Posted on 09/20/2016 9:28:48 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
It’s not clear what happened in the last few fateful moments but some facts are undisputed. Crutcher was unarmed, Tulsa’s police chief admitted yesterday, and had no weapon in his car. He had his hands up as he walked slowly away from the police and towards his SUV with an officer, Betty Shelby, trailing behind him. As he reached the driver-side door, Shelby and another officer stopped a few feet behind the SUV and trained their pistols on him. They were joined by two more cops. Then things took a turn: At some point in the next few moments, as Crutcher stood beside the door, the second officer tasered him and then Shelby fired one shot at him, killing him.
Why was Crutcher’s SUV in the middle of the road? The Times says Shelby responded to the scene after “after the police received reports of an abandoned vehicle blocking a road”:
In an interview, Officer Shelby’s lawyer, Scott Wood, said the officer had thought that Mr. Crutcher had a weapon. Mr. Wood said Mr. Crutcher had acted erratically, refused to comply with several orders, tried to put his hand in his pocket and reached inside his car window before he was shot.
Chief Jordan said Officer Shelby had encountered Mr. Crutcher and his vehicle while en route to another call and requested backup because she was “not having cooperation” from him. Officer Turnbough and his partner responded to Officer Shelby’s request for backup. It was the dashboard camera in their patrol car that recorded the shooting.
There are two recordings, one from a helicopter plus the dashboard cam video, both of which are featured in the clip below. Neither one is close enough, though, to give you a good idea of exactly what’s going on once Crutcher gets to the SUV, and the dashboard angle is obstructed by the group of cops gathered at the back of the vehicle. Did Crutcher reach through the window into the car — a police spokesman says he did — and did officers on the scene warn him specifically not to do that? If he’d been uncooperative to that point and “erratic,” the police may have thought he was on something (one of the cops in the chopper speculates about that during the clip) and worried that he was going for a gun. That would have been nuts with four cops ready to fire at him just feet away, but “erratic” people can do nutty things.
Even so, Crutcher makes no sudden moves in the clip. His hands, as noted, are in the air. The cops had a nonlethal means of subduing him available, the taser, and they put it to use, raising the question of why Shelby felt obliged to shoot. Did the taser not bring him down? Even if it didn’t, with no hard evidence that Crutcher was armed, was Shelby obliged to at least catch a glimpse of a weapon before deciding to kill him, just in case?
The audio of what the cops said to Crutcher and what he said back may end up being more valuable than the video at trial, assuming that that audio exists. The DOJ has already opened an investigation into the shooting. Crutcher is survived by four kids.
I will say this also this looks like a helicopter View of a training video, the videos we see in training where officers did not shoot and somebody reached into the car and pulled out a rifle and those officers are dead. They see those videos and all the police academy classes.
I had the exact same type of incident before with a guy who was trying to get me to shoot him.
The story is both funny in one regard and Incredibly frightening in other ways. And the story is way too long to describe here but basically the guy did everything you possibly could with his vehicle and his physical actions and his words to try to get me to shoot him.
I did not see a gun in his hand but he reached into his pickup truck as if he were retrieving a weapon after saying I’m not going back to prison.
He ran off into the woods where I later found 2 Glock magazines buried under some leaves and the Glock magazines had strong magnets attached to them so that he could secure them underneath the dashboard of his truck. He also was wearing body armor a butcher’s apron a Halloween mask and had a holster for a pistol on his hip as well as extra ammunition in his pockets.
I had a work crew in this little wooded field cutting bushes and raking brush off and on for a week and we could never find the gun that he must have had.
But there’s always a chance he never really had a gun and it would have been a lawful improper shooting head I decided to shoot him back when he was reaching in his truck.
And of course he was white so that changes the media narrative.
One other part of this incident was he had his dog with him and later at the precinct I had stripped of my uniform shirt and vest and gun belt off to try and cool down on the hot summer night and his girlfriend showed up at the precinct to retrieve his animal I went out to talk to her in the lobby and give her the dog and she decided she was going to pretend she was reaching in her purse and getting a gun to shoot me and I had no weapon on me I had to launch across the room and grab her before she could put her hand out of her purse and of course she was just pretending.
I was too legitimate shootings that I did not do in one night.
