Plainclothes or undercover police were involved in 54 of those deaths, while uniformed police were involved in 41 fatalities. There have been at least 174 fatal shootings by on-duty New York City police officers since 2000, according to an analysis of data from Fatal Encounters, a website that tracks deaths involving police. Plainclothes police have been involved in nearly a third of all fatal shooting incidents recorded since 2000, according to The Intercept study. The involvement of plainclothes police officers in Vassell’s death speaks to a dynamic of police violence in New York that frequently goes unmentioned: Despite being only a small fraction of the force, many police killings are carried out by on-duty officers who are not wearing uniforms.Īn analysis by The Intercept, using data from the Fatal Encounters project, found that plainclothes cops play a role in such killings disproportionate to their relatively small numbers among the NYPD’s ranks. Another, who pushes his way through the intersection with sirens blaring, wears a shirt with the symbol of the vigilante comic book character, the Punisher. One of the officers in the video is wearing a hat emblazoned with a large white skull. Several of the plainclothes cops were taking aggressive action to clear the area of onlookers. Responding to 911 calls about a man with a gun, they had arrived in a black Chevrolet Impala.įootage from the moments after the shooting, initially obtained by the Village Voice, shows that at least nine plainclothes officers were on the scene. The first police officers on the scene - and the ones who appeared to fire the first shots - were three members of an anti-crime unit dressed in plainclothes and one uniformed officer from another unit. At around 4:41 p.m. on April 4, Saheed Vassell was shot and killed on the southwest corner of Utica Avenue and Montgomery Street, in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.
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