By Steve Hughes
Source Times Union, Albany, N.Y.
ALBANY, NY— Body camera footage from the police shooting that left 32-year-old Jordan Young critically wounded Monday showed him running at an officer moments before the officer fired several shots.
Police Chief Eric Hawkins played the video of the shooting for reporters Thursday afternoon at police headquarters in a 40-minute news conference. Before showing the footage he continued to defend his officers' actions saying, "As I said at the press conference Monday, this was an officer that was under attack."
The department shared footage from the two officers who were the first to encounter Young as he walked his dog on New Scotland Avenue.
It starts about 15 minutes after officers received a call at 12:50 a.m. for a home invasion at the Morris Street address where Young lives. The unidentified caller told police there was a group of people in the house and someone had a gun.
Two officers, who both joined the department 10 months ago, were patrolling the area looking for someone who was spotted on the home's roof. That person may have later been spotted in a nearby parking lot. The two officers were circling the area when they came across Young. The footage picks up Young at about 1:14 a.m., crouched next to his dog with a knife to its throat in the middle of New Scotland Avenue near the intersection of Dana Avenue.
They asked Young what he was doing and where he was going before they noticed the knife. At that point, they drew their weapons and began repeatedly asking him to drop the knife. Neither officer was equipped with a Taser.
The two videos do not clearly pick up all of what Young says to the officers, but he releases the dog and briefly begins walking away from the officers. He moves away to avoid a car driving down the road, then heads straight toward the officer who got out of the passenger side of the patrol car.
The situation escalated quickly. As Young approached him, the officer retreated further into the parking lot where they had stopped. The video from the body camera on the officer who fired his gun shows Young running at him as the officer retreats.
The officer then fired his gun three times, striking Young each time. The entire encounter lasts less than a minute, a timeframe Hawkins said made it extremely difficult for officers to definitively ascertain any mental health issues.
"In sixty seconds, you can't make a mental health diagnosis," Hawkins said. "Certified professionals in the field, I'm sure, can't make a mental health diagnosis."
The video footage shown to reporters abruptly ends with the gunfire. The department said officers immediately rendered aid and flagged down a nearby ambulance to take Young to Albany Medical Center Hospital. The video of a third officer who came upon the scene while the first two officers were talking to Young — and who fired a Taser — was not shown.
Hawkins explained why the other two officers were not equipped with Tasers. He said when the department replaced its entire Taser stock in August 2020, the department was dealing with social justice protests and calls for police reform, Hawkins said.
He prioritized de-escalation training and other reforms over ensuring all of the department's officers were trained to use the new Tasers, he said.
"It's just that at the time when we purchased the new system that we have right now, the other priorities that I just explained were things that we wanted to move forward on," he said.
Hawkins said he believes the department anticipates filing charges against Young, who remains at Albany Medical Center Hospital.
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Many details concerning the initial incident police were called for remain unclear. Hawkins said one person was arrested at the home that generated the initial 911 call, but he did not have that person's name or the charges they face.
The police department had previously shown the video to some members of the Common Council as well as several members of the city's Police Review Board, who watched the videos Thursday morning.
Lawmakers who reviewed the body camera footage said they were left with questions, but none of them disputed the police department's version of what happened.
The review board will decide whether to open an independent investigation into the incident after all of its members watch the videos, board chairwoman Nairobi Vives said Thursday afternoon.Voters recently gave the board new powers to investigate police conduct.
Before the shooting, Young, who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, according to a family spokeswoman, had a series of recent encounters with police.
He was taken into custody after allegedly threatening someone with a handgun-shaped lighter on Jan. 14. When police tried to process him, Young refused to be fingerprinted and photographed, according to the arrest report, and his family claimed he was beaten into compliance.
Hawkins flatly denied those allegations on Thursday.
"Absolutely not," Hawkins said. "We have complete video footage of our entire booking area. That has been reviewed and there was no beating. There was no assault upon the gentleman during that incident at all."
Members of the public were not allowed to view the footage in-person on Thursday, including Alice Green, executive director for the Center of Law and Justice, who is acting as the family's spokeswoman.
Green was irate after being barred from the briefing.
"His life will never be the same," Green said of Young, who incurred internal damage as a result of the shooting. "You don't blow someone's intestines apart and expect them to have a normal life."
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