In the spring of 2019, two
New York City Police Department officers entered the Bronx apartment of
Kawaski Trawick. The 32-year-old personal trainer and dancer had called
911 after locking himself out.
But 112 seconds after their arrival, footage showed, one of the officers shot and killed Trawick, despite the officer’s more-experienced partner repeatedly telling him not to use force.
When an internal investigation later cleared the officers — saying “no wrongdoing was found” — the NYPD offered no explanation for its reasoning. But records obtained by ProPublica can now reveal how the department came to that conclusion.
Investigators never
explored key exchanges between the two officers in the run-up to the
shooting. They also never followed up with the officers when their
accounts contradicted the video evidence.
“Any conversation between
you and your partner?” the head of the investigative unit asked Officer
Herbert Davis hours after the shooting.
“No,” Davis answered.
That wasn’t true.
After arriving at Trawick’s
apartment and finding him holding a stick and a bread knife, body-worn
camera footage shows that Davis, who is Black, told his less-experienced
white partner, Officer Brendan Thompson, not to use his Taser. “Don’t,
don’t, don’t,” he said, motioning for Thompson to step back.
Thompson fired his Taser
anyway, causing Trawick to become enraged, and Davis then tried to stop
Thompson from shooting Trawick. “No, no, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t,
don’t,” Davis said, before briefly pushing Thompson’s gun down.
The investigators had access to all that footage. They never asked either officer about it.
Thompson told police investigators that before firing on Trawick, “I feared for my safety.”
this man deliberately made the conscious choice to harm then kill this man and actively refused instruction from his experience partner not to do it. and internal investigations somehow never encountered this footage
