Video of police fatally shooting a pregnant Black woman set to be released, Ohio department says
stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to 
apnews.com
Authorities in Ohio say they will release body camera footage of a fatal police shooting of a pregnant Black woman.
When police departments fight against releasing bodycam footage and only do so under immense public pressure, then still drag their feet and delay as long as possible, that tells you all you need to know.
Oh look.
The video not only shows he had time to get out of the way, it shows him pointing the gun at her first.
They really should show the whole footage, unedited.
People should be able to see the reality of getting shot.
Let's see whether or not the officer moved out of the way after firing
What a tragedy. These dumb cops are the fucking problem. Why the hell is he standing in front of the vehicle? Is it so boring that they have to get their adrenaline flowing for a shoplifter? Unbelievable that they can murder a young mother based on an assumption and get away with it. Innocent until proven guilty my ass. A family is devastated.
Hug your loved ones.
Listen, I get the whole ACAB thing, and I think the unjustified shooting of anyone is awful. And I know black people are treated extremely unfairly by the police.
But as someone who (even briefly) worked retail, some shoplifters are batshit. I will not be surprised if the video shows exactly what the police said in this case. Being pregnant is not gonna stop a cop from shooting you if you drive your car at them. And it’s insane to think otherwise.
We need better addiction solutions. A pregnant woman should not be risking her life to score alcohol.
Edit: That said, I also won’t be surprised if the cops lied. Obviously.
Edit 2: Seen the video. She shouldn’t have driven at him, but I do not think he was justified shooting her. His life was not in danger. She was at a dead stop, she could’ve floored the gas as hard as she could and he would’ve been fine. Fucking awful.
Somehow she made it out of the store without inflicting her hypothetical murderous shoplifter rage on anyone but I guess she was just like some kind of bull triggered by red and blue lights. Thanks for providing some entirely unnecessary made up context to preemptively justify the actions of people you apparently know are a bunch of lying racist murderers.
Employees aren’t supposed to engage with shoplifters unless they’re loss-prevention. You let them leave and let the cops handle it. If no one tried to stop her, of course she didn’t try to get past them. Also don’t put words in my mouth, I said nothing about murderous rage.
She didn’t want to be caught. She’s a mom with two kids and another on the way, and clearly not thinking rationally or she wouldn’t be shoplifting alcohol. If you aren’t thinking clearly and you don’t want the cops to stop you, driving away (even towards them!) while they try to stop you may seem like a good choice. Again, don’t mischaracterize what I said.
The world is not black and white. A person is not automatically a good or bad actor in every situation purely because of the color of their skin or the uniform they wear, and pretending otherwise is childish.
I didn’t justify anything, I simply said I won’t be surprised if the cops didn’t lie about this situation.
Please learn to recognize nuance. The world will be better if we all strive to understand one another.
A witness has said she put the bottles down before she left the store. I think she was scared of the two armed men using unjustified force on her
Hadn’t heard that. Having seen the video though, I really don’t think they were justified in shooting her. At all. Their lives were not in any immediate danger. Trigger happy fucks.
Thanks for admitting that you have a personal bias towards shoplifters.
Getting drunk during pregnancy is how the "Greatest Generation" created the boomers.
And that should result in a death sentence?
I made no such conclusion.
I mean, the facts are pretty straightforward: she used a deadly weapon (a motor vehicle) to attack pedestrians (the officers).
Had she simply submitted to the initial arrest, she would have faced a fine and some community service. Shoplifters rarely face anything more serious than that. In an attempt to avoid those minimal consequences, she chose to escalate from a simple property crime to assault with a deadly weapon. The best she could hope for would have been a lengthy prison sentence.
No, the case is straightforward and boring. The only interesting factor I found in it was fetal alcohol syndrome.
According to the police.
According to the video.
The one that was released after your comment. You believe anything anyone who shoots a black person says.
