Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/09/23/video-captured-by-wife-of-keit.html
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How many days of riots have the police incited now by refusing to release the dashcam and bodycam footage?
It’s like living in a fucking time warp back to the 50’s.
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The yelling by police seems to feed on itself. Like:
Why did you shoot him?
He had a gun
Did you see the gun?
No but the other guy did. I heard him say drop the fucking gun
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(in the Dalek voice)
Exterminate
Ex-term-in-ate
EX-TERM-IN-ATE!
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Pretty much 
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It’s difficult not to conclude with all these shooting videos that some cops really want an excuse to shoot someone, or in the least, they just get impatient and shooting the subject ends the situation faster. Even if the guy actually had a gun, he didn’t point it at them. Disobeying a police order should not be a death sentence. There are plenty of other people who have been talked into putting down weapons without getting shot by cops.
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Yeah but they were all white people…
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Didn’t watch it.
Reading the transcript was bad enough.
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Or terrorism suspects that we might be able to parade as trophies to show we’re winning the “War on terror”…
As the government keeps terrorizing people here.
Seriously … fuck.
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The transcript is enough. There really isn’t much to see in the actual video. The shooting happens off camera and it’s all from a distance.
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Then the next one I hear say “drop the goddamn fucking machine gun”
Wish we could actually see him at all during this whole exchange. As it is this video doesn’t really show anything to settle the questions of “did he have a gun?” and “did he move to point it at police?” which do a lot to turn how I view the situation.
Yeah, no sense in giving any credence at all to what she has to say. She’s just a swearing black woman, amirite?
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Part of the issue here is that law enforcement typically does not try to de-escalate confrontations. They tend to give priority of addressing a threat with equal force, this in comparison with European countries where pulling a gun on someone would have to be only in circumstances of extreme danger.
With this man that was shot they could have restrained him, talked to him calmly, any number of things that probably would’ve resolved the situation without the need to escalate so quickly.
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That’s what I was thinking of when I wrote that. I specifically had this video in mind:
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Reports are that he was brandishing a handgun. His wife’s plea to him to ‘do not fucking do it’ indicates that there’s more to the story than the very simplified narritive given here. I’m not justifying police brutality, but the devil’s in the details and the details aren’t being presented fully.
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“Keith, don’t you do it!” could mean anything. It definitely doesn’t prove that he had a gun. If he really did have a gun, I think the cops would release their video without hesitation.
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“Police reports are that he was brandishing a handgun.”
FTFY. Consider the source. The wife’s video also has her saying he’s unarmed. “Don’t do it” could mean anything.
You are correct that the details aren’t being presented fully and it’s quite possible the truth will never actually be known publicly.
But we do have the precedent of cops planting guns on people, such as was recently covered with former Officer Jason Stockley planting one on Anthony Smith after Stockley killed Smith with Stockley’s personal AK-47 after having said, “I’m going to kill this motherfucker” on a recording.
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Yes, because that’s what I said and if I doubt even a little that he had no gun I’m a raving racist incapable of believing a swearing black woman worried her husband is about to get shot. /s
I think a lot of that is that guns are so much less common in Europe so cops are in less immediate danger. And because guns pose such an existential danger to cops they need to be able to deal with the threat so they get guns too and there’s very little time to deescalate.
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