What Happened in Brooklyn?
Base10 doesn't know what to make of this. Police Officer Patrick Caprice was shot by a drug dealer in Brownsville last Wednesday. Later, when officers confronted the perp in his apartment, the perp, one David Redden, shot and killed himself. Caprice was saved by his vest and looks like he's going to be okay, but several news reports today indicate that Caprice's partner, PO Gilberto Marrero actually fled from the scene. Here's the article in NY1 and here's the account in the Post. Apparently caught on surveillance tape, Marrero ran from the scene without returning fire and waited for other units to arrive before doing anything. He did however call for help. Apparently, the incident was caught on video surveillance cameras, too.

I'd like to debunk some of the things in the Post article. A police "official" said that Marrero could lose his job due to "dereliction of duty." This official patently doesn't know what he is talking about. There is no charge for "dereliction of duty." While incidents lke this are rare, they have happened in the past. First, I'm not convinced thst Marrero was so at fault. The Post's unnamed official says,

While the wounded officer bravely gets up and returns fire, Marrero is seen running away several car lengths towards other officers who were responding to the scene of the shootout, the investigator said.

I don't think that runing several car lengths to take cover constitutes cowardice, but I haven't seen the tape. The thing that makes this most innapropriate is that the tape was leaked. An incident like this should never have made it to the press. Remember that this is the same pub lication that was ready to send Officer Richard Neri to jail when he accidentally shot a young man on the roof of a public housing development, A grand jury disagreed.

This particularly hits home with Base10. Brownsville was his old neat. And Base10 was inviolved in a fatal shooting there too. My partner and I confronted a group of men in the stairwell of a housing development when one of them turned and fired at me point-blank. I was able to return fire and hit him. At the end of the confrontation, the guy who shot at me was dead and I was not. Miraculously, he missed and I escaped with only powder burns on my face. I relate this event not to garner sympathy from my readers but rather to support Marrero.

Many people find it easy to judge others in this situation. I do not. Most of these people have not been in the situation themselves. I firmly believe that you have no idea how you will react in this situation until you are in it. If you thnk Marrero was such a coward, you had better hope that you never get your chance to prove youir bravery. You might not react quite as well as you hope.

There is another issue here as well. The Police Department simply does not train its members sufficiently in combat skills. You go to the range one a year and that's about it.

As for dereliction of duty, I'd like to see the "investigator" who leaked this tape brought up on charges of releasing information about pending investigations. There is a rule against that.
- posted by Base10 @ 6:38 PM