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    Officer and 3 Others Injured by Police Gunfire in Subway Station Clash

    When officers shot a man wielding a knife on a platform in Brooklyn, an officer and two bystanders were also hit, the police said. One bystander was in critical condition.A late-summer afternoon at an elevated subway station in Brooklyn exploded in chaos on Sunday as a police officer, a disturbed man armed with a knife and two bystanders were struck by police gunfire, the police said.The officer was struck below his armpit and was in stable condition on Sunday night, the police said. The man with the knife was struck several times and was also in stable condition. A 49-year-old male bystander was struck in the head and was in critical condition. A 26-year-old woman, also a bystander, was grazed by a bullet and was stable. The shooting occurred just after 3 p.m. at the Sutter Avenue stop on the border of East New York and Brownsville.Two officers saw a man enter the station without paying and followed him up the stairs, said Chief Jeffrey B. Maddrey at a news conference on Sunday evening.“The officers are asking him to take his hands out of his pockets,” Chief Maddrey said. “They become aware that he has a knife in his pocket. The male basically challenges the officers: ‘No, you’re going to have to shoot me.’”A Manhattan-bound L train entered the station, and the man darted inside an open door. The two officers followed and fired their Tasers, but neither device was effective in subduing the man, Chief Maddrey said.The man returned to the platform. “He’s advancing on one of the officers with his knife,” and both officers fired their handguns, Chief Maddrey said. The man went down, and the fallout of the shooting quickly revealed itself. One officer and two bystanders had also been struck.“I don’t like to use that term ‘friendly fire,’ but absolutely we believe at this time that our officers were the only ones who discharged weapons,” Chief Maddrey said. “Everyone that was struck this afternoon, we believe, was by our officers.”The newly appointed interim police commissioner, Thomas Donlon spoke briefly to reporters. It was Mr. Donlon’s first emergency response since he was appointed three days earlier, after the resignation of Commissioner Edward A. Caban, whose phone was recently seized in a federal investigation with a scope that remains unclear.“It’s a dangerous job, and today is another reminder of that,” Mr. Donlon said. “Right now we are grateful that our officer will be OK.”Mayor Eric Adams also briefly addressed reporters, citing the danger posed by the man with the knife, “a person with over 20 arrests, a real career criminal.”The daytime shooting rattled neighbors who regularly use the Sutter Avenue subway stop. Arlene Alfred, 74, was passing the station when she heard the booming shots. “Like echoes,” she said. “The noise, with the train coming in, with the gunshots.”Ms. Alfred lives a block away and has lived in Brownsville for 32 years.“Anything could happen, any time, any day,” she said. “I’m always going up and down those stairs. I said to myself, Thank you, Jesus, I wasn’t in the train.”Olivia Bensimon More

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    City Hall Seeks New York Police Commissioner’s Resignation

    Edward Caban has faced increasing pressure since last week, when federal agents searched the homes of top officials in the Adams administration and confiscated electronic devices.Mayor Eric Adams’s administration is seeking the resignation of Edward A. Caban, New York’s police commissioner, less than a week after agents seized the commissioner’s phone in one of several federal investigations that have engulfed City Hall, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.Commissioner Caban has been under growing pressure to step aside since last Thursday, when news broke that federal agents had taken his cellphone, as well as phones belonging to several of the highest-ranking officials in the Adams administration.The mayor, a retired police captain who served on the force with the commissioner’s father and was close to him, appointed Mr. Caban in July 2023, making him the department’s first Latino commissioner.But the seizure of the phone belonging to the man in charge of the nation’s largest police force sent shock waves through the agency’s headquarters and City Hall. Agents last week also seized the phones of the first deputy mayor, Sheena Wright; her partner, Schools Chancellor David C. Banks; the deputy mayor for public safety, Philip Banks III; and a senior adviser to the mayor, Timothy Pearson, a retired police inspector who is one of the mayor’s closest confidants.The mayor’s own phones were seized in a separate earlier investigation.None of the people have been charged with a crime, but the raids buffeted the administration of Mr. Adams, which was already reeling from other legal problems. They include a federal inquiry into whether Mr. Adams and his campaign conspired with the Turkish government to collect illegal foreign donations in exchange for pressuring the Fire Department to sign off on a new high-rise Turkish consulate in Manhattan, despite safety concerns.It was not clear whether Commissioner Caban would actually resign. The Police Department did not immediately offer a comment.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Trump Urges Police Officers to Watch for Voter Fraud

