Release the video tape!

[MrScorpio]

[Feral Child]

1. Do they get a bonus

for shooting a black dude?

What's it going to take before killer cops are held accountable?


REC

[rpannier]

4. What's it gonna take?

Juries to convict.
The level of stuff the police get away with is rather amazing
The homeless guy they killed in southern California -- not guilty.
Until there are convictions, nothing is really going to change

[Feral Child]

17. 1st

We'd need:

Departments that will prosecute.
Grand Juries that will indict.
Prosecutors that will follow through.

But I hear you; the system has to change. There has always been racial prejudice in our multitudinous enforcement agencies, but it has gotten so blatant as to be almost acceptable since the Patriot Act.

[Travis_0004]

2. The case is going to a grand jury

If they dont want to release the video to avoid tainting the jury pool, I dont have a problem with that.

[pampango]

3. Plus they don't want to taint witnesses who might 'remember' things differently after

seeing the video.

Crawford attorney concerned that witness saw video of Walmart shooting

An attorney for the family of a Walmart shopper Beavercreek police fatally shot in August is demanding to know why a key witness, Richard Ritchie, was shown store surveillance footage from that night — key evidence that the attorney and others have sought to be released publicly. “We are very concerned about that because it was our understanding that was the whole reason that (Ohio Attorney General) Mike DeWine did not want to release the video,” attorney Michael Wright said Monday. “He did not want people to have the opportunity to change their statements.”

A writer for the British newspaper The Guardian, in a story published Sunday, said Riverside resident Richard Ritchie told the newspaper that he was shown “the surveillance footage by officials in the (Ohio) attorney general’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation.”

Susan Brenner, University of Dayton School of Law Samuel A. McCray chair in law and an expert on grand juries, said it’s difficult to understand why investigators would show a key witness in this case the store video.

“If I were a defense attorney, I would say it could create memories that weren’t there,” Brenner said. “It’s the same thing as sending witnesses into a grand jury or into a trial,” she added. “You don’t want them to taint each other.”

http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/news/crime-law/crawford-attorney-concerned-that-witness-saw-video/nhJMD/

[Enthusiast]

5. When Limbaugh, Fox "News" and

the entire Right Wing Republican media establishment stop characterizing black people in every possible negative way maybe this police abuse would slow down.

Have you ever listened to it?

Hear what Paul Ryan had to say about inner city fathers? Ryan implied that all black men are lazy and their children will be lazy. This man has an audience. His words have consequences.

Ryan's words are typical of Republican anti black rhetoric.

This language encourages cops to take the worst possible perspective of a black man in a given set of circumstances as in the Wal-Mart incident.

There would be enough racism and profiling by the cops without the encouragement of the dominant right wing media.

It is almost as if the Right Wing Media is trying to incite a race war.

God Damn Rupert Murdoch and the rest. These deaths are on their heads.

[daleanime]

6. +1

[mountain grammy]

8. I've listened to it! You are entirely correct..

[Omaha Steve]

7. I agree

RELEASE THE TAPE!!!!!!!

K&R!

OS

[mountain grammy]

9. Release the video!

[KansDem]

10. I don't understand this...

Police had been summoned...reported that a man was carrying what appeared to be an AR-15 rifle.

Really? So someone carrying a rifle in a store is cause to call the police? What about the stories of late about 2-A aficionados carrying rifles in retail stores & fast-food restaurants? I don't recall any report of police being summoned to those events. Did I miss something?

[NYC_SKP]

12. In a way, all this silliness about Open Carry may be causing undue panic. Bloomberg needs to stop.

And open carry assholes need to stop.

It's gotten to where people are freaking out and calling cops if a person picks up a toy rifle in a store???

Really???

America, calm the fuck down already.

And these cops need to be investigated, indicted, and tried.

[marble falls]

13. What about the Marine who reported the incident? I want to hear his tape to 911, too....

this is too screwed up for words. There's a race war being waged right now.

[MrScorpio]

14. None of those other guys were black...

At least, not ALONE (without white people around) while being black.


You can here the 9/11 calls: http://www.whio.com/audio/911-calls-of-beavercreek-walmart-shooting/?__federated=1

When Ronald Ritchie called 911 from the aisles of a Walmart in western Ohio last month to report that a black man was “walking around with a gun in the store”, he said that shoppers were coming under direct threat.

“He’s, like, pointing it at people,” Ritchie told the dispatcher. Later that evening, after John Crawford III had been shot dead by one of the police officers who hurried to the scene in Beavercreek, Ritchie repeated to reporters: “He was pointing at people. Children walking by.”

One month later, Ritchie puts it differently. “At no point did he shoulder the rifle and point it at somebody,” the 24-year-old said, in an interview with the Guardian. He maintained that Crawford was “waving it around”, which attorneys for Crawford’s family deny.

Ritchie told several reporters after the 5 August shooting that he was an “ex-marine”. When confronted with his seven-week service record, however, he confirmed that he had been quickly thrown out of the US marine corps in 2008 after being declared a “fraudulent enlistment”, over what he maintains was simply a mixup over his paperwork.

