Man Shot Dead by Police After Scuffle in WisconsinBy ASHLEY SOUTHALL MARCH 7, 2015
The police investigated the scene of a shooting in Madison, Wis., on Saturday.
Credit Steve Apps/The Capital Times, via Associated PressA 19-year-old Wisconsin man was shot and killed Friday by a police officer during a scuffle inside an apartment in Madison, police officials said. The shooting prompted protests that continued on Saturday and led officials to call for restraint while the shooting is investigated.
The shooting occurred Friday evening after the police received calls for a man who had committed battery and was jumping in and out of traffic, Michael C. Koval, the Madison chief of police, said. A police officer followed the man to an apartment on Williamson Street and forced his way in after hearing a disturbance inside, the chief said. The man then assaulted the officer, who shot the man, according to Chief Koval, who spoke Friday evening at a
news conference in Madison.
The officer immediately began rendering first aid, but the man died at a hospital, Chief Koval said. The authorities did not immediately release the man’s name, but friends and relatives identified him as Anthony Robinson, an African-American who graduated from high school in 2014.
“My son has never been a violent person,” Andrea Irwin, who identified herself as Mr. Robinson’s mother,
told WKOW, a Madison television station. “And to die in such a violent, violent way, it baffles me.”
Chief Koval described the scuffle between the officer and the man as “mutual combat,” but he said he did not know if the man had been armed. Initial findings “did not reflect a gun or anything of that nature would have been used by the subject,” he said.
The police did not identify the officer or release any details about his time on the force. Chief Koval later said the officer had suffered minor injuries from the altercation, in which he was struck in the head and knocked down.
Chief Koval said the officer had fired more than one shot, but he did not say how many times the man had been wounded.
Friday’s altercation was the third fatal shooting involving a Madison police officer since a law was adopted in April requiring police shootings to be investigated by an outside agency, according to
The Wisconsin State Journal.
It happened amid a public debate over how the police use lethal force in encounters with unarmed civilians, especially African-Americans, and the subsequent absence of charges or convictions for the officers involved. The refrain “Black lives matter” became the rallying cry of nationwide protests over the deaths of Eric Garner in Staten Island and Michael Brown of Ferguson, Mo., and others who died at the hands of police officers who were later cleared of criminal wrongdoing.
On Friday night, demonstrators gathered at the scene around a police blockade, drumming and chanting, “Black lives matter.” On Saturday, a crowd of protesters gathered for a rally at a downtown building that houses the Madison Police Department’s Central District and marched to Williamson Street, where the shooting happened.
Their protests coincided with the 50th anniversary commemoration of
the civil rights march from Selma, Ala., to Montgomery, the state capital. Representative John Lewis of Georgia, who participated in the Selma march in 1965 and introduced President Obama there on Saturday, urged others to “get out there and push and pull until we redeem the soul of America.”
The police said that the protests in Madison had been peaceful and that there were no arrests connected to the demonstrations.
Mayor Paul Soglin of Madison said that he met with the man’s relatives on Friday and that the shooting had caused a great deal of sadness and anger for the family and the larger community.
“The parents have encountered the worst imaginable outcome of anything in life, which is to lose a child,” he said. “They’re angry. They want answers.”
Mr. Soglin said that as far as he could tell, the man was “a nonviolent kid,” but he would not confirm his name. “He was a teenager,” he said. “He was congenial, had a lot of friends. He certainly wasn’t a kid that one would worry about as we do with some kids with gang affiliations. There is none of that, as far as I know.”
A memorial service was planned for Sunday evening.
Some people vented about the shooting on Twitter, using the hashtags #Justice4Tony and #WillyStreet to refer to Williamson Street.
“Praying for Madison tonight,”
wrote Shane Claiborne, a peace activist and a founder of the Simple Way, a faith community based in Philadelphia. “Stand up, sit in, walk out — until u get answers. And until there are no more hashtag eulogies.”
Zellie Imani, who writes about the intersection of politics, education, race and social change at
Black-Culture.com, compared the shooting to the death in 2010 of 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones in Detroit. The girl was fatally shot by a police officer during a late-night police raid in search of a murder suspect. The police officer who shot her was charged with involuntary manslaughter and reckless endangerment with a gun. After two mistrials, the final charge against him was
dismissed in January.
“You should’ve learned from the killing” of Aiyana, he
wrote on Twitter, “that even being Black in Your House isn’t safe.”
Chief Koval said it was “absolutely appropriate” for the protesters to express their feelings, but called for restraint. The shooting was being investigated by the Division of Criminal Investigation, an arm of the State Department of Justice that looks into police shootings.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/us/man-shot-dead-by-police-after-scuffle-in-wisconsin.html