Sam Dubose...alive.
After a routine traffic stop by a University of Cincinnati Police Officer, Sam Dubose ended up dead with his face blown off. The officer was wearing a body camera, but the city refuses to release the video. In the meantime,
everybody who sees it is deeply disturbed, including the city wide police chief.
Cincinnati Police Chief Jeffrey Blackwell said he's seen the unreleased footage from a University of Cincinnati officer's body camera during last week's fatal shooting and "it's not good."
"The video is not good," Blackwell said. "I think the city manager has said that also publicly. I'll leave it there."
Here's the City Manager...
City Manager Harry Black also spoke about the unreleased body camera video of the shooting.
"It's not a good situation," Black said. "It's a tragic situation, someone has died that did not necessarily need to die."
In 2001, after local police killed a man named Timothy Thomas,
unrest broke out across the city.
“To quote the family, ‘We don’t want another Timothy Thomas situation,'” said Pastor Ennis Tait, of the Church of the Living God. “They’ve said that and that’s their heart. They don’t want the city to be turned upside down and that issue to be attached to their brother’s life.”
The Police Chief is
already calling for peace....
“We're concerned clearly. We're concerned about what could happen in our city. We're hopeful that the people of this great city are reminded that we do things right and that even when an officer may have done something inappropriate that it will be dealt with in an appropriate fashion,” Blackwell said.
But here's the thing.
All studies indicate that in nearly 99% of instances of police killing someone, even in the most egregious circumstances, "something appropriate" doesn't actually happen and officers are let off.
Let's keep pushing for the release of this video. We must never assume that justice will happen on its own, but must fight for it daily.