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The Los Angeles County Police Department has faced heavy criticism this week. Video posted on social media shows two police officers shot dead Double amputees running away from them.
A short video showed Anthony Rowe Jr., a 36-year-old black man who had lost the lower half of both legs and had a knife but left his wheelchair and limped away from police officers.
Jeffrey Fagan, a law professor at Columbia University who specializes in policing, told Yahoo News in an email that the details of the incident cast doubt on whether the use of lethal force was justified. Told.
“It’s hard to imagine police couldn’t disarm a man in a wheelchair with a taser or other less lethal weapon,” Fagan said. “Police abide by the ’20-foot rule’ as a zone around a suspect when he is not in danger, and within that zone he is in danger. …most reasonable people.” thought the police exaggerated their threats and used an unreasonable level of force. ”
Officers in Huntington Park, Calif., responded to a stabbing incident last Thursday afternoon in which the victim suffered a collapsed lung and internal bleeding, police said. He stabbed him and claimed to have escaped in a wheelchair.
Responding officers identified Lowe as a suspect and attempted to arrest him.The police statement said Mr. Lowe was given two tastings after resisting arrest, but “deploying a Taser gun was effective.” There was no
The two officers ended up firing about 10 shots at Lowe, according to Huntington Park Police Department Lieutenant Hugo Reynaga, who said the incident was under investigation.
Lowe’s family does not accept the police’s explanation and insist that officers be charged with his death. “His leg was amputated after an altercation with law enforcement in Texas, and his family has questions about the incident,” Rowe’s sister Yatoya Toy told The Times.
Another sister, Tatiana Jackson, told the newspaper that “something is wrong with this situation” of Lowe, the father of two children. “My daughter is four and loves him. It breaks my heart to let her know.”
“They murdered my son in a legless wheelchair,” Rowe’s mother, Dorothy Rowe, said at a news conference Monday. “They need to do something about it.”
The agency did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Yahoo News, but said in a public statement that the agency “is aware of the impact on communities and families” the shooting may have caused, and said it was transparent and honest. He said he would guarantee a “comprehensive investigation” with a thoroughness.
But critics are skeptical of the police’s account, especially after other high-profile incidents in which police murdered other black men and exaggerated the threat posed by them. A police officer has released a shocking video of him fatally beating 29-year-old black man Tire Nichols. A police report said Nichols had attempted to get into a fight with officers, but video showed him complying with their demands and becoming increasingly limp as the physical abuse continued.
At the Huntington Park shooting, Lowe twice attempted to throw a knife at officers, according to a police statement. However, Reinaga told The Times that Lowe “didn’t throw the knife in the end, but he made many movements over his head like he was going to throw the knife.”
Local activists feel the discrepancy is part of an attempt to make Lowe look like a greater threat to police officers than before.
“Anthony was brutally executed last Thursday in a vicious and cowardly attack by Huntington Park police officers,” Coalition for Community Control organizer Cliff Smith said at a news conference Monday. community members added that they were not. I am confident in my research. “Anthony has a strong family and we are here to join his family in fighting for justice.”
Few details of the incident are known, as brief cell phone footage of police tracking Lowe did not capture the shooting. Renaga said the officers’ names will be announced in the coming days. He said Huntington Park officers don’t wear body cameras.
“Video is just one part of the investigative process,” Keith Taylor, a 23-year NYPD veteran and adjunct professor at CUNY John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told Yahoo News.
Questions remain open about where Taylor was running and who else he might have been running towards.
“If officers are using lethal force, they must believe in their minds that they or someone else is in imminent danger of serious bodily injury or death. He said. I have to find out if.”
The nonprofit Mapping Police Violence released a report this week that police will kill 1,192 people in 2022. That’s more than any other year in the last decade. The report also said many of these killings could have been avoided by changing law enforcement’s approach to such encounters, such as sending mental health care providers to specific 911 calls. claim.
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Cover thumbnail photo: Screengrab from Twitter/MikeSington’s video
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