A 49-year-old man was in critical condition late Monday after being shot in the head by the police during a confrontation at a Brooklyn subway station between officers and a knife-wielding man who they believed had not paid his fare, officials said.
The man with the head wound was one of two bystanders and four people in total who were shot in the melee at the Sutter Avenue L station. Critics said the shooting raised questions about the Police Department’s use of lethal force in a tight, crowded space to enforce a minor, if persistent, offense.
City leaders, police officials and transit executives have made reducing crime in New York’s subway and buses a top priority. They have flooded the system with officers in a bid to improve safety and combat a perception in some quarters that the subway, especially, is dangerous.
As part of the push, officials have moved to crack down on fare evasion, which in 2022 cost the financially strapped Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state agency that runs the transit system, nearly $700 million in lost revenue. Aggressive fare enforcement can keep weapons out of the system and stop criminals from committing serious offenses, officials say.
“Let’s not forget why this started,” Janno Lieber, the authority’s chief executive, told reporters on Sunday. “It started because somebody wanted to come to the transit system with a weapon.”
But civil rights advocates said the confrontation was a reckless, dangerous and outsize response to the crime in question.
“They chose, in an enclosed space, to escalate the situation and use a disproportionate, excessive amount of force to answer what essentially was not an equal threat,” said Jennvine Wong, a supervising attorney with the Legal Aid Society Cop Accountability Project. “In doing so, what they’ve done is put people’s lives in danger.”
In addition to the 49-year-old man, those injured in the shooting were a 26-year-old female bystander who was grazed by a bullet, a police officer who was struck under his armpit and the man suspected of failing to pay the fare, who was shot in the stomach, officials said. He was also in critical condition on Monday; the woman and the officer were listed as stable. The police did not release their names.
The Police Department, noting that the episode was being examined by its Force Investigation Division, said in a statement that the man who was officers’ intended target posed an imminent threat.
“This is beyond fare evasion,” the statement said. “When approached, the individual produced a knife, threatened the lives of police officers and put bystanders at risk.”
At the Sutter Avenue station on Monday, two officers stood near an entrance and two others patrolled the Manhattan-bound platform. People interviewed outside the station expressed a shared sentiment: Was enforcing the payment of a $2.90 fare worth the potential cost of a life?
Marquita Delgado, a disability specialist who has lived in the nearby East New York section for 17 years, said she was struggling to make sense of what had happened.
“I don’t believe that hopping a turnstile should result in you being shot, not even being Tased,” Ms. Delgado, 40, said.
Matthew Miller, who lives in Brownsville and works at a Dollar General store in the neighborhood, was similarly dumbfounded.
“It was unnecessary, and they were putting everybody’s lives at stake for $2.90,” Mr. Miller, 57, said.
Others were less quick to judge the police harshly. Alyssa Rios, a student, said she wanted more details to be released.
“If they felt threatened then they should defend themselves, but they should train police on how to disarm without using guns,” she said.
The shooting occurred at about 3 p.m. after two officers followed a man who officials said had sneaked onto the platform at the Sutter Avenue station. When the officers asked him to stop, he threatened to kill them, Jeffrey Maddrey, the chief of department, said at a news conference on Sunday.
The officers asked the man to take his hands out of his pockets and then “became aware” that he had a knife in his pocket, Chief Maddrey said. His response to their command, the chief said, was: “‘No, you’re going to have to shoot me.’”
A Manhattan-bound train arrived, the man got on and the officers followed him, Chief Maddrey said. They fired Tasers at him but did not subdue him, the chief said. The man came at one officer with the knife, and both officers fired at him.
Bystander video of the aftermath shows a chaotic scene on the station platform, with people yelling and running as officers hustle from car to car. The suspect, his hands cuffed behind his back, can be seen lying in a pool of blood in one car with officers around him. A second injured person can be seen on the floor at the far end of an adjacent car. Another snippet of footage shows the wounded officer being helped by several colleagues.
The police said on Sunday that a knife had been recovered at the scene and posted a picture of it on social media. But on Monday, the department posted a message online seeking the public’s help finding an unidentified man who, they said, had taken the knife from the crime scene about a half-hour after the shootings.
The episode renewed criticism of law enforcement’s expanded presence in the transit system as city and state officials struggle to achieve prepandemic ridership levels. Several high-profile attacks this year alarmed many riders, even as crime on the subway dipped in the year’s first six months. A rider survey this spring found that fewer than half of respondents were satisfied with subway service; many expressed concern about crime and harassment.
Public safety officials have deployed hundreds of additional officers to trains and stations, expanded the use of surveillance cameras and announced a pilot program under which riders would be scanned by weapons-detecting machines.
Last year, the authority announced several steps meant to combat the evasion problem, including a public awareness initiative and the installation of new turnstiles that are harder to jump.
But enforcement continues to fall on officers patrolling the system, and it has skyrocketed in recent years. In the second quarter of 2018, the police made 1,012 arrests and issued 9,861 summons for fare evasion, according to Police Department data. In the same period this year, officers made 2,277 arrests and issued 32,304 summonses, data shows. Black and Latino New Yorkers have been disproportionately affected, data shows.
Jeffrey A. Fagan, a Columbia University law professor who specializes in policing, said the shooting on Sunday reflected the Police Department’s heightened emphasis on curbing fare evasion under Mayor Eric Adams, in part to catch people with outstanding warrants.
But, Professor Fagan added, “in most cases, fare evasion doesn’t turn up people with either weapons or drugs or other contraband or outstanding warrants.”
“That, to me, is the test on the policy,” he said.
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