Bystander injured in police shooting in Times Square (courtesy cbsnews.com)

Click here for video taken by a bystander in September. It shows New York’s [allegedly] finest circling and firing at a deranged man in the middle of Times Square…while many hundreds of other bystanders watch from the sidewalks. The NYPD is no stranger to piss-poor marksmanship, but the Bad Shots In Blue really outdid themselves this time. The cops went zero-for-three when they shot at Glenn Broadnax from short range, but they did manage to shoot two innocent bystanders for an unintentional hit rate of 66%. Broadnax was unarmed, although he may have appeared to be reaching for a weapon instead of reaching for his wallet. Instead of charging the trigger-happy oafs of the NYPD, though, the D.A. convened a grand jury and charged Broadnax with first degree assault, a felony charge that can carry a 25-year sentence . . .

More details are provided by the NY Times:

Initially Mr. Broadnax was arrested on misdemeanor charges of menacing, drug possession and resisting arrest. But the Manhattan district attorney’s office persuaded a grand jury to charge Mr. Broadnax with assault, a felony carrying a maximum sentence of 25 years. Specifically, the nine-count indictment unsealed on Wednesday said Mr. Broadnax “recklessly engaged in conduct which created a grave risk of death.”

“The defendant is the one that created the situation that injured innocent bystanders,” said an assistant district attorney, Shannon Lucey.

Wrong, you twit. It’s the NYPD that created the situation that injured innocent bystanders, by failing to properly train OR properly supervise OR properly discipline its officers. As has been amply proven by a string of bad shootings and injured bystanders, these uniformed clowns rarely know when to shoot and they sure as hell don’t know how to shoot. Those responsible for allowing Bloomberg’s private army to roam the streets with guns should be brought up on criminal charges of their own.

Broadnax appears to be charged with first degree assault under the ‘depraved indifference’ prong of NY Penal Law Section 120.10: “A person is guilty of assault in the first degree when, under circumstances evincing a depraved indifference to human life, he recklessly engages in conduct which creates a grave risk of death to another person, and thereby causes serious physical injury to another person.”

Assistant D.A. Lucey’s legal reasoning here is somewhere between chilling and just plain hallucinatory. First off, ‘depraved indifference’ requires an absolute lack of care whether other people die or not. It has never, to my knowledge, been applied to behavior which could only foreseeably hurt oneself. Secondly, wandering into low-speed traffic (it was Times Square, after all) does not foreseeably create a grave risk of death to others; just to your own sorry ass. Finally, it was not Broadnax who caused serious physical injury to another person. It was the negligence and incompetence of the NYPD officers who did that.

Let’s take Lucey’s asinine arguments to their logical conclusion, shall we? Any time a police car or ambulance crashes and someone is injured while responding to an accident or crime, the person who caused the initial 911 call would be guilty of felony assault for setting it all in motion. No matter how minor their misconduct, and no matter how recklessly the police or EMTs drove.

The case against Broadnax doesn’t even hold water as a matter of civil liability, much less criminal culpability. If the NYPD’s gunshot victims tried to sue Broadnax for their injuries they would lose, because their injuries would not have happened but for an unforeseeable intervening factor: the incredibly poor shooting and poor judgment of the NYPD. Unless, of course, the D.A. is taking the novel legal position that NYPD incompetence is so widespread and predictable that it has become an entirely foreseeable response to any 911 call. Even after the shooting of nine bystanders in front of the Empire State Building, I’m not sure the NYPD is quite that bad, and even if they are that’s no good reason to let them off the hook for it.

This affair started out badly, with incompetent police missing their target and hosing down a sidewalk full of bystanders. Now the Manhattan District Attorney has taken us all further down the rabbit-hole of NYC police incompetence, and charged an unarmed man for shootings committed by police officers. The real reason for these charges is pitifully transparent: to distract attention (and civil liability) away from the incompetence of New York’s allegedly finest.

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96 COMMENTS

  1. That just goes to show that grand juries will do whatever the prosecutor wants.

    I can’t see how those charges survive a motion to dismiss.

    • I wonder about that… Was there anybody on the grand jury who saw through this? If so, were they persuaded to go along or simply outvoted? It’s also possible that they didn’t get a straight story — I think grand juries are conducted entirely by the prosecution.