Crawford, 22, turned out to be holding an unloaded BB air rifle that he had picked up from a store shelf. After Ritchie said Crawford appeared to be “trying to load” the gun, the 911 dispatcher relayed to an officer that it was believed the gunman “just put some bullets inside”.

The Crawfords’ attorneys told the Guardian that they had learned the preliminary findings of an autopsy were that he was shot in the back of his left arm and in his left side, supporting their claim that he was turned away from the police officer who shot him.

They have pleaded with Mike DeWine, Ohio’s attorney general, to release the store’s surveillance footage of the shooting to the public. Having viewed it, they say that it disproves Ritchie’s version of what led to the deaths of both Crawford and a 37-year-old woman who collapsed and died in the ensuing panic.

“It was an execution, no doubt about it,” alleged Crawford’s father, John Crawford II. “It was flat-out murder. And when you see the footage, it will illustrate that.”

DeWine has said that releasing the footage would be “playing with dynamite” and prevent any trial from being fair. He has assigned a special prosecutor from the neighbouring Hamilton County to handle the case. A grand jury will begin hearing evidence on it later this month. A Beavercreek police spokesman said in a statement: “Preliminary indications are that the officers acted appropriately under the circumstances.”

Following the opening of a federal inquiry into the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the Crawfords’ attorneys have also urged the Department of Justice to open a civil rights investigation into the Ohio incident, only the second fatal police shooting in Beavercreek’s history. A white officer has been placed on administrative leave following Crawford’s shooting.

The attorneys said that they would also be lodging a complaint with DeWine after Ritchie told the Guardian that he, too, was shown the surveillance footage by officials in the attorney general’s bureau of criminal investigation, who are investigating the shooting.

“That is very improper,” said attorney Michael Wright, who said that Ritchie’s statement on what happened should have been based only on what he remembered seeing.

Ritchie said that he had also become aware of past criminal allegations against Crawford, which were dropped. He declined to say if he had learned this from DeWine’s officials. Asked four times by the Guardian whether they had told the witness about Crawford’s court record, a spokesman for DeWine declined to comment.

‘He was stood so still’

Crawford was a high school graduate who had two young sons. On the evening of 5 August he was at the Walmart in a suburb of Dayton, with his girlfriend, Tasha Thomas. They were to buy ingredients to make S’mores for a family cookout, according to his family’s attorneys.

The couple separated inside the store. Crawford began a conversation on his mobile phone with LeeCee Johnson, the mother of his two sons. Walking in the sporting goods section, he approached a shelf and picked up a MK-177 BB/pellet air rifle, which was already unboxed.

“He never put the phone down,” said his father. “He just kind of picked the rifle up and carried it, was walking around with it.”

From this point, the Crawford team’s description of what is shown in the surveillance footage differs radically from Ritchie’s recollection, which he insisted was also backed up by the recordings from the Walmart cameras.

Crawford’s father and attorneys said that the footage showed the 22-year-old walking from one aisle to the next with the BB rifle at his side and in his left hand, pointed at the floor except for one notable movement.

“I would think that the rifle maybe got heavy to him,” said his father. “He kind of swung it like you carry it on your shoulder, then he immediately put it back down.”

“You can clearly see people walk past him, and they didn’t think anything about it. Everybody was just kind of minding their own business,” his father added. “He wasn’t acting in any type of way that he would have been considered menacing, if you will.”

Ritchie, however, says Crawford was “waving the weapon around”, causing the muzzle to move in the direction of passersby, including him and his wife, April. “And even still, it’s a gun in Walmart, in a public place, inducing panic,” said Ritchie.

The Crawford family’s attorneys contend that Ohio’s “open-carry” law means that he could have been legally holding the rifle in the store even if it had been a full-powered firearm. “We never saw him waving this rifle in front of kids or people,” said his father.

Crawford arrived at the pet products section in the next aisle, estimated at 60 yards from where he had picked up the item. Then, his family and their attorneys say, at about 8.20pm, he stopped and stood still for about six minutes. “With the rifle pointed down and the cell phone up in his right hand,” said his father, he stayed there facing a shelf, apparently preoccupied by the call.

“He didn’t move,” said his father. “He was stood so still, in fact, we thought the track had actually stopped. I asked the technician ‘what’s going on?’ and he said ‘Well, the reel is still running Mr Crawford, look at the time’.”

Ritchie, on the other hand, stated that at this stage, Crawford was “pointing [the BB rifle] at things, like moving things around the shelf with the gun.”

At about 8.26pm, armed police officers responding to Ritchie’s 911 call five minutes earlier come into view on the footage, according to those who viewed it. Within seconds, Crawford was shot twice and pounced on. He was taken to hospital but died from his wounds. The Crawfords’ attorneys say only Ritchie called 911 before the shooting.

Police and Ritchie say an officer to Crawford’s left twice shouted “put it down”. “Responding officers confronted the suspect inside the store area and the subject was shot after failing to comply with officers’ verbal commands,” a Beavercreek police spokesman said in a statement.

