from the no-service,-no-protection dept
Black Lives Matter. All Cops Are Bastards.
These are not temporary catchphrases. These are universal and forever.
And leave it to a cop to ensure we never forget either of these concepts. A foot pursuit that ended in the shooting of Connecticut resident Dyshan Best would otherwise just be a footnote in cop history if some cops hadn’t decided to be the bastards they wanted to see in the world and make it extremely clear they felt a Black life didn’t matter.
The internal investigation of the shooting of a Black man by Bridgeport PD officers delivered unsurprising results:
Dyshan Best, 39, was shot in the back last year as he fled from officers in Bridgeport, Connecticut. A report released Tuesday by the state’s inspector general found that the shooting was justified because Best had a gun in his hand and the officer pursuing him had reasons to fear for his own safety.
All the stuff we expect to see in these reports is here, beginning with the assumption that a gun is a threat even if it’s not pointed at officers to the de rigueur “fear for my safety” justification for shooting a fleeing person.
What’s somewhat expected — but still somehow surprising — is what happened after the apparently justified shooting:
The first ambulance called to take Best to the hospital arrived at the scene at 6:02 p.m., about 14 minutes after the shooting. However, at the urging of other officers, that ambulance was used to take away a white police officer, Erin Perrotta, who had been involved in the foot chase, the report said.
Paramedics reported that Perrotta declined treatment in the ambulance.
“I am fine, I just needed to get out of here,” she said, according to the report. Another officer described Perrotta at the time as “visibly hysterical (crying and breathing rapidly) and had blood all over her uniform,” the report said.
That’s right. The ambulance sent to pick up the person police officers had just shot was instead handed over to Officer Erin Perrotta, who — as the Inspector General’s report notes — was enduring the relative hardship of a “mild anxiety attack.”
The second ambulance didn’t show up for another ten minutes. The person with actual bullet holes in him didn’t hit the ER until 14 minutes after Officer “Anxiety Attack” Perrotta arrived at the hospital. The officer who was never in any danger of dying got nearly a 15-minute head start on her medical treatment.
The person they’d shot didn’t make it.
Best died at 7:41 p.m. as he was undergoing treatment for the gunshot wound, which damaged his liver and right kidney.
Meanwhile, Officer Perrotta’s employer only seems interested in outlasting this news cycle:
A spokesperson for Bridgeport police, Shawnna White, declined to comment Wednesday when asked about Perrotta taking the first ambulance. She said in an email that the police department’s Internal Affairs Division would conduct its own investigation.
Sometimes the lack of direct response says more than a direct response would. Perrotta is apparently currently on administrative leave “due to an unrelated matter.” That either means Perrotta does bad stuff often enough she’s already given the department another reason to sideline her or that the department has found other stuff to add to this headline-generating “#mefirst” effort by the officer to grease the wheels for the inevitable firing.
Whatever happens now won’t budge the needle for US law enforcement agencies. But for the rest of us not standing on the inside of the Thin Blue Line, this incident says the quiet part loud: Black lives don’t matter… not when it’s a cop claiming they can’t breathe.
Filed Under: black lives matter, bridgeport police, connecticut, dyshan best, police oversight, police shooting