    • this…. You can get a jury of our “peers” to vote yes to just about anything. I blame the education system.

  2. No, no, no, you don’t get it. It is depraved indifference to LIVE in the City of New York.

    Any reasonable person knows being around New York City cops is a danger to oneself and others.

    • This is all the more reason why I never want to go to NYC. I get why people think it would be fun, but getting shot by its own police force when I’m not involved, getting robbed/mugged/something-horribled being a legitimate fear, and not being able to defend myself are too many reasons for me to want to visit.

  3. OR properly equip.. don’t they have pistols with about a 12 pound trigger pull? No wonder they miss all the time!

    • Yet we are constantly screamed at by the Mom’s of the world that only cops should have guns because they’re “trained.”

      • No, it is as evidenced by that if cops are this bad, we could only be worse.

        All of this is the first stone wall behind which the NYPD will stand so that the other side of the question will can’t be asked. Was this a justifiable shoot to start with?

  4. Talk about gall. This Broadnax guy is going to be sporting a big ole bag with a $ on it when this is all said and done.

  5. You’ve forgotten your class in Cultural Relativism 101.
    New York City is, remember, an alien, foreign nation. We can’t expect them to share our values, after all.

  6. And people always wonder why I dislike cops in pretty much all situations.

    I have never met one that wasn’t a pompous A-hole AND shot like these NYPD guys. That’s not a good combo. Their attitudes are so bad that they use the guns first, but when they do, their marksmanship skills are so piss poor that the safest place to be in an officer involved shooting is probably right in front of the muzzle!

    Train more you useless SOBs! Or better yet, DONT SHOOT PEOPLE THAT DONT NEED SHOOTING!

    • I’ve never really understood exactly why reasonable people don’t like police officers en mass, until I watched this video. Where I grew up (small town America) I knew a couple of officers personally, and am related to one as well. I always thought the cops were the good guys and people who thought bad of police were either bad guys, or just plain wrong.

      Then I saw the officers in the video circling the unarmed man like a bunch of rodeo clowns, being yelled at by bystanders not to shoot, and still shooting 2 innocent women. Now I get it. Its not that all cops are bad guys, or that even most cops are bad people, but its places like NYC that breed incompetence and cover it up that make me understand and start to see your point of view.

      • I grew up in small town (AZ) USA as well. I know several cops and they aren’t all scumbags. But the good ones all ended up being forced to quit because the rest WERE bad.

        Cops there were about as corrupt as you would see on a tv show, it was so bad that the DEA, ATF and FBI did stings (mostly drug/gun related) on SEVERAL of the local departments and caught a ton of officers. They even ended up with a fully staffed FBI outpost there to stop it from happening that way again.

        Problem was, even AFTER that happened, the new cops were mostly out-of-state liberals that hated the mostly conservative, gun-owning population and acted like jerks just like the others. They were quite happy with abusing the NSA/FBI/DOD “domestic terrorist” label and acted like total bullies to gun store owners and patrons alike.

        I made it out of there without getting into any trouble, but I still REALLY don’t like cops….

      • We know there are a ton of good cops scattered around, but they’re in hiding. The good ones who just do their jobs never get press or video, so we tend to forget…

      • When you good guys start kicking the dipsticks off the force, then you’ll get a pass and be able to regain respect.

        As long as you tolerate the morons, idiots, sociopaths, sadists and predators in your midst, and you know a) that they are there and b) who they are, you’re not going to get a pass.

        • ^ This!

          From what I can tell there are two kinds of cops: cowards and thugs. If the non-thugs want to earn the respect they crave find a way to get rid of the incompetent and the arrogant, and not by sending them off with a thank-you and a pension either.

  7. The voice of reason:
    Mariann Wang, a lawyer representing Sahar Khoshakhlagh, one of the women who was wounded, said the district attorney should be pursuing charges against the two officers who fired their weapons in a crowd, not against Mr. Broadnax. “It’s an incredibly unfortunate use of prosecutorial discretion to be prosecuting a man who didn’t even injure my client,” she said. “It’s the police who injured my client.”