    Former President Donald J. Trump urged the board of the nation’s largest police union on Friday to “watch for voter fraud” across the country, an appeal that, if followed through on, could run afoul of multiple state laws and raise accusations of voter intimidation.Invoking his widely debunked claims of voter fraud in 2020, Mr. Trump suggested that the only way he could lose in November was if Democrats cheated. “Watch for the voter fraud, because we win without voter fraud,” Mr. Trump said at a meeting of the national board of the Fraternal Order of Police in Charlotte, N.C. “We win so easily.”Mr. Trump added that he believed the police could effectively scare some voters. “You can keep it down just by watching, because, believe it or not, they’re afraid of that badge,” Mr. Trump said. “They’re afraid of you people. They’re afraid of that more than anything else.”Mr. Trump’s comments follow his repeated statements raising doubts about the integrity of the upcoming election before a vote has been cast. But though Mr. Trump has previously urged his supporters to monitor voting activity — particularly in Democratic cities in battleground states — his entreaty to the police union heightens concerns that he is encouraging voter intimidation at the polls.Katie Reisner, a senior counsel at States United Democracy Center, a nonpartisan organization focused on elections, said that election officials and the police had been working for years to strengthen community relations around policing and elections, and that such encouragement from Mr. Trump could disrupt years of work and planning.“The idea of Trump telling the Fraternal Order of Police to take matters into their own hands and kind of go rogue, it’s certainly not a positive from a healthy elections standpoint,” Ms. Reisner said. “But it’s also really counter to a lot of work that’s happening in a lot of jurisdictions to make sure that law enforcement are both adhering to the law and not surprising their communities on Election Day or during voting.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Dallas Police Officer Darron Burks ‘Executed’ in Premeditated Attack, Officials Say

    Two other officers were also shot, and one of them remains hospitalized. After a pursuit, the suspect was killed by the police, authorities said.A police officer in Dallas was fatally shot on Thursday night in what officials described as a premeditated execution.The officer, Darron Burks, 46, was parked in his patrol vehicle in the Oak Cliff section of the city, southwest of downtown, at around 10 p.m. during a break between assignments when a man approached him on the driver’s side. The man, who officials said appeared to record the encounter on his cellphone, briefly spoke to Officer Burks, then pulled out a handgun and shot him dead.Two other officers were shot by the suspect while they were checking on Officer Burks, who had not responded to a dispatcher’s attempt to contact him, officials said. Senior Corporal Jamie Farmer, who was shot in the leg, has been released from the hospital. Senior Corporal Karissa David, who was shot in the face, remains in critical but stable condition.The suspect, identified by officials as Corey Cobb-Bey, 30, fled the scene. After officers pursued him onto an expressway, he got out of his vehicle with a gun, approached the officers and pointed his weapon, the police said. Six officers then fired, fatally shooting him. It was unclear on Saturday what might have motivated the attack. At a news conference on Friday, Eddie Garcia, the Dallas police chief, said the information the force gathered made it clear that Officer Burks was killed in a targeted attack. “I know that the word ‘ambush’ has been thrown around in the last 24 hours or so,” he said. “That’s not what happened here. Officer Burks was executed.”For some residents, the brutal manner in which the police said Officer Burks was killed called to mind a 2016 shooting, when a heavily armed sniper gunned down five officers in downtown Dallas during a protest against fatal police shootings. That shooting remains the deadliest single attack on law enforcement since Sept. 11.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    German Prosecutors Say They Suspect Terrorist Link in Festival Stabbings

