David Collie (c. 1983- ), an unarmed Black man of Forth Worth, Texas, was shot in the back by off-duty police officers on July 27th 2016. He is now paralysed from the waist down. But until his lawyer got hold of the dashcam video in December, the police told a very different story:
According to the police officers Collie fit the description of a robber seen at a gas station: a Black man wearing no shirt with a silver gun. Collie was seen wearing no shirt (on a summer night in Texas) a half mile from the gas station and had a silver object in his hand. They ordered him to put his hands up. When he refused, they gunned him down. Ten feet from his body they found a box cutter.
Collie was taken to the hospital where he stayed 61 days chained to his bed as a dangerous criminal – the police had charged him with “aggravated assault on a public servant.”
Open-shut case! But the grand jury refused to bring any charges against Collie – presumably because they saw the video:
The video shows the police driving up on Collie who is walking along seeming to mind his own business. The police get out of their car and within ten seconds gun him down – as he is walking away pointing to something out of view (his girlfriend’s place where he was going, says his lawyer). He does not seem to be any kind of threat. There is no sound so we do not know what he or the police said.
To review: Despite the dashcam video, the officers were willing to:
- Shoot him in the back.
- Lie about it.
The video was made public just days after another video from Forth Worth showed a police officer arresting Jacqueline Craig, a Black woman who called police after a (White) neighbour choked her seven-year-old son. Instead of arresting the neighbour, the police officer arrested her and her two daughters!
Nate Washington, Collie’s lawyer, got the video three weeks ago. He made it public now to show that these officers are not just bad apples, that it goes deeper than that:
“Unfortunately, what we’ve seen from the Fort Worth police officer in that video is not an isolated incident. Many members of our community have been assaulted, handled roughly by Fort Worth police officers. To be clear, we believe the vast majority of police officers are good and decent people.”
He thinks race has something to do with the shooting:
“It is the sort of racial bias and the sort of racial prejudice that says you should be afraid of the African American man. You watch that video, you have an officer that sees Mr. Collie and within 10 seconds puts a bullet in his back.
“That doesn’t happen to other folks. That happens to African Americans.”
Five months after the shooting the officers have yet to be fired, arrested or charged with a crime. The Fort Worth police department says they are still investigating (themselves).
– Abagond, 2016.
See also:
- The police
- Also in metro Dallas/Fort Worth
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Abagond 
Now this man has to deal with the pain and agony of being paralyzed for the rest of his life, because of an afraid policeman. If you are this afraid of PEOPLE, should you really be a police officer!?
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@thetfansforum
Are they afraid or do they just use that as an excuse because they know it is a tried and true, fool-proof defense? Until legal standards regarding self defense are toughened, these agents of white supremacy will continue to walk free. So it’s silly to expect some kind of punishment against the officers, when the system permits them to do what they did, and they have powerful forces that will protect them.
The only criminal recourse here is charging the officers for falsifying their police reports and perhaps perjury, but that’s not likely to happen.
So David Collie should just focus on preparing his civil case against the city, and hope they’re willing to settle for a large sum.
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“To be clear, we believe the vast majority of police officers are good and decent people.”
Long, bitter laugh out loud.
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I used to blog about these kinds of incidents, but it has gotten so frequent, I got tired. Emotionally tired.
Being black in America is to always be suspect. When one of us commits a crime, we’re all suspect, and someone or a bunch of us must pay. SMH.
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