San Francisco police said they showed “great restraint” before beating an unarmed mentally ill man with a baton, then shooting him inside his home earlier this year.
But San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi, who is one of the toughest in the nation against cops, said the cops needlessly escalated the situation after vowing to start de-escalating potentially dangerous incidents, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
It was Adachi who released the body cam video after police refused to release it on the basis it would taint the investigation, which only makes sense if they were planning on tainting the investigation themselves.
After all, police claimed the man had charged the cops, punching them, which is why they had to respond by beating and shooting him.
But the video shows the cops charging towards the man up his stairs as he attempts to walk back inside his home.
The victim Sean Moore, survived the shooting, but suffered gunshot wounds to the groin and stomach. The 43-year-old man, who has a history of paranoid schizophrenia, was charged with assaulting a police officer, making criminal threats and resisting arrest.
He is being held on a $2 million bond.
Adachi is hoping the body cam footage, the first that has captured a shooting since the department introduced the cameras last year, will be enough evidence to get the charges dismissed.
The incident took place in the morning of January 6 after San Francisco police officers Kenneth Cha and Colin Patino showed up to Moore’s home at 4:15 a.m. to serve a violation of a restraining order filed by his neighbor, who called them to complain that Moore was banging on their common wall.
Moore is irritated that the cops are there and orders them to leave his property in a loud voice laden with profanities.
The cops say they want to hand him the restraining order, but when they do, they demand for it back.
At one point, one of the cops pepper sprays him, pepper spraying his partner in the process.
Moore was able to make it back inside his home after being shot, according to the Chronicle.
Police said Moore retreated into the house after being shot, and that hostage negotiators spent an hour attempting to coax him out before a tactical team entered to get him treatment.
His mother, Cleo Moore, said he had been moved recently from the hospital to jail.
“My son is not a very vicious person, he’s just struggling every day with mental illness,” she said Wednesday. “It’s unfortunate that it happened this way. My son did not need to be shot. … It didn’t have to happen this way if the officers would have been trained in how to take care of mentally ill patients.”
Adachi said the video shows the officers escalating the situation by aggressively dealing with an already agitated man.
“If you look at basic de-escalation 101, you talk to the person, you try and get the person in a place where they are calmer, and if the person is making reasonable requests — in this case for the officers to step off his stairs — they could have done that without endangering themselves or Mr. Moore,” Adachi said. “There’s obviously a big gap between what the officers are being told at the academy and what is being done at the street.”
Police did their part to convince the public that Moore was a dangerous threat to the officers by releasing photos of their bloodied faces.
But the video shows they struck him first with the baton, so the already agitated man became even more agitated.
