[Vision2020] The F.B.I. Deemed Agents Faultless in 150 Shootings

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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June 18, 2013
The F.B.I. Deemed Agents Faultless in 150 Shootings By CHARLIE
SAVAGE<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/charlie_savage/index.html>and
MICHAEL
S. SCHMIDT<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/michael_s_schmidt/index.html>

WASHINGTON — After contradictory stories emerged about an
F.B.I.<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/f/federal_bureau_of_investigation/index.html?inline=nyt-org>agent’s
killing last month of a Chechen man in Orlando, Fla., who was being
questioned over ties to the Boston
Marathon<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/b/boston_marathon/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>bombing
suspects, the bureau reassured the public that it would clear up
the murky episode.

“The F.B.I. takes very seriously any shooting incidents involving our
agents, and as such we have an effective, time-tested process for
addressing them internally,” a bureau spokesman said.

But if such internal investigations are time-tested, their outcomes are
also predictable: from 1993 to early 2011, F.B.I. agents fatally shot about
70 “subjects” and wounded about 80 others — and every one of those episodes
was deemed justified, according to interviews and internal F.B.I. records
obtained by The New York Times through a Freedom of Information Act
lawsuit.

The last two years have followed the same pattern: an F.B.I. spokesman said
that since 2011, there had been no findings of improper intentional
shootings.

In most of the shootings, the F.B.I.’s internal investigation was the only
official inquiry. In the Orlando case, for example, there have been
conflicting accounts about basic facts like whether the Chechen man,
Ibragim Todashev, attacked an agent with a
knife<http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/05/22/18418012-man-with-ties-to-boston-bombing-suspect-admits-role-in-2011-murders-shot-during-fbi-questioning>,
was unarmed<http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-05-29/world/39599786_1_fbi-agent-fbi-review-team-fbi-shooting>or
was brandishing
a metal pole<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/31/us/man-tied-to-boston-suspect-said-to-have-attacked-fbi-agent.html>.
But Orlando homicide detectives are not independently investigating what
happened.

“We had nothing to do with it,” said Sgt. Jim Young, an Orlando police
spokesman. “It’s a federal matter, and we’re deferring everything to the
F.B.I.”

Occasionally, the F.B.I. does discipline an agent. Out of 289 deliberate
shootings covered by the documents, many of which left no one wounded, five
were deemed to be “bad shoots,” in agents’ parlance — encounters that did
not comply with the bureau’s policy, which allows deadly force if agents
fear that their lives or those of fellow agents are in danger. A typical
punishment involved adding letters of censure to agents’ files. But in none
of the five cases did a bullet hit anyone.

Critics say the fact that for at least two decades no agent has been
disciplined for any instance of deliberately shooting someone raises
questions about the credibility of the bureau’s internal investigations.
Samuel Walker, a professor of criminal justice at the University of
Nebraska Omaha who studies internal law enforcement investigations, called
the bureau’s conclusions about cases of improper shootings “suspiciously
low.”

Current and former F.B.I. officials defended the bureau’s handling of
shootings, arguing that the scant findings of improper behavior were
attributable to several factors. Agents tend to be older, more experienced
and better trained than city police officers. And they generally are
involved only in planned operations and tend to go in with “overwhelming
presence,” minimizing the chaos that can lead to shooting the wrong people,
said Tim Murphy, a former deputy director of the F.B.I. who conducted some
investigations of shootings over his 23-year career.

The F.B.I.’s shootings range from episodes so obscure that they attract no
news media attention to high-profile cases like the 2009 killing of an imam
in a Detroit-area warehouse that is the subject of a lawsuit alleging a
cover-up, and a 2002 shooting in Maryland in which the bureau paid $1.3
million to a victim and yet, the records show, deemed the shooting to have
been justified.

With rare exceptions — like suicides — whenever an agent fires his weapon
outside of training, a team of agents from the F.B.I.’s Inspection
Division, sometimes with a liaison from the local police, compiles a report
reconstructing what happened. This “shooting incident review team”
interviews witnesses and studies medical, ballistics and autopsy reports,
eventually producing a narrative. Such reports typically do not include
whether an agent had been involved in any previous shootings, because they
focus only on the episode in question, officials said.

That narrative, along with binders of supporting information, is then
submitted to a “shooting incident review group” — a panel of high-level
F.B.I. officials in Washington. The panel produces its own narrative as
part of a report saying whether the shooting complied with bureau policy —
and recommends what discipline to mete out if it did not — along with any
broader observations about “lessons learned” to change training or
procedures.

F.B.I. officials stressed that their shooting reviews were carried out
under the oversight of both the Justice Department’s inspector general and
the Civil Rights Division, and that local prosecutors have the authority to
bring charges.

The 2,200 pages of records obtained by The Times include an internal F.B.I.
study that compiled shooting episode statistics over a 17-year
period<http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/06/18/us/20130618-fbi-shooting-reviews.html>,
as well as a collection of individual narratives of intentional shootings
from<http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/06/18/us/20130618-fbi-shooting-files.html>1993
to early 2011. Gunfire was exchanged in 58 such episodes; 9 law
enforcement officials died, and 38 were wounded.

The five “bad shoots” included cases in which an agent fired a warning shot
after feeling threatened by a group of men, an agent fired at a weapon
lying on the ground to disable it during an arrest, and two agents fired
their weapons while chasing fugitives but hit no one. In another case, an
agent fired at a safe during a demonstration, and ricocheting material
caused minor cuts in a crowd of onlookers.

Four of the cases were in the mid-1990s, and the fifth was in 2003.

