Alton Sterling shooting: Video of deadly encounter with officers sparks outrage

CNN ^ | July 06, 2016 | Joshua Berlinger

[Trump20162020]

A day after a video captured white officers pinning down and shooting a black man outside a convenience store in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, federal authorities are investigating the case.

Alton Sterling, 37, is dead. The U.S. Justice Department's Civil Rights Division is leading an investigation into what happened. And the president of the NAACP's local branch is calling for the city's police chief and mayor to resign.

[struggle]

We’ll see. I wouldn’t be surprised if the guy ends up with powder burns on his had by tomorrow.

[RetiredTexasVet]

First mistake .... was in SF!!!!! (or substitute Chicago, etc.)

[struggle]

Looking at it again, it looks like his hand is in his pocket and he may have fired his gun.

[blueplum]

What was this guy's crime again?

How about being in front of a convenience store after midnight threatening folks and telling them to get out of there? .... ( MSNBC live, approx. 6pm Pacific - until they scrub it).

nbcnews article also mentions the call "after midnight" that Sterling was "was acting threatening with a gun. "

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/alton-sterling-shooting-baton-rouge-police-sparks-outrage-protests-n604431

maybe he was threatening gang members who dropped a dime on him, in which case going after the police is misdirection, or maybe he was up to something else. I guess we'll find out and we'll also find out who fired first. His family has confirmed he was carrying a gun. Maybe a better choice would have been to blow his arm off?

[kearnyirish2]

What the “gentle giant” couldn’t know was that he was dealing with two cops sent there to deal with an armed perp; once a cop has his taser out I’d shut up & sort it out later. I don’t think these cops will have a problem - and they shouldn’t. They tried the non-lethal means, it failed, and in the scuffle they have to treat this as an armed suspect - because that was what the police were told. The guy WAS armed, according to eyewitnesses who saw the police retrieve his weapon; as a cop I wouldn’t care whether or not the gun was in his hand yet once we’re fighting.

Blacks are stuck on this one; they are complaining about “de-policing” on the one hand and are now forced to canonize an armed thug on the other...

[kearnyirish2]

The comment “he has a gun” may not even indicate that they could see one; they were sent there to deal with him for menacing someone with a handgun. From the moment they roll up they are, to the best of their knowledge, dealing with an armed individual.

When an African was shot years ago in NYC by four cops (who were acquitted), the only one in any real jeopardy was the one who yelled “Gun!”. At that point, the rest are justified in lighting him up - and a jury agreed (even clearing the one who thought the wallet he reached for was a gun). The innocent suspect ignored their verbal commands and died in the ensuing events.

[Faith Presses On]

I watched this video in slow motion, and took some still shots from it. There is a lot going on in just a few seconds, and it isn't very easy to make it all out.

It seems that at around 3 seconds, Sterling hand moves, and at 4 seconds, his right arm comes back and he pulls his head off the ground. That is when one officer says he has a gun. Both officers then reach for their guns as well (the one on top of Sterling visibly does so at the 5-second mark, but I don't have a still photo of it here) and the officer on top of Sterling also apparently wrestles with Sterling's right arm for several seconds. At the 6-second mark, one can see the officer's hand apparently grabbing Sterling's, and several seconds later, just before the first shot, their hands again appear that way. For several seconds the officer on top and Sterling seem to wrestle along Sterling's right arm and side, and at around 9 seconds the camera jerks and the wrestling intensifies and at around 10 seconds is the first gunshot coinciding with the officer on top either flinging himself off Sterling or being thrown off of him as Sterling partly sits up. Once the camera is turned back on the officers and Sterling, it seems that the officer with his gun drawn is likely the officer who was on top of Sterling.

[kearnyirish2]

These cops weren’t just filmed by bystanders; they were wearing bodycams. I’m sure at least one of them thought his life was in danger; after all, they had initially been sent there to deal with an armed perp.

[Faith Presses On]

That is the moment when the officer on top of Sterling reaches for his gun. I could be wrong, because it's hard to tell, but he seems to draw it at that point, too.

[Crucial]

Sterling’s arm is partly underneath the car and I wonder if his gun was on that side in his belt or pocket.

[Faith Presses On]

That seems to be so, at least it seems to be where the officers thought it was. His left arm was visibly pinned by at least one of the officers, and you can see his hand out and empty. But his right arm was what the officer on top of him struggled with for several seconds, and it seems like that after the 5-second mark, the officer on top also had his own gun drawn in his right hand.