  8. DA in all stares are out of control due to lack of oversight. Same thing is going on with us. I will do whatever it takes to help fight this abuse. You don’t need a lawyer to fight for good over evil.

  9. From the CBS report: “…he was finally brought down as people in the crowd yelled at police not to shoot him.”

    “Broadnax was taken into custody after a sergeant subdued him with a Taser, police said.”

    Wow. Interesting circus…as we move ever closer to 1984 and martial law.

    What did Todd Jones say; “trigger pullers”?

  10. I can easily see how such charges survive the motion to dismiss. Two words: liberal judge. Remember, the justice system is made up of human beings. The DA’s, judges and juries are all humans and through either stupidity, political motivation, personal motivation, or combination of all, they can all decide to look the other way. Unethical yes, but difficult to stop when all involved decide to act unethically.

    • Agreed. You can’t have justice when the person appointing officials and judges uses that power for their own good instead of the good of the people.

  11. Innocent bystanders shot by the NYPD should sue the city citing their heavy NY Triggers and the known effect to diminish accuracy in what is essentially a single action firearm. A heavy DA revolver trigger sequence is a whole different ball game than a heavy SA trigger sequence.

    -D

  13. First rule of not getting shot club:
    Don’t live in NY.
    Second rule of not getting shot club:
    DON’T LIVE IN NY!

  14. But, but…. but Mayor Bloomberg says his police are “highly trained”, and that was the reason he didn’t want National Guard assistance after hurricane Sandy because he felt the National Guard would bring too many guns to the streets making the city dangerous. According to his majesty the mayor, the police were the only ones qualified to patrol the streets while armed. (Heavy sarcasm in use here)

    • He didn’t want National Guard commanders blabbing about his own incompetence and reporting NYPD abuses they undoubtedly would’ve witnessed.

    • Kelly didn’t want the theft ring muscled in on by the folks from upstate. One of which, it seems, could have been the esteemed Lt. Col. Robert Bateman.

  16. “Law enforcement officers” need to be held accountable for recklessness and crimes they commit.

    Sadly, that’s just about impossible since they investigate themselves and they’re a protected class.

    Combine the proglodyte idea that government is always right and naive conservative uniform worship and you have what we have now.

    Cops need to be held accountable. They’re no better than the rest of us plebs, even though they often like to act as if they are.

  17. Maybe these lame brains need to be issued Daisy Red Ryders so their incompetence can’t hurt the innocent too bad. I could picture it now; the NYC cops riding around on bicycles built for two, wearing dunce caps with their brand spanking new Red Ryders slung on their backs.

  18. Nothing to see here. Keep moving.
    Just a little CYA for the police and city by the DA. After all, this guy will just get a public defender, cop a plea and all will be well.

  19. This kind of stuff is actually pretty common in NYC. My wife was a public defender in Manhattan for seven years (a long time ago). The crap she used to tell me… My favorite was the dozens of people she represented who had only one charge: resisting arrest. I still can’t get my head around that.

      • Oh, Charles… is there some reason you are following me around on this forum? Do you have some kind of a man crush thing going on here? If so, I support your right to be as gay as you need to be.

        This is a free country and I am pretty solid on the old BoR thing, so I fully support your right to say whatever you want. Feel free to keep commenting. Life is good.

    • Ha! What was the outcome on those cases? I’m expecting her to be at 100%. Please don’t disappoint me.

      • 100% charges dropped. It’s a “tune up” kind of thing the cops in NYC did. In the old days, they’d just drag someone into an alley and hit them a couple of times. Now they harass-via-arrest (at least did back then, 20 years ago).

        Case gets arraigned. DA stands up and does the State’s spiel. My wife did hers. Judge just dismisses case. Takes maybe 10 min. Everyone who knows anything sort of rolls their eyes or giggles. The bad part, from a rights perspective, is that the cops arrest someone KNOWING the charges will just be dismissed, but did it to make a point on the street. And it takes 1-3 days to get arraigned in NYC, depending upon when and where you were arrested, so it could be a major hassle to the person arrested.

