Drone footage released Friday shows a knife-wielding man lunging directly at an NYPD officer atop the Brooklyn Bridge before police fired a single fatal shot — video that should end the debate on whether this shooting was justified, but in today's media climate, probably won't.
The stake is straightforward: when clear evidence exists, it should matter more than narrative. Ordinary Americans who rely on police to face down armed threats deserve to see what actually happened, not what some outlet wishes happened.
The NYPD released bodycam and drone footage Friday capturing the final moments of 41-year-old Chaun Bottom's hour-long standoff with police on Sept. 4. Bottom was spotted walking along the bridge's cables around 3:30 a.m., hundreds of feet above the East River. Detective Nicholas Giordani of the NYPD's Emergency Services Unit climbed up and spent roughly 50 minutes trying to talk him down.
The footage shows Giordani pleading with Bottom repeatedly. "What's going on, man? What brought you up here?" Giordani asks. "This is the last place I want you to be right now, man. Whatever's going on in your life, we could talk about it, we could discuss it." At another point: "Look man, I know you don't know me, I get that, but I care about you more than you're gonna know and I plan on spending however much time I can to show you that."
The detective even spotted Bottom's knife and asked him to drop it if he stepped back toward the middle of the bridge. Instead, Bottom raised the weapon and lunged at the officer. Cops yelled "drop the knife" before Sgt. Dennis Dooley, stationed on the bridge's roadbed, fired one shot that struck Bottom.
Officers then rushed to pull Bottom from the side of the bridge and pleaded with him to drop the weapon. He was taken to Bellevue Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
ESU Chief Gerard V. Dowling previously told reporters that Bottom had stated: "I want to die, I want you to kill me, I have a bomb, you're going to make me do something bad to the cops." The footage itself didn't clearly capture what Bottom was saying to Giordani during the standoff.
The NYPD said its Force Investigation Division will continue to investigate the shooting.
The New York Post reported the facts straight: a knife-wielding man lunged at cops and was shot. The footage is unambiguous — an officer spent 50 minutes trying to save a man's life, and that man chose to charge at him with a blade. The only remaining question is how long before someone in the press tries to turn this into a police brutality story anyway.
