Queens Officer Shot by NYPD Colleague Amid Whitestone Carjacking Tangle, Suspect in Custody

An NYPD detective wounded by friendly fire amid a routine carjacking arrest in Queens raises complex questions about policing, urban safety, and the management of risk in a city on edge.

On an oppressively muggy Friday morning in Queens, commuters thudded over the Whitestone Bridge while—less visibly—New York’s complicated machinery of security spun into action. Around 8:50am, a would-be carjacker, undeterred by traffic or cameras, allegedly tried to wrest a black Toyota Highlander from an Uber driver idling on a busy service road. By the time it was all over, a 12-year NYPD detective was en route to Jamaica Hospital, not for a routine check but to recover from gunshot wounds delivered not by the suspect, but inadvertently by his own colleagues.

The facts, as dryly relayed by Commissioner Jessica Tisch, are as concise as they are disquieting. Officers from the 109th Precinct responded to the Uber driver’s 911 distress call, converging with detectives from the narcotics unit who happened on the scene. In the ensuing scrum, as the suspect allegedly menaced bystanders—sometimes purporting to wield a firearm, sometimes simply his own bravado—multiple officers fired their weapons. One detective was struck in the hand and leg. He survived, stable and reportedly in good humour when Mayor Eric Adams and Commissioner Tisch visited his bedside.

The suspect, 28-year-old Kevin Dubuisson, was remarkably unscathed and, notably, unarmed when apprehended, though he had reportedly flashed what the Uber driver believed to be a weapon. In the cascade of agency press briefings that ensued, some facts solidified, others receded. Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny, echoing decades of post-incident protocol, promised an exhaustive review of body-camera footage—now a de rigueur coda to any police-involved shooting in the metropolis.

For New York, a city perennially negotiating the uneasy truce between order and liberty, the episode is both typical and sadly instructive. Crime, especially of the opportunistic sort—carjackings, muggings, random altercations—has ebbed from its giddy 1980s heights, but remains a present irritant. According to NYPD statistics, carjackings, while fewer than 300 citywide last year, have shown a slight upward zig since 2022, a trend that policymakers monitor with furrowed brows but little concrete action.

The more salient concern, however, is not the incident’s ordinariness, but its aftermath. That a veteran detective could be felled by friendly fire during an ostensibly “by-the-book” arrest reveals the persistent hazards threading through even mundane policing. In a city boasting over 35,000 officers—the largest force in America—such mishaps are perhaps statistically inevitable. Yet, each occurrence brings discomfort that training, technology, and protocol still struggle to tie the loose ends of chaos.

The NYPD, battered by years of reform debates, body-camera mandates, and judicial scrutiny, now groans under both rising expectations and periodic surges of violence. Officers are exhorted to be both warrior and empath, a contradiction made plain in procedural reviews that seek both accountability and absolution. The department’s gravest challenge is no longer brute crime reduction—murder and major felonies have trended downward for a decade—but the finer, perhaps knottier, task of executing the law with precision and humanity in moments when seconds matter and confusion reigns.

The economic cost of such incidents is not negligible. Each injury—especially one from friendly fire—entails medical bills, lost staff hours, potential civil claims, and the less measurable cost of public trust. Data from the City’s law department suggest that police-related lawsuits, including accidental shootings, have cost taxpayers an average $220 million per year since 2020. Insurance, training, and overtime bills only spiral upwards. The repercussions ripple beyond police precincts to hospitals, city insurers, and a wary citizenry.

A city grappling with policing’s paradoxes

Comparisons abound. London’s Metropolitan Police, for instance, fired weapons just three times in all of 2023, resulting in a single injury (their armed police are fewer and more highly specialised). Paris contends with similar urban frictions but reports far fewer accidental wounds per capita. New York’s sheer scale—its density, its sprawl, and its uniquely combustible politics—renders such incidents more daunting. Each event, small in isolation, chips away at the city’s uneasy confidence in its guardians.

Politically, the affair sharpens old divides. Some progressive politicians seize on friendly-fire incidents to critique over-policing and the dangers of militarised tactics in civilian spaces. Police unions quietly counter that, amid rising expectations and palpable anxiety, split-second decisions will never be surgically clean. Mayor Adams, ever adept at stoking both solidarity and public order, preaches balance and patience—a message resonant with neither side’s most ardent partisans.

The technological fix—body cameras, improved radios, AI-assisted dispatch—is still imperfect. While footage may forestall the worst abuses, it cannot, as yet, prevent miscommunication amidst adrenaline and sirens. Nor can it conjure the mature judgment needed in chaotic street-level encounters. The real task for policymakers lies in threading the slender line between overreaction and impotent passivity.

From a classical liberal point of view, this sorry episode illustrates policing’s inherent risks but also the necessity of a steady, competent public sector. Private security will not clear New York’s streets; nor will shrill grandstanding—whether from anti-police activists or “law-and-order” diehards—restore public trust. Neither abolishing nor blindly lionising the NYPD offers a credible path forward. Instead, serious, evidence-led reforms—focused on selection, training, transparency, and after-incident care—remain the only durable solution.

As New York charts its post-pandemic future, the challenge endures: how to maintain both safety and freedom on streets layered with tension, commerce, and possibility. The Whitestone Bridge fracas may quickly fade from headlines, but the dilemmas it exposes are not as easily dispatched.

In a city forever reinventing itself, the calculus of risk, vigilance, and restraint—in police and in public—remains a work perpetually in progress. ■