        Everyone believes the NYC legal system is so good for defendants, but NYC Legal Aid only won about 1.75% of the cases adjudicated. In New Mexico, the number of wins by PDs is about 40%, which is also not a good thing as it demonstrates how badly the State over-charges and how little investigation or sanity-checking patrol officers do here… If I say you hit me, they’ll just arrest you with no investigation. They just make the arrest and let the lawyers fight it out which is why the win rate down here is so much higher.

        The State has many, many ways to make things hard on citizens.

  20. Taking a dispassionate view, the law in question is actually a good thing.The intent was this:say a felon walks into your home with a companion and intent to commit a crime.

    You shoot back, beating the NYPDs marksmanship by tabling one as the other criminal beats feet.Once the cops nail the second guy, this law means the accomplice can get charged for causing his partners death by planning the attack -even though you pulled the actual trigger.

    Leave it to the crooked New York City government to ruin even that just piece of legislation.

    • No problem with the law. The application is the problem.
      The same law exists in many other places without the same level of abuse.

    • It is generally called the “felony-murder” rule. when two or more accomplices commit a felony, each is fully responsible for the consequences of that act. For example, and this is a true case, two guys go in to rob the liquor store. One doesn’t come out alive. The survivor and the driver of the get-a-way car are charged with murder. The other robber pleads out, gets 5-10. The driver goes to trial, gets convicted and is sentenced to life. Sentence upheld. although the driver was unarmed, and didn’t shoot anyone, he was a part of the commission of a violent felony and responsible for the death.

    • the law in question is actually a good thing

      No, it isn’t. This is where a free nation always gets hoisted with it’s own petard. First, laws of that nature clearly charge someone with thought crime; see ‘conspiracy’ and ‘RICCO’. Second, these types of laws allow far too much abuse in the future. If we’ve learned ANYTHING at all, it is that government cannot be trusted, not even a little bit. Spell it out and hold government to the letter of it. Prime example: shall not be infringed; if government can twist that like it has so far, government can twist these broader laws with ease one day. All of a state’s law and federal law ought to fit within a small book or booklet. Get beyond that and Liberty always suffers.

  21. Further proof the safest place to stand when the NYPD starts shooting is right in front of the perp.

    I’m surprised these buffoons didnt shoot each other.

  23. People accuse the NYPD of being at once trigger happy and third-rate marksmen. I’ve noticed that, on the contrary, the NYPD show remarkable discipline: Manhattan provides the workplace for tens of thousands of financial executives and the home for many of the globe’s glamorous people. Yet, NYPD almost never shoots these sorts. NYPD is, therefore, clearly capable of restraint in the face of some very bad behavior. Apparently they have Smart Guns, and the trigger loses 10 pounds of pull weight when it is aimed at a hobo.

  24. I’m going to look into putting a new york trigger on my 17 just to prove that it still isn’t that f**king difficult.

    • An 8.5 lb trigger pull will really throw off your aim. But read the history of why they went to it. To many of the idot cops there were shooting themselves pulling their Glocks out of their holsters – IN THE LOCKER ROOMS AT THE POLICE STATIONS!

  25. The reason for the charge is very simple–and cynical. The NYPD/City of NY has been sued for damages by the two women who were shot. The City, in order to avoid liability, charges the target of the shootings, fully anticipating that he will be represented by a PD and will plead out. The conviction will be proof that the City is not responsible for the shooting, this guy is, and therefore the City limits or eliminates its liability to the women.

  26. Obviously we don’t have the whole story (I mean do we ever?), but that is some seriously heavy hypocrisy. It boggles the mind.

    • Yup.
      When I first read this, I had to stop and start over again.
      What’s right is now wrong, what’s left is right, what’s up is down.
      I’m not really sure it’s going to get any better.

  27. I can only imagine the mentality of a NYC liver… “I’m so grateful to live in a city where the government is there to protect me. Sure I may get shot by my protectors from time to time, but it’s worth it to live here where accountability can be shifted to the the next guy.”

  28. “The defendant is the one that created the situation that injured innocent bystanders,” said an assistant district attorney, Shannon Lucey.”

    Wow. That is pretty amazing. Cops… zero liability. Cops shoot two people and this unarmed man over here did it – he is guilty!

