Arizona cop cleared of murder of sobbing, unarmed man
Source: Think Progress
A former Mesa, Arizona police officer who fatally shot and killed an unarmed father of two was cleared of second degree murder charges on Thursday. Philip Mitchell Brailsford, 27, was also cleared of criminal liability in the death of Daniel Shaver. It took the Maricopa County jury approximately 12 hours over a span of two days to find Brailsford not guilty.
Harrowing body-cam footage of the shooting shows Brailsford and five other heavily-armed Mesa officers proceeding through the hotel to confront Shaver and one of his acquaintances. As they exit the room, police scream at the pair to get on the ground. “Apparently we have a failure for you to comprehend simple instructions, I gotta go over some of them again,” one officer says. “If you make another mistake there is a very severe possibility that you’re both going to get shot…. I’m not here to be tactful or diplomatic with you. You listen. You obey.”
The officers then proceed to give the two civilians a convoluted series of instructions, including interlocking their fingers on their head and crossing their left and right legs, before asking them to crawl toward the officers. They take the female acquaintance out of the way and attempt to do the same with Shaver, who is sobbing and can be heard saying “please don’t shoot me.” Shaver then moves his right hand downward momentarily, prompting Brailsford to shoot him several times with his AR-15. In his testimony, Brailsford maintained that he reacted correctly and believed “100 percent that [Shaver] was reaching for a gun.”
The Shaver case is another grim reminder of how common it is for police officers involved in unarmed shootings to avoid any sort of punishment for their actions. Even officer firings like Brailsford’s are something of a paper tiger: an August investigation by the Washington Post found that, of the 1,881 officers fired for misconduct since 2006, more than 450 were reinstated after union appeals.
Read more: https://thinkprogress.org/arizona-cop-who-shot-sobbing-unarmed-man-at-point-blank-range-acquitted-of-murder-53bbceda925c/
= new reply since forum marked as read
cleared to murder again...what a travesty...
Shaver was no threat to this POS
....the body-cam footage was inadmissible. There you go. By the way, the poor bloke WAS MURDERED!!!
Philip Mitchell Brailsford
Daniel Shaver, to be missed by his loved ones.
any worse! 