On June 25th of this year, police in Fresno, California shot 19 year old Dylan Noble to death with a shotgun.

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Noble was unarmed and lying on the ground of the police station where the police had pulled him over in their pursuit of a rifleman. The cops said they kept thinking he was reaching for a gun in his pocket and therefore had no option but to shoot him multiple times with their guns. Right.

Although there were a bunch of videos of the incident going around on social media, they were all kinda grainy and shaky (because the people filming them probably didn’t want the cops to shoot them), so you couldn’t really get a good idea of what was going on. For some reason though now, the Fresno police department has thought it would be a good idea release the footage from the body cameras of the police officers involved in the incident and it’s seriously disturbing viewing:

What the actual fuck? Clearly there was no need to shoot this dude multiple times? OK, I get the point that he might not be following instructions to the absolute letter (and he probably should know better considering the propensity of American cops to shoot people for much less) but as in every single one of these incidents there is absolutely no reason to shoot the guy, especially when he’s already bleeding out on the floor.

The official word from the Fresno Police Department is that there are multiple times in the video where it looks like Noble was reaching for a weapon, which is what caused the officer to shoot, but I think anyone watching this video can clearly see that it’s not threatening or worthy of firing a shot. It baffles me why they’ve released it as it’s surely not going to help them at all and only incite people even further in what is already on the verge of turning into a race war over there. Stupid.

In case you missed it, here’s another cop shooting another unarmed black man from just last week. Wish I could say it was surprising.