Philip “Mitch” Brailsford (1990- ), a White American killer cop, gunned down Daniel Shaver, an unarmed White man, father of two, who was crying, pleading for his life:
“Please do not shoot me.”
Video of the shooting was not made public till after a jury cleared Brailsford of second-degree murder on December 8th 2017.
The night in question: On January 18th 2016, police in Mesa, Arizona received an emergency call from La Quinta Inn:
“A couple of the guests – I’m an employee – they’ve come to me and they’ve told me that somebody is pointing a rifle outside of one of the windows in our building.”
Police got to the hallway outside Room 502 and ordered everyone out of the room. A man and a woman came out. The man was Shaver.
Police ordered them to get on the ground. They did.
Simon Says: Instead of simply putting handcuffs on them, Sergeant Charles Langley had them play a sick and horrifying sort of game of Simon Says. They were to crawl down the hallway towards six police officers who had their guns drawn. If they got any of the instructions shouted at them wrong, the police would shoot: “you may not survive it.”
Sergeant Langley: “You listen. You obey.”
The woman won the gruesome game, Shaver lost:
SHAVER: [on his knees] Please do not shoot me. [interrupted]
LANGLEY: THEN LISTEN TO MY INSTRUCTIONS.
SHAVER: I’m trying to just do what you say.
LANGLEY: DON’T TALK! LISTEN!!! HANDS STRAIGHT UP IN THE AIR! DO NOT PUT YOUR HANDS DOWN FOR ANY REASON!!! YOU THINK YOU’RE GONNA FALL – YOU BETTER FALL ON YOUR FACE – YOUR HANDS GO BACK INTO THE SMALL OF YOUR BACK OR DOCK WE ARE GOING TO SHOOT YOU! DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?
SHAVER: Yes, sir. [sobbing]
LANGLEY: CRAWL TOWARDS ME! CRAWL TOWARDS ME!
SHAVER: Yes, sir. [sobbing, crawling, then reaches to pull up his basketball shorts]
LANGLEY: Don’t —
BRAILSFORD’S AR-15: BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
Brailsford thought Shaver was reaching for a gun. He never saw a gun. There was no gun. Brailsford was the only one of the six officers to shoot.
The second time Shaver’s wife saw the video she went into convulsions.
Protect and serve.
In Room 502 the police found – an airgun (BB gun). Shaver was on the road from Texas, making money shooting birds that get inside Walmarts and other businesses. Thus the airgun. He invited a man and woman he had met to his room for drinks. They got drunk.
Charged with murder: Brailsford was shocked that he was charged with murder. He thought he had done nothing wrong. The police union agreed. And, after a six-week murder trial, so did the jury. Brailsford had said to them the magic words: I feared for my life.
The Mesa police department, where his father had served for 19 years, fired him. They knew something the jury was not allowed to know: Brailsford had etched onto his AR-15 the words:
“YOU’RE FUCKED”
– Abagond, 2017.
Sources: mainly Google Images, The Atlantic, Vox, Heavy, and Lybio (transcript).
See also:
- killer cops
- The BB Gun Club
- unarmed Whites killed by police
- White killers taken alive by police
565
I watched the horrifying video and this man was absolutely no threat to anyone. That officer expressed zero fear and had plenty of opportunities to handcuff this man since he was on the ground and totally compliant. It breaks my heart to know that his wife watched the footage of him be executed in this way and that his two precious daughters will never see their father again. When something like this can happen to a young, middle-class family man… and the officer can walk, America HAS to see that Black people aren’t just making this stuff up: Our entire criminal justice system is truly off the rails!
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Sorry, meant to say young, middle-class WHITE family man in my earlier post.
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This is very sad. May he Rest In Peace.
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Police abuse of authority is not just a black issue. It affects everybody, including guys like this. It affects black people more acutely than whites. It is an issue that should concern conservatives more than liberals. Unfortunately, due to the facile MSM portrayal of this issue as a “black issue”, conservatives nowadays do not align with any notion that there is a problem with law enforcement, even in the face of videos like these.
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Reblogged this on League of Bloggers For a Better World.
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“Unfortunately, due to the facile MSM portrayal of this issue as a “black issue”, conservatives nowadays do not align with any notion that there is a problem with law enforcement”
Is that the fault of the MSM, or is it because these conservatives are racist?
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I still don’t understand why they just didn’t cuff him. What was the point of making him crawl on the floor except a sadistic power trip?
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@ Solitaire
It was a sick power trip, like something out of Abu Ghraib.
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Sad and scary.
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Another video I didn’t watch. The description was enough for me. Sick! The police force has a lot of human detritus lurking within. It’s disgusting that he walks free.
Here’s the uncropped pic BTW:
https://heavyeditorial.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/brailsford-1.jpg?quality=65&strip=all&w=708&strip=all
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Definitely, some people are not fit to be police agents.
