FORD GT / Ryan BRISCOE / AUS / Richard WESTBROOK / GBR / Scott DIXON / NZL / FORD CHIP GANASSI TEAM USA by Artes Max
Via Flickr:
24 Horas de Le Mans 2019 / Circuito de Le Sarthe / Le Mans / Francia
On April 26, 2011, 18-year-old African-American Ralphael L. Briscoe was walking down the sidewalk and talking on a cell phone when a black SUV pulled up beside him and the four white men inside asked whether he was armed. (He wasn’t.) Briscoe did not respond, but continued walking away. The vehicle began tailing him down the street, so Briscoe started running. The men chased him in their SUV, until one of them shot Briscoe in the back as he fled, killing him. Briscoe was unarmed.
The black SUV was an unmarked police vehicle. The men were plainclothes police officers. The one who shot Briscoe claimed: “I was in fear for my life.” He was not disciplined in any way, and remained on active duty. In 2015, a predominantly white (5-3) jury acquitted him. Of course.
The police testified that they originally stopped to question Briscoe because he was “walking quickly” and “looking around.” For the record, this does not constitution a “reasonable suspicion” of illegal activity that would permit police to stop and question anyone. The police thus started the encounter with an unconstitutional violation of Briscoe’s civil rights, stopping him for the supposed crime of “walking while black.” The police officers admitted that this form of police racial profiling is so pervasive in the “mostly minority” neighborhood where this occurred that “residents, when they see officers approaching, lift up their shirts to show that they are unarmed.”
Briscoe didn’t; instead, he ignored the plainclothes officers in the unmarked vehicle and continued on his way. When the four unidentified white men in the creepy black SUV continued following him down the street, he ran away from them. This, again, is not behavior that would legally constitute a “reasonable suspicion” of criminal activity. Even if Briscoe had known the four were police officers, courts have already recognized that black men have a valid reason to run from police these days even if they’ve done nothing wrong.
Finally, the shooter testified that he killed Briscoe because Briscoe was “clutching at the waistband of his pants,” pulled out a gun, and turned towards the SUV as if to shoot the officers: “He pulled out the gun and failed to drop the weapon.” Briscoe did not actually have a gun, mind you, but the police said they recovered a realistic-looking (but inoperable) toy BB gun from on the ground beside Briscoe. So although the police initially created the situation with their improper misconduct, it’s still ultimately a clear case of self-defense, right?
Yeah, not so much. Although there was no body-camera or dash-camera footage from the officers or their vehicle, a nearby surveillance camera happened to catch the incident on video. (Watch it for yourself.) The video does not appear to show Briscoe doing anything but running: he did not reach for his waistband, he did not pull out a weapon--real or fake--and he did not turn towards the SUV. In fact, as the officer shot him dead, Briscoe was clearly turning right to leave the sidewalk and run away from the street altogether.
The police officer who killed Briscoe admitted that the video did not support his version of what happened, but still insisted his story was true, testifying: “The video doesn’t show what I saw. It doesn’t have the same perspective that I had.”
And what about that toy BB gun? Independent witnesses “who were in the area at the time of the shooting and who saw Briscoe minutes before the undercover police officers arrived” testified that Briscoe did not have a BB gun with him, and Briscoe’s mother testified that he never owned one. Moreover, “the video appeared to show police tossing an object toward Briscoe’s body where part of a gun was recovered.” Further damning evidence was that there were no fingerprints on the BB gun, although Briscoe wasn’t wearing gloves or anything like that. You know who was wearing gloves, though? The officer who shot Briscoe dead.
The predominantly white jury evidently found it credible that Briscoe paused in his headlong flight from plainclothes police officers to try to shoot them with an inoperable toy gun--despite the contrary video evidence--and then, as his dying act, wiped off his own fingerprints. Defense counsel argued it was because the surveillance video showed Briscoe with some sort of indistinct object in his right hand while he was running away.
...Like maybe that cell phone he was talking on before the plainclothes police decided to chase him for no legal reason?
