Photo Raises Doubts About Police Shooting of Jermaine McBean - NBC News
After Florida police shot Jermaine McBean to death as he walked home with an unloaded air rifle, they said there was no reason to believe he did not hear their orders to drop the weapon and that he pointed it at them.
But a newly emerged photo that shows headphones in McBean's ears immediately after the 2013 shooting raises questions about the police version of events, including why the white earbuds were later found stuffed in the dead computer expert's pocket.
And another aspect of the police account is also being contradicted — by a man who called 911 in alarm when he saw McBean walking around with the air rifle but who also says McBean never pointed it at police or anyone else.
Michael Russell McCarthy, 58, told NBC News that McBean had the Winchester Model 1000 Air Rifle balanced on his shoulders behind his neck, with his hand over both ends, and was turning around to face police when one officer began shooting.
"He [McBean] couldn't have fired that gun from the position he was in. There was no possible way of firing it and at the same time hitting something," McCarthy said. "I kind of blame myself, because if I hadn't called it might not have happened."
Nearly two years later, the shooting is still the subject of an "active investigation" by prosecutors. McBean's family filed a wrongful death and misconduct lawsuit against the sheriff's office several weeks ago.
Their attorney, civil rights lawyer David Schoen, says the photo of McBean with the headphones — which he provided to NBC News — is evidence of a "coverup."
The witness who took it, a nurse who asked to remain anonymous, says she pointed out the earbuds to police at the scene, after they rebuffed her offer to provide first aid to the dying man.
A transcript shows that Deputy Peter Peraza, who fired the fatal shots, repeatedly told sheriff's investigators that he did not see anything in McBean's ears.
And the homicide detective who led an internal review told McBean's relatives in an email that officers on the scene "confirmed" he was not wearing a earpiece — after the family explained that he always had them on when he was out walking. The detective said the buds were found in his pocket, with his phone, at the hospital.
"I was highly upset," McBean's mother, Jennifer Young, said of the moment she learned about the photo. "I said, 'They lied to me. What else have they lied about?'"
The Broward Sheriff's office declined to comment on the lawsuit, the investigation and its decision to give Peraza a commendation three months after the shooting.
A spokesman for the Broward State's Attorney's Office, Ron Ishoy, said there is an "active investigaton" that will be presented to a grand jury and declined to answer questions about the photo or McCarthy's account.
The union lawyer who represented Peraza when he gave a statement to homicide Detective Efrain Torres did not respond to requests for comment.
In his videotaped statement to homicide investigators, Peraza said that he fired his service weapon after McBean "pulled the weapon up over his head and grabbed it and started to turn and point it at us."
"I felt like my life was threatened. I had that feeling like if I would not go home that day," said Peraza, who has been on the force for 14 years but spent a decade of that working in the detention center.
"I felt like I could've been killed. My sergeant could've been killed. He could've shot somebody in the pool area. So as soon as he did turn and point his weapon at us, that's when I fired my duty weapon."
Another officer at the scene, Sgt. Richard Lacerra, told investigators that McBean "spun around" and brought the rifle over his shoulders. "I thought at that point and time he was gonna swing and point the rifle at us," he said. "And the next thing I know there was gunshots."
Lacerra said that after McBean fell, the wounded man said to him, "It was just a BB gun."
McBean, who had two degrees from Pace University in New York, worked in information technology at a Fort Lauderdale ad agency, servicing the company's computers. He wore his earbuds to listen to music, and to handle service calls, family said. He did not have a criminal record, according to Schoen and to a search of public records.
An autopsy report showed he had the marijuana compound THC in his blood and urine. An expert at UCLA told NBC News the level was on the high side but the test does not reveal whether someone is intoxicated from recent usage or used in the past.
McBean was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2010, shortly before he moved to Florida after a divorce, his family said. Following an episode at work six days before his death — a co-worker told police he was acting "manic" and "irrational" — he was taken to the hospital and had his medication adjusted.
When he was released, the co-worker told police, he was back to normal but decided to take the following week off.
On the afternoon of July 31, 2013, he walked to a local pawn shop where he purchased the Winchester. A police report says the shopkeeper recalled he wanted to buy a shotgun but decided on the air rifle. His family said he never showed an interest in guns and suspect he bought it on a whim.
