Officer-involved shooting near Yale prompts week of protests

“Twenty shots fired. Argyle Street. With the car, with the car,” Officer Devin Eaton of the Hamden Police Department is heard shouting. A police officer from Yale University had approached from a different angle and, in a separate video, is shown firing his weapon several times.

Connecticut State Police released the footage Tuesday in response to persistent questions and calls for transparency over the April 16 shooting that took place about a mile from Yale and has prompted a week of protests.

The driver of the Honda Civic, Paul Witherspoon III, 21, was not injured. The passenger, Stephanie Washington, 22, was shot but not critically injured, the authorities said.

Neither was armed, and both officers, who are both black, have been placed on leave while the shooting is investigated by the State Police and the state’s attorney’s office.

James Rovella, the commissioner of the state Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection, said in a news conference Tuesday that Witherspoon appeared to be complying with police orders in the video but that one of his hands had not been visible. Rovella said Eaton fired 13 shots in the encounter, and the Yale officer, Terrance Pollock, fired three times, The Associated Press reported.

Protesters on Yale’s campus and in the neighboring community have demanded justice in a shooting they say is the latest example of police officers firing at unarmed black civilians without sufficient cause.

Demonstrators have gathered almost daily at the site of the shooting and outside the home of Yale’s president, Peter Salovey. Salovey sent a letter to the Yale community the day after the shooting, calling on people to refrain from drawing conclusions until both Yale and the state completed investigations.

“As we wait to learn more about this incident, let us treat each other with respect and decency, and with a sense of common purpose,” he wrote.

Last Thursday, hundreds of Yale students and activists from New Haven congregated at a prominent intersection near the center of campus, shutting down two major thoroughfares. Protesters waved signs that read, “Jail Killer Cops!” and “Yale PD: Off of our Streets!”

“It was like nothing I’ve ever been a part of,” said Hacibey Catalbasoglu, a Yale senior who grew up in New Haven and serves on the city’s Board of Alders. “I’ve been to a lot of demonstrations throughout New Haven and Connecticut. But this was the first time I saw the Yale community and the New Haven community come together in such a way.”

On the night of the shooting, the two officers had responded to a call that indicated Witherspoon may have been fleeing from an attempted armed robbery, Rovella said.

An attendant at the Go On gas station on Arch Street in Hamden had called 911 at 4:20 a.m. and reported that an African American man with dreadlocks had pulled a gun on a newspaper delivery man outside the station and had asked him for money. The attendant gave the police a license plate number.

“I need some help, he’s dangerous, he is harassing a second person, too,” the attendant told the dispatcher, according to a transcript of the 911 call. “Send somebody please.”

The police responded and tracked the man’s car as it passed into neighboring New Haven. An officer with the Yale police responded as well, and the two initiated a stop.

Neither the bodycam footage nor two security-camera videos released earlier by the police offer clarity on why the officers began shooting. In earlier statements to reporters, Josue Dorelus, a Connecticut state trooper, said that Witherspoon had “abruptly” left his car, but the video released Tuesday does not appear to match that description.

“He already had his hand on the trigger and everything,” Witherspoon said in an interview with WTNH television. “Ready to shoot.”

Neither officer followed police protocol with their body cameras, Rovella said. Pollock, a 16-year veteran of Yale’s police force, never turned his camera on, he said. Eaton only turned on his camera after the shooting, but a special “recall” feature allowed it to capture the earlier images, he said.

Despite the initial call about an attempted robbery, police said no charges had been filed against either Witherspoon or his girlfriend, Washington.

Mike Dolan, a lawyer for Witherspoon, said that his client had gotten into a verbal disagreement at the gas station but that was all.

“My client did not hurt anybody,” he said. “He did not have a gun. He did not threaten anyone with a gun.”

The body-camera footage is difficult to follow when watched at full speed. When slowed down, Witherspoon can be seen more clearly standing up with his arms raised after being stopped by the police.

“For this young man to be ordered out of his car, and get out of his car with his hands up, and then for the officer to begin to fire, it is devastating, for me and for the community,” the Rev. Boise Kimber, pastor of the First Calvary Baptist Church in New Haven, said Wednesday in an interview.

Kimber said that he and a coalition of clergy members were planning to lead another protest Thursday to Salovey’s house and office, to demand that Pollock be fired and for Yale to take steps to improve the relationship between the campus and the community.

The mayor of Hamden, Curt Leng, said in a statement that he was “deeply sorry to the individuals who were involved that this ever occurred.”

“We will do better,” he said, “We must do better.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.