    The police say they have arrested a man they believe killed three people and wounded eight others at a festival in the town of Solingen, in western Germany.An attack on a crowd by a man armed with a large knife at a festival that left three dead and eight wounded in the city of Solingen, in western Germany, is being treated as terrorism, the federal prosecutor’s office said on Sunday.The suspect is a 26-year-old man from Syria who was living in a refugee residence only a few hundred meters from where the attack took place, the police said on Sunday. The man, wearing bloodstained clothes, approached a police car and gave himself up after 11 p.m. Saturday, the police said.In the attack on Friday night, the assailant aimed for his victims’ necks to inflict as much damage as possible, the police said.Besides planning to bring murder and attempted murder charges in the case against the man, the federal prosecutor is looking into whether he was a member of a foreign terrorist organization, Ines Peterson, a spokeswoman for the office, said on Sunday in an emailed statement.The Islamic State extremist group praised the attacker as a “soldier of the Islamic state,” but it was unclear whether the group had any connection to this particular attack.The far-right Alternative for Germany party, which has campaigned largely on an anti-foreigner platform and is poised to make significant gains in three state elections next month, jumped on the news. Even before the identity of the attacker was confirmed by the police, one of its leaders called for changes to “migration and security policy.”The authorities had earlier arrested two people who were later determined unlikely to have been the actual attackers, Herbert Reul, the state interior minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, where Solingen is, said in an interview on Saturday with a German broadcaster, ARD.A 15-year-old boy, who was arrested early Saturday, is being investigated for not having alerted the police when he learned about imminent plans to attack, prosecutors said. A man arrested by a heavily armed police unit on Saturday evening in the refugee housing facility where the main suspect also lived is being treated as a witness, the police and Mr. Reul said.On Saturday, Solingen’s mayor, the state governor and other political leaders gathered on a downtown square several hundred yards from where the attack took place to mourn the victims. It was an eerie repeat of a similar impromptu service held in Mannheim, another town in western Germany, where only three months ago an Afghan refugee attacked an anti-immigrant rally with a knife and killed a police officer trying to intervene.On Sunday, which was supposed to be the final day of a festival celebrating a city best known for making knives and scissors, a group of mourners met at a service held in a church next to the site of the attack. More

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    Four Arrested in Killing of ‘General Hospital’ Actor

    The police said they arrested three men on murder charges in the fatal May 25 shooting of Johnny Wactor, 37, in Los Angeles. A fourth person was also charged.The authorities have arrested four men in the killing of “General Hospital” actor Johnny Wactor, who was shot dead in May as three men attempted to steal the catalytic converter from his vehicle in downtown Los Angeles.The Los Angeles Police Department on Thursday announced the arrests of Robert Barceleau, Leonel Gutierrez and Sergio Estrada. All three men are 18 and from Los Angeles County. They will face murder charges.They were arrested Thursday and were being held on $2 million bond, jail records show. A fourth man, Frank Olano, 22, was arrested on an accessory charge for helping at least one of the suspects evade the authorities.Mr. Wactor was gunned down at around 3:25 a.m. on May 25 when he returned to his parked vehicle after finishing a shift at a downtown Los Angeles bar where he worked. The 37-year-old came across three men who were in the middle of stealing his car’s catalytic converter.“When Wactor arrived at his vehicle, he was confronted by three individuals who had Wactor’s vehicle raised up with a floor jack and were in the process of stealing the catalytic converter,” the police said. “Without provocation, the victim was shot by one of the individuals.”The actor was walking with a co-worker and initially thought that his car was being towed, his mother, Scarlett Wactor, told ABC7 news.She added that one of the persons “looked up, he was wearing a mask, and opened fire.”Mr. Wactor was transported to the hospital by emergency workers where he was pronounced dead.The three men were able to get away in a stolen sedan, the police said in August.Mr. Wactor was known for appearing in more than 160 episodes of the soap opera “General Hospital” as the character Brando Corbin. He also appeared in other shows, including “Westworld” and in one episode of “Criminal Minds,” according to IMDb.Catalytic converter thefts have become more common across America in recent years.The emissions-control devices contain rare and expensive metals like palladium and rhodium, making them a hot target for thieves.In a Thursday evening phone call, Ms. Wactor said she was glad to hear that the arrests had been made and said she hoped the men are convicted.“It’s a great early birthday present for Johnny,” Ms. Wactor said.Her son, she said, would have been 38 on Aug. 31. More

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    Police Nab Fugitive Tortoise on Slow Run to Freedom

    Arizona state troopers rescued Stitch, the giant sulcata tortoise, from an interstate highway after it escaped from its enclosure at a ranch.On an interstate highway between Phoenix and Tucson, Ariz., drivers on their morning commute called 911 to report a runaway. A very … very … slow one.He was miles from home and ambling across the four-lane highway when he was finally caught by police.State troopers, with the help of a few good Samaritans, stopped traffic and picked up the escapee: Stitch, a giant sulcata tortoise with a sand-colored shell.The 14-year-old tortoise had broken out of his enclosure and a few layers of fences at the nearby Rooster Cogburn Ostrich Ranch, a roadside animal park open to the public, before making a run for it. Danna Cogburn, an owner of the ranch, said he had been missing for two to three hours before officers told the owners they had found him on the road.“How in the world or where he got out?” Ms. Cogburn said. “I’m not really sure.” She said Stitch was one of only two tortoises on the ranch who were small enough to have made it through the fence. “He had to work at it and be very determined.”The night before his July 30 escape, Ms. Cogburn said, storms had damaged some of the ranch’s gates and enclosures, including the area where the tortoises are kept.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More