New York City police Officer Peter Liang was convicted of manslaughter Thursday for the killing of unarmed Black man Akai Gurley, who was fatally shot in the stairwell of a Brooklyn housing project last November.
Liang now faces up to 15 years in jail for second-degree manslaughter and will be sentenced in April. The police department announced that Liang had been fired from the force shortly after the verdict was released.
See the moment Peter Liang learned he was guilty in the death of Akai Gurley: https://t.co/7vO1bFPR2Mhttps://t.co/sn7olarGqt
— Eyewitness News (@ABC7NY) February 12, 2016
Gurley was fatally shot when Liang and his partner were patrolling the housing complex stairwell in a so-called “vertical patrol.” Gurley, with his girlfriend a flight below the officers, was killed by a ricocheting bullet.
Vertical patrols were the subject of a federal class-action lawsuit after residents of housing projects reported being stopped by police without reasonable cause and in a racially discriminatory manner. Officers had been ordered not to conduct these patrols.
ANALYSIS: Fighting Racism in the US Criminal Justice System
After news of the shooting came out, New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton was quick to say the shooting was an accident and admitted that Gurley was “total innocent.”
#PeterLiang is the first cop to be convicted of killing a black man, but also he's a POC.
— MaryCae (@MaryCae) February 12, 2016
When they gonna convict a white cop?
But reports say that instead of calling for help, Liang texted his union representative. Liang and his partner were out of contact for more than six and a half minutes after Liang fired his gun. Only after communicating with his union did Liang report the “accidental” discharge of his weapon.
The Gurley family’s legal team argued that Liang’s actions constituted “criminal negligence.”
Gurley’s family was emotional after the verdict and supporters rushed to celebrate the decision on social media, heralding it as a key step toward justice for victims of fatal police actions.
Liang, a Chinese-American rookie officer, is one of the few officers who has been held accountable for killing an unarmed Black civilian in the recent spate of fatal police brutality incidents in the United States.
The Verdict represents the first time an NYPD officer has been found guilty of killing a citizen in decades. #akaigurley
— Max RN (@MaxRivlinNadler) February 12, 2016
Liang’s indictment last year came just weeks after a grand jury in New York City also decided not to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo, who choked to death Eric Garner, another unarmed Black man, even though a witness provided video evidence of the incident.
The verdict comes amid a national outcry over the crisis of discriminatory policing and incidents of police brutality and a severe lack of trust between many communities and their local police forces. Meanwhile, the Black Lives Matter movement continues to fight against police violence and to bring attention to the structural discrimination against Black people in local police forces and the larger U.S. criminal justice system.
According to Mapping Police Violence, U.S. police killed more than 100 unarmed Black people in 2015.