He says statistics show disparities about how African-Americans and Hispanics are treated by police.
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But as he’s done with similar incidents in the past, Obama took pains to acknowledge the hard job police officers have.
Reynolds described him as a “very, very sweet man” who cared for his family and wasn’t involved with street gangs.
Cullars-Golden said she lost her son Marcus Golden at the hands of Saint Paul police previous year – shot in the head.
Castile, who was waiting for permission to see her son’s body, said she wanted the officer to be prosecuted. The officer’s ethnicity was not clear.
The incident comes hours after the U.S. Justice Department said it had opened an investigation into two police officers fatally shooting a black man in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on Tuesday. He was taken to a hospital, where he later died.
The Minnesota man was pulled over by officers in a traffic stop late Wednesday with his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, and her daughter in the auto. He added that he did not think the shooting would have happened if the people in the auto had been white.
Diamond Reynolds said the officer who stopped them claimed they had a broken tail light.
Her bottom lip trembled and tears welled as she expressed empathy for Reynolds’s young daughter, who could be heard on the video comforting her mother.
The governor said he was in talks with the Justice Department, as well as the Obama administration’s chief of staff, Mark McDonough, to “request … an immediate independent federal investigation into this matter”.
After the shooting, the officer is then overheard on the video yelling, “I told him not to reach for it”.
Beyonce had a minute of silence at her concert in Glasgow, Scotland for victims of police brutality. This use of live streaming video isn’t new, but Diamond’s decision to take command of it under her circumstances was ground-breaking. “He was a good man”.
She said she did not know how to break the news of the death to her boys. The woman and child weren’t hurt, he said.
The woman describes being put in the back seat of the police vehicle and says, “The police just shot my boyfriend for no apparent reason”.
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“This is not just a black issue, this is not just a Hispanic issue, this is an American issue”.