Apparently around the 4-second mark is when one officer screamed about him having a gun, and at the ten-second mark the officer shot. So a lot happened in a very short period of time.

[Faith Presses On]

One factor that seems quite likely is that the officer on top quite reasonably drew his own gun, and with Sterling apparently having a gun at his right side, which the officer on top seems to struggle with him for and to try to dig out from along his side, that officer was close-range to get shot if Sterling were to get even partial control of his gun. And the officer was struggling with him while having his own gun in his hand. The other officer drew his gun, but stayed clear of the struggle and just held his gun on Sterling while staying on his arm.

[Faith Presses On]

He didn’t have both arms pinned, though.

I watched the video in slow motion and captured some screen shots. See my comment here:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3446942/posts#60

His left arm was pinned, but his right was apparently not, and it appears he might have reached for his gun and that he and the officer on top of him were struggling for it for several seconds before the officer shot him.

Also keep in mind that while they likely had the report that he had a gun and threatened people with it, they didn’t actually pull their guns until one of them found that he had one. One threw him on the ground and they tried to subdue him physically, without their guns drawn, until they apparently discovered he had one.

We don’t know why, either, they didn’t seem to treat him as armed until that point, although apparently the call to police said he was.

At this point there are really many unanswered questions, but the video seems to suggest that Sterling was only partially subdued, his right arm was free and he struggled with officers with it, and while it is yet to be shown either way, that might have been the hand that would have had access to his gun.

[Molon Labbie]

I know this is a bad name around here but this shows that the videos posted on this shooting were deliberately held back by SJW who responded to the scene via police scanner looking exactly for this kind of thing.

Fair and objective are impossibilities for these people.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/07/06/video-captures-white-baton-rouge-police-officer-fatally-shooting-black-man-sparking-outrage/

[sargon]

Anyone on a jury who sees that video is going to see that the cop pulled out his gun and shot the guy point blank in the chest.

Good luck spinning that any other way. I've watched the video multiple times, and I see a cop pull out his gun and execute someone who's pinned by another cop. Most reasonable people will see the same thing.

"You hold him down and I'll shoot him." That's what I see...

[Faith Presses On]

I believe you are the one doing the spinning here.

You’ve watched the video multiple times, but have you watched and studied it in slow-motion?

In normal time, it is hard to tell what is going on.

In slow-motion, a lot more can be seen and studied.

Now tell me, will the FBI be studying the video in slow-motion, or just in real time?

[Nita Nupress]

There’s been another one:

https://twitter.com/hashtag/FalconHeightsShooting?src=tren

[sargon]

Just watched the video yet again. Neither one of the guy's arms were mobile.

The cop pulls out his pistol, then shoots the guy in the chest at point blank range.

Additionally, the initial hand-to-hand grappling is what undoubtedly escalated the situation. Maybe it would have been better to be a little more patient. After all, in close quarters like that, there's a greater opportunity for the person to grab the officer's gun as well.

I just don't see the propriety of what happened. It seems like a situation was engineered which virtually guaranteed a tragedy.

This just feeds into the narrative that cops are selective in the procedures they follow when making an arrest. I'm a white person, and I don't see the need to kill that man at that moment, and, additionally, it seems as if the situations was unnecessarily escalated.

Mark my words. Before long, there will be a CCW license holder who is killed by cops for no reason other than the fact that he possesses a gun. It's coming...

[cornfedcowboy]

CNN has this
http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/06/us/baton-rouge-shooting-alton-sterling/index.html

[sargon]

The fact is that there was no gun visible. Even if the man was supposedly reaching for a gun, there was no gun visible. It sure looks to me like both of his arms were immobile. And the incident didn't happen in slow motion. And there are several eyewitnesses. The optics aren't good, and I expect more cities to burn because of this event.

I honestly don't see why the one cop decided that hand-to-hand combat was the best solution to the situation. The guy gets pinned by two cops, which immediately subjects both of them to having their own guns grabbed by the arrestee.

I don't see the propriety of the situation that was created by the one cop deciding that a Roman Reigns spear move was the right thing to do.

If someone is supposedly armed, don't you keep a safe distance?

And then, if they start reach for a gun you can blow them away before their hand is even finished reaching into their pocket.

It looks like bad procedure to me.