    Assault charge? Wow. Only in NYC do cops shoot at you – miss, injure someone else, and you are responsible. Just Wow.

    “Leave it to the professionals!”
    – anti-gun crowd

  29. Perhaps NYPD should issue, to the officers, all those Marlins they’ve been confiscating. It couldn’t hurt their marksmanship.

  30. “Finally, it was not Broadnax who caused serious physical injury to another person. It was the negligence and incompetence of the NYPD officers who did that.”

    That’s not how this law works. I’m not commenting on the prosecution, which is absurd, but on the meaning of the law. The law is there for a factual circumstance like this: Hank is in an argument with Phil, who is near blind. Hank says to Phil “I’m going to go get my gun and kill you on your porch” and Hank then leaves and calls the police, saying Phil is waving a gun around at passerbys, threatening people who look his way. Police quickly arrive, and because Phil is almost blind, he assumes it’s Hank, back to carry out his threat, and points his gun at the cop emerging from his car. Now the police naturally shoot Phil, because as far as the police know, Phil is about to shoot them.

    In this hypothetical (actually a real case), Hank gets charged with the crime, not the police. Hank caused the unsafe situation that caused the death of Phil, and even though Hank never shot Phil, he did orchestrate the killings through his actions.

    In this case, the DA actually has a decent chance at prevailing IMHO, but it’s poor judgment and a misuse of power. She should be prosecuting the police.

  31. Bloomberg is disarming the wrong people.
    The streets of NYC would be much safer if the police were disarmed.

  32. Now I understand that the Po Po are going to start suing the people that have sued them (and won) for brutality and they are encouraged by the police union.
    If anyone knows more about this situation developing would like to know more

  33. they dont issue NYPD tasers, pepper spray or batons before they go to deadly force? In this case i would have even went for the beanbag guns, tho PDX had an issue with those recently.

  34. TTAG, please post updates to this story if any come out. I’m dreadfully curious to see how this fustercluck turns out.

  35. Don’t hire pansies from NYC who have no experience with firearms… They will shoot into crowds and lie about a threat later.

  36. One thing on liberalism, but it isn’t per se liberalism that leads to police abuses. It is because of liberals that we have a lot of the protections built into the system that we do. For example, Miranda Warning. That wasn’t originally part of the process and police railed when they were required to start having to read people their rights before questioning them.

    Usually, it is conservatives who are more comfortable giving the police the authority to be “tougher on crime.” For example, Stop-and-Frisk. Liberals unfortunately are bad though when it comes to gun rights.

  37. A New York City grand jury will indict a ham sandwich. In fact, a New York City grand jury is a ham sandwich.

    It would be very hard for a real judge to look at this charge and not recognize it for what it is — a vain attempt to duck civil liability. But it’s awfully hard to find a real judge in New York City. In fact, it’s damn near impossible.

  38. “Unless, of course, the D.A. is taking the novel legal position that NYPD incompetence is so widespread and predictable that it has become an entirely foreseeable response to any 911 call.”

    NAILED IT!

  41. Serious question:
    If He was the only one hit, would that not still be assault.

    As a kid I used to take hold my brothers hand and swat him with it and ask him why he was hitting himself.
    Same thing only different.

  42. 9mm rounds much safer in urban enviroment than TASER, a TASER might have given the perp a heart attack.

  44. The vast majority of LEOs are great people doing a job thatother people do not want. The problem here is that so many big cities have families that have been police officers back over 100 years. It is expected that you become a cop, because dad, grandpas and great grandpas were. It these places, nepotism reighns, and there are small suburbs and areas of a city that are heavily populated with police and thier families.
    Just because dad and grandpa were LEOs doesn’t mean that you should be one. This type of thing keeps all LEOs behind the blue line and allows for rampant corruption. Most probably are not corrupt, but in the precients that it is rampant, all officer take the money because they won’t be liked if they don’t. If they act against it, they will find it very hard to transfer out within the dept, and may even be brought up on charges of corruption and convicted, imagine that LEOs do not like snitches. It happenned to Serpico and happens to others, even today. You can not keep the same police force and get rid of ingrained corruption and brutality, it would take to complete reorganization and all hiring must be from outside a 100 mile area. It will never happen..

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