And unfortunately the institution itself is making mistakes in not letting those rotte apples being exemplary punished for their behavior. Sad, very sad.
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rotten
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I hope the Fed get this ****. But the Mesa Police and the town of Mesa need to be hit where it hurts ($$$) via a civil suit. That’s the only thing numbskulls like this understand. And they have to change their training and protocol. Just think, without the videotape, it would have been the same old story.
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And don’t blame MSM for making this a “black issue.” People decide what they want to do and then think up reasons to justify it.
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Solitaire, much longer conversation for another place/day, but, yes, some conservatives are racist and this is certainly a vector in the conservative backlash against BLM, but the liberal press is also racist and I would posit that it benefits from prolonging racially divisive vitriol. Further, another main vector in the problem with police abuse of authority is the impact of police unions. The MSM will not criticize unions under most circumstances, hence their default of blaming racism as the sole driver of police misconduct, when in reality the issue is nuanced and multifaceted and affects all citizens to some extent.
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@ blanc2
After I made that comment, I read the Atlantic article that Abagond linked to as one of his sources. Turns out that article was making a case for directing the media focus onto white victims as a way to achieve the police reforms BLM is calling for.
It is a strong argument, but at the same time I worry that if the underlying racism is not also addressed, even with the reforms there may continue to be a disproportionate number of black people (and Native Americans) killed.
I do agree that police violence is a problem that affects white people too, and that it especially impacts people with mental illness/disabilities across all races.
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I also don’t know if it is quite accurate to say that the MSM has a default of blaming racism for all police misconduct. Only a few years ago, there was little national media attention being paid to the racial problem. There has been discussion in the press about problems with police training, police protocol, the trend of putting their safety above the people they are supposed to protect, etc. There have been articles comparing police violence here to that in other countries and suggesting best practices that the U.S. could adopt. And I’ve read many articles about cases involving white victims.
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Solitaire — the one thing you won’t find in the MSM is any clear-eyed analysis of how public unionism exacerbates the problem by creating labyrinthine procedures that make it difficult or impossible for law enforcement leadership to weed out their bad apples. You’re correct that prior to BLM, there was little media attention given to this issue at all. This is because it tends to affect few individuals in any large-scale way, and the MSM is generally only interested in issues that sell advertising space.
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What’s MSM?
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@ Herneith
It’s kind of like BDSM only with more microphones and fewer feather ticklers.
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MSM = Main Stream Media. “If it bleeds, it leads.”
Which leads me to my other fundamental issue with the way the combined BLM/MSM approaches this problem: their autistic focus on police use of force, rather than a more nuanced look at police abuse of authority. In fact, we hire police to use force. It’s their job, and it is never pretty when they do, but the media has learned that splashing some shaky cell phone video of a cop shooting/tasing/punching somebody on their banner page under a misleading headline (i.e. “Cop tases man for jaywalking”) sells advertising space so they encourage this. The message becomes very dumbed down: “Police should not use force on black people.”
That message is untenable, and frankly nonsensical. For just one small example, I know a black woman, a friend, who was happy recently when police used force to subdue her domestic abuser, also black. This message is why republicans have united against BLM.
Abuse of authority occurs at all levels. Sometimes it involves using force where force is unwarranted; sometimes it involves parking in a handicapped space to get a coffee and donut. I believe we should take a “broken windows” approach to this, under which the pig who parks in the handicapped spot for his coffee/donut gets fired, cutting him off long before his hubris grows and he feels free to go upside some innocent person’s head just because he feels like it.
The sensationalist approach of the MSM is why Michael Brown became the first poster child, as opposed to John Crawford, whose senseless murder barely found a column inch on page 5 of my local paper. Meanwhile, every law enforcement agency that has reviewed the Michael Brown case, including Eric Holder, has concluded that he was in fact a violent man who attacked a cop, who in turn shot in self defense.
This is just one example of how the MSM/BLM combination undermines its own credibility on what I view as one of the most critical issues facing our nation in terms of threat to our democracy and freedom. Publications like Reason, The Atlantic, and The Economist have patiently laid out the case, for years, about how the increased militarization and isolation of police has created a balkanized environment in which more and more innocent civilians are injured by violence-prone or trigger-happy cops, who resort to the “we face danger every day” falsehood (and fallacy) to justify their violence. Philando Castile is dead because of this, and John Crawford, and Darrien Hunt, and Tamir Rice, and Daniel Shaver. It’s an issue that should concern conservatives a lot, because it involves the increasing frequency of government depriving citizens of liberty/life without just cause or due process, but In the meantime, MSM/BLM presents an easily assailable sound byte message (“stop using force on black people”) that alienates conservatives and turns this into a black/white issue, rather than an issue facing all Americans.
