NYAPRS Note: On the heels of police fatal shootings of people withpsychiatric conditions in Times Square (12 bullets) and California (5
bullets), here’s another horrible report of a man, known to local
police, who was nonetheless killed in a hail of 46 bullets.
Such shootings are becoming a national epidemic and demand police
training and the use of specialized Crisis Intervention Teams mentioned
here last week (see http://www.citinternational.org/). Mental health and
police groups have made important progress in these areas in several
cities…but these efforts require national and state leadership and
action!
Video Captures Michigan Man’s Shooting By Police
Man killed by cops, shot multiple times
>From Jason Carroll and Sheila Steffen, CNN August 17, 2012
Saginaw, Michigan (CNN) — Three days before Independence Day, Milton
Hall died in a fusillade of police gunfire outside a strip mall.
He had been arguing with officers in a parking lot next to a shuttered
Chinese restaurant when he was shot, in full view of passing motorists
and while he was holding some sort of knife. Saginaw County Prosecutor
Michael Thomas said later that the squad of police confronting him
opened fire “because apparently, at this point in time, he was
threatening to assault police.”
Thomas’ office and the Michigan State Police are investigating Hall’s
death. Saginaw Police Chief Gerald Cliff said Hall was “known to be an
assaultive person” with “a long history” of contacts with law
enforcement, “not only with police from our department but with the
county.”
Hall’s cousin, Mike Washington, acknowledged Hall had been jailed for
minor offenses like vagrancy in the past, but, “He was not violent.” And
Hall’s mother is growing impatient with the probe and questions why
police opened fire so furiously on her son, whom she said was mentally
ill.
“It appeared to be a firing squad dressed in police uniforms,” Jewel
Hall told CNN from her hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico. “There was
another way. They did not have to kill him. He had not done anything. He
was not violent. He was not a murderer. He was not a criminal.”
Jewel Hall said her son had once trained as a civil right activist, been
an avid reader and played football. He had lived in Saginaw for 35 years
and received Social Security disability payments for a mental illness,
but, “He knew his rights.”
“Everybody knew him. The police knew him well,” she said. “So that’s
another question: they knew him, so why? Why did they kill him?”
The July 1 shooting happened in a parking lot on West Genessee Avenue, a
busy commercial strip on the north side of Saginaw. In a video purchased
by CNN, shot by a motorist from across the street, the 49-year-old Hall
is seen arguing with a half-dozen officers. For more than three minutes,
he walks back and forth, and at one time appears to crouch in a “karate
stance,” according to the man who captured the scene.
Police said Hall had just had a run-in with a convenience store clerk.
On the video, he tells police, “My name is Milton Hall, I just called
911. My name is Milton, and I’m p—ed off.” When an officer tells him
to put the knife down, he responds, “I ain’t putting s–t down.” He
appears unimpressed by a police dog, telling officers, “Let him go. Let
the motherf—ing dog go.”
Finally, he turns to the left of the frame, where another officer had
moved out of view a short time earlier. It’s then that the police open
fire with a reported 46 shots in a five-second hail of bullets.
“I’m stunned that six human beings would stand in front of one human
being and fire 46 shots,” Jewel Hall said. “I just don’t understand
that. It’s a lot of pain in that because it only takes one shot, so the
question is why?”
She questioned why none of the cameras in the police cars at the scene
recorded the shooting — “none of them work.”
“So that’s the question I have and the community has is, what’s taking
so long?” she said. “Why is not being transparent?”
Lou Palumbo, a former Long Island police officer, told CNN’s “Anderson
Cooper 360 <http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/> ” that the video is “a
perceptive nightmare” for a police department and could reflect a lack
of training by the officers.
“This wasn’t a scenario where he was discharging a weapon in their
direction,” he said.
But Palumbo added that the shooting may yet be determined to be
justifiable. “One of the things the public has to understand, an
individual wielding a knife at you at about 20 feet can be on top of you
in a split second,” he said. “The public doesn’t know this because they
don’t do this for a living.”
Neither state police nor the prosecutor’s office would comment on the
investigation. In a written statement to CNN, the state police said,
“Our focus is on conducting a complete and thorough investigation,
rather than a hasty one.”
But Saginaw City Councilman Norman Braddock, who also has criticized the
pace of the investigation, said the probe should be a “top priority.”
When CNN showed Braddock the video, which he hadn’t seen before, he
said, “This is disturbing.”
“I can see what people are traumatized at, looking at something like
that,” Braddock said. “We need answers.”
Jewel Hall said her family is conducting its own investigation into the
shooting, “and at the end of that investigation we will decide what next
steps to take with our legal advisors.”
http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/16/us/michigan-police-shooting/index.html?hpt
=hp_t2