Officer Joseph Mensah, who has fatally shot three people in the line of duty since 2015, is resigning from the department
(Picture: AP)A US police officer who has fatally shot three people in the line of duty since 2015 including a black teenager outside a shopping mall is quitting the department.
Joseph Mensah's separation agreement with the police authorities in the town of Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, was agreed on Tuesday night, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.
The Milwaukee County District Attorney's Office has ruled all three shootings by Mensah, who also is black, were justified self-defence.
Protests followed the most recent shooting outside the Mayfair Mall, where Alvin Cole, 17, was shot five times by Mensah in February 2020 after he fled from police following a disturbance inside the shopping centre.
The officer said the teenager pointed a gun at him, so he shot him.
Mensah had been suspended by the Wauwatosa Police and Fire Commission after a complaint was filed by the family of another of the men he killed, Jay Anderson Jr. He was shot after the officer found him sitting in a car in a city park after hours in 2016.
Mensah also fatally shot Antonio Gonzales in 2015 after he refused to drop a sword, according to police.
On the same day that Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm cleared Mensah of any criminal wrongdoing in Mr Cole's death, an independent investigator hired by the commission recommended that the officer be fired.
Mr Chisholm's decision set off nights of protests throughout the city where a curfew was imposed for five days. Schools were closed, businesses were boarded up and the police department was surrounded by a metal fence in anticipation of civil unrest.
Unrest has swept several US cities in the wake of a string of high-profile police killings of black people in the US, including Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, in March this year, and George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in May, sparking waves of Black Lives Matter protests around the world.
