This was absolutely not the kind of “reform” I was hoping for:
The NYPD lieutenant from Long Island who authorized the use of a stun gun during a fatal police confrontation with a naked Brooklyn psychiatric patient committed suicide Thursday morning, police said.
On his 46th birthday, Lt. Michael Pigott of Sayville shot himself at Floyd Bennett Field, the Brooklyn base for the elite Emergency Services Unit, police said. It happened about 6 a.m., according to news reports. His death came just hours before the funeral Mass and burial of Iman Morales, 35, the stun gun victim.
I fully appreciate the Milgram concept, that if a person in authority says it’s okay (or unavoidable) to perform an act that you consider unacceptable, then you’re likely to suppress your inhibitions and perform it. In that sense, I was admittedly more furious at Lieutenant Pigott than at the officer who actually deployed the Taser.
But that principle is transitive: I was far less furious at Lieutenant Pigott than I ever was, or am now, at both senior NYPD policy makers (and their counterparts throughout the country) — and Taser International — for crafting the policies and perceptions that, somehow, convinced Lieutenant Pigott that his order to tase could possibly have been appropriate.
Let’s hope this double-tragedy results is some positive reform.