April 13, 2024
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US police fire nearly 100 gunshots at Black driver
A US police oversight agency has released footage showing five police officers firing almost 100 gunshots over 41 seconds at a 26-year-old Black man who was allegedly arrested for failing to wear a seatbelt.
The Civilian Office of Police Accountability said preliminary evidence showed Dexter Reed fired first, wounding a Black policeman.
Bodycam videos, taken from multiple angles, show Reed briefly lowering a window and then raising it as more officers arrive, yelling commands and drawing weapons.
The gunshots continued even after “Reed exited his vehicle and fell to the ground,” the police oversight agency said in a statement shared with the video.
An attorney for the family said the traffic stop was unconstitutional because the officers, who belong to a tactical unit, did not announce they were police and were in an unmarked police vehicle.
A man calling 911 to report the shooting described it as “shooting like they’re having a Vietnam War.”
In September 2023, the OHCHR, a UN agency, said that “Black people in America are three times more likely to be killed by police than whites” and that only 1 percent of police killings “result in officers being charged”.
“Racism in the US — a legacy of slavery, the slave trade, and one hundred years of legalized apartheid that followed slavery’s abolition — continues to exist today in the form of racial profiling, police killings, and many other human rights violations,” the report said.
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