Moving Targets: US police have fatally shot 30 people in moving vehicles this year......

[marmar]

from Guardian UK:


Moving Targets
US police have fatally shot 30 people in moving vehicles this year, despite federal guidelines advising them not to. Why have police departments pulled the trigger on drivers rather than reform?


Tommy Maness had no choice but to shoot, they said.

Called to tackle a supposed late-night fight at a roadside diner in Alexander City, Alabama, the 34-year-old police corporal saw Emerson Crayton Jr, a young black man, hurry into his Ford SUV in the restaurant’s parking lot and start the engine.

Maness knocked on the driver’s window and told Crayton to get out. But Crayton, 21, reversed out of his space. Then he turned his wheels toward Maness, police chief Willie Robinson alleged, and “tried to run over the officer”. Maness “could not get out of the way of the vehicle”, so instead he fired his Glock pistol into it at least three times. Crayton, who was unarmed, died from a shot to the head.

According to an Alabama state bureau of investigations file on the shooting obtained by the Guardian, however, things unfolded differently.

Maness acknowledged to investigators that, in fact, he “sidestepped the truck” as he shot. A recording from his body camera showed that despite the SUV continuing to move forward after the driver was shot, Maness was not struck. Actually, the vehicle swung sharply away from him as it brushed by and headed to the highway.

“It’s a straight cover-up,” Crayton’s father, Emerson Sr, said at his home in nearby Dadeville. “Fact is, the officer did get out the way.” Asked about the video footage in an interview in his office, Robinson repeated: “People see what they want to see.” ....................(more)

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/sep/01/moving-targets-police-shootings-vehicles-the-counted