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On Friday, Tarik Sheppard, the Police Department’s deputy commissioner of public information, defended the department’s decision to not share any information about the gunshot at a news conference on Wednesday. Officials, including the mayor, knew about the gunshot before the briefing at which they discussed clearing protesters at Columbia and City College, he said. “We could have talked about it, but I don’t recall it coming up organically in that press conference,” Commissioner Sheppard said, adding that no one had asked about it and: “I knew it will come up eventually, because it always does.” Although the sweep of the occupied building and mass arrests at Columbia may have been an “operation that people were watching around the country,’ officials didn’t feel that the gunshot was “abnormal” enough to share with the public, he said.