Governor Paterson to Set Up Task Force on Shootings Among Police Officers - NYTimes.com

Governor Paterson to Set Up Task Force on Shootings Among Police Officers - NYTimes.com

The race card is being played again in the worst forum possible.

Gov. David A. Paterson said Friday that he would convene a task force to study shootings among police officers in New York State in light of the killing of an off-duty officer by a fellow officer in Harlem last week.

After meeting with several black elected officials and community leaders, including the Rev. Al Sharpton and Malcolm A. Smith of Queens, the State Senate majority leader, the governor held a news conference outside his Midtown office and said the task force would explore whether such shootings had disproportionately affected black and Latino officers. The officer who was killed, Omar J. Edwards, was black; the officer who shot him, Andrew P. Dunton, is white.

“We tried to have an honest and open discussion today about what seems to be a number of incidents that have occurred seldomly, but within that framework, a high percentage of African-American and Hispanic police officers who were shot either on or off duty by friendly fire,” the governor said.

Paul J. Browne, the New York Police Department’s chief spokesman, said, “We’ll provide whatever assistance the governor needs.” He also disseminated a list of 10 police officers shot and killed by colleagues in cases of mistaken identity since 1930, and said they included five who were white, four who were black and one who was Hispanic. The list did not include Desmond Robinson, a black undercover transit officer who survived being shot by a fellow officer in a subway station in 1994. Nor did it include a 1992 case in which three white officers were wounded by police bullets in East Harlem.

Mr. Sharpton and others have called for the appointment of a special prosecutor to look into Officer Edwards’s death. The governor said that he would not “close the door” to such a move but that for now he was comfortable having Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly and the Manhattan district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, investigate it.

Mr. Paterson said, “We are handling this sensitively; there may be issues that involve race.” He added, “We’re not discussing any institutional or direct racism.”

The governor continued: “These are problems that may be caused by perception. We’re all aware of the comments made very honestly and very heroically about a decade ago by Rev. Jesse Jackson: He was walking down a street in Chicago, heard footsteps behind him, turned and observed a number of African-American youth and that that frightened him.

“All of us tend to be frightened by circumstances to which we are not normally familiar.”

On Friday, the Police Department, which began conducting refresher training this week on how to avoid such confrontations, disclosed several other steps it was taking in a memorandum from Mr. Kelly to elected officials like State Senators Eric Adams and José M. Serrano, Senator Smith and Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker. They included a study of whether police handguns could be fitted with electronic identification equipment that would tell other officers that a fellow officer was nearby.

Officials found two futuristic-sounding things that piqued their interest: research by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory on outfitting police equipment with radio frequency tags; and a patent under consideration that would join “emitter-detector signal technology” with the mechanical operations of firearms, according to a departmental memo on the topic that was made public on Friday.

“These are in the very preliminary stages; there’s nothing in development,” Mr. Browne said. “These are just research ideas that are being explored, and we want to encourage it and see what might be possible.”

The May 28 shooting underscored the problems of officers of different units — and particularly those in plain clothes — colliding in heightened street situations. According to officials, Officer Edwards was off duty and in civilian clothes, chasing a man he believed had just broken into his car, when a team of plainclothes officers from an anticrime unit in the 25th Precinct saw him running with his gun drawn, and confronted him.

In a matter of seconds, one of the anticrime officers, Officer Dunton, shouted a command at Officer Edwards, then opened fire, striking him three times and killing him, officials said. Officer Edwards was 25; his funeral was Thursday in Brooklyn.

The man Officer Edwards was chasing, Migueal Goitia, 42, was charged with the car break-in. In an interview at Rikers Island on Friday, Mr. Goitia said that he had been kicked and punched by jail guards who blamed him for the death of a police officer.

A spokesman for the Department of Correction, Steven Morello, said that Mr. Goitia had made no such complaint to authorities but that the agency had begun an investigation.

Mr. Kelly’s memorandum also said the department would evaluate recent academic research “regarding perception and bias in police decisions to shoot.” The department will also have all anticrime unit officers familiarize themselves with colleagues in areas where they are assigned to work by visiting station houses at roll calls to introduce themselves.

While the department has expressed interest in technology like electronic handgun identification, Geoffrey L. Harvey, a spokesman for the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, which is part of the United States Energy Department, said the “radio frequency identification tagging technology is probably not very well suited to use in a police department scenario.”

The tagging technology is as simple as placing an encoded electronic strip on an item, he said. But for such technology to be useful for officers in life-and-death situations on the street, the data being sent or received would have to be very specific as to location and transmitted quickly, he said.