The body camera footage has been released from an incident in which police shot and killed a man "armed" with a screwdriver.
The post WATCH: Police Publicly Execute Mentally Ill Man ‘Armed’ With a Screwdriver appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
Kankakee, IL – An extreme joy ride caught on police dash camera revealed a low-speed chase with a bulldozer that eventually crushed a police cruiser when cops attempted to stop the dozer by pulling a vehicle in front of the stolen construction vehicle.
After the Kankakee Police Department initially told WLS-TC that no video of the incident existed, they later relinquished the footage to the station—without explaining why they initially denied there was a video.
Police investigators now say footage of the early morning Aug. 24 incident shows Austin White, 18, engaging in a low-speed chase with police while driving a bulldozer stolen from a construction site.
The comical video footage shows multiple officers chasing the construction vehicle down the street, and includes numerous angles of the chase.
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During the chase, one officer had the bright idea to pull his police cruiser in front of the 20-ton bulldozer in an effort to block White’s escape, which resulted in the vehicle being crushed under the construction vehicle.
Officers continued to pursue the construction vehicle for another 12 blocks, as police can be seen attempting to jump onto the dozer.
Eventually, White stopped the vehicle. Immediately, police pulled him from the cab and hit him with a Taser.
Police say that White, who is being charged with driving under the influence of drugs, has never had a driver’s license, and that he is currently being held on six felony charges, including attempted murder, criminal damage to property and theft.
White should consider himself lucky, as one of the most commonly used reasons for justifying police killings is “he or she used their vehicle as a weapon.”
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This tactic of American police, to claim their lives were endangered because someone attempted to drive off, has become quite familiar. It is also considerably successful at exonerating killer cops.
Over the past few years, there have been numerous cases in which we’ve seen unarmed individuals, killed while in their vehicles, by fearful trigger-happy cops. One of the most widely covered of those cases is that of Samuel Dubose, who was killed by officer Ray Tensing. Despite the fact that Tensing was in no danger of being run over, he shot and killed the Dubose.
Another tragic case of police killing an unarmed man in a car is that of Zachary Hammond, who was shot in the side and back while trying to flee by vehicle, by an officer attempting to arrest his date for a small amount of marijuana.
In yet another heartbreaking case, a mother concerned about her son’s erratic behavior called authorities in hopes of getting her son a medical evaluation. Instead of medical evaluation, however, her son John Barry, 33, was gunned down as he attempted to back out of a parking space—with officers unloading dozens of rounds into the mentally ill man.
Thankfully, in this case, police showed remarkable restraint, as they likely could have shot and killed White only to be later exonerated.
Watch the dash cam footage below:
When a police shooting occurs, people often argue that the officer involved should have used a taser as a less lethal option—but some of the main points that are rarely discussed are how often police misuse tasers, and how many victims die as a result.
An investigation conducted by Reuters revealed that more than 1,000 people have died as victims of police tasers since 2000. Not only did the investigation find that tasers have a lethal power that is not being recognized by the company that manufactures the weapons, or by the departments that issue them, it also discovered that many of the victims are suffering from mental health problems.
“In the most detailed study ever of fatalities and litigation involving police use of stun guns, Reuters finds more than 150 autopsy reports citing Tasers as a cause or contributor to deaths across America. Behind the fatalities is a sobering reality: Many who die are among society’s vulnerable—unarmed, in psychological distress and seeking help.”
In one example, police in Ontario, California, were called to address a disturbance at a home involving an unarmed man with mental health issues. Three officers arrived, and instead of taking the 57-year-old man to the hospital, as his wife requested, a veteran officer hit the man with a taser twice—once directly to the chest—and the man died as a result. Reuters noted that this is not an isolated incident.
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Ken Wallentine, former chief of law enforcement for the Utah Attorney General, told Reuters that “cops have been turned into mental health workers on the street,” and he fears that “some police training and some police practices have allowed the crowding out of persuasion and the Taser has become the default tool.”
According to the American Psychiatric Association, 1 in every 100 police calls involves a person with a mental health disorder, and as the investigation found, police officers often do not have the proper training to calm the situation, so they resort to using a taser on the subject, which can have detrimental, or even fatal consequences.
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Peter Eisler, one of the reporters conducting the investigation, told PBS NewsHour that his team was surprised to find that there were more deaths from police tasers, there was more litigation surrounding the incidents, and there was a more significant financial burden on the public than they had expected.
“The weapons themselves are not regulated, not as they’re sold to police,” Eisler said. “You know, they’re not a medical device. They’re not regulated by the FDA. They’re not a consumer product, so they’re not regulated by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. So, Taser itself has done a lot of the—did a lot of the early testing on these devices, and one of the things that we found was that those tests were not necessarily as thorough or as solid as taser may have led police to believe.”
Eisler noted that as time went on and more research was conducted, it was discovered that the taser has the ability “to change the rhythm of the heart in a way that could lead to a fatal cardiac arrest.”
“Taser says that these weapons have been studied and that they’re overwhelmingly safe. Taser’s position is that the risks to the heart are more theoretical. The company does not concede that there has ever been a death direct — a cardiac-related death directly attributable to a taser. What we did was we looked at as many autopsy reports as we could collect on the 1,000-plus cases we identified, and we ended up getting around 750 autopsies. And we found that in at least 150-plus of those autopsies, the medical examiner, the coroner, attributed the death either in whole or in part to the taser, or listed the taser as a contributing factor to that death.”
As this investigation reveals that police are killing an alarming number of people with tasers and that many of those victims suffer from mental health issues, it serves as a reminder that there needs to be an overhaul in the way police are trained to deal with the citizens they claim to serve—especially those citizens who have mental health disorders and are often targeted and abused by the law enforcement officers they are taught to trust.
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