Commentary
Stacey Lewis, from Facebook. 
Stacey Lewis, from Facebook. 

Niagara Falls Police Shooting Raises Questions

by
Aaron Lowinger
/ Sep. 30, 2016 8am EST

On Wednesday night, Niagara Falls joined the ranks of other communities nationwide grappling with police-involved shootings. Stacey Lewis was shot during a raid on his home while armed with a box cutter.

The only real reporting on the incident so far has been done by Lou Michel of the Buffalo News. According to Michel’s report, “between 15 and 18” SWAT team officers raided the home at 488 20th Street with a no-knock warrant related to alleged drug dealing at the address. Officers claimed they saw a man with a “long gun” running upstairs. 

No report spells out exactly what happened next after the police followed the man, later identified as the 33-year-old Lewis, up the stairs. The Niagara Falls Police Department isn’t offering a narrative yet of how Lewis was shot beyond being in close proximity to Lewis and not being able to see his hands. Michel reports that after Lewis was shot in the abdomen, he was found with an open box cutter and a cell phone. Police haven’t disclosed whether they identified themselves as police, or whether the man refused requests other than to show his hands just before being shot. We’ll never know, because police weren’t wearing body cameras. Luckily, it appears Lewis will survive the incident and be able to provide his own side of the story.

There’s already one major discrepancy between initial and follow-up reports: on Wednesday night police had said that Lewis was holding a rifle when he was shot. By Thursday, the status of the rifle during the raid was in question, but we know he wasn’t holding it in his hands. 

Time Warner Cable News released a Wednesday night, which appeared to capture Lewis pleading with officers from a stretcher in front of the residence, “Why’d y’all shoot me?” 

 

The officer in question, an eight-year veteran of the force, has been placed on paid administrative leave. 

Lewis is currently in stable condition at ECMC, facing several felony counts for drugs. One assault rifle, about $2,000, and small packages of various drugs were confiscated.

In 2012, Lewis was arrested in a drug raid in the Falls, but charges were dismissed after a judge ruled that there was no probable cause for that warrant. Could the overkill of a SWAT team on this raid be a form of police retribution for how that case ended?

But rather than question the police why they changed their story, or why it might be appropriate to serve a no-knock warrant with a SWAT team on what sounds like a small-time dealer, or why the police can’t even say with certitude how many officers were on the scene, most local media was happy to take pictures of the drugs and money on the table, record the statements at the press conference, and move on. 

Most local outlets neglected wholesale to mention the national context of police violence against communities of color and recent activism around these issues. 

 

 

The News published a follow-up report this morning, including family members and community members casting doubt over the justification of lethal force. But still that report goes so far as to include the account of what happened on Wednesday from a biased source, an attorney—Thomas Burton—who has professionally defended local police for years. Burton claims to have the details of the event from the officer who fired the shot. 

The same source who also told Michel: “If this guy wasn’t dealing drugs and he wasn’t in possession of an illegal assault rifle, he wouldn’t be in the hospital. He’s lucky he’s alive.”

And: “Given this guy’s track record, (the officer) is entitled to an abundance of caution so he can go home in one piece,” Burton said. “If this guy just put up his hands to a SWAT officer in full battle gear, he wouldn’t have been hurt.”

Again, that’s an attorney baldly suggesting that use of force best-practice guidelines for police shouldn’t matter if a cop gets scared. And again, that’s the Buffalo News, reprinting not a legally biased opinion of the event without clearly spelling out exactly which horse Burton has in the game.

The NFPD has long been the subjects of complaints around police misconduct, brutality, and discrimination. A consent decree between the New York State Attorney General’s office and the NFPD was in place for five years up to 2016. The decree “required the Falls Police Department to amend internal policies and procedures involving the use of force, use of force recording and internal reviews of the use of force reports,” the Niagara Gazette reported. 

 

Of course it’s entirely possible that Lewis was a threat to his community and that when confronted with armed officers, his actions gave them no choice but to act with lethal force. His Facebook page seems to advertise his own drug selling, and he’s been arrested on multiple occasions for drugs. But without body cameras and given an official narrative that has already taken one sharp turn to the right matched with a video that appears to record Lewis sounding shocked that police had shot him when all he had was a box cutter, key questions linger about appropriate use of force in this case. 

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