Trust, but verify. I believed them when they said they had a video, and I believed them when they provided a written description of the video. They would look extraordinarily bad to be caught lying about something so easy to verify, so I saw little reason not to trust.
It fit the pattern: individual gets caught committing a minor criminal act, but rather than facing the music and accepting the slap on the wrist punishment, they instead choose to escalate to the point of endangering people, and then Pikachu-face when they get shot.
What does her race have to do with this case?
Did "being black" stop her from hearing or understanding the officer calmly ordering her to get out of the car? Did "being black" prevent her from seeing the other officer in front of her vehicle? Did "being black" force her to put the car in gear and depress the accelerator?
I'll save my outrage for cases like Breonna Taylor, Philando Castile, George Floyd, and other actual victims of police abuse. I have no sympathy for someone who would endanger lives to avoid facing minimal and deserved consequences for their own criminal actions.
Witness states she put down the bottles before she left the store. The description of the video states she accelerated towards an officer. The video shows an officer step in front of the slow rolling vehicle. He even takes a step forward right before he jumps on the hood. He was also able to safely get away from the slow moving vehicle after he fired a shot, something that he could have done before choosing to end a life
Whether she did or did not take the bottles is completely irrelevant to the shooting. A complaining witness claimed she had; officers had sufficient cause to conduct a stop and investigate that complaint.
The video shows an officer stepped in front of a stopped vehicle. That vehicle was later driven toward the officer. The description is accurate; your claim is not.
Pedestrians have the right-of-way over vehicles. Even if she was moving when he stepped in front of her, she was obligated to stop, both under traffic laws, and per the lawful instructions given by the officers. She was not justified in driving toward the officer.
She escalated from being suspected of shoplifting to committing assault with a deadly weapon.
That might be relevant if he had a "duty to retreat" from the assault. Do you believe he had a legal obligation to retreat? If so, under what legal theory do you believe he acquired that obligation?
Rhe police had her license plate number. Her physical description. They had the nature of her offence being a non-violent crime. The car did not quickly accelerate and the police officer against all common safety advice put himself in the path of the vehicle.
That his first action was to pull a gun and fire and not just get out of the way and approach the problem at a later time in a less heated situation is excessive force. Back when I worked security I watched lots people pull this stunt on police officers before and surprise - none of them got shot and none of the police got hit by a car and everybody still got their resisting arrest charge at the end if the day.
If you are scared enough your psychological reaction is to stay in a place of safety or to flee and cars provide the opportunity to both... Which is why you aren't supposed to put yourself in the path of someone's potential escape with your body. People are panicy animals who can divert entirely to basic instinct, particularly when they are hurt or in a lower estimation of being able to defend themselves like pregnancy.
This is an example of someone killed because of bad police training and decision making that ignored entirely how scary even normally benign police interactions can be to black women. If she was worried about harm to her baby because of the police's habit of putting people forcefully on the ground or slamming them against cars she would be placed under extreme distress having one yell at her to leave her car like they meant to do her violence.
The police here created wholecloth the "need" to shoot this woman. From the moment they started escalating, blocking her route of egress and not taking the moment of thought to ask if this could not be de-escalated and addressed later safely given the minor nature of the complaint.
The officer's decision to stand in front of her car may indeed be "against all common safety advice". For your argument to prevail, however, you will have to go a little further. You will have to demonstrate that his actions were unlawful, or otherwise so egregious as to justify her deliberately moving her vehicle toward him. Unfortunately for your argument, there is no legal prohibition against him standing in front of her car.
Without that justification, her actions posed a credible, criminal, imminent, threat of death or grievous bodily harm, which justifies the use of any level of force, up to and including lethal force, to stop that threat.
You have not answered my question. Did the officer have a duty to retreat? If so, under what legal theory do you believe that duty arose?
Scared or not, she had a legal duty to follow the officer's lawful instructions. Scared or not, she had a legal duty to yield to a pedestrian in the path of her vehicle. Neither her race nor her sex nor her medical condition relieve her of those legal duties.
