Times-Picayune (New Orleans)
By Bruce Nolan, Staff writer
Police Superintendent Warren Riley maintained Wednesday that police officers followed their training when they fatally shot an agitated mental patient waving a knife Monday on St. Charles Avenue, but the incident has opened a debate on whether officers should have behaved less aggressively and had more than pepper spray at their disposal before resorting to gunfire.
A preliminary investigation indicates 16 officers acted “professionally and patiently” when they partly encircled 38-year-old Anthony Hayes, a 6-foot-2, 250-pound mental patient waving a 3-inch knife on St. Charles Avenue near Felicity Street at midafternoon, Riley said.
A scene captured on videotape and replayed countless times across the country shows Hayes backpedaling slowly up the avenue, with more than a dozen officers aiming their guns at him and ordering him to drop the knife. The shooting was not captured on tape.
Officers used pepper spray on Hayes to no effect. When Lt. Billy Ceravola, the ranking officer on the scene, approached to within six or eight feet to urge Hayes to surrender, he cocked his knife arm as if to stab Ceravola, Riley said.
He said three officers fired nine rounds, killing Hayes at the scene. Two of the three were seasoned sergeants, he said.
Family members have said Hayes, 38, suffered from schizophrenia. Merchants up and down the street said they often saw Hayes talking to himself, although he had never before menaced anyone.
The incident began when Hayes allegedly struck a store manager after an electronic reader declined to accept his credit card.
Riley said preliminary accounts indicate that all the officers followed their training and proper procedures in the incident, which lasted three or three and a half minutes.
Riley said that in trying to form a human crescent around Hayes they were attempting to seal him off so he could not grab a bystander.
“Imagine a citizen being taken in that situation when you have 16 police officers around. Then what kind of department would we be?” asked Riley. “If you look it tactically, it was sound.”
Riley said the officers at first did not recognize that Hayes was mentally ill, and in any case the incident was over before they could call a special crisis unit that deals with mentally ill people.
In addition, because Hayes had not barricaded himself or taken a hostage, circumstances did not call for the SWAT team, with its special weapons and training, he said.
Riley said the investigation will continue and the department will mine the incident for lessons for the future.
Shooting sparks debate
The incident, however, has opened debate whether officers should have managed the situation differently early on, or been equipped with other nonlethal weapons, such as beanbag guns or stun guns, that might have safely subdued Hayes.
Experts who study episodes in which officers fire their weapons say the incidents are often foreordained by police choices made early, so that events unwind to an inevitable conclusion.
Peter Scharf, a criminologist at the University of New Orleans who declined to judge the particulars of the Monday incident, described such shootings as “justified but unnecessary.”
“What troubles me is that New Orleans has a relatively high number of cases of use of deadly force going back several years, while deadly force has been halved by most departments over the last 15 years. This issue of managing these encounters so you avoid deadly force is something Warren (Riley) and others have to be worried about,” he said.
“The wisdom of the profession is that you want to avert incidents like these by managing them better at the outset, and by deploying specially trained people and special technologies” such as stun guns, beanbag guns and even nets that can prevent a fatal shooting, he said.
Scharf said for decades, police shootings of African-Americans have been the most incendiary events in American cities. In addition, “about 40 percent of the time that police chiefs leave their jobs it’s because of inappropriate use of deadly force. It’s one of the most destabilizing things a department can face.”
Widespread community outcry has suggested that police could have shot Hayes in the legs to disable him when he lunged at Ceravola. But even some skeptics of the police -- as well as Riley -- dismissed that as unwise and dangerous.
“If you shoot the guy in thigh, he can still lunge forward and you’re dead,” said Raphael Goyeneche of the watchdog Metropolitan Crime Commission, who was critical of other aspects of the incident. “They’re trained to shoot for the biggest target, and that’s the torso.”
Instead, Goyeneche said the department must re-examine its policies and tools for handling incidents like Monday’s.
Goyeneche said it’s worth investigating whether police should be trained to try to slow such an incident down and isolate a subject like Hayes without approaching him to provoke a lethal confrontation. “You need to contain him, to buy time for SWAT or canine teams,” Goyeneche said. “Using deadly force is the last resort. It gives an unacceptable outcome.”
In Monday’s incident, “we went straight from pepper spray to lethal force,” indicating a shortage of options that other police departments use, he said.
Few stun guns deployed
Like other departments, New Orleans police use electric stun guns to immobilize aggressive suspects, but they are confined to specially trained officers on the SWAT team. No one at the scene had one, Riley said.
Riley said he has monitored the use of stun guns by other departments and remains unconvinced they should be in widespread use.
He cited “hundreds” of deaths in which suspects with drug histories, heart conditions and other complications have died after being shocked. Across the country, police use them not only when their lives are in danger, but to control unruly or aggressive suspects.
Such guns are indeed controversial. To many, they smack of unusual and deliberate cruelty. And while they are in use by an estimated 7,000 departments, most have chosen to introduce them carefully, giving them first only to specially trained officers in SWAT-like units, said Al Arena, who studied the issue for the International Association of Police Chiefs. The agency recommends neither for nor against the weapons, he said.
Amnesty International has been among the fiercest critics of stun guns. A report last year said 72 people died after being shocked, many in situations in which an officer was not defending his life.
But such guns are “clearly effective,” said Dennis McBride, president of the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, which advises the federal government on technology issues. McBride favors their widespread deployment on police forces.
“Let me tell you the debate-settling fact: In the 1990s law enforcement began buying stun guns. After conservatively 100,000 uses, Amnesty International has gone through all the case files and found cases where 72 people died. You do the math. That’s something like 99.99 percent effective.”
“If we don’t want to give them to everybody on the force, why can’t we give them to sergeants and lieutenants who’d also have special training?” Goyeneche said.
Policy review urged
More broadly, the department ought to review policy and training with an eye to developing a different doctrine for handling similar situations,” Goyeneche said.
“Maybe we should have a policy that immediately has a SWAT team rolling. Or stall for time. Or have (stun guns) and beanbags available to sergeants and lieutenants who get there quicker than SWAT teams and have weapons short of firearms.
“This isn’t just pie in the sky,” he said. “Other departments have policies in place and recognize the benefits.”
Copyright © 2005 LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Terms and Conditions Privacy Policy