Alfred Olango: US police kill mentally ill black man

[haele]

70. Local PBS station had a quote from the mayor of El Cajon this morning...

...who had seen the witness cell phone video. Mind you, the county DA (of whom I also have some rather colorful assessments of) had issued an order two months ago that all police incident videos cannot be released to the public as long as there is an investigation, so anyone who says they see from the one frame that was released that the victim was threatening police doesn't know what the hell they're talking about.
This was what I heard the mayor of El Cajon, Bill Wells, say in a press conference this morning on the PBS station:

“I saw a man who was distraught, and a man acting like he was in great pain,” Wells said. “And I saw him get gunned down and killed. If he was my son, I would be devastated.”

The county DA is not going to be happy with what he is saying, especially since Bill Wells job prior to taking a city council position and then being elected mayor was as a clinician working with the severely mentally ill, so he does have a lot of experience dealing with the mentally ill in crisis.

That official quote does not bode well for the police, especially since there are questions as to why the county mental health responders weren't present before the armed police responded to the call - half an hour after the first call from the sister asking for help for her brother who was experiencing a seizure that she couldn't control.

Haele