Peter Liang Deserves Prison, But So Do Negligent NYPD Brass

Liang and his partner, Sean Landau, both testified they received little CPR training.

The New York City Police Department may be “New York’s Finest”, but in terms of their firearms training and individual officer skills with firearms, they lag behind most of the nation.

The NYPD is investigating testimony during an officer’s manslaughter trial that some police weren’t properly trained in CPR.

NEW YORK (AP) — In a nation accustomed to demonstrations over police shootings of unarmed black men, this was something completely different: more than 10,000 mostly Chinese-Americans rallying in support of the Chinese-American officer who pulled the trigger. As Asian Americans, we remember the beatings of Kang Wong, Jessica Klyzek, and Sureshbhai Patel, and the shooting deaths of Fong Lee, Cau Bich Tran, Yong Xin Huang, and Michael Cho-all victims of excessive force by police.

Former officer Liang, a Hong Kong-born cop, just a year and a half on the job, fired his gun in a darkened stairwell in a Brooklyn housing project in late 2014.

“A lot of white officers have also killed people”, Zhang Yuan, who brought along his 18-year-old daughter Jing to the Brooklyn rally, told NBC News in Mandarin. “Peter Liang is a scapegoat for all this”.

“I feel sorry that Mr. Gurley was an innocent victim in all this”, he said. Since then, thousands of Chinese-American protesters have denounced the verdict.

But several dozen Black Lives Matter demonstrators, including the Seattle Black Book Club and the Pacific Rim Solidarity Network, took the stage to ask the crowd to consider the injustice against the 28-year-old father who was killed by Liang’s bullet. However, later in December 2014, Pantaleo was not found guilty.

Meanwhile, there was a counter-protest of about 20 people held nearby by the Black Lives Matter movement.

Support for Liang isn’t universal, however. The case has been widely debated in Chinese-language social media groups and held up as a sign of the weakness of Asian-American political engagement.

“However, we believe that the call we, as Asian and Asian Americans, need to be making is not for the minimizing of Officer Liang’s sentence in response, but for the full indictment of ALL police and vigilantes that commit these heinous crimes against the Black community”. Needless to say, the decision has been met with controversy, not the least because he is a Chinese-American rather than a white man – the typical demographic profile of officers in high-profile cases of police brutality. A discomforting paradox lay beneath the whole confrontation, one that cut straight across the accepted modern vision of Asians and their adjacency to whiteness: If Liang (and, by extension, all Asian-Americans) enjoyed the protections of whiteness, then how do you explain his conviction?

Indeed, the New York Times reports there was a counter-protest against the Brooklyn rally for Liang, brandishing signs with photographs of Gurley and the slogan “Jail Killer Cops”. Primarily, he didn’t intend to shoot Gurley, while in previous cases the white cops intentionally shot their victims.

“I think it speaks to how easy it is to stand up for a member of our own community, but not speak up for the whole injustice”, she said.

People are seriously questioning the justice system.

Both sides of the protest were calling for justice.

While she opposes the protesters, rather than blaming Liang, she places the responsibility for Gurley’s death on a “rotten system that Liang was part of” – a system in which “police routinely conduct unwarranted public housing patrols just to look for suspicious activity”.

Another protestor said he joined the protests after praying with his family.