Instagram Posts May Have Escalated Fatal Standoff, Police Say

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/04/us/instagram-police-fatal-shooting-maryland.html

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A police standoff in Randallstown, Md., on Monday in which a 23-year-old woman with a shotgun was killed after the police say she had been encouraged by her online followers to defy their orders has highlighted an unexpected role of social media in violent encounters.

During the standoff, which lasted several hours, videos from inside the apartment were posted to the Instagram account of the woman, Korryn Gaines, 23, whose 5-year-old son was also in the home, according to the Baltimore County Police Department.

The police said Ms. Gaines had repeatedly pointed her shotgun at officers, at least once while her son was in her arms. At one point, she said she would kill the officers if they did not leave, the police said. An officer fired once at Ms. Gaines, and she fired back, the police said. Then officers fired three shots, killing Ms. Gaines. Her son also sustained injuries in the crossfire, though they are not considered to be life-threatening.

Critics of the police have welcomed social media — especially live video — as a way to document their interactions with officers, hoping it would lead to better police behavior or eliminate conflicting stories. In July, a Facebook video broadcast by the girlfriend of Philando Castile, after a police officer shot him during a traffic stop in Minnesota, drew wide attention.

But in the case of Ms. Gaines, according to the police, it may have escalated the encounter.

While the standoff with Ms. Gaines continued, the police in Baltimore County submitted a request to Facebook — which owns Instagram — to deactivate but not delete her accounts. Facebook cooperated, temporarily making her Facebook and Instagram posts inaccessible during the standoff.

“It’s key for these trained negotiators to be able to interact with the subject without distraction, without interference from the outside,” Elise Armacost, a Baltimore County police spokeswoman, said at a news conference. The episode highlights Facebook’s increasingly complicated role in documenting violence, and in some cases, its active place in the middle of it.

Before the shots were fired, the Instagram posts caught the police’s attention.

In one of the videos, Ms. Gaines asked her son: “What’s happening outside right now? Who’s outside?”

“The police,” the boy responded.

“And what are they trying to do?” she said.

“They trying to kill us,” he said.

The police said some of the comments people left on the posts encouraged her to defy orders to surrender peacefully, complicating the negotiations.

Facebook has been forced to wrestle with how it handles violent content, especially because several shootings have been captured using Facebook’s live video after the feature rolled out to all users in April.

A team of Facebook moderators decides what violent content can remain but will take it down if it appears to glorify violence. Though the videos on Ms. Gaines’s account were not live, one of the videos was taken down for violating Facebook’s community standards related to threats of physical harm, the company said.

Law enforcement officials can submit emergency requests to Facebook when someone’s safety is at risk. Moderators at Facebook, including members of its legal team, review those requests, the company said.

In the last half of 2015 — the most recent figures Facebook has made available — the company received 855 requests from the government for “emergency disclosures,” when “disclosure without delay is required due to a risk of serious physical harm or death to any person.” The company provided data in 73.45 percent of the requests.

The police were trying to serve Ms. Gaines with an arrest warrant at 9:20 a.m. Monday at a home on Sulky Court after she failed to appear in court for charges related a traffic stop in March, the police said. She was pulled over for driving with a “Free Traveler” cardboard sign in place of a license plate, then claimed officers did not have the authority to arrest her, according to The Baltimore Sun. She told her son to “fight and bite” an officer watching him and told an officer that the police would have to “murder” her for her to leave her car, according to the newspaper.

The police were also serving an arrest warrant on her boyfriend, Kareem Courtney, 39, who the police said was wanted on an assault charge. He fled the apartment with a 1-year-old child but was arrested, the police said.

After Ms. Gaines refused to allow the police to enter, an officer obtained a key, the police said. The officers found Ms. Gaines on the floor holding a shotgun and her son, the police said. They called for backup, and the standoff began.

At a news conference on Tuesday, the police chief, James Johnson, said officers showed restraint throughout the standoff despite officers’ being in danger.

“The entire time, throughout the afternoon, she would repeatedly point the weapon at our personnel, and they maintained firearms discipline throughout,” he said.