This is for the folks who think I’ve been either too lenient (when they shoot a man charging them with a WWII era rifle complete with bayonet), or too harsh (when they gang tackle a 12yr old girl and fracture her skull) on law enforcement officers as of late
A BART police officer struggling to handcuff a 22-year-old man, stood up over the facedown Hayward resident and fired a single shot into his back while a handful of officers watched, a video taken by a train passenger apparently shows.
You can see the video here.
At the very minimum it is manslaughter due to an unintended discharge (the way he throws his hands up after the shot is fired indicates to me that it was unintentional). At the other end of the spectrum, it is murder deserving of the death penalty (and the whole “Ooops” moment was staged).
The video looks to be shot with a mobile phone and is more than a bit grainy and puts the necessary video at the very top edge of the screen. I think we can all agree that jail time is deserved here, either due to negligence (keep your boogerhook off the bangswitch) or belligerence (perp was an asshole).
Either way a man is dead because a SFPD/BART officer made a gun go off.
UPDATE by David: found a link to video from another angle here. It’s a less clear view of the shooting than the video in the link above. UPDATE 2: oops, gone already. That was quick.
I’ve seen three kinds of comments on local boards from posters claiming inside knowledge.
One kind says that there’s a reason they yanked the victim away from the wall and prone, and that reason is that he was allegedly threatening the officers saying he had a backup gun and was going to take it out and kill them. This sounds like a stretch to me, but there it is.
The second kind says the cop intended to Tase him, and used the wrong gun. That’s an unintended consequence of the new “grip just like your duty gun” Taser, although I don’t know if BART uses such a model.
The third kind notes that the cameras in BART stations are live feeds for deterrence and problem-spotting only, thus not recorded, and asserts that the cop chose to shoot knowing he wasn’t on camera. I’m pretty sure cops nowadays know about cell phone cameras, so I’m not sure about this one either.
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