A white Oklahoma police officer charged with manslaughter for fatally shooting an unarmed black man in September 2016 has said the man’s race had nothing to do with her decision to fire her gun.
Tulsa officer Betty Shelby told CBS’s 60 Minutes in an interview scheduled to air on Sunday she used lethal force because she feared 40-year-old Terence Crutcher was reaching inside his vehicle for a gun.
“I’m feeling that his intent is to do me harm and I keep thinking, ‘Don’t do this. Please don’t do this. Don’t make this happen,’” Shelby said in her first interview since the 16 September shooting.
Shelby said she remembered the moment Crutcher appeared to reach inside his vehicle.
“And it’s fast,” she said. “Just that would tell any officer that that man’s going for a weapon. I say with a louder, more intense voice, ‘Stop. Stop! Stop!’
“And he didn’t. And that’s when I took aim.”
Shelby, who pleaded not guilty to first-degree manslaughter, will go to trial on 8 May. Prosecutors say she overreacted because Crutcher was not armed or combative when she approached him on a north Tulsa street after his SUV broke down, and that he obeyed orders to raise his hands.
The shooting was caught on video from a police helicopter and a dashboard camera. Footage showed Crutcher walking away from Shelby with his arms in the air. The images do not provide a clear view of when Shelby fired the single shot.
Shelby believes she was swiftly charged because authorities feared civil unrest if they delayed taking action. Residents in other cities protested last year in response to a series of deaths of black residents in encounters with police.
The shooting attracted national attention. Donald Trump, then the Republican candidate for president, said he was “very, very troubled”.
“Did she get scared, was she choking, what happened?” he asked, during a visit to a church in Cleveland. “Maybe people who do that, people who choke, maybe they can’t be doing what they’re doing. OK? They can’t be doing what they’re doing.”
Terence Crutcher’s twin sister told 60 Minutes her brother was obeying Shelby’s commands to raise his hands.
“What we saw on that video is what my dad always taught my brothers, taught us to do if we were pulled over by a police officer,” Tiffany Crutcher said.
“Put your hands in the air and put your hands on the car. And my brother did what my father taught us.”
(TheGuardian US)
