Video is out. Read the surmise of it, not ready to watch.
[From the AP:
](http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_KILLINGS_BY_POLICE_TULSA_THE_LATEST_OKOL-?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2016-09-19-16-17-01)
From a local Tulsa TV station’s website. There is a police helicopter video embedded; I noted that one of the officers in the helicopter said of Mr. Crutcher “That looks like a bad dude, too” (:41 of the video). I cannot help but wonder what he saw that I did not that caused the impression that Mr. Crutcher was a malevolent individual.
The dash cam video is available from the same Tulsa TV station on a page at Vimeo. The killing happens about a minute and a half in.
The videos don’t make the police look good, IMO.
I’m in Tulsa…my Facebook feed is all abuzz about this. General feeling seems to be that TPD knows this looks very bad for them, and is trying to get out ahead of it by releasing the videos and being “transparent” and saying “protesting is fine, keep it civil.” Most people have been waiting for the videos before making a judgment call.
Two tidbits that may be of interest: the officer who killed Terence is a white female, and supposedly the helicopter pilot who you overhear in the video is her husband (can’t confirm that.)
Those Tulsa police officers lied about pretty much everything. But I guessing they’ll earn a paid vacation and each be nominated “Officer of the Year”.
It depresses me that someone thinks they can determine what a “bad guy” looks like from hundreds of feet in the air.
Good friggin’ grief! The guy was defying their commands. He had his hands up, yes, but he continued to refuse to obey commands and continued walking to his car and appeared to be about to open the door when he was tased/shot. For all they knew he was trying either to get into the car to flee, in which case he’d have been a danger to innocent citizens on the road and the officers in pursuit, or his plan was to retrieve a gun and start shooting.
When you have a guy who refuses to obey lawful police orders and who deliberately takes actions opposite that which they are trying to get you to take (i.e., get into/take something out of your car), you appear defiant and dangerous and unpredictable.
I have felt for decades that the police are far, far too quick to pull the trigger, and that often when they do the threat they’re under doesn’t justify it. They’ve apparently been trained that a mere potential threat to their lives warrants shooting someone, and now the courts have pretty much given them carte blanche to shoot any time they want simply by claiming they felt threatened, which is utter bullshit.
But let’s not buy into the ridiculous narrative promulgated by the press (yet again) that the police just wantonly killed an unarmed black guy for no apparent reason other than that he was black. Once again and as in almost all the other black guy shootings, if he’d only complied with their lawful commands he wouldn’t have been shot. It’s not entirely the police’s fault if you defy them and behave in such a manner as to make yourself look like a rebellious (and/or determinedly jail-averse) and unpredictable asshole you get yourself shot as a result.
Where in the video did you get all that? I’m not saying the cops were thinking “let’s kill this n-”, but I heard no commands that were ignored, and all I saw was a man with his hands up leisurely walking to his car and then getting shot.
There were 4 cops. Why did they need to shoot him? Why couldn’t they have physically stopped him when his hands were up if he was disobeying orders? Why were they so quick to resort to deadly force?
Starving, why are you choosing to believe the police?
The video shows him with his hands up in the air. The police claimed he refused to put his hands up in the air. The video clearly shows this is not the case.
The police claim that he reached into his vehicle. The video shows that he did no such thing.
The police claim they shouted orders at him that he repeatedly disobeyed. There is no audio for us to confirm this. But if I had to wager a guess, I’d say the guy did not expect anyone to be shouting orders at him. He hadn’t done anything wrong. He wasn’t in the middle of a crime scene. He wasn’t a “bad guy”, in his mind. In his poor panicked, freaked-out mind. Maybe he thought the officers were shouting at him to get back into the car. Maybe he thought they were shouting at him to put his hands on the vehicle. Maybe the good pastor thought that everything would be cleared up as long as he could show them his ID. Maybe he couldn’t hear what the cops were shouting over the noise of the helicopter rotor overheard. Maybe his ears heard the words, but he couldn’t believe them given the context of the situation.
I am not inclined to believe the police anyway, but especially not after all their claims have been disproven by the video.
I’m not believing the police, monstro. In fact I don’t even know what they’ve said, although the impression from what you and others have said is that they lied about certain aspects of what happened. I came upon the video while looking at one of the NYC news sites and clicked a link to the video and that’s pretty much all the input I’ve had on it. But based on just that video, these were my impressions (along with comments to address some of the points you raise):
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Whatever was going on had been going on a long time and most likely involved running from the police or some major type of incident. I came to this conclusion because of the number of police at the scene and the helicopter overhead.
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He was likely defying police instructions to halt and to get on the ground. I’ve never known of a police incident involving that number of officers and a helicopter where the cops demanded that the suspect get back in the car.
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His hands were indeed up but my impression was that this was perhaps to buy time and keep them from firing while he got to where he wanted to go, which was his car. As iiandyiiii said, he was walking at a leisurely pace back to his car and didn’t appear to be under any confusion or uncertainty at all as to how he should be behaving or what specific thing they wanted him to do.
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When he got to his car he brought his hands down to the door handle. It was at this point he was pretty much simultaneously tased and shot. My guess, although I don’t know it for a fact, is that they were yelling at him not to touch the door handle or they would shoot. When he then did, one cop fired his taser and the other fired her gun.
I don’t know anything about the guy himself. He might have been a thug, a part-time thug and great guy otherwise, or a great guy all around. But I do know that he did something to draw the attention of a lot of cops and a helicopter and that he appeared to be defying the orders of the police and to be deliberately trying to open the door of his car.
