Police killing of unarmed man sparks protests

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Protesters decrying this week’s fatal shooting of an unarmed black man marched from Sacramento City Hall and onto a nearby freeway Thursday, disrupting rushhour traffic and holding signs with messages like “Sac PD: Stop killing us!”

Hundreds of people rallied for Stephon Clark, a 22-yearold who was shot Sunday in the backyard of his grandparents’ home. Police say they feared he had a handgun when they confronted him after reports that he had been breaking into cars and a home in the South Sacramento neighborhood.

But police found only a cellphone.

“We are at a place of deep pain because of recent violence directed at black people in Sacramento and elsewhere,” said the Rev. Les Simmons, a community leader. He said the city’s first black police chief, Daniel Sequita Thompson recounts the horror of seeing her grandson, Stephon Clark, dead in her backyard after he was shot by police in Sacramento, Calif. Police suspected Clark had been breaking into cars and a home and had a gun, but he was only holding a cellphone when he was shot. Hahn, is doing what he can but protested the actions of Hahn’s officers.

Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg earlier said he was

horrified but won’t secondguess the “split-second decisions” of the officers. He praised Hahn for quickly releasing videos of the believe they were in danger, and if so the shooting was likely legally justified.

But independent experts said the footage from body cameras and an overhead helicopter raises more questions than it answers.

One officer is heard “doing a mental inventory to make sure there’s no holes in his body” because the officers appear to think Clark may have shot at them and missed, said Peter Moskos, a former police officer and assistant professor in the Department of Law and Police Science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

But Geoffrey Alpert, a professor of criminology at the University of South Carolina and an expert on police use of force, said the officers may have a tough time explaining why they jumped to the conclusion that Clark had a gun.

He also questioned why an arriving backup officer had the two original officers turn off the microphones on their body cameras, eliminating what he called “important evidence.”