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Another police shooting If You Had a Hammer...By Rick Horowitz You live, you learn. You pay attention, you learn even more. Which is why I've been learning all sorts of things lately from our friends in law enforcement. I've been learning from the FBI, for instance, how important it is to have a really good filing system. If you don't have a really good filing system, important information -- even crucial evidence -- can drop out of sight for years and years. That could be really embarrassing; some federal marshals could just show up at your door someday and start grabbing things. And now I'm learning from the NYPD how dangerous a hammer can be. I never realized it before. But thanks to the NYPD, now I know. Exactly how dangerous can a hammer be? Extremely dangerous. Just ask Gidone Busch. Actually, you can't ask Gidone Busch. He's dead. He was holding the hammer. "New York's finest" shot him down. [Insert requisite paragraph here about how police work is hazardous work, how police officers put their lives at risk on a daily basis, how they have to make split-second judgments under enormous pressure, how the "thin blue line" is all that stands between law-abiding citizens and the utter breakdown of society as we know it. Now back to our latest botched police operation.] Gidone Busch was a mentally disturbed man who lived in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn. When police responded to the 911 call the other evening, a man had been reported on the street at Busch's address, menacing children. Two officers went to Busch's basement apartment to question him; they found Busch and another man (no children, apparently), and Busch waved a hammer at them. The officers then called for backup from the Emergency Services Unit -- they're trained to deal with this kind of situation -- but before Emergency Services got to the scene, two more officers arrived, and then two more. That made six. Gidone Busch had a hammer. Apparently the police were outnumbered. They say Busch came at them, swinging his hammer and screaming. As they tried to back out of his apartment, one of the officers squirted him with pepper spray, hoping to subdue him. It didn't work; in fact, it only made him angrier. Then the officer who was using the pepper spray tripped and fell, and another officer stepped between Busch and the officer on the floor. Busch started hitting this second officer with the hammer, and the second officer fell down, too. Drop the hammer, the police ordered. He didn't drop the hammer. Twelve bullets later, Gidone Busch was dead. Bullets to his heart, his lungs, his liver, his intestines. The whole thing -- from call to confrontation to killing -- took less than ten minutes. "A claw hammer is a very dangerous instrument," the Police Commissioner declared after the shooting was over and the protests were just beginning. This was news to me. I mean, you always hear about police raining bullets down on somebody because they believed -- or so they later claim -- that the somebody was reaching for a gun, even if it actually turns out to be a wallet, or a cell phone, or even if he had nothing on him at all beyond a certain attitude or a swarthy skin tone. People with swarthy skin tones seem to do particularly poorly in these kinds of encounters -- who knows why? But this was a white man -- a deranged white man, but a white man nonetheless -- and the police knew right from the get-go that it wasn't a gun he was waving. They put 12 bullets in him anyway. They didn't try to gang-tackle him. They didn't try to throw a net over him. They didn't fire a warning shot. They put 12 bullets in him. Call them equal-opportunity overreactors. "When you are being attacked with a claw hammer" -- this was the Police Commissioner again -- "you are in deadly fear of your life." I'd never thought of it quite that way before. "And this isn't the movies," the Commissioner insisted. "You don't shoot hammers out of hands, you don't shoot people in the leg." Apparently not. Apparently you don't even try. I'm learning things all the time. Posted
9/4/99. And you're learning where to go for fresh stuff twice weekly!
(Hint: It's Rick's.)
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Rick Horowitz