‘Fuck Your Breath’—Video Shows Cop Mocking Unarmed Man as He Dies from Police Bullet
When a victim of police brutality tells an officer, “I’m losing my breath,” the officer responds, “fuck your breath.” It's just another example of another unarmed black man dying at the hands of police.
13 April, 2015
Video
released by an Oklahoma sheriff’s department on Friday shows an
unarmed black man named Eric Harris fleeing police as they exit their
cars to chase him. After officers catch up to Harris and bring him to
the ground, an officer calls out the word “Taser” twice, before
firing a single shot at Harris. The shot, which was fired by Reserve
Deputy Robert Bates, was fatal. Harris was pronounced
dead an hour later
The
shooting appears to be a tragic accident. Bates did say “Taser”
before shooting Harris, and immediately after pulling the trigger,
Bates drops the gun and says “Oh! I shot him. I’m sorry.” At a
press conference on Friday, a Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office
spokesperson claimed that Bates was a “true victim” of something
called “slips and capture” — a police term for when someone
does one thing while believing they are doing something else in a
high stress situation. They say that Bates believed he was holding
his Taser and not his firearm when he fired the round that killed
Harris.
Whatever
Bates’s intentions, however, the other officers on the scene
respond to Harris’s cries for help by forcefully pinning him to the
ground and telling him to shut up in the video released by the
sheriff’s department. As Harris lies face down on the ground
bleeding and crying out “oh shit man, he shot me, he shot me! Oh,
he shot me!” one officer puts his knee on Harris’s head in an
apparent effort to subdue him. An officer tells Harris to “shut the
fuck up” shortly thereafter.
When
Harris tells one of the officers “I’m losing my breath,” the
officer responds, “fuck
your breath.”
At
the press conference on Friday, Tulsa County Sheriff’s Capt. Billy
McKelvey claimed that the officers who surrounded Harris immediately
after Bates fired his gun were
not aware that Harris had been shot.
McKelvey also claimed that they radioed for paramedics as soon as
they released that Harris was wounded.
An
unusual twist in this story is that Bates, the reserve deputy who
shot Harris, is not a full-time officer. He is a 73-year-old
insurance executive and a wealthy donor to the sheriff’s
department.
The department includes 130 reserve deputies who are volunteers who
donate their time to law enforcement. Bates is classified as
“advanced reserve,” the highest level of reserve deputy, a
position that permits him to “do anything a full-time deputy can
do.”
Bates
did serve as a full-time police officer for one year — in 1964 and
1965 — and he had to complete 800 hours of training to be
classified as advanced reserve. Once they have completed this
training, however, an advanced reserve deputy must only serve for 40
hours every six months in order to maintain their certification.
At
the Friday press conference, Tulsa Police Sgt. Jim Clark said the
Tulsa County Sheriffs Office’s investigation concluded that Bates
did not commit a crime and no policy violations occurred.
Here is Chris Martenson talking about police brutality. This is the closest to anger that I have seen from the normally equitable and mild-mannered Chris
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