On Thursday, Feb. 11, the jury in the trial of 27-year-old New York police officer Peter Liang reached a verdict and found Liang guilty of second-degree manslaughter and official misconduct in the death of 28-year-old Akai Gurley, becoming the first NYPD officer in over a decade to be convicted in a fatal shooting.
An article published on villagevoice.com called Liang's conviction "a pretty thorny place in city politics." Many Chinese New Yorkers wondered why Liang was indicted, prosecuted and convicted while white cops who had killed black men in recent years went scot-free.
The article said that the NYPD and policing, in general, are now under a high level of scrutiny as political pressures to hold the police accountable are increasing while deep resistance to systemic change is felt.
Liang's trial stretched across three weeks, and for both the Brooklyn district attorney's prosecutors and Liang's defense team, the trial was remarkable.
One of the things that made it notable is that the basic facts were uncontested and incontrovertible: that on Nov. 20, 2014, Liang and his partner, who were both rookie cops, were on a "vertical patrol" inside the Louis Heaton Pink Houses, a public housing complex in East New York, when Liang's gun went off. Akai Gurley was on the landing one floor below when Liang's bullet ricocheted off a wall in the dark stairwell and hit the 28-year-old, unarmed man. He died.
But beyond this, during final summations, both the prosecution and defense attorneys expressed their views on what Liang's trial meant. For the defense, it was to protect Liang from the bad timing.
According to the Daily News, out of the 179 persons killed by NY police officers in the last 15 years, only three cases led to indictment.
The incident involving Liang occurred just months after an NYPD officer was caught on video choking Eric Garner and the shooting of Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Public uproar over police violence was further intensified by the non-indictment of the shooters of Garner and Brown.
"The decision to make a prosecution in this case is no less political than it is in other cases," Alex Vitale, a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College who studies police policy, was quoted in the article. "This is taking place in the middle of a legitimacy crisis in policing."
According to Liang's lawyers, the situation and the usual rules were turned against them.
"Policing in America is not on trial here," Robert E. Brown, one of Liang's attorneys, said in closing arguments. "What's on trial here is the evidence presented by these prosecutors against my client in this courtroom. He shouldn't be made a scapegoat for any other thing that's happening."
The article said that what Brown seemed to be saying was that public housing is dangerous, and if an order should be imposed on such places, it should be imposed by cops who may have their guns drawn. Brown added that Liang was a cop doing what people ask cops to do every day.
The prosecutors, on the other hand, argued that Liang's shooting of Gurley was unrelated to any wider controversy over police violence.
"The defense is right," Assistant District Attorney Joseph Alexis told jurors in his own summation. "This isn't about other things that happened in our country. It's not about other police killings. It's about this police killing."
For Alexis, however, it was not about protecting Liang but it was more about protecting the force from being tainted by Liang's case.
"It is our position that Peter Liang is not the same as the police officers who bravely keep us safe every day," Alexis said. "Convicting Peter Liang is not a conviction of the New York City Police Department."
According to prosecutors, Liang was a coward, fearful in the dark stairwell, too quick to shoot, too slow to man up, radio the incident in, and try to save Gurley's life as he lay bleeding out on the landing below.
Alexis argued.
"There are proud, brave cops who go out every day and patrol every day and every night to keep us safe," he said. "We honor those cops. We applaud those cops. But Peter Liang falls short of that. Peter Liang is not one of those cops."
Liang's conduct violated the basic social contract with police, Alexis said.
"In exchange for the power we give to police, the power to keep us all safe, the police have a sacred trust that they fulfill, a sacred trust with each community. That trust is that the police department commits to thoroughly train its officers before arming them with deadly weapons and sending them into our communities. That's why police officers go through rigorous and thorough training." Alexis said, adding that Liang disregarded that training.
Some Chinese New Yorkers saw Liang's indictment as a double standard.
"A lot of our people think this is very unfair," said Eddie Chiu, senior director of the Lin Sing Association, a 116-year-old Chinatown institution. "Why only charge Peter Liang? Because he's Chinese?"
Chiu helped raise more than $40,000 for Liang from the Chinese community, money the Liang family used to hire their own defense team.
However, other Chinese and Asian Americans are celebrating Liang's conviction. CAAAV, an organization that began in Chinatown 30 years ago as the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence, fighting police brutality against immigrant communities, led in supporting Gurley's family's calls for justice against Peter Liang.
Cathy Dang, CAAAV's executive director, said: "He's an officer of color, and he's one of the first cops to be put on trial in a very long time. There haven't been indictments of white officers."
Dang also rejected the notion that Liang is a scapegoat.
"A scapegoat is someone who didn't do anything wrong," she said. "Peter Liang did do something wrong: He killed Akai Gurley."
"The climate has changed so much from when Eric Garner and Michael Brown were killed," Dang added. "The movement for police accountability has never been as strong as it is now, and those conditions made it so that the district attorney could indict Liang. Around the country, we're starting to see more and more police officers being held to account in the justice system."
The article noted that the day after Liang's conviction, the family of Akai Gurley shifted focus from individual accountability to a wider structural overhaul.
"We want justice beyond the courtroom," they wrote in a statement. "We want policy changes within the NYPD, to end the violence that police officers routinely inflict on our communities."
They called for an end to vertical patrols, a withdrawal of the NYPD from public housing, and a reallocation of police funds to affordable housing and after-school programs. Police unions, negligent prosecutors, and indifferent politicians are all on notice, they said.
"We will keep pushing for the systemic changes we need to end police violence for good."
Peter Liang faces up to 15 years in prison. He was fired by the NYPD the same day he was convicted.