New Surge in Shootings by Officers
By J. DAVID GOODMAN
Published: August 25, 2013

The episodes ran the gamut of dangerous situations faced by New York City police officers: a man stabbing his ex-girlfriend; a driver fleeing the police in a stolen car; a group of young men thought to be heading for a hidden weapon; a gunman firing at plainclothes officers on a darkened street.

What bound them together was the way the officers responded in each case: with gunfire.

The cluster of four police shootings over three days — three on Saturday and one on Thursday — was atypical of recent years, and comes amid intense public scrutiny of the Police Department. Each shooting remains under investigation; none resulted in death.

Along with crime in the city over all, the number of shootings involving the police has declined over the last decade. In 2011, the most recent year for which records were available, there were 92 shootings; 36 of those involved “adversarial conflict with a suspect” of the type seen in the past few days. (There were 61 such shootings in 2003.)

“It’s unusual for 2013, without a doubt,” said John C. Cerar, a former commander of the Police Department’s firearms training section. “But if you go back 20 years, that’s what happened during the ’90s. It was nothing to have five in a week, seven in a week.”

Of all the recent shootings, the most dramatic took place around 8:30 p.m. on Saturday, after two patrol officers in the Melrose section of the Bronx were alerted to an assault in progress in a second-floor apartment nearby. The officers arrived to find a man stabbing a woman numerous times, the police said, and they ordered him to stop. When he refused, one of the officers shot him once in the abdomen.

The police later said the man, Guillermo Melendez, 37, a former boyfriend of the woman’s, had also attempted to attack the officers with a black-handled kitchen knife. He was in critical but stable condition at Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center, the police said. The woman, stabbed eight times, was also taken there, and was expected to survive.

Earlier on Saturday, at 4:30 a.m. in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, a uniformed officer was monitoring a van that the police believed held a gun used in a shooting earlier on Saturday, waiting for a search warrant. When the officer saw three young men enter the van, he yelled for them to stop, then fired his weapon more than once, hitting one of the men, 17-year-old Geremy Botor, in the buttocks, the police said.

Mr. Botor and another man, Kevin Johnson, also 17, were arrested and charged with weapons possession; Mr. Johnson was charged with the earlier shooting. A third man fled. The police did not immediately say how many shots had been fired.

About an hour and a half earlier on Saturday, three police officers in Harlem encountered an armed man on West 111th Street and Lenox Avenue after hearing gunfire. As they approached, the police said, the man fired a silver Smith & Wesson .357-caliber revolver at least once in the officers’ direction; two officers returned fire but did not strike the man, John Bradley, 27. He tossed the gun away as he fled and was later arrested on multiple firearm and assault charges, the police said.

On Thursday evening, police officers opened fire on a Ford pickup in Astoria, Queens, after the driver, suspected in a nearby robbery, hit one officer with his vehicle and began to flee. The police later identified the driver as Gary Sarback, 61, of Lake Worth, Fla., and said the pickup had been reported stolen on Tuesday, with a revolver inside; so far no arrests have been made.

Police guidelines prohibit officers from firing at a moving vehicle unless an occupant is using deadly force against them other than with the vehicle. “We are taught to get out of the way,” Mr. Cerar said.

The police said the officer struck by the vehicle, and another officer, each fired one round; it was not clear if either hit the intended target.

“Even in cases where it appears the officer has followed all guidelines, a final determination is not made until the full investigation into the incident has been completed,” said John J. McCarthy, the department’s chief spokesman.