I am looking at the same videos as everyone else. First, this looks nothing like the George Floyd case, which was an obvious killing. Mr. Floyd was on the ground, face down, handcuffed, pleading for his life. The Rayshard Brooks situation is nothing like that. Although more information will become available, when I first heard Mr. Brooks’s lawyers at about 9 PM eastern last night, I concluded a man was shot in the back while fleeing. But the publicly available videos tell a different and more complete story. It looks from the videos like Mr. Brooks resisted being handcuffed, assaulted the police officers (punched one of them), and then turned and aimed the taser at the pursuing officer as Mr. Brooks was fleeing, which he’d forcibly taken from one of the officers. I don’t know if the officers followed protocol. But I do know this is why we have a justice system — with a real court, a real discovery process, and lawyers, to gather the facts and pursue the truth. And we should wait for all the facts to come out here, not the kind of narrative I heard last night from the lawyers, and not just selected video of Mr. Brooks fleeing the scene without any context — which we are seeing over and over again on cable TV today
Meanwhile, a lawless crowd burned down the Wendy’s restaurant, which had nothing to do with the confrontation. The police chief resigned. And the officer who discharged his weapon was fired.
As an aside, all of us know that when an officer stops you, you cooperate. You certainly don’t resist arrest. And you certainly don’t assault the officer and seize one of his weapons. The officer doesn’t know you. He doesn’t know if you’re dangerous to him or others. While Mr. Brooks’s lawyers repeatedly accused the officers of escalation, the videos appear to tell a different story.