighbor, Eric Dixon.

Malcolm came home at 3:30 p.m. to find her home cordoned off. Without telling her what had happened, police took her to the precinct. “They killed ’Marley!” Hartley yelled when she saw her daughter. Police then locked the elderly woman in a room and questioned her for hours.

“They interrogated my mom for seven hours trying to put words in her mouth,” said Malcolm in late March 2017, at one of the many press conferences she and her volunteer support team have arranged over the last five years. “She stood her ground, because she knows what she saw” (Marlowe and Myers 2-3).

… The officers insisted that Ramarley had thrown a gun out the window and tried to get her to agree. When she refused, Hartley says they called her a “fucking liar.” Malcolm demanded a lawyer be present, but police refused to release Hartley, even after Malcolm’s lawyer arrived at the station. In the end, police held Hartley for seven hours, she says. (The NYPD said it was closer to five and a half, but pledged to investigate Hartley’s treatment.)

Following the shooting, city officials, including then–police commissioner Ray Kelly, expressed a commitment to get to the bottom of what happened. Bill de Blasio, then the city’s public advocate, issued a statement. “We need answers and we need them quickly.” But those commitments did little to comfort Graham’s family. Hartley was treated for trauma at the hospital. Ramarley’s father, Frank Graham (who separated from Malcolm soon after Ramarley’s birth but lived in Harlem and remained close to his son), also went to the hospital when his blood pressure skyrocketed. That weekend, Malcolm couldn’t see her son’s body because it had been misidentified. The morgue didn’t find it until a State Assembly member intervened.

Meanwhile, the NYPD pushed its own version of the facts to the press. On the night of the shooting, a spokesman for the department told the New York Times that the teenager had been running from police into his home, though the surveillance camera clearly showed Ramarley walking into the house, and that there had been a struggle between Graham and Haste. The next day, a law-enforcement source told The Wall Street Journal that Graham had been arrested eight times (police documents list seven arrests). None of the arrests resulted in charges.

Horne, of course, couldn’t have known about Graham’s record when he saw the teenager leave the bodega. It stretched between June 2009 and October 2011 and included arrests for robbery, trespassing, disorderly conduct, possession of a weapon, burglary, and selling marijuana. Malcolm detailed a few of the arrests to me and chalked them up to misunderstandings: Friends had accused her son of stealing headphones; police thought he’d taken someone’s bike. Nor was Graham’s record unusual for the neighborhood during the height of the “stop and frisk” era: While black and Latino men between the ages of 14 and 24 made up 4.7 percent of the city’s population, they accounted for 41.6 percent of stops in 2011.

According to a former principal at Graham’s middle school, Ramarley had sought advice from teachers on how to avoid the rougher side of the neighborhood. But in ninth grade, he dropped out and began bouncing among odd jobs. His MySpace page featured crudely rendered street-gang logos and pictures of Graham and his friends posing with what looks like weed and what appears to be a handgun. When I asked Malcolm about the pictures, she had a blunt response: “Kids do stupid things.” But in the 47th Precinct, “stupid things” are considered evidence. Supportive officers sent Haste the webpage, ex post facto proof, they believed, that Graham had warranted suspicion. Malcolm wasn’t surprised. “This is what the NYPD does to justify what they did,” she said. When asked to describe the man her son was becoming, Malcolm paused. “He was 18,” she said. “He was just coming into himself when he died.”

Works cited:

Marlowe, Jen and Myers, Amy. “1 Teen, 6 Cops, 1 Bullet and 5 Years of a Black Family Screaming for Justice.” Colorlines, April 12, 2017. Net. https://www.colorlines.com/articles/1-teen-6-cops-1-bullet-and-5-years-black-family-screaming-justice

Walsh, James D. “The Bullet, the Cop, the Boy.” New York Magazine Intelligencer, June 2017. Net. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/06/ramarley-graham-nypd-shooting.html

White, Davon. “Ramarley Graham 1993-2012).” Blackpast, November 10, 2017. Net. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/graham-ramarley-1993-2012/

 

Bad Apples, January 1, 2009, Oscar Grant

On New Year's Day 2009, an Oakland police officer shot and killed an unarmed, pinned suspect. The officer, Johannes Mehserle, was arrested on murder charges on January 14th, 2009. The trial began on June 10, 2010. Here's what happened:

On January 1, 2009, at approximately 2 a.m., officers of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) responded to reports of a fight on an Oakland subway car. They detained approximately 20 passengers. One of the passengers, who witnesses say was not actually involved in the fight, was 22-year-old Oscar Grant.

