Bodycam video shows University at Albany police officer shooting car as it drives past him on campus
By: -----
The University at Albany police on Friday released body camera footage from the incident, in which a police officer fired two shots at a car filled with young adults who had previously been banned from campus.
The 17-second raw video shows the officer on Center Drive East on the school's uptown campus approaching the car at a jog on a perpendicular line to the driver’s side. “They’re leaving, huh?,” he says into his radio.
He raises his service weapon and yells “Stop!” as the vehicle turns in his direction out of a parking lot. As it passes him on his left, the officer fires twice at the side of the car and appears to fall to the ground near the edge of the pavement. He stands up and begins running in the direction of the fleeing vehicle.
“Four-10, shots fired — he almost ran me over!,” he says into his radio.
The police previously described the Aug. 27 incident as an attempted traffic stop and said the vehicle had hit the officer before driving off the campus around 1 a.m. The driver was arrested after a police chase that ended near Albany Medical Center Hospital.
University Police Chief Paul Burlingame said that although the initial descriptions called the incident a traffic stop, he has tried to offer a clearer explanation.
“He was attempting to stop a vehicle on foot,” Burlingame said. The car's occupants “were subjects that were previously banned from campus, so their return was a criminal act.”
The group of young people — none of whom are UAlbany students — had been banned earlier that evening for reportedly harassing and threatening behavior. Burlingame said they were committing criminal trespass when they returned to campus, and the officer was going to “take enforcement actions.”
But he added that the police department hasn’t come to any conclusions after watching the bodycam footage.
“This is simply facts known to us at the time — no opinions drawn,” he said. “We are not at the point where we can draw conclusions.”
They are still investigating, and “will have a very good understanding of the sequence and facts before we draw any conclusions,” Burlingame added.
In the meantime, he said he released the footage to be transparent about the incident. “We thought it was important to show our commitment to the process,” he said.
The State Police are assisting with the investigation and also reviewed the footage before it was released. The released video, a collaboration between the State Police and the University Police Department (UPD), begins with a heavily annotated version of the footage that stops several times to point out everything from the officer’s raised arm to the direction of the wheels as the vehicle turns left and even a flared reflection on the side window. (The raw video is presented after the annotated version.)
The State Police annotations also highlight lights from another vehicle, which appears to be a UPD unit pursuing the vehicle after the encounter with the officer on foot.
State Police claimed that the officer unholstered his gun while the car’s wheels were pointed toward him.
In the video, UPD says that the officer was struck by the car and described the shots as hitting the driver’s side door.
One of the officer’s hands could be seen touching the ground after the car went by.
Police chased the vehicle and arrested three occupants. Anthony Taylor, the 19-year-old driver, was charged with attempted aggravated assault on a police officer, assault, reckless endangerment as well as several misdemeanors and traffic violations. Two passengers in the car were also charged.