LEAKED VIDEO REVEALS OMISSIONS IN OFFICIAL ACCOUNT OF POLICE SHOOTING

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LEAKED VIDEO REVEALS OMISSIONS IN OFFICIAL ACCOUNT OF POLICE SHOOTING

BY SPENCER WOODMAN

In the predawn hours of January 24, 2013, a police officer in Fayetteville, North Carolina, shot and killed a 22-year-old resident named Nijza Lamar Hagans, who had been pulled over for running a red light and making “several furtive driving maneuvers such as darting onto a neighborhood street and into a driveway,” according to a memo by Cumberland County’s district attorney, Billy West. The police officer, Aaron Hunt, then 24, claimed that, peering into the SUV Hagans was driving, he saw Hagans reach aggressively for a gun in his pants pocket as he opened his car door.

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Fayetteville police shooting dashcam video, condensed from The Intercept on Vimeo.

“Officer Hunt fired his weapon after observing Mr. Hagans reaching for the gun and exiting the vehicle and turning toward Officer Hunt,” wrote West in his memo (embedded below), which concluded that Hunt’s response was “lawful and measured.”

Yet the report absolving Hunt, who is Native American and is still a police officer in Fayetteville, did not mention the existence of video from the dashboard camera in Hunt’s cruiser, which shows a more troubling unfolding of events.

The footage — which the city has withheld from public release but was provided to The Intercept by a source who requested anonymity — shows Officer Hunt shooting at Hagans a split-second after Hagans begins thrusting open his car door and while Hagans is still largely in his vehicle. Hunt shoots at Hagans, who is black, twice more as he exits the vehicle. The video then shows Hagans running away from Officer Hunt, who, instead of pursuing him, shoots at Hagans twice as he flees. Just after these final shots, Hagans stumbles to the ground where he died.

While many elements of the video corroborate the state’s outline of events, the circumstances surrounding the most disturbing moment in the footage — the last two shots — were wholly elided in District Attorney West’s report that cleared Hunt.

The district attorney’s memo appears to rely heavily on Hunt’s account of events and also omits a key finding from the state medical examiner’s report: two of the four bullets that hit Hagans entered through his back and rear shoulder. These bullets pierced Hagans’ lungs; one of them went on to rupture Hagans’ aorta, the body’s main artery, just above his heart, according to the autopsy findings, which The Intercept obtained through a records request. Instead, West quoted only the phrase “multiple gunshot wounds to the chest” from the medical examiner’s report to explain the cause of death.

District Attorney West declined to comment on the case. In response to a list of questions, the Fayetteville Police Department provided The Intercept with West’s report, but, citing pending litigation and confidentiality of personnel records, provided little additional comment.

The emergence of Officer Hunt’s dash-cam video comes in the context of a series of police shootings of black men that have become national political events, sparking protests across the country and igniting a nationwide discussion about race, inequality and policing tactics. Footage taken at shooting scenes has factored heavily into some cases. In April, for instance, a police officer in North Charleston, South Carolina, was charged with murder after The New York Times obtained footage of the white officer shooting Walter Scott, a 50-year-old black man, in the back as he ran away.

Because he carried a loaded .380 caliber pistol, according to police, Hagans posed a genuine potential threat to Hunt, whereas the unarmed Scott had posed no such danger to the police officer who shot him. The dashboard camera does not offer a vantage point that shows whether or not Hagans, who had a record of violent crimes, reached for a gun before being shot, and it appears that Hagans’ car door hits Hunt as it swings open.

Yet the footage of Hagans’ shooting raises a number of questions about the lethal use of force by police and the quality of information released to the public about the hundreds of fatal shootings each year for which police officers are cleared.

Under North Carolina law, video from police dashboard cameras can be withheld from public disclosure, and the city of Fayetteville has fought vigorously in recent weeks for a court order to keep the Hagans video under wraps after “inadvertently” disclosing it — without a court order mandating it stay secret from the public — to lawyers for Hagans’ family, which is suing Hunt and the city. In a letter filed in federal court, an attorney for the city states, with some alarm, that the family’s legal team has disseminated the video among experts for review, and warns that public release of the video could have “ethical implications which can easily be avoided.” In another letter, the attorney invokes a state law in arguing that the video is privileged material.

The lawsuit filed by Hagans’ family against the city of Fayetteville and Hunt contends that Hagans’ killing was both wrongful and a violation of his civil rights. It also lodges a detailed critique of the city’s recent record of racial bias in policing, much of which the city’s attorneys deny. The attorneys for Hagans’ family declined requests to comment for this story.

The Fayetteville Police Department has a history of its officers disproportionately targeting black citizens for traffic stops. Some of these traffic stops have turned fatal. Fayetteville’s police chief, Harold Medlock, who has drawn some praise from civil rights advocates since he assumed his post two years ago, requested that the U.S. Department of Justice review his police department. The DOJ review, which is ongoing, is looking at the use of force by Fayetteville police officers and the investigations that the police department conducts into those incidents.

During a traffic stop that took place just months after Hagans’ shooting, a Fayetteville police officer shot a black man named Lawrence Graham III after he allegedly displayed a gun. The shooting left Graham paralyzed, and he died two months later. Earlier this month, Graham’s family filed a wrongful death suit against the city of Fayetteville.

As in the Hagans case, District Attorney West reportedly concluded that Graham’s shooting was a “lawful and measured response” to a perceived threat. And, also as in the Hagans case, the city has refused to release dashboard camera footage that allegedly shows the shooting. Last month, Police Chief Medlock said that he supported the public release of all police footage that could clear certain hurdles relating to privacy and legal concerns.

“I think it would give the public, our citizens, a better feel for exactly what our officers do out there every day and every night,” Medlock told The Fayetteville Observer. The police chief’s enlightened public position, however, did not stop the city from attempting to block the release of the video taken from Hunt’s dash-cam.

Medlock has vowed to improve the policing tactics of the city’s department, and he has so far achieved some positive, if mixed, results, according to Ian Mance, a staff attorney at the Southern Coalition of Social Justice who has studied racial bias in traffic stops in North Carolina….More Here

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LEAKED VIDEO REVEALS OMISSIONS IN OFFICIAL ACCOUNT OF POLICE SHOOTING