The police chief of the American city of Atlanta resigned after an officer killed a black man during an arrest, said the mayor Saturday, the new murder angered the demonstrations against racism and the police brutality.
Images in local media showed hundreds of protesters on the streets on Saturday and flames engulfed Wendy’s restaurant where Rayshard Brooks, 27, was killed.
The officer who shot Brooks was sacked on Saturday and identified by Atlanta police as Garrett Rolfe. The second officer has been placed on administrative service, according to ABC News.
In televised comments made earlier today, Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said that Shields, with more than two decades of police experience, “offered to step down as police chief immediately.”
The protesters were in the streets before dark on Saturday, a group blocking a highway near the Wendy’s restaurant and confronting the police.
Dozens of protesters have been arrested, CNN said, citing Atlanta police.
Unrest comes as the United States faces a historic toll of systemic racism, with mass civil unrest triggered by the May 25 murder of another African-American man, George Floyd, while he was in police custody.
Floyd died after a white Minneapolis policeman knelt on the neck for almost nine minutes.
The protests that spread first in the country and then in the world forced a conversation on the consequences of slavery, colonialism and white violence against people of color, as well as on the militarization of the police in America.
Georgia was hit hard by these protests. A black man, Ahmaud Arbery, was killed in the southwest of the state by one of three white men who chased him in vans while jogging in February.
“Why kill him?”
Wendy’s employees called police Friday evening to complain that Brooks was sleeping in his car and blocking other customers at the scene, an official report said.
He failed a sobriety test and resisted when police tried to arrest him, said the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI).
The surveillance video showed “that during a physical fight with officers, Brooks got one of the agent’s Tasers and started to flee,” the report continued.
“The officers chased Brooks on foot and during the chase, Brooks turned around and pointed the Taser at the officer. The officer fired his weapon, hitting Brooks,” said the statement.
Brooks was taken to hospital but died after an operation, he added, adding that an officer had been injured.
A lawyer acting for the family of the deceased said that disproportionate force was used during the confrontation.
“In Georgia, a Taser is not a deadly weapon – it is the law,” L. Chris Stewart told reporters.
“The support came, I think in two minutes. He would have been locked up and trapped. Why did you have to kill him?”
“(The officer) had other options than shooting a man in the back.”
Brooks has four children, Stewart added, and celebrated his eight-year-old daughter’s birthday on Friday.
His death was the 48th shooting involving an officer the GBI was asked to investigate this year, according to local newspaper Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Fifteen of these incidents were fatal.
“I watched this on the Internet, of the whole situation of George Floyd coming together as we do,” said Decatur Redd, Brooks’ cousin, clearly shaken.
“The most hurtful thing for me is watching the video, waking up and watching the video,” he added. “And I have two little boys, they see the same video.”
(With the exception of the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
