The Tulsa, Oklahoma, police department on Monday released several videos showing last week’s fatal shooting of an unarmed black man by a white female officer.
Advertisement
The video shows Terence Crutcher walking toward his SUV with his hands up and Officer Betty Shelby following behind him.
“I’m going to tell you right here now: There was no gun on the suspect or in the suspect’s vehicle”, Jordan said.
The US Justice Department said it was looking into the incident as a possible civil rights violation.
Forty-year-old Terence Crutcher’s auto broke down in the middle of the road on Friday.
Shelby came upon Crutcher while heading out to another call, and called in to dispatchers that he wasn’t cooperating with her demands.
In the video, Crutcher has his hands in the air as he walks back to his vehicle that had stalled in the middle of the road.
Crutcher was shot and killed last week after his auto broke down.
“We think he may have just been tasered”, a man’s voice is heard on a police radio.
Tiffany Crutcher, playing on the words of the male on the video shot from the helicopter, said her brother was a good man who loved God.
Then nearly immediately, someone can be heard saying, “Shots fired”. Over the radio, an officer can be heard referring to him as a “suspect” – although the situation was initially called in as a traffic incident, possibly involving a broken-down vehicle. As Crutcher approaches the driver’s side of the SUV, another officer walks up followed by two others and Crutcher appears to lower his hands and place them on the vehicle.
“We saw that Terence did not have any weapon”, family attorney Damario Solomon-Simmons told reporters on Monday. “We saw that Terence did not make any sudden movements”.
Crutcher is seen in the video after he’s shot lying in the street for more than two minutes before officials render aid.
“Terence died on that street in his own blood, without any help”, the lawyer said. “The video apparently validates his family’s assertion that his hands were up when the shooting occurred”.
“We will achieve justice in this case”, Tulsa Police Chief Chuck Jordan told a news conference, adding that the release of video was done as a matter of transparency and added that he found the videos “very disturbing, very hard to watch”.
This story has been corrected to show that Crutcher’s first name is spelled Terence, not Terrence. The shooting follows recorded police killings of unarmed black men and teenage boys by police offers in Ohio, Minnesota and Cleveland. We’ve seen them in action, in NY over the last, you know, 48 hours because of the terrorist attacks’.
“With something of this magnitude, we’re trying an approach that we believe is necessary to further that transparency”.
Tulsa resident Mark Whited, who was among the protesters, said more should be done to “bridge the mistrusts” between police and citizens. Initial police briefings indicated Crutcher was not obeying officers’ commands, but MacKenzie said Monday she didn’t know what Crutcher was doing that prompted police to shoot.
Advertisement
The Department of Justice is conducting a separate civil rights investigation from the local investigation.
