NEWS YOU OUGHT TO KNOW
Mississippi official: Black people ‘dependent’ since slavery
By EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — After rejecting a proposal to move a Confederate monument, a white elected official in Mississippi said this week that African Americans “became dependent” during slavery and as a result, have had a harder time “assimilating” into American life than other mistreated groups. Critics said his remarks were outrageous and called on him to resign.
In northeastern Mississippi’s Lowndes County, supervisors voted along racial lines Monday against moving a Confederate monument that has stood outside the county courthouse in Columbus since 1912. The monument depicts a Confederate soldier and says the South fought for a “noble cause.” Three white supervisors voted against the proposal and two black supervisors voted for it.
Could the police shooting in Atlanta have been prevented?
By LISA MARIE PANE
It started off as routine: a man asleep in his car in a fast-food drive-thru. But it rapidly spun out of control when Atlanta police tried to handcuff and arrest Rayshard Brooks for being intoxicated.
Video of the scene from late Friday shows the 27-year-old black man wrestling with two white officers, taking a Taser from one of them, running a short distance through the Wendy’s parking lot, and then pointing the stun gun toward one. That officer shot him twice in the back, killing him.
How did it all go so wrong so fast? And what, if anything, could officers have done to defuse the situation?
Law enforcement experts say the answers to those questions are complicated and not as clear-cut as in the recent death of George Floyd, the black man who was pronounced dead after a Minneapolis officer put his knee on Floyd’s neck for nearly 9 minutes.
While police generally consider Tasers in their own hands to be nonlethal weapons, Kevin Davis, a police officer in Ohio for nearly three decades who specializes in training, said that a stun gun in the wrong hands and pointed at the head, for example, could prove deadly or cause serious injury.
On the other side of the argument, Tasers have a reach of about 15 feet, so the officer could have tried to keep his distance. Also, it was a crowded parking lot, making it risky for an officer to fire his gun.
Could the officer have shot Brooks in the leg or somewhere else that wouldn’t have been deadly? Police experts reject that idea, saying that officers facing what they believe is a deadly threat are trained to stop it cold, which usually means shooting at a person’s torso.
1 wounded, 1 sought in Dallas shopping mall shooting
DALLAS (AP) — One person was shot Tuesday at a busy Dallas shopping mall, and police were seeking a single suspect, authorities said.
The incident happened shortly before 7 p.m. at the Galleria in north Dallas. Police Senior Cpl. Melinda Gutierrez said the wounded person was taken to Parkland Memorial Hospital. Their condition was not immediately known.
The mall was evacuated as officers reviewed security video and made a store-by-store search of the mall for the suspect. No other shootings or injuries were reported.
Dallas Police said on Twitter that there was “not an active shooter.”