They may gain the legal justification needed to avoid prison in the States but here in Canada they would be fucked and they would have had the legal duty to retreat. The duty of police here is to merit only so much force as is required in a situation for all parties to get to safety and reassess if the situation merits any harm. Even if someone takes a swing at you with a weapon lethal force is only justified if all other potential options for resolving the conflict have been exhausted. Since she was rolling very slowly the potential threat to life was low. The officer had time to both draw and aim a weapon which means he also had time to remove himself from the psth of the car. Also the scope of the percieved crime comes into play. It was a non-violent supposed theft of property. Here unless someone has seen the uninterrupted process of selection, concealment and removal from property the crime is not chargable. Stores however are able to ban customers from their premises based on the criteria of suspicion of prior theft. So an arrest made under the circumstances of incomplete suspicion of theft would likely just fall apart in court. Escalating to yelling at her and making her feel her life is threatened in the first place for such a mild offence would have been considered at least a little dodgy. Ideally here police are supposed to utilize means to de-escalate conflict. Losing their cool for a minor charge and escalating the conflict to yelling even if the case was airtight would have been seen as a need to retrain them.
Here's what thia would have looked like in my country. They would have stated the person was under arrest and was to leave the vehicle, tell them the legal consequences of resisting arrest but to do so in a calm.way that keeps the situation safe for all. If the cost to safety of themselves and the public of enforcing the arrest is too dangerous given the nature of the crime then any force applied would be potentially considered improper use of force. Since the he only thing endangered is a small amount of property the authority of the officer neither of those things are worth more than the safety of all involved. Legal ramifications can happen safely elsewhere after everyone has cooled off. They had the tools to do that.
The police here would not be justified. The limitations of their powers are that their first duty is to the safety and to protect the lives of the public and themselves. Their authority to command is entirely second to this. The question of "were there ways to resolve this safely for all parties without a non-violent resolution" would be asked. But even if something is lawful does not make it just.
Regardless of ruling, what happened here is essentially that these officers placed more value on an inflated idea of their authority than the safety of themselves and the woman. They placed themselves in the path of harms way for a percieved stolen property under $50. They shot someone and effectively killed two because they felt justified doing so for a charge of property under $50. Their first reaction they made to being lightly jostled by a car was not to remove themselves from her path and pursue the charge later with the tools they had or even to draw a weapon to warn her to stop and give her a second chance of compliance. Their first reaction was to draw take a second to aim and then fire a lethal shot. At the end of the day she was killed for an improper reaction to authority over a tiny amount of property that the police valued more than her safety.
If that is the society you want I am at least glad that I don't have to live in it. For a country that calls itself "land of the free" the powers you give to police is inhumane.
It's the only reason you believed the police before they released the video.
As though you don't have excuses for why each of them had it coming too.
No. I believed their easily verifiable description of the events.
I'm more pissed off about each of them than you are. Castile in particular.
It wasn't verifiable before they posted the video. In the absence of evidence, you believed the people who shot a black person.
I don't think you understood my point. You seem to have missed an important difference in meaning between "verified" and "verifiable".
"Three angels can dance on the head of a pin" is not a verifiable statement. It can't be proven true or false. "There are three cats in this bag" is readily verifiable, even if that fact has not yet been verified.
Their claims were readily verifiable at the moment they made them; they were verified when the video was released.
Knowing that the police would want to paint themselves in as positive light as possible, and knowing how bad they would look in getting caught making so blatant a lie, trusting their statement was not unreasonable.
You believed them immediately without evidence.
This place is weirdly hyper-leftist. Don't expect this comment to go well
Leftism is when you downvote dumbass comments
This isn't a left/right issue. The divide here is between people who have learned the laws governing the use of force, and people who haven't. The problem is that the cops are in the first camp, and the people being killed (and the people outraged at them being killed) are all in the second.
The only viable solution to this problem is to broadly teach these laws to people before they decide whether to act a fool.