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@ Blanc2
What is your opinion about racial disparity in policing? I’m not only asking about police violence but also things like racial profiling and targeting minority neighborhoods to meet ticket quotas.
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@ Blanc2
Your arguments are riddled with fallacies.
The most glaring fallacy is the conflation of the Mainstream/Corporate Media with Black Lives Matter. Where did you get that bizarre idea? Breitbart?
Black Lives Matter is a decentralized coalition of groups, some with more integrity than others. The corporate media is the mouthpiece for politically powerful groups in this country——-including the police. The media uses a specific tone and words to describe police actions. That tone and words are very different when they discuss BLM. Examples can be found in this article:
I will write about the remaining fallacies later in the day. Until later….
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Solitaire: Police abuse of authority affects black people more acutely than whites, in many ways such as the things you outline, but in more subtle ways too, such as individual officers (both black and white) being quicker to resort to force when dealing with a black suspect as opposed to a white one, or the sense by police that they can “get away with” more involving a black person because juries tend to be less sympathetic to black people suing police. All of the issues facing civilians vis-à-vis police are magnified in the case of black civilians.
Afrofem: BLM obtains its voice through the media. Without media exposure, BLM would be small groups huddled on street corners chanting and shouting to random passersby.
The media manipulates its message to enhance advertising revenue, which is the business of media (that is, the business of media is not disseminating news, it is selling advertising). One credo of the MSM is: “If it bleeds, it leads.” In other words, sensational imagery, accompanied by glib sound bytes, is a successful business strategy for media. Hence the autistic focus on police use of force.
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@ Blanc2
Perhaps you should explain what you mean by the MSM. I consider both the Atlantic and the Economist to be mainstream media.
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@ Blanc2
“BLM obtains its voice through the media. Without media exposure, BLM would be small groups huddled on street corners chanting and shouting to random passersby.”
That comment presumes a mass media environment that existed in the 1970’s when protest groups strategized and postured for mass media exposure of their message. That strategy hasn’t worked for decades.
The influential 1971 Powell Memo put the kybosh on that form of media strategy. Powell criticized the mass media of his day for giving ink and air time to left oriented groups with whom he disagreed. Powell wrote:
http://reclaimdemocracy.org/powell_memo_lewis/
In the years since the publication of that memo, mass media/corporate media has sharply curtailed coverage of protests against the system. From nuclear disarmament to women’s rights to police brutality, groups that agitate against the system have found themselves either shut out of coverage, reported in a negative light or trivialized in corporate media.
In a 2008 Global Research article examining media disinformation about social groups, human rights researcher, Michael Barker pointed out “In 1998, John McCarthy and his colleagues compared the number and coverage of protests which took place in Washington DC in 1982 and 1991, and found that although there were 50% more protests in 1991, the number reported in the media (the New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC, CBS, and NBC) decreased by 16% (from 158 to 133).”
So even though there has been a general increase in protests over the years, they are covered less and with a more critical eye by the corporate media. That is particularly true of protests by Black people against White institutions such as the police and their allies.
One reason Black Lives Matter and similar groups have been more visible is due to the rise ofsocial media. For a time, groups that challenge the system were able to speak to the public without gatekeepers or media filters. The “shaky cell phone video of a cop shooting/tasing/punching somebody” could be shown directly to the public through YouTube and social media without corporate media censorship.
However, since the election of Trump, social media platforms have been under intense pressure to banish such groups to the digital wilderness. They have responded by pushing activists off networks, making their reports, videos and images harder to find and in the case of Google, exiling left oriented websites to page ten of the search results———a move akin to sending someone to online Siberia.
To me, that is hardly excessive media exposure. Certainly not enough to conflate BLM with corporate media.
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Afrofem: I agree with your points. I’m aware of the history you cite.
As to BLM itself, I’ve heard many incisive, nuanced statements, including that 2-minute impromptu talk that went mini-viral where that white supremacist rally gave a BLM speaker 2 minutes on their stage and the BLM guy killed it with an amazing monologue.
But I’m listening, unlike most of America. Worse, unlike many other protest movements, BLM has received a ton of coverage in the MSM, and that coverage has been reductionist and simplistic to a huge degree. This is the version of BLM that most of America hears, and it is the version of BLM that has balkanized the discourse on police abuse of authority in a way that has turned it into a conservative/liberal schism. The message of BLM has effectively been co-opted by the MSM. I have my own theories about why the media would do this, which is a discussion for another place and time, but I will say that I think the MSM profits from promoting a racially divided America.
I view the growth of militarized police, and the growth of police violence on civilians, as one of the great looming threats to our democracy. It is an issue that should be of urgent concern to conservatives (and I’m talking about people who are actually conservative in a traditional sense — small government, small spending, individual liberty — as opposed to the faux conservatives that comprise Trump’s base — racists and theocratic fascists) because it involves the erosion of liberty.
