By Shaila K. Dewan And Oren Yaniv, The New York Times
The head of the New York City police union said yesterday that politics and emotion were forcing a rush to judgment in the case of a police officer who fatally shot an unarmed teenager last weekend.
At a news conference, the union president, Patrick J. Lynch, repeated his earlier charge that Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly had been “absolutely wrong” to announce, only hours after the shooting on the roof of a Brooklyn housing project, that there had apparently been no justification for it.
“The one person who knows what happened on that roof, the police officer involved, has not had the opportunity to be interviewed by the district attorney’s office as of yet,” Mr. Lynch said.
The chief spokesman for the Police Department, Paul J. Browne, said that Mr. Kelly’s response was not influenced by politics, and that the commissioner routinely offered public assessments of police shootings before the officers involved had been interviewed. Most often, Mr. Browne said, the shootings appeared justified and the union did not protest.
“He tends to call it as he sees it,” Mr. Browne said of the commissioner. “And qualifies it, as he did in this instance, that these are preliminary.”
Asked about Mr. Lynch’s criticisms, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said: “I think in this case it looked to us pretty obvious that a tragedy occurred, that there was no justification for that we could see at the time, and the public has a right to know.
I don’t think there’s anybody that has been more a protector of the world’s greatest police department than this administration.”
Although Mr. Lynch, the union president, spoke in the lobby of the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, he said he did not think the district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, had acted improperly in the case. “We want to ensure that the district attorney treats this case fairly,” Mr. Lynch said, before meeting with Mr. Hynes.
Mr. Hynes’s office has indicated that he will most likely ask a grand jury to return an indictment of criminally negligent homicide or second-degree manslaughter against the officer, Richard S. Neri Jr., who shot Timothy Stansbury Jr., 19, while patrolling the roof of the Louis Armstrong Houses in Bedford-Stuyvesant at night. Mr. Stansbury and two friends had been about to exit the door to the roof when Officer Neri and his partner opened it to check the stairwell, witnesses have said. No words were exchanged between the officers and the youths before Officer Neri fired.
Mr. Stansbury’s friends and Officer Neri’s partner have all spoken to the authorities. It is not likely, however, that prosecutors will have any opportunity to interview Officer Neri. His lawyer, Stuart London, said he would probably have his client speak directly to the grand jury, if at all. As is routine in such cases, the district attorney has asked the Police Department not to interview Officer Neri, to avoid giving the officer immunity against a possible charge.
Yesterday, detectives continued to canvass the housing project, and Mr. Hynes said that the police Internal Affairs Bureau had identified a new witness. The witness did not see the shooting, the police said, but had information relevant to the case.
In the morning, about 20 people demonstrated at the housing project where the shooting occurred, saying that Officer Neri should go to prison. Irene Clayburne, 73, Mr. Stansbury’s grandmother, carried a placard that said, “The charge is murder.”