In many cases, the accuracy of the F.B.I. narrative is difficult to
evaluate because no independent alternative report has been produced. As
part of the reporting for this article, the F.B.I. voluntarily made
available a list of shootings since 2007 that gave rise to lawsuits, but it
was rare for any such case to have led to a full report by an independent
authority.

Occasionally, however, there were alternative reviews. One, involving a
March 2002 episode in which an agent shot an innocent Maryland man in the
head after mistaking him for a bank robbery
suspect<https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/709016-anne-arundel-red-car.html>,
offers a case study in how the nuances of an F.B.I. official narrative can
come under scrutiny.

In that episode, agents thought that the suspect would be riding in a car
driven by his sister and wearing a white baseball cap. An innocent man,
Joseph Schultz, then 20, happened to cross their path, wearing a white cap
and being driven by his girlfriend. Moments after F.B.I. agents carrying
rifles pulled their car over and surrounded it, Agent Christopher Braga
shot Mr. Schultz in the jaw. He later underwent facial reconstruction
surgery, and in 2007 the bureau paid $1.3 million to settle a lawsuit.

The internal review<http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/709016-anne-arundel-red-car.html>,
however, deemed it a good shoot. In the F.B.I.’s narrative, Agent Braga
says that he shouted “show me your hands,” but that Mr. Schultz instead
reached toward his waist, so Agent Braga fired “to eliminate the threat.”
While one member of the review group said that “after reading the materials
provided, he could not visualize the presence of ‘imminent danger’ to law
enforcement officers,” the rest of the group voted to find the shooting
justified, citing the “totality of the circumstances surrounding the
incident,” including that it involved a “high-risk stop.”

But an Anne Arundel County police detective prepared an independent
report<http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/709016-anne-arundel-red-car.html>about
the episode, and a lawyer for Mr. Schultz, Arnold Weiner, conducted a
further
investigation<http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/709016-anne-arundel-red-car.html>for
the lawsuit. Both raised several subtle but important differences.

For example, the F.B.I. narrative describes a lengthy chase of Mr.
Schultz’s car after agents turned on their siren at an intersection,
bolstering an impression that it was reasonable for Agent Braga to fear
that Mr. Schultz was a dangerous fugitive. The narrative spends a full page
describing this moment in great detail, saying that the car “rapidly
accelerated” and that one agent shouted for it to stop “over and over
again.” It cites another agent as estimating that the car stopped
“approximately 100 yards” from the intersection.

By contrast, the police report describes this moment in a short, skeptical
paragraph. Noting that agents said they had thought the car was fleeing, it
points out that the car “was, however, in a merge lane and would need to
accelerate to enter traffic.” Moreover, a crash reconstruction specialist
hired for the lawsuit
estimated<http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/709016-anne-arundel-red-car.html>that
the car had reached a maximum speed of 12 miles per hour, and an
F.B.I. sketch, obtained in the lawsuit, put broken glass from a car window
142 feet 8 inches from the intersection.

The F.B.I. narrative does not cite Mr. Schultz’s statement and omits that a
crucial fact was disputed: how Mr. Schultz had moved in the car. In a 2003
sworn statement, Agent Braga said that Mr. Schultz “turned to his left,
towards the middle of the car, and reached down.” But Mr. Schultz insisted
that he had instead reached toward the car door on his right because he had
been listening to another agent who was simultaneously shouting “open the
door.”

A former F.B.I. agent, hired to write a report analyzing the episode for
the plaintiffs, concluded that “no reasonable F.B.I. agent in Braga’s
position would reasonably have believed that deadly force was justified.”
He also noted pointedly that Agent Braga had been involved in a previous
shooting episode in 2000 that he portrayed as questionable, although it had
been found to be justified by the F.B.I.’s internal review process.

Asked to comment on the case, a lawyer for Agent Braga, Andrew White, noted
last week that a grand jury had declined to indict his client in the
shooting.

In some cases, alternative official accounts for several other shootings
dovetailed with internal F.B.I. narratives.

One involved the October 2009 death of Luqman Ameen Abdullah, a prayer
leader at a Detroit-area mosque who was suspected of conspiring to sell
stolen goods and was shot during a raid on a warehouse. The F.B.I.
report<http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/06/18/us/20130618-fbi-dearborn-document.html>says
that Mr. Abdullah got down on the ground but kept his hands hidden, so
a dog was unleashed to pull his arms into view. He then pulled out a gun
and shot the dog, the report says, and he was in turn shot by four agents.

The Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations filed a
lawsuit against the F.B.I. The group was concerned in part because the
handgun had no recoverable fingerprints and because of facial injuries to
Mr. Abdullah. It also contends that the dog may have been shot instead by
the F.B.I. agents and the gun thrown down in a cover-up.

A report by the Michigan attorney general’s office, however, detailed an
array of evidence that it says “corroborates the statements of the agents
as to the sequence of events,” including that bullet fragments in the dog’s
corpse were consistent with the handgun, not the rifles used by the F.B.I.
agents. Such an independent account of an F.B.I. shooting is rare. After
the recent killing of Mr. Todashev in Orlando, both the Florida chapter of
the same group and his father have called for investigators outside the
F.B.I. to scrutinize the episode.

James J. Wedick, who spent 34 years at the bureau, said the F.B.I. should
change its procedures for its own good.

“At the least, it is a perception issue, and over the years the bureau has
had a deaf ear to it,” he said. “But if you have a shooting that has a few
more complicated factors and an ethnic issue, the bureau’s image goes down
the toilet if it doesn’t investigate itself properly.”




-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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