CHICAGO — The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, said on Friday that the additional scrutiny and criticism of police officers in the wake of highly publicized episodes of police brutality may have led to an increase in violent crime in some cities as officers have become less aggressive.
With his remarks, Mr. Comey lent the prestige of the F.B.I., the nation’s most prominent law enforcement agency, to a theory that is far from settled: that the increased attention on the police has made officers less aggressive and emboldened criminals. But he acknowledged that there is so far no data to back up his assertion and that it may be just one of many factors that are contributing to the rise in crime, like cheaper drugs and an increase in criminals who are being released from prison.
“I don’t know whether that explains it entirely, but I do have a strong sense that some part of the explanation is a chill wind that has blown through American law enforcement over the last year,” Mr. Comey said in a speech at the University of Chicago Law School.
Mr. Comey’s remarks caught officials by surprise at the Justice Department, where his views are not shared at the top levels. Holding the police accountable for civil rights violations has been a top priority at the department in recent years, and some senior officials do not believe that scrutiny of police officers has led to an increase in crime. While the department had no immediate comment on Friday, several officials privately fumed at Mr. Comey’s suggestion.
Among the nation’s law enforcement officials, there is sharp disagreement over whether there is any credence to the so-called Ferguson effect, which refers to the protests that erupted in the summer of 2014 in Ferguson, Mo., over a police shooting.
In Oakland, Calif., for example, homicides are on the rise after two years of decline. But shootings are down, and the overall crime rate is about the same, said Oakland’s police chief, Sean Whent. “Our officers are very, very sensitive to the climate right now, but I haven’t seen any evidence to say our officers aren’t doing their jobs,” Chief Whent said.
In Washington, homicides are also up, but violent crime and crime over all are down, said Lt. Sean Conboy, a police spokesman. “Trying to correlate it to a Ferguson effect, I don’t believe is appropriate,” Lieutenant Conboy said.
After civil rights leaders and the Justice Department accused the Seattle Police Department of discriminatory policing and excessive force, the number of officer-instigated stops declined and crime ticked upward, said Kathleen O’Toole, the police chief.
Chief O’Toole said it was up to police leaders to insist on reversing that trend. The critiques made the department better, she said. Crime is down this year, and her city has hosted police officials from places such as Baltimore wanting to understand why.
“There’s never been as much scrutiny on police officers as there is now,” Chief O’Toole said. “We should embrace it.”
But Mr. Comey said that he had been told by many police leaders that officers who would normally stop to question suspicious people are opting to stay in their patrol cars for fear of having their encounters become worldwide video sensations. That hesitancy has led to missed opportunities to apprehend suspects, he said, and has decreased the police presence on the streets of the country’s most violent cities.
“I’ve been told by a senior police leader who urged his force to remember that their political leadership has no tolerance for a viral video,” Mr. Comey said, adding that many leaders and officers whom he had spoken to said they were afraid to address the issue publicly.
“Lives are saved when those potential killers are confronted by a police officer, a strong police presence and actual, honest-to-goodness, up-close ‘What are you guys doing on this corner at 1 o’clock in the morning’ policing,” Mr. Comey said. “We need to be careful it doesn’t drift away from us in the age of viral videos, or there will be profound consequences.”
But investigations by the Justice Department have given weight to the loudest criticisms of police behavior in Ferguson and elsewhere. Those inquiries have found that many officers unfairly singled out African-Americans for stops and arrests, and too often used force that was unjustified. Videos of deadly encounters with the police in cities such as Cleveland, New York and North Charleston, S.C., have fueled that criticism.
More than his predecessors, Mr. Comey has used his position as one of the nation’s top law enforcement officials to bring attention to issues that state and local police departments are confronting. It is not clear what impact he will be able to have on the issue. He said that the remedies to the problem were not clear, and that law enforcement authorities needed to have better data about crime and shootings involving police officers.
Mr. Comey, who was in Chicago for the annual conference of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, plans to address the issue with law enforcement leaders.
