Monday afternoon outside One Times Square — the New Year’s Eve ball-drop building, next door to an NYPD substation, on what may be the most heavily touristed and most heavily policed block in the country — a woman holding two large kitchen knives was shot by New York Police Department officers. Bystander video shows at least ten officers in a circle around her, at least one trying to stop her with a Taser, the Taser failing to bring her down, the woman walking quickly toward the officers with the knives waving in front of her, an officer backing up, at least two more drawing handguns, and then the sound of gunfire. The NYPD closed part of Seventh Avenue and told the public to stay away. The woman’s condition wasn’t released at the briefing. Whether she had hurt anyone before the shooting remained unclear.
This is the second time in two weeks the NYPD has answered a knife with a gun in Manhattan. Fifteen days earlier on the Lower East Side, officers fatally shot a knife-wielding man. Both shootings sit in the same response pattern: the Taser fails, the protocol funnels to lethal force, the briefing is held, the avenue is reopened, the file is closed. Each incident becomes its own news cycle. Each cycle ends with the city treating it as an isolated event. The throughline is the default. The default is the doctrine.
The doctrine is what deserves the column’s attention — not the officers on the concrete, who were executing a protocol, not improvising one. Martin Luther King told the mourners at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in September 1963 that the case of the four murdered children must be made, but that the more important inquiry was into “the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers.” King’s structure — conduct at the front, system behind it — is what New York refuses to apply to these two Manhattan shootings. The officers on the video did what they were trained and equipped to do. The question is why what they were trained and equipped to do runs through one Taser, deployed once, to lethal backup as the only fallback.
The cui bono trace is plain. The tourist economy needs Times Square to read as a stage set: costumed characters, selfie-takers, the glass-cleaned windows of the flagship stores. That economy pays for the policing that keeps the stage clean. What that policing is equipped to do when a person in crisis walks into it with a blade is exactly what the bystander video shows: the Taser, the failure, the gun. The doctrine is built for the stage-set version of the block. When the stage cracks, the doctrine’s answer is the one we just watched. The cost-bearer is the person in crisis, and the cost is the bullet wound — and, two weeks ago on the Lower East Side, the cost was a life.
The city’s pattern is to file each incident as its own event. June’s Penn Station stabbings, which left five commuters hurt, became a story about a single attacker. The Lower East Side shooting became a story about a single armed man. Monday’s shooting outside One Times Square will become a story about a single knife-wielding woman in crisis. Each story arrives complete with its press briefing and its closed avenue. What no story arrives with is the next call, the next Taser, the next funnel to lethal force — because the doctrine that produces the next call has not been named in any of them.
This is the opportunity New York keeps refusing. Not a chance to assign blame to the officers who fired on Monday. The opportunity is to interrogate the doctrine itself. Why is the non-lethal option a single Taser, deployed once, with lethal backup as the only fallback? Why are there not shields, containment tools, less-lethal munitions rated for edged-weapon encounters staged at a substation that sits at the symbolic center of the city? Why does the response to a person in crisis waving a knife in a tourist zone look identical to the response on the Lower East Side, identical to the response that will come the next time, and the next?
A tourist economy that depends on Times Square being a stage set cannot also depend on that stage doubling as a shooting gallery. The substation is right there. The cameras are right there. And the lesson is right there, if the city chooses to read it: not that officers did the wrong thing on Monday, but that the system around them offered no better thing to do.
The police are not the enemy. The doctrine is. The doctrine is what the next call will meet. The briefing will come. The avenue will reopen. The next call will come too — and the Taser will fail, and the gun will come out, and the city will hold another briefing, and the file on this one will close, and the doctrine will still be the doctrine. King’s long arc bends toward justice, but only when specific people, in a specific moment, push it. New York has not pushed. The officers on the concrete are not the city. The doctrine is the city. The doctrine is what the next call will meet.