Police Release First Footage of Officers Shooting Man in Brooklyn

NEW YORK — The New York Police Department on Tuesday released the first video of the shooting last week in which officers in Brooklyn shot and killed a mentally ill man who was holding part of a welding torch as if it were a gun and, police said, pointing it at people on the street and then at arriving officers.

In the video, filmed from a security camera about half a block away, the officers and the man, Saheed Vassell, appear as small figures in the distance. Before the shooting, in the late afternoon on April 4 in the Crown Heights neighborhood, people gather at a bus stop, watching buses pass and peering down the street for another.

Then plainclothes officers in an unmarked sedan come into the picture. They drive down Utica Avenue, turn across traffic at Montgomery Street and crack their doors open. A marked police vehicle follows behind them.

About eight seconds later, before the officers get more than a couple steps from their car, the video shows them with their arms outstretched as if they are firing and people on the street flinch and then scatter. The officers are on one side of Montgomery Street, and Vassell is outside a market on the other side of the street. Vassell is seen dropping to the sidewalk.

The footage is at too great a distance to reveal much about the shooting. The police last week released a snippet of video from a different security camera showing Vassell raising the welding torch as if it were a gun in the moment before the shooting and, police said, pointing it in officers’ direction. Several 911 callers had told dispatchers he might have had a gun, but they were not sure.

Witnesses have said the officers said nothing before firing. The police last week said the officers repeatedly shouted, “Drop it.”

The police said the video released Tuesday was the only footage investigators recovered of the shooting itself. Police declined to release it last week because, police officials said then, the department and the state attorney general’s office were still investigating the shooting.

And Mayor Bill de Blasio suggested on Tuesday that the video had been withheld because the attorney general’s office had prevented its release during the early stages of its investigation.

But Phil Walzak, the department’s deputy commissioner for public information, said on Tuesday that the attorney general’s office had never objected to the video being released. He said officials decided to show it publicly, as they have in other cases in which shootings were captured on body-worn cameras.

Amy Spitalnick, press secretary for the state attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, said in a statement: “Our office played no role in the NYPD’s decision to release partial footage concerning the Vassell case last week, and we have not objected to the NYPD’s release of video footage of the officers.”

The Police Department does not have a clear public policy for when it will release footage in shootings involving officers, and it has previously said the release of footage in shootings captured on officers’ body-worn cameras was up to the commissioner, James P. O’Neill.

“The NYPD is committed to transparency, as demonstrated with prior releases of body-worn camera footage of officer-involved-shootings when it is available,” Walzak said. “The NYPD is also committed to ensuring that the attorney general can conduct a thorough and complete review. The attorney general’s office has thus far not objected to the release of video in the Vassell case.”