When Jameel Harrison, a suspected drug dealer, attempted to escape from F.B.I agents trying to arrest him near a Baltimore shopping center two years ago, agents opened fire.
Two bullets hit his Infiniti FX37’s left front tire.
Six bullets struck him in the head and neck, killing him.
After investigating the case, a state prosecutor and the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division declined to prosecute the agents.
That left the F.B.I.’s shooting incident review group, a panel of officials who decide whether shootings comply with bureau policy on the use of lethal force and that rarely punishes agents.
In 2013, The New York Times reported that of more than 150 episodes in which an agent shot another person dating back at least two decades, the group deemed every one justified.
In the case of the Baltimore shooting, however, the bureau took the unusual step of deeming part of that case a “bad shoot” in agents’ parlance.
But the group did not fault the two agents who killed Mr. Harrison. Instead, it chastised only the agent who shot the tire, recommending that the agent be suspended for a day without pay, according to documents obtained by The Times in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
The review group’s reasoning was that the bureau’s policy on using lethal force forbids firing a gun to disable a vehicle, and it concluded that this had been the agent’s motive in shooting the tire. But the same policy permits firing a gun to protect people from danger, and the panel decided that the two agents who shot Mr. Harrison were trying to keep him from driving into bystanders.
The F.B.I. review group made its decision about the Baltimore case in November, 2014.
In February of that year, the group also termed an episode in which an off-duty agent in Queens, N.Y., shot and wounded a car burglar outside his house a “bad shoot,” as documents disclosed by the F.B.I. in August, 2015 previously revealed.
Those two “bad shoot” findings ended a years-long pattern in which the F.B.I. had deemed proper every intentional shooting by its agents, according to thousands of pages of bureau records obtained in Freedom of Information Act litigation.
Before the Baltimore incident, the last time the F.B.I. tried to discipline an agent for intentionally firing a gun was 2003, after an off-duty agent fired a warning shot during an altercation with day laborers outside a Home Depot in Los Angeles. Before the Queens shooting, it is not clear when, if ever, the F.B.I. tried to discipline an agent for intentionally shooting someone; there are no records of any such episode in the documents obtained through the litigation, which date to 1993.
The disclosure of the two recent “bad shoot” findings comes at a time of heightened national scrutiny of shootings by law enforcement officials. Mr. Harrison was black, as is Adrian Ricketts, the victim of the shooting in Queens who later admitted to investigators that he had helped burglarize the agent’s Lexus before the agent shot him from the second-story window of his house. Mr. Ricketts and that agent, Navin Kalicharan, agreed not to testify against each other, and neither was charged.
The F.B.I. declined to comment on the shooting reviews.
A month after his death, the Baltimore Sun reported that a police report identified Mr. Harrison as a member of the Black Guerrilla Family gang and that he had been arrested many times. He was unarmed when he was shot, but the F.B.I. documents said Mr. Harrison had more than $1,800 and two bags of heroin in his possession at the time of the shooting. His killing attracted relatively little attention, in contrast with the widespread protests, rioting and arson that followed the death last spring of Freddie Gray while he was in police custody in Baltimore.
The decisions by the 11-member shooting review group to fault both the Queens agent and the Baltimore agent who shot the tire were unanimous. One member also elected to find the other two Baltimore agents’ shooting of Mr. Harrison unjustified, but was outvoted; the report did not specify that member’s objections.
The names of the four agents involved — the fourth did not shoot — were redacted. But a Baltimore County police report about the episode, obtained by the Baltimore Sun in 2014, listed their last names as James, Lipsner, Nye and Reagan. The police report did not identify each agent’s role in the incident.
Lawrence Berger, a lawyer representing the agent who shot the tire, said his client is appealing the sanction. The review documents included a statement from that agent saying that he or she shot the tire in an attempt to “immobilize the vehicle and neutralize the threat” it posed to nearby people.
Mr. Berger, the general counsel of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, also represents the agent in the Queens case, Mr. Kalicharan. The Times reported in August that the F.B.I. was trying to fire Mr. Kalicharan, but he was fighting dismissal.
Additional documents newly disclosed by the bureau provide an update to the Queens case. They include a December 2015 letter to Mr. Kalicharan from Candace Will, the agency’s assistant director for professional responsibility, saying she was “dismissing you from the rolls of the F.B.I.”
Mr. Berger said Mr. Kalicharan is appealing Ms. Will’s decision and maintained that the punishments the F.B.I. is trying to impose in the Queens and Baltimore incidents will ultimately be rescinded.
“In both situations, both individuals reacted appropriately to the overt threat that was presented to them,” Mr. Berger said.
The newly disclosed documents also include shooting review reports about the F.B.I.’s killing of a Chechen man, Ibragim Todashev, in Orlando, Fla., during an interrogation in May 2013 about the Boston Marathon bombing suspects. Other documents describing the investigation into that matter, including those from a Florida prosecutor and the Civil Rights Division, were already public.
*Culled from The New York Times
