What We Know About the Latest Unarmed Black Man to be Killed by Cops

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On Monday, police in Tulsa, Oklahoma, released multiple videos showing a father and local community college student being shot and killed by cops on the side of the road. Terence Crutcher, a 40-year-old, unarmed black man, was holding his hands in the air when he was confronted near his SUV.

Both a police dash-cam and a helicopter recorded footage, as the New York Times reports. All of it is difficult to watch, not just because the clips depict someone being killed, but because both perspectives make it hard to tell what exactly is happening. But at around 7:40 PM last Friday evening, Crutcher seems to have raised his hands, walked toward the car, and either leaned against it or reached inside before one officer, Tyler Turnbough, tasered him, and moments later, another, Betty Shelby, shot him with her gun.

The Tulsa Police Department and the federal Department of Justice are investigating the incident while Officer Shelby is on paid administrative leave, and, naturally, many questions remain. Two people called 911 before the encounter to complain that the SUV was blocking an intersection; one said that the vehicle was smoking and looked ready to burst into flames. The police have not yet said definitively why Crutcher was pulled over there, but Officer Shelby was apparently in the area responding to an unrelated domestic violence case.

Crutcher was unarmed at the time of the encounter, and no weapon was recovered from his vehicle after he was shot, Police Chief Chuck Jordan told local reporters Monday.

For their part, Tulsa cops have suggested Crutcher was behaving erratically and not following commands. "Looks like a bad dude, too," one officer who was in the helicopter can be heard saying of Crutcher just prior to the shooting. "Could be on something."

In many ways, the tragic story––and how the family of the victim and the officers involved are reacting to it––is jarringly familiar. It is, after all, almost routine for white cops to fatally shoot unarmed black men in modern America. But this latest incident echoes another one from the same city in April 2015. That's when Robert Bates, a 73-year-old reserve sheriff's deputy who previously worked in insurance, chased after an unarmed black suspect and shot him in the back from close range.

Unusually for these such cases, Bates was actually convicted and sentenced to four years in prison. And in January, a white officer and former college football star in nearby Oklahoma City, Daniel Holtzclaw, was sentenced to 263 years in prison for systematically raping black women he pulled over while in uniform.

So even if Tulsa and the surrounding area are already beleaguered by cases of egregious, racially-charged police brutality, officials there are doing what they can to project optimism about achieving some measure of justice.

"My hope is that we remain a strong city, a together city, and we don't want to see things that happen in other cities here in Tulsa, Oklahoma," City Councilor Jack Henderson, who is black, said during a press conference on the videos Monday. "And with the openness of the police department, it makes me feel good that nothing's going to be swept under the rug."

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