From USA Today:
Surveillance video shows 27-year-old Rayshard Brooks was running away after resisting arrest in the parking lot of a Wendy’s restaurant when he was shot by officer Garrett Rolfe, who, on Sunday, was fired. The Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Office on Sunday said Brooks died of two gunshot wounds to his back and ruled the manner of death a homicide.
After being questioned for falling asleep in his car in the restaurant’s drive-thru line, Brooks had wrestled with the police when they tried to handcuff him and took officer Devin Brosnan’s Taser, firing it once at Rolfe as he gave pursuit with his own Taser in hand.
That’s this case in a nutshell.
Brooks was drunk in his car in the parking lot of a Wendy’s. That’s an automatic arrest. He resisted, took an officer’s weapon, ran away and pointed it at another officer. He got shot.
Kalfani Ture, an assistant professor of criminal justice at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, served as a police officer in the Atlanta metropolitan area for five years.
A street cop turned academic, let’s see what he says about this.
“Black people don’t want to be taken into custody,’’ said Ture, who is Black, “because there’s always the fear that they may not come out on the other side.’’
So that justifies resisting arrest? Seems like that is the fastest way to get killed by law enforcement is to resist and take a cops weapon.
Andy Harvey, a former Dallas police officer and current police chief of Ennis, Texas, said the officers didn’t have to arrest Brooks despite him registering above the legal blood-alcohol limit for driving.
“They could have taken other alternatives before getting to that point where they felt they had to take action,’’ Harvey told USA TODAY. “How do we resolve this? Is there a cab you could call, or a family member who can come pick him up?’’
Isn’t DUI a mandatory arrest? Is it not in Texas? Once you are in a car drunk, you’re ending up in handcuffs.
Change the law if you want, but telling cops not to enforce the law is a bad idea.
The murder of George Floyd was clearly bad. But the problem with the aftermath is that a justified shooting is being lumped in as a murder and the Monday quarterbacks are trying to explain how under the current zeitgeist, shpuld not enforce the law on black people and black peoples’ resisting arrest is justified.
These people are going to drive a scenario where any cops that are not abolished quit out of disgust for how cops are being treated.
I can see this from several angles. Overall, and this may be Monday Morning Quarterbacking, I think this is a bad shoot.
On the one hand, he was drunk and behind the wheel. That’s an automatic arrest most places.
On another hand, to address Andy Harvey’s point of view, Brooks reportedly offered to leave his car at Wendy’s and walk home. The problem is, they had him dead to rights for DUI and most places, arrest is mandatory.
On yet another hand, the officers detained him for that DUI for almost an hour, talking to him and according to some, trying to get him to incriminate himself on the DUI and other things. The problem is, Brooks was legally drunk, but he wasn’t THAT drunk.
On even yet another hand, Brooks grabbed one of the officers’ Tazer and fired it. This would normally justify a lethal-force response. There have been a number of (usually black) commentators saying it doesn’t because a Tazer is not a lethal weapon, but that’s bulls#!t because even though a Tazer is not lethal force, it does incapacitate, which would leave Brooks free to access everything else the officer was carrying, including a loaded firearm and extra ammunition (and a police cruiser, with other firearms, ammunition, and police equipment).
That would in most circumstances make this a good shoot, if it weren’t for three mitigating points:
1. A Tazer is a one-shot weapon, and Brooks fired it and missed. Having already been frisked, he was verifiably unarmed at that point. Legal precedent would be similar to a “thrown knife”, and the courts have long said that once the knife is thrown a suspect is unarmed and must be treated as such — hostile and combative, certainly, but much less dangerous than if he were armed.
2. After firing the Tazer, Brooks was fleeing, on foot. He was no longer a serious danger to anyone, and Tennessee v. Garner wouldn’t consider him as a continuing threat.
3. A second officer was on-scene, so even if the Tazer had connected and incapacitated the first officer, being unarmed the second officer could have responded to the now-unarmed Brooks.
Of course, like I said, all of that is Monday Morning Quarterbacking, and may or may not have been reasonable to consider in that moment, on that night.
In any event, this case will not make it to the legal courts until long after it’s been tried in the court of public opinion, which has already decided against the officers.
And it just pours more gasoline on the dumpster-fire of the George Floyd Antifa/BLM protests/riots.
We live in interesting times.
Oh, and the normal “IANAL, this is not legal advice,” warnings apply to everything above.
Except there are Taser models now that are multi shot weapons. The X2 model holds two cartridges ready to use.
The older X26 carries a reload on the grip.
One cannot automatically assume he was “one and done.”
@Kermit: True, and we have no way of knowing.
But what about the officers, who train and carry them daily? What did THEY know at the time?
Also, what did Brooks know? Would he have known how to use a multi-shot Tazer, or how to reload a X26 model? Would he have been capable of either, while drunk and running?
What’s the “reasonable person” in that scenario to assume?
If the officers’ department-issue Tazers are “one and done”, or if Brooks was unable to reload it (which takes time, and is difficult while running), then my conclusion stands. Brooks turned and fired, missed, then turned away and kept running. He didn’t try to fire again and didn’t try to reload it. When he was shot, it appears he was effectively unarmed except for an inert piece of plastic with a flashlight.
This is the limit of how useful after-the-event commentary can be. We don’t have all the facts, and we don’t know what the officers knew at the time. That will all come out later. In the meantime, barring other information, I still call it a bad shoot.
I thought Tasers also have a stun driver function for contact stun after the projectile is discharged? If so even a single shot isn’t exactly “one and done”, it would still pose a threat to officers closing in to apprehend the subject.
@ben: Unless the other officer also had a Taser (another unknown data point; in some departments qualification is voluntary, and not all officers choose to qualify). That feature may also vary by model. The officers would know better than we do.
And Brooks was still fleeing after firing the one shot, and may not know how — or may not be capable while intoxicated — to operate the stun driver function.
So we’re back to what the officers knew at the time, in that moment, and what Brooks knew and could reasonably perform while drunk and running. More information is sure to come out and a court will eventually decide, but right now the totality of circumstances doesn’t look good.
My view goes against the grain, but what are the one common fact in both the George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks deaths?
If they had peacefully gotten in the squad car after being arrested, they would be alive today. They both fought and resisted arrest, causing the police officers to begin the escalation of force/violence to try to bring them under control. That escalation of force ended with their deaths.
Why did Rayshard Brooks do something so freaking stupid?
The police had his ID, they had his car, they had him on tape, they had a breathalyzer test. Only an idiot would try to escape arrest at that point. Maybe since he knew he was going back to jail, he figured he had nothing to lose?
https://www.citizenfreepress.com/breaking/rayshard-brooks-video-discovered/