Grant, a local grocery store butcher, and the father of a four-year-old girl were unarmed. He [Grant] approached police in what appeared to be a nonviolent manner and was backed against the wall. In one video, he can be seen kneeling and pleading with police for reasons that are not yet clear. Some eyewitnesses say that he had already begun asking police not to shoot him. Officers restrained Grant and pinned him, face down, on the pavement. It is not clear whether he was handcuffed at this point.

As shown in a widely disseminated cell phone video of the shooting, Grant was restrained by two officers. A third, 27-year-old Johannes Mehserle, then drew his service pistol and shot Grant fatally in the back (Head 1).

Mehserle was charged with murder, but maintained throughout his trial that he mistakenly grabbed his service weapon, not his Taser, as he was attempting to arrest Grant (Booker 2).

While there had been previous cases where police officers confused guns with Tasers, modern Tasers weigh half as much as handguns. The prosecution argued that the position of Mehserle's Taser "in relation to his duty weapon, combined with the different 'feel' and color of the two weapons made it highly unlikely that he would have mistaken one for the other". [Grant family attorney] Burris responded to claims of Taser confusion by arguing that video evidence did not support the idea of Taser confusion. In any event, he said, Mehserle had no reason to fire his Taser. Mehserle was wearing his Taser on the left side of his body (on the opposite side from which he wore his gun) – but set up for a cross-body, strong hand (right-hand) draw (Wikipedia 3).

His [Mehserle’s] trial was moved to Los Angeles where a jury convicted him of a lesser charge of involuntary manslaughter. As member station KQED reports, Mehserle, was convicted in 2010 and sentenced to a two-year prison term. However, he was released in 2011 after serving just 11 months.

Oscar Grant's name became a rallying cry and another example of excessive force by law enforcement against communities of color. Similar claims are being made at recent national protests sparked by the deaths of Black Americans [George] Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Elijah McClain and others this year.

A 2013 film, Fruitvale Station, based on Grant's final moments, helped introduce new audiences to his story. It won awards including the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival that year. (Booker 2).

Though initial protests on July 8, 2010, against the jury verdict were peacefully organized, after dark there were incidents of looting, arson, destruction of property, and small riots. Nearly 80 people were eventually arrested. On November 5, 2010, Mehserle was sentenced to two years, minus time served. He served his time in Los Angeles County Jail protective custody, held in a private cell for his safety. On June 13, 2011, Mehserle was released under parole after serving 11 months. Oakland civil rights attorney John Burns filed a $25 million wrongful death claim against BART on behalf of Grant's family. BART settled with Grant's daughter and mother for a total of $2.8 million in 2011. It also settled with several of Grant's friends who had sued for damages because of police brutality. A separate suit by Grant's father did not result in a jury award, as it was decided that due to his imprisonment he was not sufficiently involved in Grant's life (Wikipedia 2).

More than a decade after the BART police killing of Oscar Grant, the transit agency has released [in 2019] a long-sealed report on a shooting that shocked the Bay Area, led to a rare criminal conviction for an officer's use of force and heralded a national movement for police accountability.

The 94-page report released Tuesday shows that investigators questioned Officer Johannes Mehserle's explanation for the New Year's Day 2009 shooting — that he meant to draw a Taser, not his service firearm, before firing the round that killed Grant.

The document also lays much of the responsibility for the incident, which occurred after BART police responded to a report of a fight on a train, on a second BART officer — Anthony Pirone. The report says Pirone, who punched and kneed Grant after detaining him, "started a cascade of events that ultimately led to the shooting."

The report, completed by independent investigators hired by BART in July 2009, was released by the agency Tuesday [2019] under terms of SB 1421, California's new police transparency law.

Sections of the report relating to Mehserle were redacted, and investigators noted they had been unable to interview the officer.

But they wrote that videos of the Fruitvale Station incident showed Mehserle may have known he was drawing his firearm, not his Taser, before shooting Grant.

"Despite the inability to interview Officer Mehserle, the conclusion can be made from a close viewing of the enhanced video that he was intending to pull his firearm and not his Taser," the report says, noting that Mehserle repeatedly reached for his gun "and on the final occasion can be seen looking back at his hand on the gun/holster to watch the gun come out."

Mehserle fired a single round into Grant's back.

Just prior to the shooting, the 22-year-old Grant, face down on the station platform with Officer Pirone kneeling on his neck and head, had put both hands behind him "in a handcuffing position," the report says.

…

The report is unsparing in its criticism of Pirone's conduct in the chaotic 13 minutes before the shooting, saying the officer lied repeatedly to investigators about his actions.

