Video of Kajieme Powell’s Killing Differs from Police Description of Incident | Vanity Fair →vanityfair.com
Shortly after officers shot and killed another St. Louis-area man on Tuesday, the police department announced that Kajieme Powell—the 25-year-old involved in the incident—was menacing police officers with a knife. St. Louis police chief Sam Dotson said the man was charging toward officers while holding the knife in “an overhand grip.”
On Wednesday evening, the police department released a video of the incident. Apparently filmed on a cell phone, the video shows Powell walking erratically and demanding officers shoot him. A few seconds later, as Powell walks toward the officers, they oblige his request, firing a barrage of bullets into his crumpling body. Officers continue shooting, even as Powell, whose arms were by his side when the shots began, begins falling to the ground. The sound of at least nine shots can be heard on the video. Police then handcuff the man, who may have already been dead, but was certainly dying.
“Oh my God,” a witness can be heard saying in the video. “They just killed him. Here we go again. They just killed this man. He’s dead. They putting him in cuffs. And he’s dead. Oh my God.”
“They cuffing him, and he’s already dead,” the man filming continues. “Y’all see this for yourself. The man is already dead.”
Speaking to CNN on Wednesday night, Dotson
defended the actions of his officers. “The officers did what I think you or I would do, they protected their life in that situation,” Dotson said.“Certainly a Taser is an option that’s available to the officers, but Tasers aren’t 100 percent. So you’ve got an individual with a knife who’s moving towards you, not listening to any verbal commands, continues, says, ‘shoot me now, kill me now.’ Tasers aren’t 100 percent. If that Taser misses, that [individual] continues on and hurts an officer.”
Powell was suspected of stealing energy drinks and a donut from a nearby convenience store. He was a suspect in a crime, and he was advancing on officers while reportedly carrying a knife. Few would argue that the latter detail might justify some use of police force. But the officers in the video appear wholly uninterested in taking Powell down, disarming, or taking him into custody. Seconds after arriving on a scene, they fired at least nine shots at a man who, judging solely by the footage and eyewitness accounts, appears unwell.
The incident occurred in St. Louis City, an approximately 3.5-mile drive to the scene where Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old, was shot and killed by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson on August 9. Nearly two weeks of clashes between heavily armed officers and protesters prompted Attorney General Eric Holder to visit Ferguson, where he spoke movingly of “the mistrust” between the public and the police.
Holder described two incidents in which he felt profiled:
I am the attorney general of the United States. But I am also a black man. I can remember being stopped on the New Jersey turnpike on two occasions and accused of speeding. Pulled over. . . ‘Let me search your car’. . . Go through the trunk of my car, look under the seats and all this kind of stuff. I remember how humiliating that was and how angry I was and the impact it had on me.
I think about my time in Georgetown—a nice neighborhood of Washington—and I am running to a picture movie at about 8 o’clock at night. I am running with my cousin. Police car comes driving up, flashes his lights, yells ‘where you going? Hold it!’ I say ‘Woah, I’m going to a movie.’ Now my cousin started mouthing off. I’m like, ‘This is not where we want to go. Keep quiet.’ I’m angry and upset. We negotiate the whole thing and we walk to our movie. At the time that he stopped me, I was a federal prosecutor. I wasn’t a kid. I was a federal prosecutor. I worked at the United States Department of Justice. So I’ve confronted this myself.
“The dispute over the facts in the Michael Brown case offers the hope that there is a right answer—that Wilson either did clearly the right thing or clearly the wrong thing,” Ezra Klein
wrote. “The video of the Powell case delivers a harder reality: what the police believe to be the right thing and what the people they serve believe to be the right thing may be very different.”
“The same kid who got stopped on the New Jersey freeway is now the attorney general of the United States,” Holder told Ferguson residents, less than a 10-minute drive from the scene where officers killed another young black man. “This country is capable of change. But change doesn’t happen by itself.”
Meanwhile, the incident report on Powell’s killing
lists the officers—who were completely unharmed—as the “victims” in the incident. Eric Holder told Americans he understands why they sometimes distrust the police that are tasked with protecting them, a point two St. Louis officers had just underscored with at least nine pulls of a trigger.
, fukk them all
