Critics are questioning the New York Police Department’s use of lethal force in a tight, crowded space to enforce subway fare evasion after police shot four people — including two bystanders — on Sunday. City leaders, police officials and transit executives have made reducing crime in New York’s subway and buses a top priority, and have flooded the system with officers in a bid to improve safety and combat a perception that the subway is dangerous. Part of that push is a crackdown on fare evasion. “Let’s not forget why this started,” Janno Lieber, the authority’s chief executive, told reporters on Sunday. “It started because somebody wanted to come to the transit system with a weapon.” But civil rights advocates said the confrontation was a reckless, dangerous and outsized response to the crime in question, The New York Times reports. “They chose, in an enclosed space, to escalate the situation and use a disproportionate, excessive amount of force to answer what essentially was not an equal threat,” said Jennvine Wong, a supervising attorney with the Legal Aid Society Cop Accountability Project. “In doing so, what they’ve done is put people’s lives in danger.”
A 49-year-old man was in critical condition after being shot in the head by the police during the confrontation at a Brooklyn subway station between officers and a knife-wielding man who they believed had not paid his fare, officials said. In addition to the 49-year-old man, those injured in the shooting were a 26-year-old female bystander who was grazed by a bullet, a police officer who was struck under his armpit and the man suspected of failing to pay the fare, who was shot in the stomach, officials said. He was also in critical condition on Monday; the woman and the officer were listed as stable. The police did not release their names.
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