The document says Pirone was the first BART officer on the southbound Fruitvale platform, responding to reports of a fight on a Dublin/Pleasanton train crowded with passengers returning from New Year's Eve festivities in San Francisco.

Witnesses would later describe Pirone to investigators as the "crazy cop," “very agitated," "harsh and unprofessional," and "not calm, not once."

Pirone left his partner, Officer Marysol Domenici, who was handling a separate issue at a station agent's booth, and climbed the stairs to the station platform about 2:04 a.m. He stopped three black men who'd just walked off the train, telling them either to "sit the fuck down" or "get on the fucking wall," according to what they told investigators.

When Domenici joined him, he told her to "watch these guys," while he ordered Grant over to the wall.

Pirone then got on the train to detain a passenger named Michael Greer. Witnesses described Pirone as loud, aggressive and profane, with one saying the officer yelled, "Get the fuck out of my car" before dragging Greer off the train and handcuffing him.

Grant, meanwhile, was telling his friends against the wall to "just be cool" and "be quiet — we’re going to go home tonight" as they argued with Domenici, according to Jack Bryson Jr., one of the detained men.

Pirone told investigators he saw Grant fighting with Domenici and that he rushed to help her.

"The video, however, shows a completely different story, one of Grant pushing his friends back from Domenici and no touching of her ever taking place," the report says.

When he reached Grant, Pirone told investigators they scuffled. But the report notes that video of the incident shows Pirone shoved Grant against the wall and punched him in the head and that Grant did not fight back.

"Pirone accomplished his apparent intended goal to have Grant sit down. Once down, Pirone kneed Grant in the face," the report says, calling the strike "punitive" and unjustified.

Pirone told investigators that Grant called him a "bitch-ass n-----" and that he responded by saying, "bitch-ass n-----, huh?"

"For a white law enforcement officer to utter the word 'n-----' to an African American male while detaining him in the tense racial atmosphere at the Fruitvale station undoubtedly contributed to the escalation of tensions," the report says. "The use of such a word diminished Officer Pirone and the BART PD."

At that point, the report says, Pirone and Mehserle began struggling to handcuff Grant.

Mehserle shoved Grant down, and Pirone put his knee on Grant's neck and head. The internal investigation found that Pirone's weight likely prevented Grant from getting his hands out from under his stomach to put them behind his back.

"When Pirone takes his weight off Grant, Grant immediately puts both hands behind his back for cuffing," the report says.

That's when Mehserle drew his gun and fired.

Nigel Bryson, one of the men detained along the wall, told investigators he heard the gunshot, then looked over to see Grant raise his head slightly and say, "You shot me" (Emslie and Brekke 1-3).

Here is a somewhat different account of the details of Pirone’s actions.

Leading up to the shooting, Grant was on the train and was recognized by his friend Katie, which in turn caused an enemy from a nearby gang to recognize Grant and proceed to fight him. However, some of the other passengers on the train, along with Grant's girlfriend Sophina, were able to break up the fight. Shortly afterward, the train conductor announced to the passengers that the police had been contacted and were on their way to the station at which they were stopped. As the passengers began to exit the train, Grant and his girlfriend saw the police walking towards them and split up. As they got closer to the train, police started to pick out people they believed to have been involved in the fight. Officer Pirone walked up to two African-American men and ripped the jacket off one. Pirone threw three people against the wall and then turned to the train, yelling for everyone involved in the fight to exit the train and come to him. Everyone remained on the train, so Officer Pirone walked into the train to see if there was anyone who looked as if they were involved in the fight. Pirone saw Grant dressed in an outfit similar to that worn by those who were sitting against the platform wall and therefore removed him (Wikipedia 1).

An investigation was conducted to determine whether any other officers should be disciplined. On January 12, investigation results were forwarded to the district attorney. The investigation, which interviewed seven police officers and 33 other witnesses, came to no conclusion and made no recommendations. The details were forwarded to Meyers Nave, an outside law firm, for an independent investigation. It was led by Jayne Williams, the former city attorney for San Leandro, and was estimated to cost $250,000. In August, the law firm provided two reports to BART but released only one publicly. The report said officers failed to follow recommended procedures, failed to work as a team, and had lapses in both tactical communication and leadership

