The Associated Press
BOSTON (AP) - A new Boston Police Department policy established after a young mother was fatally shot by a police officer has some asking if officers’ safety will be imperiled.
Commissioner Paul F. Evans on Monday announced that police could no longer shoot at a moving vehicle unless someone in the car has initiated a gun battle. The change came after Sunday’s fatal shooting of Eveline Barros-Cepeda, 25, who was in the backseat of a car that had allegedly run down an officer.
The existing policy allows officer to shoot if they have “no reasonable or apparent means of escape.”
The police administration must still work out the details, but the Boston Police Association wasted no time before offering its view.
“We feel that Paul Evans has opened the city to a criminal element that will utilize motor vehicles to commit various crimes,” the union said in a statement released Tuesday. “We feel this proposed change is shortsighted and a knee-jerk reaction to recent events.”
The policy changes had been in the works for months, Evans said.
An attorney for the officer allegedly hit, Michael Pallant, and his partner, Thomas Taylor Jr., who police said fired the fatal shots, said Taylor started shooting because he lost sight of his partner and feared he was pinned beneath the wheels of the car.
Attorney Thomas Dreschler called Evans’ decision “tasteless,” and said the officers felt like they had already been criticized.
“I think it’s a panic reaction to a shooting that was completely justified,” Dreschler told the Boston Herald. “It’s the basest form of pandering and showboating.”
Johnny Santiago, the brother of Nelson Santiago, who died at 39 in May as he allegedly tried to run down two officers in a stolen car, called the policy “a little late, but better late than never.”
While the policy sounds like a good idea, it should be debated, said Jose Barros, of the Cape Verdean Community Task Force.
“I think the police would accomplish much more if they just opened up to the community,” he said.
The president of the Boston Police Detectives Benevolent Society, Tom Montgomery, has requested a meeting with department heads, hoping to better define the policy.
“I’m quite certain the department would never say to an officer, ‘Don’t discharge your weapon, even if it means protecting your life or those around you,”’ Montgomery said. “When an officer discharges his firearm, he knows what the consequences are going to be.”
Barros-Cepeda was the eighth person killed by Boston police in the last 22 months, and the fourth this year. From 1995 to November 2000, officers killed six people.