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How much force is too much?

By David Freedlander, amNewYork Staff Writer
More stories | dfreedlander@am-ny.com

November 14, 2007

Brooklyn teen with hairbrush fatally shot by NYPD

Calvin Hunt holds up a hair brush while speaking to the media the morning after an area youth was shot and killed by police November 13, 2007 in Brooklyn, New York. (Spencer Platt, Getty Images / November 13, 2007)

Troubled by the latest police shooting of an unarmed person, many New Yorkers wondered yesterday just what the line is between self-defense and excessive force

"There is a lack of accountability that gives officers in the street the feeling that it is OK to shoot first and ask questions later," said LaTanya White of the People's Justice Coalition, a grassroots group that monitors police brutality. "There is a disrespect for communities that are seen as not having political power or cache to defend themselves."

On Monday, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, 18-year-old Khiel Coppin confronted five police officers claiming that he had a gun hidden in his pants, according to police sources. The officers fired 20 times on the young man, who died at the scene. The object in his waistband was later discovered to have been a hairbrush. Coppin had a history of mental illness.

Some questioned why so many incidents of police officers firing on civilians, including last year's Sean Bell shooting, involved police officers firing on black males.

"A bear has a better chance of being tranquilized and returned to his native habitat than a young black man has of being subdued and given the help he needs," said Bruce Green, of the Central Brooklyn Anti-Violence Coalition, a neighborhood group that spent time with Coppin's family yesterday. "Not another mother should expect her child to be killed by an official who claims to represent the public."

Michael D. Lyman, an author of several textbooks on police procedure, said far more of the details of the incident would have to be known before conclusions could be drawn.

"The Supreme Court's standards are that an officer's actions must be objectively reasonable," he said. "You can't armchair the cases. You have to go with what the officers knew at the time."

About 100 other residents, lead by Calvin Hunt, who leads an activist group called People's Committee, marched in anger to the 79th Precinct, where three of the five officers involved in the shooting are assigned.

Hunt carried a hairbrush above his head.

"This is not a gun,'' he said. "What is this, a 45? This is a brush. You brush your hair with it."

"There are hundreds of thousands of interactions between police officers and civilians and incidents like these, as unfortunate as they are, are few and far between," said Al O'Leary, a spokesman for the city's Patrolmen's Benevolent Association. "NYPD [officers] are among the most restrained in the world when it comes to use of deadly force."