Did ESU Lieut. Overreact?

Did ESU Lieut. Overreact?

The Emergency Services Unit is one of the elite cadres — some would say the elite cadre — within the NYPD, with applicants carefully screened and trained and membership restricted to cops with at least five years of service.

And so it seems astonishing that an ESU Lieutenant, Michael Pigott, could have ordered one of the cops under his command to fire his Taser at an emotionally disturbed man, Iman Morales, during a confrontation in Brooklyn Sept. 24. Mr. Morales, who was swinging a fluorescent light bulb at ESU officers but posed no serious threat to them, was standing on top of a security gate about 10 feet above the ground when he was hit by the electrical voltage and fell head first to the pavement and died.

It is a violation of NYPD guidelines to use the Taser if it could cause the target to fall from an elevated surface and be seriously injured. ESU had called for an inflatable bag that could have cushioned Mr. Morales's fall, but it hadn't arrived by the time Lieutenant Pigott gave the order to fire.

He has been stripped of his badge and gun, and faces possible criminal charges by the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office.

A New York Post article quoted a source saying that Lieutenant Pigott may have been concerned that the ESU cop at whom Mr. Morales was swinging the light tube was in a precarious-enough position on a fire escape that he could have lost his balance and fallen to the pavement below. The DA's Office, and perhaps a grand jury as well, will have to consider whether the risk posed could not have been remedied in some other way than using force that wound up having a lethal effect.

The naked Mr. Morales would have presented a bizarre sight to his neighbors, but there should not have been anything disorienting about him to veteran ESU cops. They have numerous emergencies to which they respond, but the most common are encounters with emotionally disturbed persons.

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, besides the preliminary discipline against the Lieutenant and the cop who followed his order, named a new commander of ESU two days after the fatal confrontation and had all its members undergo new training.

A group led by State Sen. Eric Adams, an ex-NYPD Captain, subsequently called for a new unit to be created to deal with emotionally disturbed people. That strikes us as an overreaction: as chief NYPD spokesman Paul Browne noted, the department handles 80,000 EDP calls a year, almost all of them efficiently and conscientiously enough that they don't attract public attention.