The version of BLM that has been promulgated in the media has caused backwards movement on that issue. It has unfortunately pushed the conversation backward, not forward, and it has done so at a time when there was potentially a window of opportunity for honest public dialogue on this issue.
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@ Blanc2
Two observations:
🌀 From my point of view, BLM and similar groups have not “balkanized” the discourse on police violence against civilians. They have pointed out the violence and they have protested against the violence. They are reacting to existing “balkanization” in our society, not creating division.
A majority of White Americans have a dim view of protest by Black Americans. They are extremely resentful of:
➤ the fact that Black Americans exist at all.
➤ the fact that they have to hear anything negative from Black Americans about unequal treatment in this country.
➤ the fact that Black American groups like BLM will sometimes employ direct action tactics (blocking freeways, bridges, disrupting concerts and Christmas Tree lighting ceremonies) that jolt the White majority out of their usual mode of ignorance and feigned innocence.
➤ Those are the tactics that attract the attention of sensationalistic media outlets. The message of BLM has not been “co-opted” by the media, those outlets just love the theater of those dramatic protests. They attract eyeballs to their channels, etc.
🌀 The USA has not been a democratic republic for some time now. There is no “our democracy”. There is no liberty. We are already in the first stages of totalitarianism. I understand that a lot of people have been clinging to those views for years in a vain attempt to not see what is right in front of them. The only good thing I can say about Trump is that he is saying (and doing) out loud what previous presidents did in back hallways and smoke filled rooms.
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Now that police are starting to murder White citizens, yelps from Euro-Americans are growing louder. I recently came across an post that criticized the New York Times for downplaying the phenomenon of “swatting”. Swatting is when malicious “pranksters” call the police to the home of someone they don’t like and the police arrive guns ablazing.
That is something the police have been doing in ‘hoods, barrios and rez’s for years. Of course, when they were confining their murderous impulses to those locations, police behavior didn’t rate a mention because the lives of Black folk, Latinx folk and Native folk didn’t matter. [Still doesn’t]
Unlike those innocent White Citizens now being gunned down.
I found the comments quite interesting too. Out of nearly fifty comments, only two people mentioned race at all.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/01/lee-camp-let-fix-ny-times-police-kill-another-innocent-man.html
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I’m a combat veteran (21B) with two deployments to Iraq with multiple engagements, a CAB, GCM, multiple ARCOM’s and a list that extends out of block 13, and the respect of all of my peers and family. I served honorably. when I saw the video I immediately broke down and cried. Let it be known, Philip Brailsford and this SGT Langley are as disgusting to me as ISIS. I consider every member on that team to be a threat to the American people, and they displayed a failure to analyze the situation and a clear misunderstanding of how to detain a non-combatant. You have failed your badge, your flag, and most importantly you failed the people you SWORE to protect. I back the blue, and for any law enforcement viewing this, they shamed the badge you proudly wear. I don’t want to hear what would I do, I’ve been in far worse situations than a man begging for his life and crawling on his knees. Look, neutralizing threats is a job for professionals, if you can’t put on your big boy pants, stay away from the badge. Disappointing. The Japanese samurai used to disembowel themselves ceremonially in order to preserve their honor after failing themselves and their comrades in arms. Low hanging fruit.
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“When something like this can happen to a young, middle-class family man… and the officer can walk, America HAS to see that Black people aren’t just making this stuff up: Our entire criminal justice system is truly off the rails!” – Laura M. Sands
Sorry ‘bout that Laura, but your screed of a post reeks to high hell and your thin veneer shielding your suspect attitude towards Black people is quite worn. Thereby, revealing you as that of a typical, Amerikana racist!
Why on God’s earth should it take the death of ONE American white man on his knees, begging for his life in the process, for white Amerika at large to finally say: Lo, these white law enforcement officers are shooting so-called African American not only unjustly, but even when they are unarmed. Is this what it truly takes Laura??
May I ask you, where were you when Eric Garner was choked to death by Officer Daniel Pantaleo; or when Tamir Rice was fatally shot by Officer Timothy Loehmann; or when Philando Castile was shot multiple times in front of his daughter and girlfriend and so many others who died unnecessarily at the hands of white cops?
It bears repeating: Where were you Laura??
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OMG are you kidding me!!!? That officer should be charged for murder!!! That man was so scared he didn’t know how to respond to the directions. Another fucked up cop with power issues thinking his authority has god syndrome.
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How the hell could a jury find Brailsford not guilty? Even if they thought it wasn’t murder surely they had the option of manslaughter, you can’t shoot someone five times at close range without intending to harm them, an outrageous verdict that taints the whole justice system which has hardly got a clean image anyway.
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