That’s Detective Kenneth Ayala headed home from the hospital yesterday. He was one of four of New York’s finest who were shot by Nakwon Foxworth when the NYPD Emergency Service Unit stormed his apartment. They were called after the Brooklyn resident had waved a gun at some movers and threatened his girlfriend and child. It looks like all of the cops will recover and gladder of that we could not be. Our only question is why the hell were they shot in the first place?
And no, we don’t mean that crap about illegal guns flowing into NYC from Virginia and North Carolina. Mayor Mike and Chief Kelly will do what they do and rail against the inconvenience posed by the Constitution ad nauseum. We’re wondering what possessed those four cops to storm Foxworth’s apartment in the first place?
Sure, he was armed and erratic. But he was alone.
He started waving a gun, and one of the movers called 911. Foxworth then barricaded himself in his sixth-floor apartment with his girlfriend and the baby.
Moments after the ESU team arrived, the terrified girlfriend ran out of the apartment, with the child, to safety. She later told cops that, moments earlier, Foxworth had started loading all three of his illegal weapons.
OK then. We’re not SWAT tacticians and we don’t play one on the Intertubes. But we’re second-guessers par excellence. So think about the situation for a moment. The cops had an armed, angry guy holed up in his apartment. His girlfriend and baby were safe. Turning our 20/20 capabilities up to eleven, wouldn’t the safer course of action have been to evacuate nearby apartments and either wait him out or disable him with some handy flashbangs and perhaps a soupcon of teargas?
Instead, the cops charged into the joint with Kevlar shields up. Foxworth may have been nuts, but we apparently wasn’t stupid. He shot under the shields, hitting all four of them from the calf on down.
Of course, you wouldn’t really expect a New York reporter to ask a question like that. Even if a paper like the Post assigns three of their top ink-stained wretches to the story. No, they were too entranced by the tale of the twelve shots Foxworth fired from his “9mm revolver” and the “cop-killer bullets” loaded in his “sawed-off military assault weapon.” That probably sells more papers than stories of a possible tactical screw-up that landed four cops in the hospital.