Ritchie says Crawford turned towards the officer after hearing the instruction, and then moved to run to his right, causing the BB rifle’s muzzle to swing in the officer’s direction moments before the officer fired.

“Then he got back up and tried to either go for the rifle or go for one of the officers,” Ritchie said of Crawford. “But the officer had him on the ground before he got to either target.”

Yet the Crawford team dismiss almost all of this. By the time the officer advanced from his left, according to Wright, Crawford was “turned 30 degrees to the right,” standing “almost in a catty-corner position, facing in an opposite direction to the direction they were coming”.

He did not seem to hear the police orders, said Wright. “Based on the video that we saw, it did not even appear that he knew they were there,” he said. “He doesn’t look at the officers, he doesn’t turn his body towards the officers. It’s as if he was just shot on sight by the officers.”

Johnson, the mother of Crawford’s children, who remained on the phone line to him throughout, has told reporters that she heard him say “It’s not real”, adding: “they said ‘get on the ground,’ but he was already on the ground because they had shot him”. Wright said they were trying to reconcile this with the footage.

Crawford’s father and Wright insist that the footage also did not show the 22-year-old trying to flee, nor trying to get back up to reach the weapon, which, they stress, he would have known was an unloaded BB rifle with no potential use. His only movement, they said, was a few steps to the right and to the ground upon being shot.

The Crawfords’ attorneys said they had been informed by Dr Robert Shott, deputy coroner of Montgomery County, that the 22-year-old was “shot in the back of the left arm, above the elbow, and on the left side of his torso, to the left of his belly button”. Shott did not respond to a message requesting comment. Ritchie, however, said the first shot entered Crawford’s arm from the front after he turned to the officer.

Within a few minutes, fellow shopper Angela Williams, a 37-year-old nursing home worker reported to have suffered from a heart condition, was in cardiac arrest after collapsing trying to flee the melee. She died later that evening in hospital.

Crawford’s attorneys said Williams and two of her young children had been in the same aisle as Crawford in the moments before the shooting. “She was completely indifferent as to him being there,” said Wright. “She wasn’t startled, she wasn’t alarmed or anything like that.”

Ritchie said that it was his own heart condition that saw him discharged from the US marines after joining in September 2008. He insisted that he had disclosed the condition when signing up. However, he claimed, “my recruiter never turned that paperwork in, so they considered me a fraudulent enlistment” when officers later discovered the condition.

Beavercreek police and the attorney general’s office have declined to name the officer who shot Crawford. However, after Sergeant David Darkow and Officer Sean Williams were placed on leave following the incident, Darkow has returned to work but Williams has not.

Williams was the officer behind the only other fatal police shooting in Beavercreek. In 2010, he shot dead Scott Brogli, a retired master sergeant in the US air force. According to Williams and a colleague, Brogli charged at them with a large knife after they went to investigate the 45-year-old’s drunken beating of his wife. A grand jury declined to bring any charges.

Wright, the Crawfords’ attorney, cited this in reiterating a request for the Department of Justice to step in and mount its own investigation.

“This has a lot of civil rights implications,” said Wright of the Ohio shooting. “This was a young black man apparently being shot and killed by a white police officer.” The US attorney for the southern district of the state has said his office is “monitoring” the case.

“Attorney General DeWine has been keeping US attorney Carter Stewart updated as the case and investigation has been proceeding,” said Dan Tierney, a spokesman for DeWine. “We’ve also been updating the FBI.”

John Crawford II said that he would remember his son by the laughter they shared one week before the shooting, while playing pool in a restaurant-bar on the evening of his 22nd birthday. “I hugged him, and I told him ‘happy birthday’, and we finished the night out, and we came home,” he said. “And I can just remember him smiling and having a good time.”

“We’re still in the shock stage of things,” he said. “I’m still relatively numb.” A grand jury in Greene County is scheduled to begin hearing evidence on 22 September.

http://yasboogie.tumblr.com/post/96936466312/when-ronald-ritchie-called-911-from-the-aisles-of

[1StrongBlackMan]

16. You clearly missed the memo ...

the "call the police" decision is primarily predicated on the race of the person carrying the weapon.

Here's the primer:

White = Ignore it
Black = Call the police to register your concern

White Male = Ignore it ... unless he is wearing a cartoon villain mask; if so, then wait and see
Black Male = Call the police in a panic

Young White Male = Ignore it ... unless he is wearing a cartoon villain mask AND in a movie theater; if so, call police to register your concern
Young Black Male = Shoot him yourself

[NYC_SKP]

11. K/R (nt)

[logosoco]

15. It should be released. It is hard to watch these tapes, but I do because

it is happening now, well, it always has, but now it is captured more for folks to see.

After seeing more than I wanted to, I was wishing I had computer and musical talents. I would put these videos together with music and a song. Maybe if it is put in one video people will really see it.

And I don't get it either that this guy got shot, but I have seen plenty of photos of white guys walking around with large guns, openly enough that I would vacate the area immediately if I saw them.

[Cha]

18. So damn sad, MrScorpio :(