KTVU broadcast cell-phone video that showed Pirone striking Grant, resulting in additional agency actions. BART General Manager Dorothy Dugger said a "rigorous" internal affairs investigation would be ordered. Later, an attorney, representing BART and referring to the same video, said that Grant provoked Pirone's blow by trying to knee Pirone at least twice, "It is our position that there was a provocation and assault on Mr. Pirone based upon a video that shows Mr. Grant apparently hitting Mr. Pirone with his knee." On September 22, KTVU reported that Meyers Nave, in its unreleased report, had recommended the termination of Tony Pirone and Marysol Domenici. After being on leave since the incident, Domenici was terminated on March 24, 2010. She was rehired the following December after labor arbitration settled in her favor. Pirone was terminated on April 21 after an internal investigation upheld a finding of misconduct against him. Like Domenici, Pirone later sought to be reinstated through arbitration. This is a process whereby the BART administration and BART police union elect a member of the police union to decide if the firing of Anthony Pirone was justified. This arbitration was delayed, as Pirone served a tour in Afghanistan in the US Army. When he returned, the arbitration was set to finish by the end of 2013, but was delayed until the end of 2014. In December 2014, BART spokesperson Alicia Trost told reporters that Pirone's arbitration was denied, and the arbitrator upheld the termination (Wikipedia 4).

In October [2020], Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley reopened the investigation into Anthony Pirone, a former BART officer who hauled Grant out of a train car and pinned his knee to Grant’s neck and back in a manner similar to that used in the death of George Floyd last year.

Grant’s family had sought criminal charges against Pirone for years and at a news conference Monday, his mother, the Rev. Wanda Johnson, continued her call for justice, the Bay Area News Group reported.

“My son laid on the cold concrete with that Officer Pirone’s knee on his neck. My son’s head was smashed against the wall and he was kicked and he was pushed. Pirone still walks around free today,” Johnson said.

In a 16-page memo, O’Malley … [ultimately concluded] that no matter how “offensive or unacceptable” Pirone’s conduct that night, he did not fire the gun that killed Grant and there is no evidence that he knew Mehserle would fire his gun, which Mehserle said at trial he thought was his Taser (AP 1-2).

“My heart hurts on today, because 12 years I've been crying out for justice for my son," said Rev. Wanda Johnson, Grant's mother, in a press conference Monday. "Let the district attorney do what is right and charge him for the acts that he committed that led up to my son's death."

…

"I want to say to you that when you sleep on tonight and you think about why we're standing here — why I'm standing here — it's because my son laid on the cold concrete with that officer Pirone's knee in his neck," Johnson said. "And he continued to say he couldn't breathe. My son's head was smashed against the wall and he was kicked and he was punched. And the officer, Pirone, still walks around free today."

…

"It can't be hard to see that he was treated not humanly. It couldn't be hard to hear that a racial epithet was used against him. And if you or I used those against someone, and a crime was committed, we would definitely be charged with the hate crime," Johnson said. "So I'm not asking anything different than what our United States Constitution says or what our laws say. I'm asking for him to be charged for his actions leading up to my son's death."

…

[O’Malley’s] decision also cites a recent California Supreme Court decision, saying in the report that “a non-killer participant in a crime cannot be held vicariously liable for any death that results from that crime” unless the participant knew beforehand that death would likely occur and “with a knowing and willful disregard of the likelihood that death would occur."

Grant’s family and their attorneys plan to keep meeting with O’Malley and pressing for criminal charges.

"We want you to know that the fight still goes on. We've been standing at these banks, as you know, for the last 12 years and we're not going anywhere," said Cephus "Uncle Bobby X" Johnson, Grant's uncle (Wiley 1-2).

Works cited:

Booker, Brakkton. “California District Attorney Says Probe Of Oscar Grant Killing Will Be Reopened.” NPR, October 6, 2020. Net. https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racial-justice/2020/10/06/920895464/california-district-attorney-says-probe-of-oscar-grant-killing-will-be-reopened

Emslie, Alex and Brekke, Dan. “BART Releases Report with New Details of Officers' Roles in Oscar Grant Killing.” KQED, May 1, 2019. Net. https://www.kqed.org/news/11744106/bart-releases-report-with-new-details-of-officers-roles-in-oscar-grant-killing

Head, Tom. “The Shooting Death of Oscar Grant.” ThoughtCo, Updated August 11, 2019. Net. https://www.thoughtco.com/shooting-death-of-oscar-grant-721526

“No Charges against 2nd Officer in 2009 Police Killing of Oscar Grant.” The Associated Press, January 11, 2021. Net. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/no-charges-against-2nd-officer-2009-police-killing-oscar-grant-n1253843

Wikipedia. “The Shooting of Oscar Grant.” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Net. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Oscar_Grant

Wiley, Michelle. “'Crying Out for Justice': Oscar Grant's Family Vows to Keep Fighting after DA Declines to File New Charges.” KQED, January 11. 2021. Net. https://www.kqed.org/news/11854829/crying-out-for-justice-oscar-grants-family-vows-to-keep-fighting-after-da-declines-to-file-new-charges