Six days after Terence Crutcher was fatally shot by a Tulsa police officer, and despite the release of video and audio, key details remain disputed. Did the 40-year-old have his hands up at the moment Betty Shelby opened fire? Was he reaching towards the inside of his SUV, and was the window open or shut? Were police influenced by his race? Was he behaving erratically, as if on drugs – and even if that was the case, could it provide any sort of justification for killing him?
What cannot be challenged, based on clear video evidence from a squad car’s dashcam of the encounter last Friday evening, is that after Crutcher had been shot once in the chest, tased by another officer and sank to the ground, lying still and bleeding profusely, the officers near him did not immediately provide medical assistance. In fact, they backed away tentatively in tandem, weapons still drawn, as more colleagues arrived.
It is not until almost two minutes later that an officer approaches Crutcher – to examine his clothes, evidently to check if he is armed. Finally, about 30 seconds later, an effort is made to administer first aid.
In addition to anger at the death of an unarmed man whose interaction with police began merely because his car appeared to have broken down in the middle of the road, some activists are outraged at what they argue was a lack of urgency as Crutcher lay on the ground.
They accused police of callous indifference towards his fate. “They just sat there and let him bleed out. That is disregard for humanity, in itself,” said Marq Lewis, a local community organiser.
Ryan Kiesel, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Oklahoma, said the police’s actions were “reprehensible and indefensible” and compounded the tragedy. “They dehumanised him even further in death by allowing him to bleed out, failing to render any sort of immediate aid and even casually milling about the scene. There is on the video no sense of urgency among any of the police officers about trying to save this man’s life,” he said.
Shelby has basic training as an emergency medical responder, but her attorney said that her colleagues told her not to help the man she had just shot. “I know Officer Shelby, after she was taken to the back of her car, you can see that on the video, said ‘please let me get my EMT bag and let me go work on this man’. The officers there thought it best that in her state of mind that she not go back up there, but I do know Officer Shelby wanted to,” Scott Wood said.
Amid the ongoing nationwide focus on fatal encounters between police and African American people, departments around the country have drawn criticism for not rendering aid promptly in high-profile incidents captured on video.
Last year, following the failure of officers in Cleveland to help Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy they fatally shot in 2014, the city agreed to changes in its use of force policy that include a requirement to provide emergency first aid.
It was several minutes after he was shot inside a car in July before police in Minnesota began administering first aid to Philando Castile. He died in hospital about 20 minutes after sustaining multiple gunshot wounds.
As with many aspects of police training, medical standards and expectations vary widely across the country. Boston, for example, has a detailed policy requiring officers to give first aid while waiting for an ambulance.
When Houston police fatally shot Alva Braziel in a street last July, body camera footage shows officers were more focused on ensuring the scene was safe and talking with witnesses than on attempting life-saving measures.
An officer leans over Braziel’s body and pries what appears to be a gun from his right hand, as another stands nearby, weapon drawn – but the footage does not indicate that anyone tried to administer first aid. An officer is heard saying an ambulance has been called; it arrives about six minutes after the shooting.
A Houston police spokesman declined to discuss the incident because it is still under internal investigation. Generally, he said: “We do not have medical training at HPD, we leave that up to the fire department and the paramedics … Some officers are trained and have use of tourniquets but not all 5,200.”
“Best practice is that after the shooting occurs and as soon as the officers are assured that they are safe, and that the scene is stable, the officers need to shift from being in enforcement mode to being life-savers and trying to provide what may be life-saving medical assistance,” said Jim Bueermann, a former police chief in California who is president of the Police Foundation, a national police thinktank based in Washington. “But it’s this matter of making sure the scene is stable. Using Tulsa as the example, they had to first make sure that there was no one else in the vehicle.
“Someone who is wounded by the police can still be capable of shooting them. There are examples where police have shot and wounded a guy and he was able to shoot them. A gun concealed in a waistband; or there are examples of someone being arrested and put in a police car and they missed that he had a gun in his pocket and then he shoots them,” he said.
“But there is a huge problem – this is a huge issue, it’s the number one issue, this issue of the police use of force and shooting people of colour and how it affects community trust and confidence in the police. On a national level, this is THE issue.”
The Tulsa officers cannot be accused of failing to follow the department’s medical protocols – because there aren’t any. “We do not currently have a policy regarding rendering medical aid,” said Jeanne MacKenzie, a spokeswoman.
She said Oklahoma state standards require eight hours of CPR and basic first aid training, which the Tulsa force supplements with another eight hours of “tactical medical training”, which focuses on “providing a student with training more specific to battlefield trauma. So we focus more on stopping heavy bleeds, clearing blocked airways and treating penetrating chest injuries.”
A decision by the local district attorney on whether Shelby will face criminal charges is not expected before next week.
Peaceful protests and vigils have been held each day since police made the footage public on Monday. On Wednesday evening, a standing-room-only crowd of hundreds crammed into a Baptist church north of downtown for a service one speaker billed as the chance to give expression to “righteous rage”.
Many attendees wrote laments on pieces of paper pinned to wires that ran along the walls of the hallway at the main entrance. Some quoted the Bible, some expressed sorrow and others conveyed anxiety. One note said: “I live in fear that my nephews may be next”.
