The Shooting Of Philando Castile

My God, this video below of the immediate aftermath of Philando Castile’s shooting by a suburban Minneapolis police officer leaves one speechless. His girlfriend, Lavish Reynolds, started uploading the video to Facebook live, moments after the officer shot him in a traffic stop for a busted tail light. In the video, you see a wounded, bleeding Castile in what were the last moments of his life. Do not watch this if you are not prepared for it! It is NSFW! But I hope you will watch the horror that this woman and her seven-year-old daughter endured, to say nothing, obviously, of the dead man:

From the Washington Post account of the video:

As Castile moans and appears to lose consciousness, the officer can be heard in the background shouting expletives in apparent frustration.

“Mam, keep your hands where they are,” the officer shouts at Reynolds. “I told him not to reach for it! I told him to get his hands up.”

“You told him to get his ID, sir, his driver’s license,” Reynolds responds. “Oh my god. Please don’t tell me he’s dead. Please don’t tell me my boyfriend just went like that.”

More:

From her video, Reynolds appears to have begun recording seconds after her boyfriend was shot, just after 9 p.m. local time. (The footage appears to have been flipped when it was uploaded to social media sites, mistakenly suggesting Castile was the passenger in the car when, in fact, he was the driver.)

More:

In the video, Reynolds tells the police that her boyfriend is “good man” who works for St. Paul Public Schools.

“He doesn’t have no record or anything,” she says. “He’s never been in jail or anything. He’s not a gang member or anything.”

A website for J. J. Hill Montessori Magnet School lists Phil Castile as its cafeteria supervisor.

Clarence Castile, Philando’s uncle, told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that his nephew had worked in the school’s cafeteria for 12 to 15 years, “cooking for the little kids.” He said his nephew was “a good kid” who grew up in St. Paul. Philando Castile’s Facebook page says he attended the University of Minnesota.

And finally:

“He was reaching for his license and registration. You told him to get it sir! You told him,” Reynolds says. “He tried to tell you he was licensed to carry and he was going to take it off. Please don’t tell me boyfriend is gone. He don’t deserve this.”

The screen goes black.

“Please Lord, you know our rights Lord,” Reynolds says, apparently praying. “You know we are innocent people, Lord. We are innocent people.”

Read the whole thing.

Keep in mind that we don’t know what happened in the moments before the shooting. Why would a police officer approach a car stopped for a busted tail light with his weapon drawn? The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports that Castile had only misdemeanors on his criminal record. Did the cop order Philando Castile to keep his hands up, and did Castile defy him by foolishly reaching into his coat to remove the gun that, according to Reynolds, he told the cop that he had? Was the gun licensed and legally owned, as Reynolds said? Does that matter?

To be clear, the only people who saw what Castile did in the seconds before the shooting are the cop, Lavish Reynolds, and perhaps her daughter. I want to be careful here and not judge the cop based only on partial information. But this is a horrible situation, and … what can you even say at this point, other than may God comfort those suffering people, keep the peace, and bring forth justice. 

Question for the room: should we be grateful that technology brings us videos like this, because it tells us the true story with vivid immediacy? Or should we regret it because the imagery is extremely emotional, and obscures the search for truth?

Me, I’m grateful that we have this technology now, because police can’t get away with abusing their authority. But I’m writing this as someone who just watched this video, and who is in an emotional state, shocked and grieving for Castile, Reynolds, her daughter, and those who loved Castile. I know that emotion conditions the way I regard this killing. We watch a man die on video, shot to death by a cop at point-blank range. We hear the sobbing and the pleas of his girlfriend, and the cries of her daughter, who may have seen it happen too (this isn’t clear from the video). The humanity of this scene tears your heart out and, if Reynolds’ account is accurate, infuriates you. That is a black man, a school cafeteria worker, who was pulled over because he had a busted tail light. And now he is dead.

The video is so emotionally direct that it’s hard to keep straight the fact that we don’t know what happened in the moments before she started recording. The partial truth is so vivid and shocking that it may obscure our ability to take in the whole truth. This is the problem with video: it makes us think we’re getting the whole story, when that may not be the truth.

How Lavish Reynolds kept her cool and recorded this I will never know. However this comes out, that woman showed grace under pressure that is heroic.

I will update this post throughout the day as more information becomes available.