[ad_1]
More than a dozen people have been arrested and more than 30 officers were injured in protests stemming from the fatal police shooting of a black man in Philadelphia.
Officers said the man refused their orders to drop a knife in a confrontation captured on video.
The man, identified by city officials as Walter Wallace, 27, was shot before 4pm Monday (8pm GMT) in an episode filmed by a passerby and posted on social media.
Witnesses complained that the police had fired an excessive number of shots.
Wallace’s father, Walter Wallace Sr., told The Philadelphia Inquirer that his son appeared to have been shot 10 times.
He said his son was also a father, was taking medication and had struggled with his mental health.
“Why didn’t they use a Taser?” I ask.
Officers had been called to the predominantly black Cobbs Creek neighborhood of West Philadelphia over reports of a man with a gun, said Tanya Little, a police spokeswoman.
Police said they found Mr. Wallace holding a knife and ordered him to drop the gun multiple times. Wallace advanced on the officers, who fired multiple shots, Little said.
In the video, a woman and at least one man follow Mr. Wallace, trying to get him to listen to the officers, as he quickly walks down the street and between cars.
The woman, identified by family members as Wallace’s mother, screams and throws something at an officer after her son is shot and falls to the ground.
The video doesn’t make it clear if he was actually holding a knife, but witnesses said he was.
Mr. Wallace was hit in the shoulder and chest, Little said, but did not say how many times he was shot or how many times officers fired.
One of the officers took him to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead a short time later, he said.
No officers or bystanders were injured in the initial confrontation, Little said. The names of the officers who fired the shots and their races were not immediately released. Both wore body cameras and were removed from service on the street pending investigation.
Neighbors and witnesses soon gathered Monday night in the Locust Street block where the shooting took place, with many saying police didn’t have to shoot Wallace.
Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw went to the scene and spoke with neighbors, and both Mayor Jim Kenney, Democrat, and Ms. Outlaw said they would be holding a meeting soon to speak with the community about the shooting and other concerns.
“I heard and felt the anger of the community,” Ms. Outlaw said in a statement, adding that the video “raises a lot of questions” and that “those questions will be fully addressed by the investigation.”
Later, hundreds of people took to the streets in West Philadelphia into the early hours of Tuesday, and interactions between protesters and police turned violent at times, the Inquirer reported.
Police cars and dump trucks were set on fire as police struggled to contain the crowd. More than a dozen officers, many with batons in hand, formed a line as they raced down 52nd Street.
Following this, the crowd largely dispersed.
Thirty officers were injured, most of them by thrown objects such as bricks and stones, according to police.
One officer had a broken leg and other injuries after she was hit by a pickup truck, police said. The other injured officers were treated and released.
The 52nd Street corridor was also the scene of protests against police brutality in late May, after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police.
Those protests have been the subject of hearings in the City Council, in which protesters described harsh and unnecessary tactics, such as tear gas and projectiles fired by police.
[ad_2]