When Tulsa police officer Betty Shelby shot Terence Crutcher last week, I’m sure that she thought that therw would be little or no repurcussions.
Before Black Lives Matter protests, and the increasing frequency of videos of police misconduct, the worst that could be expected was that she might have been fired, and then gone to work at another police department.
Not today. The district attorney charged officer Shelby with 1st degree manslaughter:
The police officer who fatally shot an unarmed black man in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Friday has been charged with manslaughter, prosecutors announced on Thursday afternoon.
Tulsa County’s district attorney, Steve Kunzweiler, said he had filed a first-degree manslaughter charge against Betty Shelby, the white police officer who killed Terence Crutcher last week.
………
A court filing by prosecutors said Shelby “unlawfully and unnecessarily” shot Crutcher because he was refusing to comply with her orders.
Shelby “reacted unreasonably by escalating the situation”, according to an affidavit from Doug Campbell, Kunzweiler’s chief investigator, who alleged that she became “emotionally involved to the point that she overreacted”.
Kunzweiler said a warrant has been issued for Shelby’s arrest and “arrangements are being made for her surrender to the Tulsa County sheriff’s department,” where Shelby was previously employed.
The video of the shooting is pretty clear on what happened, and what did not happen.
When even Donald Trump thinks that this was a bad shoot, you know that something seriously went wrong that day:
Donald Trump has expressed concern over the recent police killing of an unarmed black man in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Speaking to a crowd of black pastors at an Ohio church, the Republican nominee said he was “very, very troubled” by the shooting.………
But Mr Trump has billed himself as the “law and order candidate”, making his remarks stand out as a rare criticism of police actions.
The New York billionaire, who has been a vocal critic of the Black Lives Matter movement, received an endorsement by The Fraternal Order of Police on Friday.
“I must tell you, I watched the shooting in particular in Tulsa and that man was hands up. That man went to the car, hands up, put his hand on the car,” Mr Trump said at the New Spirit Revival church in Cleveland Heights.
When a shooting of a black man draws public doubt from Donald f%$#ing Trump, it is not a good shoot.
Between this shooting and the shooting in Charlotte, which has experienced unrest and a curfew, it is no surprise that distrust of the police is at the highest level in at least a generation.