Questions linger after police shooting in Chester

Six officers.

As many as 100 bullets.

One man dead.

Two lingering questions: Did police unfairly execute Shalamar Longer? Or were they properly defending themselves against an armed ex-con?

Longer, 33, died in a hail of police gunfire after an early-morning chase Feb. 8 ended with him crashing his SUV in a Chester neighborhood.

Delaware County District Attorney Jack Whelan ruled the shooting justified, saying Longer had aimed a loaded gun at police and vowed not to return to prison.

Yet nearly two weeks since Longer's death, community members remain skeptical.

Officials acknowledge Longer never fired a shot. No video captured the scene.

Investigators questioned witnesses to the 2 a.m. shooting, Whelan said. Some neighbors on the block that night say police never talked to them.

Other residents say several dozen shots at one man - armed or not - is just too many.

"This is a breaking point," the Rev. Calvin Williams of Chester's Temple of Brotherly Love, said Friday. "When there are 100 shots fired . . . that's excessive force on any level."

The differing views of law enforcement and the community have put yet another spotlight on Chester, a notoriously violent and poor Delaware County city of 34,000 and its history of police tensions.

Last week, the city's new leadership took steps to address that. On Thursday, Mayor Thaddeus Kirkland and his new police commissioner, Darren Alston, told residents at a packed town-hall meeting that city patrol officers would begin wearing body cameras in the next 30 days. They also said they have asked the U.S. Justice Department to review the department's current use-of-force policies, as well as past cases of deadly force by police.

Despite the community concerns over Longer's death, experts and attorneys who routinely work on cases involving the use of force by police told The Inquirer that almost every bullet was justified.

"Does it look bad? One hundred [shots], one guy, six cops. . . . This sounds brutal," said Daniel Kennedy, a consultant often tapped to testify in use-of-force cases and a professor at Oakland University in Michigan. "But not if you look at what's going on in the mind of each officer who is thinking, 'This guy is going to hit me.' "

Police say the incident began in the early morning of Feb. 8, when an Upland Borough officer noticed a burned-out light above the license plate on a Chevrolet SUV and tried to pull the vehicle over.

Longer, on parole and allegedly carrying a gun illegally, then sped away. His cousin Asmar Longer, 23, sat in the passenger seat.

Other police took up the chase, which ended when the SUV crashed outside a house on Keystone Road in Chester. Longer then pulled a gun and aimed it at police, Whelan said.

Six officers opened fire. Whelan said their bullet count was "very close" to 100. Longer died in the car without firing a shot.

Whelan said Asmar Longer - who was shot in the ankle, fled the SUV, and subsequently passed out - told police his cousin - who had multiple convictions and most recently served a prison term for robbery - had vowed not to return to jail.

(Approached at a vigil in Chester last week, Asmar Longer declined comment. His relatives said they have retained a lawyer.)

Whelan said Thursday he did not believe police knew Shalamar Longer was the driver of the SUV when they tried to pull him over. But he said once anyone attempts to flee from police, it is an officer's obligation to pursue the chase.

"It would be very unusual and, in fact, it would be a dereliction of duty" for an officer to let a car speed away, Whelan said.

In certain situations, Whelan said, such as a high-speed chase or a pursuit in a highly trafficked area, an officer might be asked to end a chase to prevent injury to himself or bystanders. But Longer's pursuit, he said, was relatively low-speed and occurred in the middle of the night.

State law says officers can use deadly force to protect themselves or someone else from death or serious injury.

"The situation dictates what kind of level of force you must use," Alston, the police commissioner, said in an interview Friday. "You don't bring a Taser to a knife fight."

Experts say officers are never trained to kill - only to neutralize a threat. But when police are faced with a high-stress situation in which they must make a decision, often in the middle of the night, shooting to simply "neutralize" a threat becomes monumentally difficult.

"Police have a split second to make these decisions, and we have weeks and months and years . . . to argue every position," said Emanuel Kapelsohn, a use-of-force expert in Lehigh County. "Police don't have that luxury."

The nearly 100 shots that night, experts agree, was a result of sheer math.

If six officers empty their guns, each was likely to fire 15 or 16 shots. And they have reasons to use every shot: increased difficulty assessing a threat in the middle of the night, a low accuracy in hitting targets in the field, and the rapid fire at which police can unload their guns - nearly four bullets per second.

"They all perceive themselves in danger," Kennedy said. "You're not going to wait for the other to fire. What if all six officers are thinking the same thing?"

How many times Longer was hit, and by whom, hasn't been disclosed. The only public record of his autopsy is a one-page summary that says he died of "multiple gunshot wounds." Authorities haven't named the officers involved, except to say four of the six were from the Chester force.

Patrick Geckle, a Philadelphia lawyer who specializes in police-misconduct cases, believes officers should be required to justify every bullet they shoot.

The initial shots may have been justified in Longer's case, Geckle said, but that "does not mean 90 shots were justified."

State police keep no statistics on how many police-involved shootings Chester officers are involved in each year, and the information wasn't available from city officials. Nationally, the FBI reported 444 justifiable homicides by police in 2014. In the same year, 46 police officers were fatally shot in the line of duty, the statistics show.

Alston, the police commissioner, acknowledged Friday that relations between Chester officers and the community still "have room to improve."

"And we most definitely will work on it," he said. "We're always going to review and critique some of our actions."

Still, he and Kirkland both said they stand by Whelan's ruling that the shooting was justified.

Kirkland, sworn in as Chester's mayor in January, said he and Alston already have goals to improve police relations with the community. One is to create a civilian review board to evaluate complaints against police.

Until then, he said, he understands the upset around Longer's death.

"It may seem excessive . . . and I know that has to be a very traumatic event," Kirkland said.

"But if I believed that our police officers were wrong, I'd be the first ones to say they're wrong."

cmccabe@philly.com

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