Mayor Eric Adams on Tuesday continued to praise two NYPD officers behind a police shooting on a Brooklyn subway platform last week that left four people, including one of the cops involved, injured.
Hizzoner also blasted those who have been critical of the officers’ actions following the release of body camera footage of the incident last Friday that somewhat contradicted the NYPD’s original narrative of how the incident unfolded.
The bodycam video shows that the two cops shot 37-year-old Derell Mickles multiple times after they pursued him on Sept. 15 for entering the Sutter Avenue subway station in Brooklyn without allegedly paying the $2.90 fare and refusing to drop a knife. But the incident also resulted in one of the officers and two bystanders getting shot, leaving one man — 49-year-old Gregory Delpeche — with brain damage.
Adams continued to broadly defend the officers’ handling of the incident during his weekly news conference on Tuesday and instead took aim at their critics.
“It is very easy to look back and look at the video, where you can hit pause, you can hit stop, you can hit delay, you can go and get something out of the kitchen and come back and look at it again. That’s not real life,” Adams said. “The person who had the knife ran towards the police officer, those officers, several times, attempted to say ‘drop the knife, drop the knife, drop the knife.'”
While NYPD brass and the mayor have continued to insist that the officers showed “restraint” in only shooting Mickles when he charged at them — and after they failed to talk him down and subdue him using their Tasers — the edited body-camera video tells a slightly different story.
It shows that although Mickles did refuse to drop the knife and briefly charged at one of the officers, they shot him at a moment when he was standing still with his arms at his sides and his back against the train.
In light of the footage, police reform advocates have charged that Mickles did not pose a threat at the moment of the shooting, which, they argue, could have been avoided.
Still, Mayor Adams insisted that the cops “did what they were trained to do” by using their tasers, which did not appear to have an effect on Mickles, before using their firearms. He added that they did their job by stopping Mickles, who has an extensive wrap sheet, from hurting anyone with the knife.
“This is a person that has been arrested over 20 times that we could talk of,” Adams said. “He had a clear mission to carry out a violent act. And I thank God that those officers took the necessary precautions.”
Mickles pleaded not guilty from his hospital bed on Friday morning to charges including attempted aggravated assault on a police officer, possession of a weapon and skipping his subway fare.
Backlash over the NYPD’s handling of the shooting has only intensified since the body camera footage was released.
Shortly after the video came out on Sept. 20, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams slammed the mayor’s comments that the officers handled the situation with restraint. He argued that Adams choosing to laud rather than condemn the officers’ handling of the situation amounts to poor leadership.
“He continues to fail when leadership is desperately needed and should be utterly ashamed of those comments,” Williams said in a statement. “Our police are often asked to do too much in difficult conditions. They need leaders who will be clear when something clearly went wrong. This was a blatant disregard for the life of this community, and officers growing ‘impatient’ is not a valid reason to use deadly force.”