I have had several other incidents where it would have been totally lawful to pull the trigger and I did not, but none were as strange as these two the other two were people either pulling knives on me or trying to stab somebody else and the circumstances just were such that the backdrop was bad or they dropped a knife before I could shoot.
I apologize in advance for any weird words or misspellings because I was using voice to text for this post.
So the police ordered him to return to his vehicle? NO?
I. DON'T. CARE. At all........
Start with this: why is his car stopped in the middle of the road? Even when I've run out of gas, or had catastrophic breakdowns I've always managed to get my vehicle to the side of the road. So, were I an officer I would be super suspicious from the get-go on this.
“His disregard for obeying lawful commands... is what got him killed”
AKA, being stupid.
“In dealing with any cop when on.is in a law enforcement situation as the enforceee is to keep it from getting to where the cop feels impelled to draw a gun.”
This is the point. You know your intentions, the cop doesn’t. They are nervous to begin with, and when you’re being difficult and not complying it intensifies that nervousness.
Why is it that certain racial minorities are excused from obeying commands?
I don't know what it's like in Tulsa, but you'll get 4 cops and a helicopter for a burnt out tail light here in San Diego. </slight exaggeration>
We think the guy was stupid, but some people will always push a little and a little more to try to see what they can get away with - and then there is DRUGS and ALCOHOL.
And then there is plain stupid again.
They are really driving the church-a-going-thang narrative here. Attending music classes too - ruined Future Rap Career?
Probably hopped-up on something is my guess. Have they done a toxicology report on the guy?
Hillary is using this event to say that white people need to be talked to about racism.
How do the police videos get on YouTube so fast?
Also I question why the person was walking around that is really strange !
Simple. Get down on the ground.
Thanks for the other comment - I don't know how you guys do what you do day in and day out. Thanks for your dedication.
If he had done what the officers had told him to do he would be alive.
If he had done what the officers had told him to do he would be alive.
If he had done what the officers had told him to do he would be alive.
If he had done what the officers had told him to do he would be alive.
If he had done what the officers had told him to do he would be alive.
If he had done what the officers had told him to do he would be alive.
So Simple.
But for the life of me, the woman that shot him? It looks like a sympathetic muscle response to me. That's why you keep your finger off the trigger until you're going to shoot.
I guess she missed class that day.
You have to do what cops tell you, or you could get shot. You can always sue them afterwards, if you are alive.
This is pretty much the best answer I've seen so far. Doesn't guarantee anything when you have someone with a twitchy trigger finger though. The really bad thing IMO is that you can be thrust into these kind of adrenaline charged situation without being in any way at fault for anything at all. It's sad that the whole 'us versus them' attitude institutionalized in so many police departments fans the flames of this type of situation as well. Personally, I try my best to avoid this kind of situation, but I know that it isn't always possible. I just have to trust in the Lord to bring me through it, and if he doesn't then at least we'll get to have a talk about it afterwards.
John R. Lott Jr., “Does a Helping Hand Put Others at Risk? Affirmative Action, Police Departments and Crime,” Economic Inquiry, April 1, 2000.)
It turns out that, far from “de-escalating force” through their superior listening skills, female law enforcement officers vastly are more likely to shoot civilians than their male counterparts. (Especially when perps won’t reveal where they bought a particularly darling pair of shoes.)
Unable to use intermediate force, like a bop on the nose, female officers quickly go to fatal force. According to Lott’s analysis, each 1 percent increase in the number of white female officers in a police force increases the number of shootings of civilians by 2.7 percent.
Adding males to a police force decreases the number of civilians accidentally shot by police. Adding black males decreases civilian shootings by police even more. By contrast, adding white female officers increases accidental shootings. (And for my Handgun Control Inc. readers: Private citizens are much less likely to accidentally shoot someone than are the police, presumably because they do not have to approach the suspect and make an arrest.)
Maybe he was told show some ID, and his ID was in his car.
He was moving very slowly. Maybe he was under the influence of something or having a medical issue.
She gets points for restraint. I’d have pepper-sprayed him or something.
But she is too small. She’ll end up having to shoot somebody some day because of it.
In 2011 a deaf Indian woodcarver was shot and killed in Seattle. He was carrying his carving knife and a small log, and he didn’t hear the police shouting at him, and he wasn’t acting in any way threatening. That shooting was ruled unjustified but it wasn’t a woman cop who shot the man.
You are correct. The helicopter cam shows him reaching into the car.
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