Police officer Jason Rivera, 22, had only been on the NYPD since November, 2020. Barely enough time to scuff his service belt. Lashawn McNeil, 47, shot him and killed him. The first question was why, and it took reading through 12 insipid paragraphs in the New York Times to find out.
Three officers answered a 911 call from a woman who said she was fighting with her son. When the officers arrived at the apartment, they were met by the woman and a second son. There was no indication from the 911 call, officials said, that there were weapons in the apartment.
The woman told the officers that the son she had been fighting with was in a back bedroom at the end of a long, narrow hallway. Two of the officers approached the bedroom, and as they did, the door swung open, and Mr. McNeil began firing. After shooting the two officers, he tried to leave the apartment and was shot by the third officer.
That there was a domestic dispute between a mother and her son, no mention of weapons, is the sort of call that would have arguably have been diverted from police to an alternative response, such as a team of social workers. In some instances, this would be hailed as a far more effective alternative than sending in police with guns, prone to dealing with conflict with force, and too often resulting in violence and tragedy that could have been averted.
Tragedy happened this time, but not the tragedy the reform narratives fear. McNeil didn’t give the officers a chance to talk, whether to escalate or de-escalate. He fired first and killed one cop and critically wounded another. Only after that did a third take McNeil down. Frankly, it could have been three cops down given the way NYPD cops tend to aim.
Had a team of social workers been sent instead, would we have had a dead social worker, another critically wounded, and then no one to stop McNeil once the shooting started? Would the third social worker be dead as well as McNeil’s mother? Since this didn’t happen, it’s purely speculative to suggest how this would have gone had the people entering the apartment at the putative request of Mother McNeil to assist not worn badges and guns. Maybe McNeil wouldn’t have fired at all, seeing no threat from social workers.
But maybe he would. Maybe the team of well-intended helpers, there not to arrest McNeil but to help him through whatever crisis he was having that caused him to create sufficient concern in his own mother that a call was placed to 911, wouldn’t have ended in death. Maybe. But maybe is doing a lot of work here.
It’s entirely understandable why people seek to avoid escalating situations that are already so tense as to compel a person to seek police intervention. Nobody wanted McNeil to die that day. Presumably, his mother wanted protection from her son, help ending the dispute, but not her son’s death or arrest. When the cops responded to the dispatcher’s call of a domestic dispute, they didn’t think to themselves that this was a cool chance to shoot somebody. Domestic disputes are remarkably common, and most are just screaming matches, maybe some pushing and shoving, that require an outside third party to cool the participants down. Then life goes on.
Life didn’t go on here for Officer Rivera. Had it been an alternative response team, as the 911 call appeared to warrant if that were an option in New York City, it very well might be a social worker or three in the morgue. The tendency to have facile arguments where every reform idea works out for the best and never goes south, never ends up with the dead guy not being the one intended to be saved by the narrative obscures the difficulty, the confusion, the many ways a scenario can play out.
This isn’t to say that options like alternatives to cops aren’t worthy of consideration or implementation, but that the day will come when another McNeil guns them down before they ever have the chance to explain to him how emphatic they are with his oppression. But that day wasn’t yesterday, when the person murdered was a young police officer named Jason Rivera, who did nothing more than his job. May he rest in peace.
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When army of occupation policing is used against certain communities some members of those communities see it as less humiliating to shoot at the police thus making their own death inevitable than to subm.t to arrest. It is a pride thing. In Israeli occupied Palestine we see Palestinians futiley attacking armed Israeli soldiers with knives knowing that they will not succeed and that they will be shot dead. It is a way of saying “WE REALLY REALLY TRULY HATE YOU, WE DO NOT SUBMIT”.
Carlyle, I’m so glad you wrote. I know just what you mean! A story.
When I was a kid, the ice cream man would come down the street in his truck. I really wanted the ice cream, but I couldn’t go near the truck. It was the bells. The bells just kept making that noise. The noise hit me right in the kidney and did stuff to the cells. Whatever the stuff was, it ran into my jeans and in my knee. But I didn’t feel it in my knee because it suddenly ran up my spine and in my ear. But it didn’t stay there because it was a real short way to my brain cells. Well, not really the cells. IT WAS THE SPACE BETWEEN THE CELLS. The space exploded and it hurt. It still hurts. I want the space to stop hurting.
I feel like we’re twins. I hope you can help. What can I do to fix the space between my brain cells?
I think SHG could write an article about a baseball game and Carlyle would find a way to make it about Israel.
I am using Israel as an example. Israe’s version of army of occupation policing is in fact army of occupation policing but US policing of minority neighbourhoods has similarities and the attitudes of some minority nominal citizens is similar to that of Palestinians who take a knife to a gun fight.
These people feel humiliated if they fail to attack and do not care that it will certainly get them killed. Making a point of how much they hate cops/Israelis is all that matters
Sounds like some assumptions are being made about this being a representative situation for a particular demographic. Was there a giveaway for you?
I am not saying all Blacks/Hispanics hate police so much that they would prefer to start a gunfight than risk interacting with them but certainly there are some that do. My point is that poisonous relationships between communities and the police mean that there are more of them.
The worst bigots don’t say “all,” but some people’s first response will be to explain the behavior in racial terms to bolster a narrative.
Many social workers wouldn’t go near that scenario. Maybe a new classification; do gooders. They can be trained for 6 months and sent to incidents such as this.
I’m being a smart ass or maybe I’m being ignorant. But eventually no one, not cops or social workers are going to respond to these situations until it’s too late.
Here in the flats, the presence of weapons would be assumed. Domestic calls are among the least favorite of police everywhere. Officers are likely to be in danger, and also to be criticized if they use any force.
“Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.” ― John Donne, Meditation XVII
You were going well until this line of rubbish-
“Had a team of social workers been sent instead, would we have had a dead social worker, another critically wounded, and then no one to stop McNeil once the shooting started? ”
Social workers are not cops. Send in a woman and a man, they chat to the Mum, the woman goes down the hall asking “Mr Son, do you want to come and chat to your Mum about this?”..
Why would he shoot her? I put it to you there is every reason he wouldn’t- not a cop, no gun, no uniform, a woman, someone who wants to talk and not arrest him… Just no comparison at all!
Unless American social workers are indistinguishable from their cops.
This weird thing happens with non-lawyers, where they indulge in some fantasy scenario where everything goes swell, nothing goes wrong and it seems as if the magic solution is obvious. Lawyers come to realize nothing ever happens quite as fabulously as it does in these fantasies.
Here in Baltimore 3 unarmed non-uniformed violence interrupters have been shot and killed in the last year, 2 of them trying to resolve disputes. They don’t even have the state imprimatur that social workers have. Social workers can take your kids away.
My agency hadn’t put in an alternative responder program at the time of retirement, but for us I doubt that a mental health team would have been sent to a domestic dispute. We always found domestic disputes to be among the most volatile situations, with or without violence or weapons. We might have made an effort to sent officers trained in crisis intervention, particularly if there was any indication of mental health issues. I know that there are different proposals in different areas, and don’t know what might have been suggested for the NYPD.
The article I read in the NY Post said that the caller didn’t mention weapons or injuries, but didn’t say whether or not she was asked about them or about any violence or the subject’s mental health history. If she was not asked all of these question, the call taker should lose their job.