Video exposes official
lies about police killing in Nashville, Tennessee
By Warren Duzak
17 February 2017
17 February 2017
Police in Nashville, Tennessee have backed off
initial reports that a man had physically “charged” a policeman who had stopped
him last Friday, February 10, for running a stop sign. The man, Jocques Scott
Clemmons, was later shot and killed by the same police officer.
Clemmons, 31, attempted to flee on foot after
being stopped in the Cayce Home public housing area parking lot in East
Nashville, but later turned on Officer Josh Lippert, according to police.
During a subsequent scuffle police said Clemmons dropped a loaded handgun
before retrieving it and again attempted to flee when he was shot three times
by Lippert.
While the videos from security cameras appear to
indicate a struggle later when Lippert shot Clemmons in the back, the report
that the policeman had initially been assaulted when he got out of his car have
been shown to be demonstrably false.
Clemmons, who was African American, was shot by
Lippert, who is white, twice in the lower back and once in the hip. Police said
he was shot just as he was turning in between two cars after struggling with
Lippert.
But a local resident told a reporter for the
Tennessean that she saw that as excessive and unnecessary force. “A person is
shot in the back,” Brenda Morrow said. “That means he’s fleeing; he’s no threat.”
Police attempts to explain why the initial
police statements suggested that Lippert had been physically attacked when he
had not were less than plausible: “When interviewed by detectives on Friday,
Lippert did NOT(original emphasis) assert that he was physically contacted by
Clemmons just after he got out of the police car. That interview occurred
before he had the opportunity to see any video,” police said in a statement.
Most media ran with the
initial police report including the New York Daily News which
carried a story of the shooting that even embellished the phantom contact:
“As Libbert (sic) got out of his cruiser,
surveillance video provided by police shows Clemmons tackling the officer to
the ground before running off. Libbert (sic) quickly got to his feet and chased
after Clemmons.”
The misspelling of the policeman’s name and the
fact that he was in an unmarked car not a “cruiser” are examples of sloppy
journalism and forgivable. A total distortion of the facts is not.
Although Lippert had received
some commendations in the five years he had worked for the Nashville Police
Department, he had also received a total of 20 suspensions for improper
conduct. Some were minor, such as for failing to attend in-service training,
but two involved use of force, Nashville’s the Tennessean reported.
“In October 2015 Lippert used physical force to
pull a black motorist from the vehicle during a traffic stop, even though the
driver said he’d be willing to get out in the presence of a supervisor. Lippert
was also reprimanded for having the man’s car towed without giving him a chance
to park the car or turn it over to someone else,” as required by department
policy, the paper reported.
The Nashville Branch of the NAACP has called for
an “immediate and transparent” investigation, while the U.S. Attorney’s office
here has said it will “monitor” the Nashville Police Department’s
investigation.
This is not an isolated incident but one that
occurs in a certain context and “raises serious questions,” ACLU-TN Executive Director
Hedy Weinberg said in an ACLU statement.
“The shooting of Jocques Clemmons did not happen
in a vacuum,” Weinberg remarked, “…incidents like these also compel us to take
a step back and ask why Mr. Clemmons was stopped in the first place and how officers
make decisions about who to stop for minor traffic infractions. Any one
discretionary stop risks a tragic ending if there is an escalation of conflict
– far too frequently such escalations result in police use of force, and also
expose police to unnecessary risk.”
Weinberg could well have been referring to
research by a local African American community group, Gideon’s Army. Describing
itself as an “Army for Children,” the group produced a report entitled “Driving
while Black” which showed African American and low-income Nashville
neighborhoods suffering a disproportionate number of traffic stops and searches
by a police department that conducts such traffic stops at an overall rate
almost 8 times higher than the national average for police departments.
Nashville/Davidson County District Attorney
Glenn Funk announced Thursday that for the first time the Tennessee Bureau of
Investigations(TBI) would, starting with the Clemmons shooting, investigate all
future shooting involving Metro police.
The use of TBI would by state law effectively
make the investigation records confidential until TBI officials considered its
investigation completed.
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