Vol. 80/No. 8 February 29, 2016
(front page)
NY cop convicted for killing Akai Gurley in Brooklyn
The case marks the first time in over a decade that a New York Police Department cop was convicted in a shooting.
On the evening of Nov. 20, 2014, Liang and his partner, Shaun Landau, were conducting so-called vertical patrols, where they walk the stairways and the roof, in the Louis Pink Houses in the East New York neighborhood. As the cops entered the eighth floor stairwell, Gurley and his friend Melissa Butler, both of whom are African-American, began walking down the stairs a floor below, as the elevator wasn’t working.
Liang, holding his gun in his left hand and a flashlight in the right, fired off a shot that ricocheted off the wall, hitting Gurley in the chest. Gurley, father of a 2-year-old girl, went down two more flights before collapsing.
Neither officer made any effort to provide medical assistance and didn’t call for help for at least four minutes. Butler testified that while she knelt in a pool of blood trying to resuscitate Gurley, the officers came by, stopped briefly, and then just went on down the stairs.
A lawyer for Kimberly Ballinger, the mother of Gurley’s child, is asking the NYPD inspector general to investigate whether the Police Academy provided inadequate CPR training. Three cops, including Liang, testified at the trial that they were unprepared. Liang said his academy instructor gave the class the answers to almost the entire CPR exam.
Liang, a “rookie” who’d been on the police force for 18 months, claimed at the trial that his finger was on the side of his drawn pistol as he entered the stairwell and it went off accidentally. But to fire the 9 mm handguns the cops were using takes more than 11 pounds of force on the trigger, NYPD firearms expert Detective Mark Acevedo testified.
The conviction “was right because it will make other cops think twice before they shoot anyone,” a young woman who lives in the building where Gurley was killed and asked that her name not be used told the Militant Feb. 14. She said the cops had started the building patrols a couple months before Gurley was killed and then stopped immediately after.
“Frankly, they made the cop into a scapegoat. He was a rookie, scared,” said Rodney King, a 48-year-old maintenance worker who lives in Pink Houses. “He was a scapegoat for all those other cases where the cops killed people, but nothing was done. It’s good that people are speaking out about police brutality.”
“Wow, I am happy for [Gurley’s] family,” Esaw Garner, widow of Eric Garner, told the New York Daily News after the verdict was announced. Four months before Gurley’s death, cop Daniel Pantaleo killed Eric Garner in Staten Island in a chokehold. But in that case no charges were brought against the cop.
Both Liang and Landau were fired after the trial. Liang faces up to 15 years in prison, with sentencing set for April 14. His attorneys said they will appeal.
Seth Galinsky and Lea Sherman contributed to this article.
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