An internal review found that the Yale police officer who ordered a black Yale undergraduate to the ground at gunpoint recently did nothing wrong. But it also found that the Yale police department needs more training on certain firearm policies.
The officer did not use excessive force and followed all basic procedures when he stopped undergraduate Tahj Blow, believing the student matched the description of a burglary suspect, according to the report. Yale President Peter Salovey released the report in an e-mail to the university community Tuesday afternoon, and promised to convene a panel to review the police department’s investigation process.
Click here to read the full report.
Blow—the son of New York Times columnist Charles Blow—was leaving the library on the afternoon of Jan. 24, in the area of College Street and Elm Street. The officer was responding to a call about an unknown “black male” intruder who had entered several Yale undergraduate dorms.
The incident reached national prominence when Charles Blow wrote a series of Tweets and a column describing his son’s side of the story. “I had always dreaded the moment that we would share stories about encounters with the police in which our lives hung in the balance, intergenerational stories of joining the inglorious ‘club,’” Blow wrote, linking the event to other allegations of racial profiling.
The officer drew his gun and “held it at the ‘low ready,’ which is a technique that involves a firearm pointed in the direction of, but not directly at, a potential suspect, in an attempt to gain compliance while maintaining control if the encounter becomes a lethal encounter for the officer,” the report said. The officer did not put his finger on the trigger at any time.
He ordered Tahj Blow to lie down, and did not physically touch him at any time. The officer then “determined that the Complainant was a self-described Yale student carrying electronic gear and likely not the burglar,” the report said. The officer kept Blow with him, until police arrested the actual burglar 200 feet away in the entryway of a different Yale dorm.
The report found that the officer acted correctly, but also found three “areas of deficiency” in the Yale police department as a whole. The department “Use of Force policy” does not clearly define the “low ready” position or the “pointing” of a firearm. Officers also did not know when to turn on body cameras, stating that they thought the device should be turned on only when a crime is in progress. But the policy states that the device should be “activated during any consensual or non-consensual encounter when the officer is engaged in official duties,” the report said. “Appropriate training should follow” for all three of these areas.
The Yale police union released the following statement after the report was released:
“The Yale Police Benevolent Association is pleased Yale University did the right thing in exonerating our officer. We have maintained throughout the investigation that our officer did nothing wrong. Police officers must exercise the utmost caution when conducting felony stops. Indeed, hesitating when confronting a potential felony suspect could cost an officer his/her life.
“We certainly empathize with the student who was stopped on the Cross Campus by our officer, as being the subject of a felony stop can be traumatizing to a member of the public. However, our officer would have been derelict in his/her duty had he/she not stopped a person matching the description of a suspect in a burglary occurring minutes prior and within a short distance of the stop.”
Tahj Blow did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
His father tweeted: “So, according to Yale, this was ‘in compliance with department policy’? No apology? #sigh .”
In his e-mail, Salovey wrote that the university had convened an independent panel to review the police department’s investigation process and offer recommendations for for them to “consider regarding relevant policies, procedures, and training; and to suggest actions that might be taken to continue to advance the goal of community policing and constructive interactions between police and students.”
Yale psychology professor Marvin Chun will chair that panel, which will also include former federal U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Robinson, and former police chief Charles Reynolds.
“We also must continue to recognize that this incident intersected—in ways that were both public and very painful—with current national conversations on race, prejudice, policing and the use of force,” Salovey wrote in the e-mail. “We will be creating opportunities in the near future to discuss these challenges as a community and hope that you will participate.”