In February, Mr. Comey delivered an unusually candid speech at Georgetown University about the difficult relationship between the police and African-Americans. Some officers, he said, scrutinize minorities more closely using a mental shortcut that “becomes almost irresistible and maybe even rational by some lights” because black men are arrested at much higher rates than white men.
Mr. Comey said that without more reliable data, the task of identifying trends and remedies to fix them is far more challenging. He said state and local law enforcement officials were increasingly open to providing the F.B.I. with better data so it can more accurately chart trends.
“ ‘Data’ is a dry word, but we need better data,” Mr. Comey said. “And people tend to tune out when you start to talk about it, but it’s important, because it gives us the full picture of what’s happening.”
The question was first posed by Juvenal, a Latin poet whose life spanned the first and second centuries: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Translation: “Who watches the watchmen?”
The old question finds new relevance in an era of heightened concern about police brutality, where cameras are omnipresent and police misbehavior routinely goes viral. These days, all of us watch the watchmen,, a de facto citizen’s review board armed with cellphone cameras.
Why not? Police certainly use sophisticated versions of the same gadgets to watch us. Cameras catch us speeding and running red lights. There is even a camera that reads your license plate and checks for warrants. All that notwithstanding, police have long resisted the idea that citizens have a right to record them at work.
The ante has been upped in recent years amid a flurry of citizen, dashcam and surveillance videos capturing questionable police behavior ranging from a man killed by a chokehold in New York to the takedown of a 15-year old girl in a bikini in Texas to a man in Delaware kicked in the head while complying with an order to get on the ground, to a New Jersey man having a police dog sicced on him after he was subdued, to a man shot in the back in South Carolina.
Which brings us to the unfortunate thing Rahm Emanuel said earlier this month at a summit of police officials and politicians in Washington. In explaining a recent uptick in violent crime, the Chicago mayor said cops have gotten “fetal.” He added, “They have pulled back from the ability to interdict … they don’t want to be a news story themselves, they don’t want their career ended early, and it’s having an impact.”
No, he is not known to have been drunk. And for the record, police chiefs and elected officials from other cities reportedly seconded his remarks. They are calling it the YouTube effect.
In response, a few things must be said.
One: Had it been Emanuel’s intention to make police seem petulant, pouty and entitled, he could hardly have chosen more effective language. Small wonder a police union official promptly denied that officers have returned to the womb or are otherwise giving less than their best effort.
Two: Emanuel’s city was a killing field long before the recent spate of viral video embarrassments. Exactly how long have his officers been “fetal?” And what did he blame before he blamed YouTube?
Three: There is a virtually foolproof strategy for police to avoid Internet mortification. Three syllables: Do your job. Then there’ll be no YouTube videos to worry about.
It is disappointing to see President Obama’s former chief of staff join the ranks of those who insist we must treat police like hothouse flowers or Fabergé eggs. First, we are told we may not criticize bad cops because that means we hate all cops. Now, apparently, we may not criticize them because doing so hurts their feelings.
Look: It is important to be concerned about police morale. But what about the morale of Eric Garner’s family? Or Walter Scott’s? Or Freddie Gray’s? Or Tamir Rice’s? What about the morale of all the families who daily send sons — and daughters — into unforgiving streets, honestly unsure if the police — their police — will be friends or foes? Is it OK if we spare some concern for them, too?
This is about accountability, something that has been absent from police interactions with the public for far too long. And where there is no accountability, justice is tenuous. The plain truth is, cameras are here to stay; this genie will not go back in the bottle. Police will not stop the watchers from watching.
But a smart cop will make sure there’s nothing to see.
A prolific Internet troll lost more than 400 pounds after abusing body builders who then helped him lose weight. Jesse Shand bullied people across the Internet from the safety of his mother’s home to make himself feel better about his colossal weight gain. But when he began to troll bodybuilders on an online forum they demanded he show a picture of himself – when he did his life changed forever. Instead of giving Jesse a taste of his own medicine the bodybuilders gave him tips on how to get in shape and they were not going to accept any excuses. The 28-year-old became a recluse and troll who eventually weighed more than 700 pounds before he started trying to lose weight in May 2013.
I couldn't even tell you what this shit was about but I never come across a lamer nigga in my life
