Police said a firearm was recovered beneath his body.
“This information is based on the GBI’s preliminary investigation,” the agency said in a release. “The GBI will continue to thoroughly investigate this incident to determine exactly what occurred
Source: www.nydailynews.com
SARATOGA SPRINGS, Utah (AP) — A woman has criticized police in the Utah County city of Saratoga Springs over the fatal shooting of her 22-year-old son, saying she believes the outcome would have been different had he not been black.
Susan Hu…
Source: www.huffingtonpost.com
Customs and Border Protection’s acting Internal Affairs chief said Friday that he is unaware of any Border Patrol agent or CBP officer being formally disciplined for killing someone through the use of force since at least 2004.
Source: www.azcentral.com
Victor White III died in a hospital, the victim of a gunshot police said White fired after being frisked, handcuffed and placed in a police cruiser.
Source: www.cnn.com
While the autopsy results are being withheld from the family and public, both officers are on paid administrative leave.
Source: ushypocrisy.com
The article on The Root hit me hard;
Reject the “He was a good kid” or “He was a criminal” narrative and lift up the “Black lives matter” narrative.Those who knew him say Brown was a good kid. But that’s not why his death is tragic. His death isn’t tragic because he was on his way to college the following week. His death is tragic because he was a human being and his life mattered. The good-kid narrative might provoke some sympathy, but what it really does is support the lie that as a rule black people, black men in particular, have a norm of violence or criminal behavior. The good-kid narrative says that this kid didn’t deserve to die because his goodness was an exception to the rule. This is wrong. This kid didn’t deserve to die, period. Similarly, reject the “He was a criminal” narrative surrounding the convenience store robbery because even if Brown did steal some cigars and have a scuffle with the shopkeeper, that is still not a justification for his killing. All black lives matter, not just the ones we deem to be “good.”
It caused me to think back about why, during the George Zimmerman case, I did not debate nor defend against accusations that Trayvon was a “thug.” Here we are again with Michael Brown, and there are folks trying to posture Michael as deserving of death because he was not a “good kid. “
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Source: blackbutterfly7.wordpress.com
Thank you @XenaBb7 for the HT
‘He was stood so still’
Crawford was a high school graduate who had two young sons. On the evening of 5 August he was at the Walmart in a suburb of Dayton, with his girlfriend, Tasha Thomas. They were to buy ingredients to make S’mores for a family cookout, according to his family’s attorneys.
The couple separated inside the store. Crawford began a conversation on his mobile phone with LeeCee Johnson, the mother of his two sons. Walking in the sporting goods section, he approached a shelf and picked up a MK-177 BB/pellet air rifle, which was already unboxed.
“He never put the phone down,” said his father. “He just kind of picked the rifle up and carried it, was walking around with it.”
From this point, the Crawford team’s description of what is shown in the surveillance footage differs radically from Ritchie’s recollection, which he insisted was also backed up by the recordings from the Walmart cameras.
Crawford’s father and attorneys said that the footage showed the 22-year-old walking from one aisle to the next with the BB rifle at his side and in his left hand, pointed at the floor except for one notable movement.
“I would think that the rifle maybe got heavy to him,” said his father. “He kind of swung it like you carry it on your shoulder, then he immediately put it back down.”
“You can clearly see people walk past him, and they didn’t think anything about it. Everybody was just kind of minding their own business,” his father added. “He wasn’t acting in any type of way that he would have been considered menacing, if you will.”
Ritchie, however, says Crawford was “waving the weapon around”, causing the muzzle to move in the direction of passersby, including him and his wife, April. “And even still, it’s a gun in Walmart, in a public place, inducing panic,” said Ritchie.
The Crawford family’s attorneys contend that Ohio’s “open-carry” law means that he could have been legally holding the rifle in the store even if it had been a full-powered firearm. “We never saw him waving this rifle in front of kids or people,” said his father.
Crawford arrived at the pet products section in the next aisle, estimated at 60 yards from where he had picked up the item. Then, his family and their attorneys say, at about 8.20pm, he stopped and stood still for about six minutes. “With the rifle pointed down and the cell phone up in his right hand,” said his father, he stayed there facing a shelf, apparently preoccupied by the call.
“He didn’t move,” said his father. “He was stood so still, in fact, we thought the track had actually stopped. I asked the technician ‘what’s going on?’ and he said ‘Well, the reel is still running Mr Crawford, look at the time’.”
Ritchie, on the other hand, stated that at this stage, Crawford was “pointing [the BB rifle] at things, like moving things around the shelf with the gun.”
At about 8.26pm, armed police officers responding to Ritchie’s 911 call five minutes earlier come into view on the footage, according to those who viewed it. Within seconds, Crawford was shot twice and pounced on. He was taken to hospital but died from his wounds.
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Source: www.theguardian.com
Three miles from where 13-year-old Andy Lopez was shot and killed by a Sonoma County sheriff’s deputy nearly a year ago, a mural of the boy went up.
Santa Rosa artist Mario Uribe installed Friday the temporary 8-foot-by-16-foot mural along the side of a vacant gas station at West Avenue and Sebastopol Road in the heart of Roseland. It’s one of the busiest intersections in the southwest Santa Rosa neighborhood, which was rattled by the fatal Oct. 22 shooting by Sonoma County Sheriff’s Deputy Erick Gelhaus, who reportedly mistook the airsoft BB gun Lopez was carrying for an AK-47 assault rifle that it was designed to resemble.
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Source: justicecoalitionforandylopez.com
500 innocent Americans are murdered by police every year (USDOJ). 5,000 since 9/11, equal to the number of US soldiers lost in Iraq.
In 1994 the US Government passed a law authorizing the Pentagon to donate surplus Cold War era military equipment to local police departments.
In the 20 years since, weaponry designed for use on a foreign battlefield, has been handed over for use on American streets…against American citizens.
The “War on Drugs” and the “War on Terror” replaced the Cold War with billions in funding and dozens of laws geared towards this new “war” against its own citizens.
This militarization of the police force has created what is being called an “epidemic of police brutality” sweeping the nation.
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Source: www.filmsforaction.org
