A police officer in United States’ Atlanta city on Friday shot dead an African-American man while trying to arrest him, triggering more protests amid massive outrage over George Floyd’s death last month, Reuters reported. The city’s police chief resigned on Saturday.
Rayshard Brooks, 27, had fallen asleep in the drive-thru line of a fast food restaurant named Wendy’s. The restaurants’s employees, then, called the police to complain that he was blocking other customers in line. The police tried to take him into custody after he failed sobriety test.
The entire incident was filmed by an onlooker. The video from the spot showed Brooks struggling with two officers on the ground outside the restaurant. He then broke free and ran across the parking lot, apparently with a Taser gun, a non-lethal weapon, in his hand.
In another video footage from the restaurant’s security cameras, Brooks is seen being shot by a police officer and falling to the ground, after he possibly aims the Taser at the officer.
Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Vic Reynolds said Brooks ran the length of about six cars in the parking lot, turned back and pointed what he had in his hand at one of the officers. “At that point, the Atlanta officer reaches down and retrieves his weapon from his holster, discharges it, strikes Mr. Brooks there on the parking lot and he goes down,” Reynolds was quoted as saying by the news agency.
Brooks was taken to a hospital but died after a surgery, according to AFP. The lawyer representing his family told Reuters that the police had no right to use force even if he had fired the Taser gun, a non-lethal weapon, at them.
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Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, meanwhile, said she has accepted the resignation of police chief Erika Shields. “I do not believe that this was a justified use of deadly force and have called for the immediate termination of the officer,” she said at a press conference, according to the news agency. The authorities have, however, not yet released the names of the police officers involved in the incident. The Fulton County District Attorney’s Office has launched a probe into the incident.
On Saturday, protestors blocked traffic at the Interstate-75 highway, prompting the police to use squad cars to control them. Several others set fire to the restaurant where Brooks was killed.
The incident came amid massive protests in the US and across the world against racism and inequality, triggered by Floyd’s death.
On May 25, four police officials detained Floyd after he had allegedly used a counterfeit bill at a store in Minnesota. Protests grew after a widely shared video showed a white former police officer kneeling for almost nine minutes on Floyd’s neck. Floyd was seen gasping for breath, pleading with the officials saying, “I can’t breathe”. He died on the spot. An autopsy found that he died of asphyxiation due to neck and back compression. Derek Chauvin, the officer responsible for Floyd’s death, was eventually charged with second-degree murder.
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