St. Louis Police Release Video Of Kajieme Powell Killing That Appears At Odds With Their Story

Another police killing of an African American has occurred. Caught on camera by a bystander (see video below the fold), apparently the man, identified as Kajieme Powell, a 25-year-old, had gone into a convenience market, deliberately took two cans of soda, walked out without paying for them, proceeded to set the two cans symbolically down on the sidewalk, and waited for police to come, as if having planned and predicted the entire sequence of events.

The police soon arrived, and Powell approached them, telling them to shoot him. And without the slightest hesitation, they did, firing nine shots in rapid succession into Powell at close range, several of the shots occurring after he had already fallen to the ground. Then they had the audacity to cuff him, ridiculously acting as if a man with nine bullets in him, who for all the world looked dead or unconscious on the ground, was still a threat. It was all over within seconds of their arrival on the scene.

Powell’s actions looked to me to be a deliberate, symbolic protest of police, clearly intended to induce a replay similar to the events which had recently occurred with Michael Brown, who had been shot while surrendering with arms raised, allegedly minutes after taking cigarillos from a nearby store. And the police behaved exactly as Powell expected they would.

Powell allegedly had a knife, although one is not visible in the video, and his arms were not raised in aggression, and he was not brandishing any weapon in a threatening manner. They could have easily backed away 30 paces, deescalated the situation, talked him down. They could have tasered him (or maybe not), or any other number of nonlethal methods. No, in my mind this was murder. We expect more from police. We expect professionalism. We expect them to think before acting.

The police, in an earlier press conference, before the revealing video had been released, had clearly lied about Powell having allegedly threatened the shooting officers with a knife in an “overhand grip”. In the video, Powell’s hands are at his side, with no overhand motion. No object is visible in his hands. Powell seemed to be expecting to be shot with minimal effort, and his motions were slow and non-threatening, simply moving toward the police, reflecting what he thought would be sufficient to provoke an overreaction by the police.

The striking implications of the new police killing seems to be that cops in the St. Louis area are so reliably prone to shoot Black people with the slightest provocation, that anyone can elicit a reenactment of the Brown incident by simply arranging the same pieces on the chessboard all over again. And the police obligingly cooperated by willingly playing their part, firing nine lead bullets into Powell, completing the events as if a planned theatrical drama, as if performance art.

— by ZhenRenFollow writing for Daily Kos

Here is a video of the killing of Kajieme Powell by a St. Louis policeman. This video was released by the police department to support their claim that the killing was justified, but the video seems to support the exact opposite — the killing of Kajieme Powell was completely unnecessary.

TRIGGER WARNING: THIS VIDEO SHOWS AN ACTUAL HOMICIDE.

http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-P54MZVxMU&bpctr=1408671811