By Steve Gorman and Kanishka Singh
July 22 (Reuters) – Police officers in Madison, Wisconsin, fatally shot a man they were trying to arrest on Wednesday during a street-corner scuffle, which was recorded by onlookers and went viral on the internet, sparking protests in the city.
Police said the officer who fired his weapon was injured by a knife that the man produced during the struggle.
Bystander video of the incident circulating online and on news media outlets suggested the man who was shot was a person of color, and all four officers involved in the incident appeared to be white.
As in many other deadly police shootings in the U.S. in recent years, race added to tensions over whether lethal force was justified, with an African-American community advocacy group saying the man shot on Wisconsin’s capital city was Black.
“Madison Police shot another black man. We need all eyes on Madison police. We keep us safe,” the group Urban Triage said in a message posted on social media.
Speaking to reporters at a news conference, Madison Police Chief John Patterson described the man who was killed only as a male in his 30s, and declined to specify his race, or the race of any of the four officers – three men and one woman.
Patterson said the incident unfolded when police responded to a call about a person who was suspected of “checking parked vehicles” in the Marquette neighborhood of Madison, the capital city of Wisconsin. When police located the man and tried to make contact with him, he fled on a bicycle.
Officers caught up with him about 30 minutes later, and the scuffle ensued after the man “either fell off or was taken off the bicycle by officers,” the police chief said.
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Patterson said an “independent” investigation would be conducted by the Wisconsin Department of Justice’s criminal division, and that all four officers would be placed on administrative leave.
The police chief said he had reviewed two bystander-filmed video clips circulating online, but said there was additional footage that had not been widely seen, and he asked the public not to jump to conclusions.
Asked whether he would classify the shooting as an apparent case of excessive use of force, Patterson answered, “I can’t determine that.”
The video going viral presents “one perspective” of the incident, he said, adding, “it is not a full overview of everything that was visible from different angles.”
The video online shows the four uniformed officers grappling with the man amid shouts of “Let go” and “he’s got a knife.”
In one clip, an officer is heard yelling “Taser” as police clutch at the man. Seconds later, the man is forced to the ground, and one officer stomps on his legs as another pulls his gun and fires three shots. That officer then appears to re-holster the weapon and kneel down to the man, who has stopped moving.
Patterson said it appeared to him, also, that there were three shots, and all were fired by a single officer, who he described as a “veteran” of the department.
He said the officer who fired his weapon did so after he had suffered injuries from a “large, fixed-blade knife” that the man had “pulled out or produced” moments before while police were trying to subdue him as he resisted arrest.
A second officer suffered an unspecified injury during the confrontation, according to the police chief.
Between the emergence of the knife and the gunfire, another officer attempted to immobilize the man with a Taser stun gun, but the device, for unknown reasons, proved ineffective, Patterson said.
How much time elapsed between the knife emerging and the shots fired was not clear, he said. But an object that may have been the knife is seen on the ground from the start of the video clip, which did not capture the beginning of the struggle.
News media images showed crowds of demonstrators gathering and marching down the state Capitol in protest after the shooting.
(Reporting and writing by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Additional reporting by Kanishka Sing in Washington; Editing by Michael Perry)
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