One officer is seen standing at her door and repeatedly telling her to “get out of the car”.
“For what?” she responds twice, adding: “I’m not going to do that.”
One officer seen in front of the car has his left hand on the hood, his gun drawn in the other hand.
“Are you going to shoot me?” she says moments before a single shot is fired and the officer quickly moves out of the car’s path.
The cop who killed her was in no danger, and has time to casually stroll out of the way of the vehicle.
What he doesn’t have is a name or a face — as often happens, the police haven’t been named, and their faces have been blurred in the video.
Why?
If they weren’t cops — if they were just a pair of random dudes killing a black pregnant woman, and there was video footage — would their names remain secret, their faces blurred?
It’s possible for both people to have been in the wrong. That woman wasn’t a murderer, so let’s remember degrees of wrong, but she definitely wasn’t innocent. One of cops’ literal jobs is to catch criminals who don’t want to be caught. That’s why they approached her and probably why he stood in front of the car. They weren’t accosting some rando on the street. What they did wrong was drawing a gun, pointing it at a person, and pulling the trigger when not in mortal danger.
I don’t appreciate that in these situations, everyone lines up on one side or the other and whomever we’ve decided to defend could have done no wrong. The wrongdoers were wrong in every possible way. It’s mob mentality. And then we wonder why those on the other side can’t see things our way. Hyperbole helps nobody.
So the cops didn’t take down the license plate? The job of the police is to maintain law and order. Escalating a situation so they can gun someone down in a parking lot is the exact opposite of maintain order. Instead of of doing the sensible thing of allowing the person leave the parking lot and then arrest the person in a less dangerous situation, they continued to escalate it and then shot and murdered a person in the middle of a busy parking lot.
I don’t appreciate that in these situations no one has any regard for the bystanders that had nothing to do with the situation put at risk by murderous cops. These cops are greater danger to the public than a woman slowly moving her car forward.
“Innocent until proven guilty” is a fine principal, quickly forgotten by most, and a punchline for police.