BRIDGETON, N.J. (AP) — A police video of officers confronting and then fatally shooting a black man in southern New Jersey has raised questions and stirred anger over another death at the hands of police.
The video of the Dec. 30 killing of Jerame Reid in Bridgeton, a struggling, mostly minority city of 25,000 people just south of Philadelphia, was released this week.
The nearly two-minute deadly standoff came after the killings of black men in New York and Ferguson, Missouri, triggered months of turbulent protests, violence and calls for a re-examination of police use of force.
Conrad Benedetto, a Philadelphia lawyer, said he has been hired by Reid’s wife, Lawanda, to investigate. He said in a statement the footage “raises serious questions as to the legality and/or reasonableness of the officers’ actions that night” because Reid was shot as he raised his hands.
With the dashboard camera in their cruiser rolling, police pulled a Jaguar over for running a stop sign on a dark night. But things suddenly turned tense when one of the officers warned his partner that he could see a gun in the glove compartment.
Screaming over and over “Don’t you f—ing move!” and “Show me your hands!” at the man in the passenger seat, the officer reached into the car and appeared to remove a silver handgun.
Then, the passenger, despite being warned repeatedly not to move, stepped out of the Jaguar, his hands raised about shoulder level.
The officers opened fire, killing him.
Reid and the man driving the car were black. The Bridgeton officer who spotted the gun, Braheme Days, is black; his partner, Roger Worley, is white. Both officers have been placed on leave while prosecutors investigate.
“The video speaks for itself that at no point was Jerame Reid a threat and he possessed no weapon on his person,” Walter Hudson, chairman and founder of the civil rights group the National Awareness Alliance, said Wednesday. “He complied with the officer and the officer shot him.”
Reid, 36, spent about 13 years in prison for shooting at three state troopers when he was a teenager. And Days knew who he was; Days was among the arresting officers last year when Reid was charged with several crimes, including drug possession and obstruction.
In Bridgeton, where two-thirds of the residents are black or Hispanic, the killing has stirred small protests over the past couple of weeks, including a demonstration on Wednesday, a day after the video was made public at the request of two newspapers under the state’s open records law.
The Cumberland County prosecutor’s office previously said a gun was seized during the stop but would not comment further on the investigation. Bridgeton police would not answer any questions about the video and said they opposed its release as neither “compassionate or professional.”
County prosecutor Jennifer Webb-McRae has disqualified herself from the case because she knows Days. But Lawanda Reid’s lawyer and activists are demanding the state attorney general’s office take over the investigation, something it said it will not do.
In the video, the mood changes in a flash when Days tells his partner about the gun and starts yelling, “Show me your hands!” The driver, Leroy Tutt, raises his hands immediately. Reid does not at first.
Days, still yelling, reaches into the car and appears to remove a gun.
“I’m going to shoot you,” Days shouts, at one point addressing Reid by his first name. “You’re going to be f—ing dead. If you reach for something, you’re going to be f—ing dead.”
Days tells his partner, “He’s reaching for something.”
Faintly on the video, Reid can be heard telling the officer, “I ain’t doing nothing. I’m not reaching for nothing, bro. I ain’t got no reason to reach for nothing.”
Then one of the men in the car tells the officer, “I’m getting out and getting on the ground.”
The officer again orders Reid not to move. Seconds later, Reid emerges from the car, raising his hands, which appear to be empty. Both officers fire immediately, shooting at least six rounds.
Bystanders start yelling at the officers, and other emergency vehicles arrive.
The South Jersey Times reported this week that residents had filed seven municipal court complaints against Days since 2013 and two against Worley in that span for alleged abuses of power; all the complaints were dismissed.
___
Mulvihill reported from Haddonfield, New Jersey.
Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Warning: The video below, via ABC News, may be graphic and disturbing.
Again…we have an angry cop. Again a cop spewing profanities and neck veins bulging. Again a cop that shoots a man over failure to submit to his authority…not because the man presented any danger to anyone.
And just how fucking stupid are you if you threaten to shoot a man on video and then do it under these circumstances?
I am not understand the police much anymore. This is yet another example of our police shouting and going crazy, yelling out commands to the occupants of the car faster than they can comply. It didn’t look to me like they ran that stop sign either, but I suppose we have to let that go.
What exactly caused the officer to get so overly excited in this situation. It looked and sound to me like the guys in the car were trying to comply as best they could.
Given the frequency of these shootings, is it no wonder black men being pulled over are fearful? The are getting shot while trying to comply with the officers.
I am not getting the police side of these issues much anymore.
Uggggh…Why oh why did he get out of the car? I mean, sure, we’ve got two angry, idiot pigthugs here who clearly overreacted and seem almost to be weaving what could rightly be called almost a stereotypically scripted lead up to shooting someone and trying to make a “record” that they were justified…but why oh why did he get out of the car???
Exactly, this is just a disaster all around. It’s not the usual “white cops shooting an unarmed black man;” one of the cops (and the one who apparently fired more rounds) was black, and he was also the one who dramatically escalated the situation. On the other hand the victim was a known (at least to the black cop) criminal who was slow to raise his hands, and then took it upon himself to open the door and get out of the car when both cops were allegedly shouting “don’t move! don’t move!” (at least from the article; couldn’t quite tell from the video). Just a disaster.
Rawstory provides a longer video, and a better background story. One cop is saying don’t move and the other one is saying get out of the car. I have no idea why TPM is showing the shortened version which police are promoting instead of the whole video with police shouting different commands Link: