Andrew Brown shooting: anger as family shown only ‘snippet’ of police footage
Lawyers representing the family of Andrew Brown, a Black man shot and killed by police in North Carolina last week, accused authorities of “hiding” video evidence of “an execution” on Monday after relatives were shown only a 20-second clip of the incident from a single officer’s body camera.
Anger boiled over at an afternoon press conference in which they said the snippet they were permitted to view showed Brown, 42, with his hands on the steering wheel of the car he was driving when he was shot dead in a hail of police bullets. One of the lawyers, Harry Daniels, said Brown was shot in the back of the head.
“My dad got executed just trying to save his own life,” Khalil Ferebee, Brown’s son, told the briefing in Elizabeth City, a town in the north-east of the state with a population of about 18,000, about half of them Black.
“It’s messed up how this happened.
It ain’t right. It ain’t right at all.”
Protesters were gathering in the city on Monday evening.
The family’s lawyers had emerged from the viewing of the selected footage arranged by the authorities, but much delayed on Monday, amid growing tension.
They stood and spoke alongside family members, saying there had been a heated disagreement with county officials over their lack of transparency.
“One bodycam, 20 seconds, an execution … we still cannot get justice and accountability,” Bakari Sellers, one of the attorneys, said.
Another lawyer, Chantel CherryLassiter, said there were “at least eight officers there but we only saw [footage from] one body camera, we did not see any dashcam.”
Police were already firing at Brown when the clip began, she said, crowding his car with handguns and assault rifles drawn.
“The car was riddled with bullets. They’re shooting and saying let me see your hands at the same time,” she said, adding that she had seen Bushmaster assault rifles and Glock pistols wielded by the assembled officers.
“This was an execution. He had his hands on the steering wheel, he was not reaching for anything.”
The numbers of police officers present, cameras, bullets fired and other details remain unconfirmed.
Brown’s family had been bracing themselves for the viewing of bodycamera footage on Monday morning, only for it to be delayed for several hours while authorities blurred out the faces of the officers, according to Michael Cox, the Pasquotank county attorney.
Cox came under attack from the civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who is also representing the Brown family, on Monday afternoon.
“Why is it they get to choose what are the pertinent parts [of the footage] to show? At the last minute they decided they are going to redact it?” said Crump, who also represented the family of George Floyd in Minnesota.
“They are trying to hide something.
They don’t want us to see everything.”
Crump said he believed up to nine body cams were available, plus footage from at least one police dashboard camera, and a camera on a lamppost. The attorneys, he said, should have seen all of it: “That’s what transparency is, let us see with our own eyes. Where’s that written in the statute that the family doesn’t have the right to see the entire video?”
Sellers said there had also been disagreement between Cox and the Pasquotank sheriff, Tommy Wooten, over the release.
“The sheriff ’s perspective was he wanted the family to be able to see the video today,” he said. “[But] all these decisions were made by the county.”
According to an eyewitness, deputies fired at Brown as he tried to drive away from officers executing a drugs warrant. Dispatch audio was captured in which a first responder can be heard saying: “Be advised EMS has one male, 42 years of age, gunshot to the back.”
Brown died after seven officers including a tactical team were deployed to his house to serve the search and arrest warrant. Not all of the officers discharged their weapons, but seven have been placed on leave.
Local leaders have urged calm and patience amid protests surrounding the killing. Lloyd Griffin, the chair of the commissioners of Pasquotank county, said: “Rushing the gathering of evidence and interviewing of witnesses would hurt any future legal case that might be brought in the wake of this tragedy.”
Lawyers said that patience was running out. Sellers told Monday’s press conference: “I wish we were somewhere else. I wish we had a week where Black folk weren’t just dying at the hands of law enforcement. The state of North Carolina can no longer hide videos from the people who need to see them.”
Crump addressed the indications that Brown was shot in the back. “The most cowardly thing in the world you can do is shoot somebody in the back. They don’t shoot white men in the
back. They shoot us in the back. The most dangerous thing to a police officer in America is a black man running away,” he said.
At the weekend, the Rev William Barber of the Poor People’s Campaign called for the footage to be made public.
“We’re sick and tired of all these deaths happening that don’t have to happen,” he said. “Release the tapes!”
systemic racism.”
The murder of Floyd, who was Black, at the hands of a white police officer touched off global protests against police brutality and systemic racism. Biden said then that the long-overdue racial reckoning created a once-in-ageneration opportunity to directly address historic racial injustices.
As president, Biden has placed emphasis on racial equity, drawing support from civil rights activists and criticism from conservatives.
He assembled a cabinet that is the most diverse in history, including the first female, first African American and first Asian American vice-president, as well as the first Native American and first openly gay cabinet secretaries, the first female treasury secretary, the first African American defense secretary and the first immigrant to lead the Department of Homeland Security.
Confronting systemic racism is the “responsibility of the whole of our government”, the White House declared, laying out steps the new administration would take to address inequality in housing, education, criminal justice, healthcare and the economy.
He has emphasized equity in vaccine distribution and targeted underserved communities with his $1.9tn relief plan. His infrastructure plan dedicates funding to neighborhoods harmed by pollution and environmental hazards as well as to homecare aides, predominantly women of color. He endorsed statehood for the District of Columbia, a heavily Black city that does not have voting representation in Congress. He warned that some states were “backsliding into the days of Jim Crow” by imposing new voting restrictions.
Yet a major voting rights bill remains stalled along with a long-promised policing overhaul. Biden’s sweeping immigration reform has yet to gain traction as Republicans hammer the administration over an influx of migrant children at the Mexico border. Spasms of gun violence have renewed calls for gun control.
Biden’s first in-person meeting with a foreign leader began with the Japanese prime pinister, Yoshihide Suga, extending his condolences for a mass shooting at a FedEx facility in Indianapolis, which left eight people dead. Suga also condemned a rising tide of violence against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders since the start of coronavirus lockdowns.
The summit underscored Biden’s belief that the nation’s crises are not only an inflection point for America – but for the world. Biden has framed his domestic revitalization effort as part of a global conflict between authoritarianism and democracy.
“That’s what competition between America and China and the rest of the world is all about,” Biden said in his infrastructure speech. “It’s a basic question: can democracies still deliver for their people?”
Jonathan Alter, author of The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope, said Biden, like the 32nd president, has a rare opportunity to transform the political landscape for generations.
“Roosevelt and his New Deal represented a new social contract between the government and the people in terms of what the government owed Americans,” he said. That lasted for nearly five decades, he said, until Ronald Reagan gave rise to a new era of small-government and free-market competition.
Whether Biden can forge a new social contract to meet the most urgent challenges of the 21st century – yawning inequality, a warming climate and rising authoritarianism – is a question unlikely to be answered by his 100th day in office, Alter cautioned. But he expects the next 100 to be revealing.
“It’s hard to imagine but Biden has already spent several times as much in 1933-dollars as Roosevelt did in his first 100 days,” Alter said. “And the odds that a Rooseveltian achievement in American political life will take place this year are highly likely.”