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An African-American Police Officer was Convicted for the Murder of an Unarmed African-American Man

African-American police officer Dominic Heaggan Brown has been convicted of the murder Sylville Smith, a 23-year-old African-American man on accounts of First Degree Reckless Homicide.

As Heaggan, (who aspired to be a rapper and knew Smith in high school) saw Smith leaned over into the passenger side of a car with an out of state license plate, he went to investigate the situation. Court documents explain that the body camera video from Heaggan shows Smith slip in between the fence of two houses as well as raise up a gun and throw it over one the fence. While the gun was in Smith’s hand, Heaggan fired a shot into his arm; but once Smith had thrown the gun over the fence Heaggan fired a fatal shot in Smith’s chest.

Mayor Tom Barret made the following statements about the use of body cameras within Heaggan’s trial:

Once of the important parts of this investigation centered around the body cameras that were worn. Had this (incident) happened 10 or 15 years ago, we would not have that evidence.”

Mayor Barret advocates for the release of the footage as it has not been released yet. However, within the conviction of Smith a question must be asked as to why he was convicted of the murder of an unarmed African-American as compared to non-African-American officers not being convicted of murder after shooting unarmed black citizens such as George Zimmerman in the case of Trayvon Martin, and more recently Michael T. Slager in the case of Walter Scott, and. The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and Upturn’s report on body cams garnered the following information as reported by CNN: “When officers view camera footage before filing their reports, there’s a real danger of reports reflecting only what cameras happened to record, rather than what the officer actually experienced.” As this became the conclusion of the integration of body cameras into investigations early this year in August, nothing of the sort seemed to apply to the case of Sylville Smith today in Milwaukee.

In striking contrast to the death of Sylville Smith is Walter Scott who was shot with eight rounds of ammunition by Michael T. Slager, a white officer, while running away from him, in a controversy that was all captured on video.  With these two trials (one a mistrial) coming in very close and resulting in the conviction of the African-American police officer who seemed to be in a more life-threatening situation than the White cop that shot a “suspect” that was running away, it must be noted that a mockery of the lives of African-Americans is occurring, and a misconstruing of police brutality against African-Americans is being thrown at society — on purpose. The detonation of the African-American body in America is reaching points of acceleration and extermination in such a manner that now America has seemingly used the fallacy of “Black-on-Black” crime being the cause of most African-American death in America to warrant justice for the victims of Police Brutality.

An unarmed person should never be shot by a police officer, but an African-American man should be tried in the same manner for the death of unarmed African-Americans in the same way that non-African-American police officers are and are getting away with it.

 

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