When the story first came out, it appeared to be a justified shoot.  Seattle Police Officer Ian Birk saw a man with a knife. He told him to drop it three times, and the man took an aggressive posture, then responded by lunging at him.  Burke fired four shots and 50 year old John Williams was dead on the ground.

The story began to change.

Preliminary reports that Williams lunged at Birk have since been retracted. “We dropped the lunging and advancing [allegations] pending further need for investigation,” says police spokesman Sean Whitcomb.

A witness told the Seattle Times, “His body stance did not look threatening at all. I could only see the gentleman’s back, and he didn’t look aggressive at all. He didn’t even look up at the officer.”

“The only thing we know for sure is the individual had a knife,” said Chief John Diaz at a press conference on August 31. “We know from audio recordings that the officer issued at least three commands for the suspect to drop his knife.” But Williams allegedly refused Birk’s orders. From approximately 9 to 10 feet away, Birk fired four rounds.

The knife, a 3 incher that was perfectly legal (and which later turned out to be closed), was in the hands of a partially deaf, Native American wood carver shuffling across the street minding his own business.  So when he didn’t comply with Birk’s comment, bang.  Then came the dash cam

What a nice, sunny day it was.  No rain.  It would have been a beautiful day in Seattle for John Williams, but for the fact that he was dead.  The good stuff begins around the 1 minute mark, where the striking part is how swiftly it goes from a police officer’s command to death. 

Seattle has had its issues with police officers acting, oh, improvidently.  For example (and only example, as it’s hardly an exhaustive list):

Seattle officers and civilians have had a series of high-profile conflicts that escalated rapidly: on September 4, officers using a Taser on a man who later died; an officer punching a 17-year-old girl in the face after a routine jaywalking stop in June; Officer Shandy Cobane apparently stomping the head of a Latino suspect in April while shouting, “I’m going to beat the fucking Mexican piss out of you, homie,” as the man lay face down on the pavement (King County prosecutors declined to charge Cobane with a felony hate crime); a mentally disabled teenager allegedly beaten by three officers for jaywalking in July 2009 (exonerated of wrongdoing by SPD’s Office of Professional Accountability; the teen has filed a lawsuit against SPD and the City of Seattle).

The response from police is replete with weasel words and talk about better training. They use such warm and modern words as “transparent investigation” and being “responsive” to community concerns.  The community is concerned that the cops are killing people for nothing.

“The inquest process in King County rarely leads to any form of justice whatsoever,” says James Bible, chapter president of the NAACP. “The families are rarely represented. The shootings are almost always deemed justified. There hasn’t been a single use-of-force complaint in the past couple of years that the SPD hasn’t deemed sustained—as in it never really happened.”

After all, the guy had a knife.  What more do you need to shoot a man down on a sunny day in Seattle?

H/T Keith Lee