Month: September 2016

The video is disturbing and prompts many questions — and that’s how the police see it. The family of Terence Crutcher, who was shot dead by police Friday, says the footage should lead to criminal charges against the officer who killed an unarmed man.

The Justice Department has begun a parallel investigation into possible civil rights charges related to Crutcher’s death, U.S. Attorney Danny Williams, Sr., said Monday. He promised “to seek justice on behalf of this family, and for the public.”

Crutcher, who was black, died next to his SUV that had stopped in the middle of a two-lane road in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Seconds before he was shot, police dash-cam and helicopter footage shows, he had walked to his car with his hands held over his head as Officer Betty Shelby walked behind him, her gun raised.

We’ll post the helicopter video and link to more footage here, with the warning that some of the video is graphic and may be difficult to watch.

In the recording from the Tulsa police helicopter, an officer is heard saying of Crutcher as he walks in front of Shelby, “Looks like that’s a bad dude, maybe on something.”

Officers had been called to the scene by passers-by who called in to report a vehicle that had been abandoned. “He took off running,” a woman told a 911 operator, saying that the man said his vehicle might blow up. She added, “I think he’s smoking something.”

Shelby, who is white, was one of four police officers who were standing at the rear bumper of Crutcher’s car as he stood next to his vehicle around 7:45 p.m. Friday. She’s also the officer who shot him once, in the upper body — and who then radioed, “Shots fired.” Police say another officer used his Taser on Crutcher at nearly the same time he was shot.

“I want to assure our community, and I want to assure all of you and people across the nation who are going to be looking at this, we will achieve justice, period,” Tulsa Police Chief Chuck Jordan said Monday, as his department released the videos. He called the footage “very disturbing; it’s very difficult to watch.”

Officer Shelby’s attorney, Scott Wood, told the Tulsa World that Shelby believed Crutcher was reaching for something inside his car, and that he hadn’t been following her commands.

Jordan added that he had first watched the police-cam footage was when he viewed it with Crutcher’s family — he said he did that Sunday, to give the slain man’s relatives a chance to see the video before anyone else.

“After watching the video and seeing what actually happened,” said Tiffany Crutcher, “We’re truly devastated, the entire family is devastated.”

Tiffany Crutcher then went on to tell the media gathered in Tulsa, “You all want to know who that big ‘bad dude’ was. That big ‘bad dude’ was my twin brother. That big ‘bad dude’ was a father. That big ‘bad dude’ was a son. That big ‘bad dude’ was enrolled at Tulsa Community College, just wanting to make us proud.

“That big ‘bad dude’ loved God; that big ‘bad dude’ was at church singing, with all his flaws, every week. That’s who he was.”

Tiffany Crutcher said her brother’s future was taken away because of negligence and incompetence — “and because he was a big ‘bad dude.'”

Demanding charges for the officers involved, Tiffany Crutcher said of her brother, “his life mattered.”

Referring to other incidents of police killings of unarmed black men, she added, “This is bigger than us right here. We’re going to stop it right here.”

The timecode in the video taken from the dash-cam of Officer Turnbough shows that Crutcher was shot around 1:50 into the recording. 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.

After Shelby shot Crutcher, two officers walked to the opposite side of the vehicle to ensure it was safe; a female officer is then seen running away from the immediate area. Moments later, three officers, seemingly including Shelby, backed slowly away from Crutcher’s body. They then crouched down behind a police cruiser.

Crutcher was left alone on the asphalt until around the 3:45 mark in the video, when an officer checks his pockets; it isn’t until around 4:30 that anyone crouches down to render any aid.

The police department says Betty Jo Shelby, 42, joined the force in December of 2011. Tulsa World reports that she had previously worked at the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office.

“Please, maintain the peace,” Police Chief Jordan said at his news conference. He added, “Protests are not a problem… I grew up in the 60s, it’s a very valid way for people to air their grievances.”

Social media have become home to two things in recent years: memes and public shaming.

Both came into play Monday night when Donald Trump Jr. tweeted an image of a bowl of Skittles, comparing Syrian refugees to poisoned candy. “If I had a bowl of Skittles and I told you three would kill you, would you take a handful?” the meme asks. “That’s our Syrian refugee problem.”

The post by the Republican presidential candidate’s son immediately went viral. It earned the support and praise of many Trump supporters, who worry that an influx of refugees poises an existential security threat. It also drew condemnation from many who viewed the tweet as a flip, dehumanizing way to address a humanitarian catastrophe affecting more than 13 million people.

The makers of Skittles were quick to join the second camp. “Skittles are candy. Refugees are people,” a spokeswoman for the candy’s parent company, Wrigley, said in a widely distributed statement. “We don’t feel it’s an appropriate analogy. We will respectfully refrain from further commentary as anything we say could be misinterpreted as marketing.”

Others were more direct in their response, posting graphic images of Syrian refugees and writing, “Not a Skittle.”

And, as the Washington Post pointed out, the bowl of Skittles would have to be awfully large for Trump’s analogy to be accurate: The odds of being killed by a refugee in a terrorist attack are about 1 in more than 3.6 billion, according to a recent Cato Institute study.

Still, the potential danger posed by Syrian refugees has been a central theme of the Trump campaign. Trump regularly warns that refugees could be a “Trojan horse,” entering the country with the goal of later attacking it.

Trump has called, at varying points, to end all immigration by Muslims, from countries with a high risk of terrorism and from countries without proper screening methods. (Trump’s campaign has not clarified which countries fit the second two criteria.)

At a Florida rally Monday afternoon, Trump recited the lyrics of a jazz song called “The Snake,” something he’s done several times before, to underscore his worries.

The song tells the story of a woman who takes a snake into her house and rehabilitates it, only to see the snake bite and kill her. “Now I saved you, cried the woman. And you’ve bit me, even why,” Trump recited to the crowd. “And you know your bite is poisonous and now I’m going to die. Ah, shut up, silly woman, said that reptile with a grin. Now you knew damn well I was a snake before you brought me in.”

These mental images — refugees as poisonous candy, venomous snakes or terrorist cells-in-waiting — come at a time when the Obama administration is working to humanize the world’s refugee problem. “They are just like us. They are us. And as Americans, so many of us are the product of families that had refugees and immigrants. And they’ve contributed so much to our country,” Assistant Secretary of State Tony Blinken told NPR.

He recently worked with Sesame Street to produce a video aimed at humanizing refugees so that children can better understand the problem. As Blinken explains to the Muppet Grover in the video, refugees are “people who’ve had to leave their homes because it’s not safe for them to live in their countries.”

While both Trump and Democratic rival Hillary Clinton have called for tighter security screening of refugees admitted to the country, the United States already implements a detailed security check. Approval can take up to 24 months, as NPR reported last year.