Days after Ybor shooting, Tampa police launched internal investigation into officers’ response

Описание: In just seconds on Oct. 29, 2023, Ybor City became the site of a deadly shooting.

“We had two unfortunate, tragic people that died from that incident, Elijah Wilson and Harrison Boonstoppel, and then we had the other victims,” Tampa Police Chief Lee Bercaw said.

In a one-on-one interview, Tampa’s police chief sat down with 10 Investigates to go over his officers’ actions that night. He said not only did they thoroughly investigate what took place that night, but they also looked into how their officers responded.

“It was very important for us to assess how we did things, how we do things, because we always want to do things better and better, and doing internal assessment is what we do on a lot of things, but not to the scale that we had for this incident,” Bercaw said.

The scale included a thorough investigation into videos officers themselves had questions about. 10 Investigates uncovered emails and videos revealing the chief’s internal brief from April. The department sent the video brief department-wide regarding video footage from Oct. 29.

“There’s a concern about a small portion of video being taken out of context when an officer briefly took cover before proceeding,” the chief said during the brief.

We asked the chief about the brief and the surveillance video in question. The surveillance video showed an officer retreating when others moved forward after gunshots were fired.

“I think there were 7 officers that took cover for that extent. When that happened, officers did as they were trained. If someone is looking at little snippet of video then you can see how this could be taken out of context,” Bercaw said.

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