By AL BAKER
Published: May 8, 2008


“Unfortunately,” he continued, “we are human beings who do make mistakes. We make them. There were mistakes in the Diallo and Bell shootings. But that doesn’t make the department murderous.”

He added: “We have to make split-second life-and-death decisions and sometimes we make the wrong ones.”

As the numbers have changed, so have the reports that have categorized and collected them. Inspector Cerar said that firearms statistics were first seriously compiled by the department beginning in 1971.

There is a marked shift in the way the data is presented, beginning in 1998. For instance, the reports in 1996 and 1997 include the race of the officer and the person who was shot, facts that do not appear in the 1998 report.

The 1996 and 1997 reports said that 89.4 percent of those shot by the police were black or Hispanic. The racial information has not been included since then.

Testifying before the City Council’s Public Safety Committee on Monday, Deputy Chief John P. Gerrish downplayed how much understanding could come from releasing details on race.

“Every firearms discharge must be judged in light of the unique circumstances in which it occurs, and any conclusion drawn from the purely demographic data involved is fatally flawed,” he said.



The individual reports also used to contain information on civilian bystanders unintentionally shot and killed or injured by the police, but that, too, disappeared. In 1996, no civilians were killed by police but five were injured, including one hit by a ricochet.

While officers hit their targets about a third of the time over all, far fewer bullets generally found their mark during gunfights. In 1999, only 13 percent of bullets fired during a gunfight were hits.

By contrast, in 2006, 30 percent of the shots fired during gunfights were hits, an unusually high percentage. That year, a total of 19 officers fired their weapons in 13 separate gunfights.

The 2006 report made it clear that even when officers did all the firing, they often faced a threat. In that year, in 47 shootings when only officers fired, a gun was pointed at them in 26 instances, and in 21 others “subjects were armed with weapons other than firearms.”

A parenthetical note breaks those 21 down: 6 cutting instruments, 6 motor vehicles, 4 miscellaneous weapons. Five others used “physical force/furtive movement,” the report said.

Christopher T. Dunn, the associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said that he considered the five cases citing “physical force/furtive movement” as the police shooting at an unarmed person. He said he counted about five similar cases in every year since 2002.

“That the number of shooting incidents is down since 1996 is good for everyone,” Mr. Dunn said. “At the same time, the likelihood that nearly everyone being shot at is black or Latino, and the fact that in most incidents only the police are shooting, raise serious concerns that were highlighted by the Bell and Diallo shootings.”

A year after the Bell shooting, the civil liberties group filed a request under the freedom of information law seeking the department’s annual discharge reports, as well as documents on the race of everyone the police fired upon. The department turned over the discharge reports in February, but denied the other request last month.

The civil liberties group said it wanted the data to better understand the role of race in police shootings, not as information to back up any lawsuit.

The report used to be called the “Firearms Discharge Assault Report.” In 1996, it noted that 76 officers were fired upon, in 42 shootings, and did not return fire. In 1999, the title changed to “Firearms Discharge Report,” and the “assault against officers” category was eliminated.

Inspector Cerar said that that data should have continued to be reported.

In the 1996 report, there were 22 reasons given for the accidental discharges, including: struggling with a perpetrator (13); tripping, falling, slipping or running (10); unloading or cleaning a gun (7); removing a weapon from its holster (2); attempting to clear a jam (1); an officer startled (1). Officer Aguirre, the spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Police Department, said it produces an annual Officer Involved Shooting Report that is similar to the one in New York. “We do all the analyses,” she said, “It is quite extensive.”

She said that parts of the report are not made public. She said that the chief, William J. Bratton — a former New York police commissioner — instituted a policy under which he receives a report within 72 hours of each shooting about what occurred, with an eye toward making tactical improvements or modifying training.

Jo Craven McGinty contributed reporting.

My Commentary: Hits Count. The bottom line is the bottom line.