Chicago Police Construct False Narrative After Shooting Black Man

After Chicago police killed Harith Augustus, the question was not: What happened? It was: How do we justify what happened?

On the last day of his life, Harith Augustus left the barbershop where he worked on the South Side of Chicago and set out to run some errands. It was late afternoon on July 14, 2018. Walking streets he had traversed countless times before, Augustus can be seen on surveillance video moving along the sidewalk with loose-limbed grace. He’s wearing earbuds and appears to be moving to music only he can hear. Carried east by the flow of life on 71st Street, the main commercial artery in the South Shore neighborhood, he displays no unease as he passes three police officers chatting with each other at the corner of 71st and Chappel. A few minutes later, he returns, going west, and passes them again with the same air of nonchalance.

Moments later, his body lay motionless in the middle of 71st Street, having been shot five times by Officer Dillan Halley.

In previous reporting for The Intercept, and in a collaborative project with Forensic Architecture titled “Six Durations of a Split Second,” we used video evidence to show that Augustus’s death was the result of aggressive policing rather than any criminal conduct on his part. The police stopped him because he appeared to be carrying a gun, but in a concealed carry state that alone is not a sufficient basis for an investigative stop. Augustus had committed no crime, and at no point did he remove his gun from its holster. It was actions by the police that produced the “split second” of perceived threat to which they responded with lethal force.

Now, by virtue of unedited body camera footage released in the context of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, it is possible to examine the sequence of police actions immediately after Halley killed Augustus: the moments when the official narrative of what just happened crystallizes. Viewed together with previously released footage, it deepens our understanding of how a demonstrably official false narrative of a police killing takes shape.

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Видео Chicago Police Construct False Narrative After Shooting Black Man канала The Intercept