The officers’ names and races weren’t released. “Another sign read”, I am not a threat”.
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Police in Tulsa, Oklahoma released video on Monday showing an officer fatally shooting an unarmed black man who had his hands in the air, and the U.S Justice Department said it was looking into the incident as a possible civil rights violation.
16 after being tased and shot once by Tulsa police officers. Another officer reportedly tasered Crutcher at the same time.
According to Goss, the footage shows Crutcher’s SUV parked in the middle of the road after it had broken down. The officers were walking to the SUV when Crutcher approached them, The AP reported. The officers surround him, making it harder to see his actions from the police dashboard camera’s angle.
Online court records show Terrence Crutcher of Tulsa with the same date of birth as the man who was killed pleaded no contest in 1996 to carrying a concealed weapon and resisting an officer and was given a six-month suspended sentence.
After that someone on the police radio can be heard saying, “Shots fired”. Crump asked. “When unarmed people of color break down on the side of the road, we’re not treated as citizens needing help, we’re treated as criminals, as suspects”.
Both Shelby and Turnbough are award-winning officers, which doesn’t mean much considering police departments hand out awards out to every officer at one point or another, but it does sound good to the police-adoring public, especially those that have the fortune of not being threatened at gunpoint for having a vehicle stall on them. “We saw that Terence was not being belligerent”, one of the attorneys for Crutcher’s family, Damario Solomon-Simmons, said at a news conference separate from one police held.
Tulsa Police Chief Chuck Jordan said Monday that Crutcher had no weapon when he was shot to death by an officer who was responding to a report of a stalled vehicle. She said Monday that she didn’t know what Crutcher was doing that prompted police to shoot.
Tuell said David Shelby wasn’t the officer who commented on Crutcher’s appearance.
For Tulsa, Friday’s shooting is the second time in as many years that the police have been involved in a controversial, high-profile shooting that was captured on video.
As has been the case in city after city following fatal police shootings, local officials called for calm and promised transparency in the hopes of preempting civil unrest.
Video shows Crutcher walking toward his vehicle with his hands above his head while several officers follow closely behind him with weapons raised.
His family has told the press that they are heartbroken and that Crutcher had been leaving a class at the community college when his vehicle broke down. One police officer follows him, her gun pointed at his back.
She says the family is asking for “peaceful protests” over Terence Crutcher’s death.
A Tulsa police officer shot and killed a black man who ignored repeated requests to put up his hands before reaching into an SUV that was stalled in the middle of a street, the police department said.
Local and federal authorities are investigating the death of 40-year-old Terence Crutcher, Tulsa Police Chief Chuck Jordan said before the department released dashcam footage of Friday’s shooting. But the family’s lawyer questions those statements after seeing the footage, saying Crutcher “died on the street by himself in his own blood without any help”.
Spokesmen for police and the Justice Department did not immediately return phone calls Sunday for additional comment.
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About a dozen protesters have gathered outside the Tulsa County courthouse to protest the fatal police shooting of a black man whose SUV had stalled on a city street.
