Amid a climate of confusion and anger, retired police officer Jeff Roorda lent his pro-police perspective to CNN’s analysis of the shooting of Terence Crutcher in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
While video footage shows Crutcher with his hands up only seconds before Officer Betty Shelby fired the fatal shot, Roorda cautioned against rushing to condemn the officer, particularly given what already is known about the suspect.
“Let’s wait for all the information before we reach some judgment,” Roorda told host Don Lemon during a Tuesday appearance on CNN Tonight. “And I think what we know so far is that this gentleman did not have his hands up when the officer shot him. We know that he was very likely under the influence of a controlled substance.”
In case developments on Thursday, the officer was charged with first-degree manslaughter.
District Attorney Steve Kunzweiler filed the charges Shelby, 42, and her lawyer was arranging for her to surrender.
Lemon noted that until autopsy results are released, it won’t be known if Crutcher was under the influence, but Roorda warned against drawing hasty conclusions anyway.
“We’re fine with rushing to judgment on the police officer, but we don’t want to rush to judgment on the suspect,” Roorda chided. “But they did find PCP in his car.”
Roorda, author of the brand new book “The War on Police,” added the person who called 9-1-1 to report Crutcher said he appeared to be on some sort of drug.
However, that was not good enough for former Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, who appeared with Roorda on the CNN panel. Nutter insisted there is “no evidence” Crutcher was under the influence of PCP. “That’s a man walking down the street with his hands up,” the mayor cried. “That’s a big black man, so now it’s BBM.”
Crutcher, however, apparently was not following orders from police, either, Roorda noted.
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According to Shelby’s attorney, Scott Wood, the officer was on the scene with Crutcher for about a minute-and-a-half before the start of the video clip that was made public Monday.
When Shelby first spotted Crutcher, she asked if the abandoned car in the middle of the road was his, but Crutcher didn’t respond. Instead, he began to put his hand into his left pocket. Shelby asked him to keep his hand out of his pocket, but he didn’t respond. She asked him again, and this time he put both his hands in the air.
The officer tried to get Crutcher to talk to her, but he only mumbled unintelligibly and stared at her, according to Wood. He walked to the edge of the roadway and started to reach into his pocket again, despite Shelby’s orders to stop.
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It was at that point when Shelby suspected this man was high on a drug, possibly PCP. She pulled out her gun and commanded him to get on his knees. However, Crutcher walked toward his SUV with his hands up. Shelby followed him with her gun drawn, ordering him to stop multiple times.
Crutcher only lowered his arms when he got to the driver’s side door of his SUV. According to Wood, the suspect reached into the driver’s side window, which prompted Shelby to fire one shot while fellow officer Tyler Turnbough deployed his Taser.
Wood said Shelby believed Crutcher was attempting to retrieve a weapon when he reached into his car, so she felt she was in imminent danger.
Nevertheless, on CNN, Nutter insisted Crutcher “never presented a threat” to the officer. The former mayor said Crutcher did not have a weapon, Shelby did not know what was in the SUV, and therefore Shelby should have used her Taser instead of her gun.
“So when can the officer deploy their weapon?” Roorda challenged the mayor. “Do they have to be looking down the barrel of a gun?”
Nutter replied the standard is to use deadly force when there’s an imminent threat to the officer, to which Roorda replied the officer did believe there was an imminent threat.
Indeed, Shelby’s attorney said the officer initially pulled out a gun instead of a Taser because she thought Crutcher had a weapon. She was planning to arrest him for public intoxication and possibly obstructing the investigation.
CNN played the helicopter camera footage in which one officer remarks, “That looks like a bad dude, too. Might be on something.”
Lemon asked Roorda how someone could possibly tell from the air whether Crutcher was a “bad dude.” Roorda encouraged Lemon to listen to the audio closely.
“The first thing [the officer in the helicopter] says is, ‘He’s got his hands up now,’” Roorda said. “So that implies that when they first got there, when they’re watching from the sky initially, he doesn’t have his hands in the air. They say, ‘This looks like a bad dude; I think he’s on something.’ I think it’s not his size or his skin color; it’s the fact that he appears, even from a helicopter in the sky, to be under the influence of something, is why they’re saying he’s a bad dude.”
As WND previously reported, Hillary Clinton declared America needs to deal with the problem of police shootings like the one in Tulsa by tackling “systemic racism” and “implicit bias.”
When asked about Clinton’s comments, Roorda said the former secretary of state is rushing to judgment, attributing racist motives to Shelby. However, he admitted implicit bias is real.
“We’re all guilty of implicit bias,” Roorda said. “Everybody on camera right now, everybody watching your show thinks they know something about other people because of the color of their skin, and it’s wrong and it’s a bad, ugly part of our society.
“The question is whether these police officers in Charlotte and Tulsa acted on that implicit bias, or if they were acting on something else.”
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Get “The War On Police” now at the WND Superstore, weeks before its November 10 release date.
from PropagandaGuard https://propagandaguard.wordpress.com/2016/09/23/retired-police-officer-sets-cnn-panel-straight-on-tulsa-shooting/
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