Mayor Bill de Blasio, who was blasted by police unions for statements he made in the wake of a Staten Island grand jury's decision not to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo for Eric Garner's death, released a more subdued message Tuesday. “I am happy, I have faith in the Brooklyn District Attorney and I thank him.” 
 
 Liang discharged one bullet when patrolling the stairways of the Pink Houses in East New York, striking the 28-year-old Gurley in the chest as the man stood in the landing a floor below next to his girlfriend. Officer Liang, 27, was conducting a so-called vertical patrol with his partner, starting on the roof and heading down through the stairwells, a common procedure for officers assigned to housing projects. Al Sharpton, who called for protests in the earlier cases, said he “didn’t know” whether an indictment was appropriate for Officer Liang.
– A rookie cop with the NYPD will face criminal charges after shooting an unarmed black man to death in a stairwell, reports the Wall Street Journal. A Brooklyn grand jury indicted Peter Liang, 27, on charges of second-degree manslaughter in the November shooting of Akai Gurley, 28, reports the Daily News. The charges essentially accuse Liang of acting recklessly, says the newspaper. Police have previously said that Liang's gun fired accidentally as he and a partner were patrolling a public housing complex and preparing to descend a dark staircase. The bullet struck Gurley, who was on a landing one floor below. “They didn’t present themselves or nothing and shot him,” Gurley's girlfriend, who lives in the building, told DNAInfo after the shooting. “They didn’t identify themselves at all. They just shot.” Liang, who has been on desk duty since the shooting, is expected to turn himself in tomorrow morning. The development follows the lack of indictments in the Eric Garner and Michael Brown cases. Those two deaths involved white officers, while Liang is Asian-American, notes the New York Times.