The footage was released this week by the New York Attorney General’s Office of Special Investigation. It is hard to watch. Not because of what the suspect did, although that is bad enough. It is hard to watch because three officers were on scene, and the woman on the floor still took stab wounds after they got there.
This is not a bad-cop story. This is a bad-tactics story. There is a difference, and people in this profession need to be able to say it out loud.
What Happened
Around 2:43 p.m. on Sunday, May 10, a woman in Northampton called 911 and reported that her 28-year-old son was intoxicated and acting violently inside the home. While officers were responding, she called back. He was now threatening her with a knife.
Three Southampton Town Police officers arrived shortly before 3 p.m. They entered the home and found Steven Eastwood standing over his mother. She was on the kitchen floor. He had a knife in his hand. His sweater, his sleeves, and his hands were covered in what appeared to be her blood.
Officers ordered him to drop the knife. He did not.
He advanced on the officers. Two of them backed off and retreated out the front door. He followed them. He paused on the porch with the knife still in his hand, stared out for a moment, then turned and walked back inside the house. A third officer was still in there. So was his mother.
He returned to her and resumed stabbing her.
Only then did two officers fire. He was pronounced dead at the scene. Several knives were recovered.
The Tactical Problem
You do not let a suspect who has just stabbed somebody walk back into the house. You do not let him do it when your partner is still inside. You do not let him do it when the victim is bleeding on the floor. Those are not high-level concepts. That is day-one stuff.
The officer in the kitchen was five or six feet from a man who had just stabbed his own mother more than forty times. The suspect was holding the knife he used to do it. He was ignoring commands. He had blood on his hands.
Every cop in this country has been taught the 21-foot rule. A suspect with a knife can close that distance and put it in you before you can draw and fire. Five to six feet is well inside that. The officer did not even have his gun fully up. That is not a complicated decision. That is a man standing in front of you actively threatening to do to you what he just did to her.
Then the suspect walks back outside, and the officers outside let him turn around and re-enter the house. They do not stop him. The officer who stayed inside never made contact with the victim. He retreated into a back room. He was not in a position to protect her if the suspect doubled back, which he did.
There is also a crossfire problem on this scene. Officers stepping into each other’s lines of fire. That is its own conversation.
No Taser was deployed. No bean bag round. No less-lethal option appears in the footage at all. Three officers responded to an armed, actively violent subject with handguns and verbal commands. That is it.
Graham v. Connor
The legal standard for use of force is Graham v. Connor — objective reasonableness from the perspective of an officer on scene at the moment force is used. Severity of the offense. Active resistance. Immediate threat.
Severity: a man actively stabbing his mother on the kitchen floor.
Resistance: refusal to drop the knife, advancing on officers, returning to the victim after officers tried to draw him away.
Immediate threat: a knife in his hand, blood on his clothes, a victim on the floor he had just stabbed, and the willingness to keep stabbing her with officers in the room.
Force was justified the moment officers walked through the door and saw him standing over her. The question this case raises is not whether the eventual shots were lawful. They were. The question is why it took so long, and what additional wounds the victim received in the time it took.
What This Looks Like to Me
I do not think these are bad men. I think they were either undertrained or afraid. I am not sure which is worse.
There is a version of post-Floyd policing where officers are so worried about the second-guessing, the lawsuit, the viral clip, the chief throwing them under the bus, that they freeze. They talk when they should act. They retreat when they should engage. They give a knife-wielding suspect ten more chances to comply, and a victim ten more seconds of being stabbed.
The job is to protect life. When the only way to do that is to use deadly force, you use it. You do not back into the next room and hope it sorts itself out. You do not let an armed suspect walk back into a house with your partner still inside. You stop the threat, and then you take care of the victim.
The mother in this case took more wounds than she had to. That is hard to say. It is still true. She was medevac’d to Stony Brook University Hospital. Emergency surgery. Serious condition at last public update, which was weeks ago now. All three responding officers were transported post-incident for evaluation, standard protocol after a shooting.
The Office of Special Investigation will run its review under Section 70-b. Suffolk County PD Homicide is assisting. Southampton Town PD Detectives are providing internal support.
Whatever that review concludes about the legality of the shots fired, the department has a tactical problem on its hands. The kind of problem that does not get fixed by a press conference. It gets fixed in training, on the mat, in scenario-based drills, and in a culture that tells officers their job is to act, not to manage their own liability while the citizen they were sent to protect bleeds out on the kitchen floor.
