Re "Review: Police shooting justified," Thursday article:
Written by
Randolph M. McLaughlin and Debra S. Cohen
It was hard to imagine that the City of White Plains could have managed to further exacerbate the pain inflicted on the family of Kenneth Chamberlain Sr. or find a way to further fuel skepticism about whether city officials really want to get to the bottom of how and why White Plains police shot and killed Mr. Chamberlain after responding to the accidental activation of his medical alert device.
The report publicly released last week by the city, titled "An Analysis of the White Plains Police Department 2012," manages to do both.
The report was supposed to be an independent review of the police department in response to the fatal police shooting of Chamberlain, in his White Plains apartment Nov. 19.
At the time it was commissioned, Mayor Thomas Roach stated, "when you have a tragedy such as we suffered, I think it's important that we take a look at everything and do everything we can."
The public was led to believe that the panel of academics and former police executives would engage in a thorough, exhaustive review of the facts and circumstances surrounding the shooting death of Mr. Chamberlain. In fact, the 83-page report contains only 11 paragraphs on the Chamberlain incident.
The section on the Chamberlain shooting is grossly inadequate for a number of reasons, including its brevity. First, no officer was interviewed in connection with the "investigation." The author of that section, Michael Walker, a former director of the Paterson, N.J., Police Department, only reviewed the written police reports, audio and videotapes of the encounter between the police and Mr. Chamberlain.
Most telling, Walker did not seek to interview Mr. Chamberlain's niece, who was an eyewitness to the events as they unfolded in the hallway outside of Mr. Chamberlain's apartment. Equally troubling, Walker offered a sanitized version of the events. He stated that during the incident an officer went to the window of Mr. Chamberlain's apartment to distract him, but "this failed to get the desired result."
What Walker fails to mention is that the means for distracting Mr. Chamberlain involved not only banging on his window, but also calling him a "ni----." To fail to mention or analyze that an officer used this word to "distract" a 68-year-old African-American, who resided in a predominantly black housing development, demonstrates the lack of objectivity of the report and its authors.
Moreover, there is no mention in Walker's analysis of the incident that the police dispatcher advised the units responding to Mr. Chamberlain's apartment that he was what they believed to be an emotionally disturbed person. There is no discussion of the utter lack of professionalism displayed by the officers who responded to a medical alert call who taunted Mr. Chamberlain, mocked his military service and called him a "grown ass man."
The only conclusion that one can reach from the failure of the report to mention any of the facts surrounding this incident is that the report, with respect to the Chamberlain incident, was designed to cover up what truly happened that night.
The police who responded to an accidental medical alert taunted a man they believed to be emotionally disturbed, refused the requests of his family to speak with him, used racial slurs, broke his door down, used a stun gun on him to the point of burning his flesh, and killed him in his own apartment.
Mr. Chamberlain did not deserve to suffer this fate. He served his country honorably during the Vietnam era, only to be abused by poorly trained, and perhaps biased, police officers in his own home.
He deserved better, and the public deserved better from its officials -- instead of a one-sided report.
Randolph M. McLaughlin and Debra S. Cohen are co-chairs of the Civil Rights Practice Group of Newman Ferrara LLP, and, along with Mayo Bartlett and Abdulwali Muhammad, represent the Estate of Kenneth Chamberlain Sr.
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Inquiries about this case may be directed to Newman Ferrara attorneys, Prof. Randolph McLaughin and Debra S. Cohen, at 212-619-5400.