It also occurs to me that he may have felt the cops would never fire given all the publicity these days surrounding the shooting of black men and he could just get in his car and drive off. Who knows? But one thing I’d bet my last dollar on is that if he’d just lain on the ground or followed whatever other commands the police were giving him in order to bring the situation under safe control he’d still be alive now.
They completely can. I mean, if you look closely you’ll see that he had a case of excess melanin.
Like thisguy?
The AP article above indicates that the police were responding to a report of a stalled car.
Why is it that unarmed black motorists are getting shot and killed by local police officers, while armed terrorist suspects are taken alive?
The serious part of my question: was the terrorist suspect taken by FBI agents? Do they have a different protocol, and training, compared to local law enforcement?
It did look like he brought his hands down. According to the story that Bo threw down into the quarry, it sounds like he was tased, then the other officer shot him, after a second or two. This is the problem: the police have citizens’ lives in their hands and they are not doing due diligence. If she shot him because he twitched, that is being way too hair-trigger.
Well for one thing, the terrorist was firing while on the move on a crowded city street and managed to wound two police officers in the process before being brought down himself when shot in the arm (and possibly the leg; his leg was bandaged in the photo I saw but this wasn’t mentioned in the caption). The black motorist on the other hand was shot while relatively stationary and from only a few feet away.
Which brings up another complaint of mine with regard to police procedure, which is the philosophy of always aiming for center mass. I understand the reasons for it (wounded suspects can still fight/fire/stab after being shot) but this guy was obviously unarmed and the threat he posed appeared to have been something that might have happened once he opened the door to his car. A shot in the leg to bring him down before then and had the taser not worked would have been both preferable and justified in my opinion.
Okay, I looked at the AP article and it’s clear that things went down somewhat differently than I previously imagined. Still, there was plenty going on to cause alarm and result in an extraordinary amount of police presence and helicopter coverage. Calls for backup that result in the arrival of numerous cops plus a helicopter aren’t the usual response to a stalled car, I can guarantee you.
So let’s try to look at the situation objectively and if possible from the point of view of the police on the scene. First of all, being found in the middle of the road as it was, it’s highly unlikely the car was ‘stalled’. When cars and underway and lose power for some reason the driver doesn’t just stop where they are in the middle of the road. They coast over to the side, and are supposed to get completely off the pavement if they can and onto a shoulder or onto the grass. So finding a car stopped in the middle of the road like that is a likely indicator of some sort of troublesome for the cop problem. Perhaps the driver is stone drunk but had enough presence of mind to stop the car and put it in park before passing out. Or maybe a domestic dispute had broken out causing the driver to slam on the brakes and both parties to exit the vehicle and take the fight off road. Or maybe a drive-by shooting had happened. Any number of things could be the reason a car could be stopped in the middle of the road like that and almost none of them are good.
So the cop stops to investigate, with his antenna already on the alert for trouble. Crutcher then appears on the side of the road and refuses to obey the officer’s commands. Now things get kicked up a notch in the officer’s mind. What’s going on, he wonders. Did this guy just kill someone? Is there a body in the field? What? So he calls for backup. The other officers arrive and are apprised of what’s going on. They all draw their weapons and start yelling for Crutcher to put his hands in the air or to get on the ground. He raises his hands but still refuses to halt or get on the ground. Instead he begins walking to the driver’s side of his car, where for all the police know is the weapon he may have used to kill the person who may be lying dead off in the field somewhere. They begin to yell at him not to open the door. They warn if he touches the door handle they will shoot. He, either on drugs or drunk or under the mistaken impression they wouldn’t dare shoot in today’s political climate, reaches for the door handle anyway. And he’s instantly tased and shot.
Now maybe he was based first and the taser did no good so the gun shot came next, or maybe he was both based and shot simultaneously. But it’s clear from the video that his reaching for the door handle was the event that caused the taser and the gun to be fired.
Based upon their training and what they see every day, cops have to be alert to things that most civilians would never think of. The uncommon is common to them and they have to be on the alert for anything and everything, and for it to be coming at them from any direction. Just because it looks to someone on the outside like this is an innocent case of a car stalled in the middle of the road with an occupant not cooperating because he doesn’t like the officer’s tone or whatever, it can look like and actually be a completely different thing in reality, and the police have to treat it that way until such time as they’re able to bring things under control and find out the truth. And unfortunately Mr. Crutcher’s refusal to cooperate, exacerbated by his appearing to go for a weapon in the car, made this impossible until it was too late.
So again, compliance is the key. There isn’t one single case I’m aware of where any unarmed black guy was shot by a cop after he complied with the cop’s instructions. And in every single case I do know of where a shooting did happen (barring the tragically mistaken case of Philando Castille), it happened because the victim refused to comply (and in some cases physically attacked the cop).
Don’t let that stop you from going on at length about your latest imaginings. They’re *soooo *interesting.
“Once i looked at the actual evidence, it’s clear that things went down somewhat differently than I previously imagined.”
As a sig line, it lacks punch and pithiness, but in terms of accuracy, it would be perfect for you.
No. when the engine fails, you would not be expecting it. The drag on the torque will bring it to a stop rather quickly, because most drivers will not instinctively throw it into neutral. Meanwhile, the PS has shut down, so the driver has to fight the wheel: you will note that the van is straddling the centerline, suggesting that he had struggled to steer. Then, of course, the road has very steep shoulders that one cannot just get off onto.
Cars are troublingly reliable, which means that when they do actually fail, many drivers are simply not prepared to deal with the situation. The guy was already stressed out, probably in a neighborhood he did not want to be stuck in, and now there are police shouting orders at him. How do you think you would cope?
He would inquire if the officer wanted fellatio before being shot for resisting arrest.
(Excerpt from Hirohito’s speech to the Japanese people announcing the surrender.)