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"If you can have the trial jury public, why not have the grand jury public?" asks Barron. In the wake of the Sean Bell shooting–where cops fired 50 rounds at three unarmed men, killing Bell on the night before his wedding–attorney Norman Siegel and others asked for an independent prosecutor, afraid that the Queens’ DA was too close to the police. The DA’s office, in turn, reiterated its independence, and eventually a grand jury indicted three of the officers involved in the shooting–for manslaughter, assault and reckless endangerment, though not for depraved indifference, as some critics had hoped, which could have drawn a stiffer sentence. No date for the trial has been set.

During the Zongo trial, Judge Straus was especially troubled by Conroy’s explanation that he was following police protocol by pointing his gun at the unarmed Zongo. ‘’Is that true? Is that what police are trained to do?’’ Justice Straus asked, according to The New York Times. ‘’In the city of New York, how can a police officer be trained to communicate with people by taking a combat stance?"

In response, NYPD officials stated to the press that officers were explicitly trained not to deal with unarmed civilians by assuming a combat stance, a policy that is acknowledged by Noel Leader, cofounder of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care and a recently retired NYPD officer. "We’re taught to keep our finger on the side strap, not the trigger," explains Leader, who believes that in the Stansbury case, like Zongo, Officer Neri should have been indicted.

"This was criminal negligence," Leader says. "Neri is in a residential building that he knows is occupied, and he’s not in pursuit of a criminal. Yet he’s got his gun out, it’s pointed up and his finger is on the trigger. If he had even tripped, he would have shot. That is totally against our training."

But a look at the practice of vertical patrols in public housing developments reveals that what is taught in theory and what is practiced on duty don’t always correspond.

In the fall-out from the Stansbury killing, there was a discussion by Commissioner Kelly and groups like 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care of revising the procedure for conducting vertical patrols, which was ultimately shelved. The section of the NYPD Patrol Guide that covers vertical patrols doesn’t explicitly address whether officers should have their weapons drawn, stating only that they should conduct patrols of assigned locations and "take appropriate police action." The freedom to decide when it is appropriate to draw a weapon is left to the officer.

The use of this judgment has led some cops to interpret mere human presence in occupied buildings as a sufficient threat to warrant a potentially deadly response. Several months after the Stansbury shooting, Brooklyn firefighters responding to a call of a stuck elevator in a public housing development in East New York climbed to the roof to shut off the power. As they walked through the door to the roof, they were met by two cops on a vertical patrol whose guns were aimed directly at them. According to the fire department, the cops explained that they had pointed their guns at them "because they had heard someone coming up the stairs."

In response, the fire department sent a safety bulletin to every firehouse in the city, alerting them to "loudly announce that they are members of the Fire Department" when entering stairwells or the roof and to remember that "this situation"–of finding NYPD guns suddenly trained on them–"can occur anytime day or night."