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Columbus Police Kill Unarmed Black Man Who Was In Bed

Police con­tin­ue to shoot black peo­ple in ways that they dare not shoot ani­mals with­out con­se­quence. Worse yet, the sys­tem con­tin­ues to allow one police agency to inves­ti­gate anoth­er police agency and come to con­clu­sions of inno­cence or guilt as if it isn’t still police inves­ti­gat­ing police.
As a for­mer Police offi­cer, I am pre­dis­posed to giv­ing police offi­cers the ben­e­fit of the doubt in tense sit­u­a­tions where it’s life and death, and they are forced to make snap decisions.
In most of these killings, we are wit­ness­ing not sit­u­a­tions where offi­cers shoot because they see a gun; they are shoot­ing peo­ple based on the alle­ga­tions against them.
Please remem­ber that we are devolv­ing from a stan­dard where an assailant had to be in actu­al pos­ses­sion of an iden­ti­fi­able gun and point­ing, turn­ing, or lift­ing the [gun] to point it toward a per­son, includ­ing a cop, for police to be jus­ti­fied in shoot­ing that assailant.
We have now devolved to where police offi­cers are shoot­ing peo­ple who do not have weapons and have made [no]hostile moves toward police.

These are slave patrols, not legal police actions. People must wake up and real­ize that this is being done in the names. It is out­right murder.


We can­not as a soci­ety have a devolv­ing stan­dard that jus­ti­fies police killing cit­i­zens as the stan­dard of law enforce­ment. Look how far we have devolved from freeze-drop your weapon to the present, where sim­ply awak­en­ing from deep sleep is enough to get one mur­dered by law enforce­ment officers.
President Biden, in a recent speech, said he is against defund­ing the police, and he is against defund­ing the FBI. one of his senior advis­ers, for­mer Atlanta Mayor Keish Lance-Bottoms, an African-American woman, puts it best on Tuesday, ‘we want law enforce­ment to keep our com­mu­ni­ties safe not warriors.
We can­not con­tin­ue to con­done police killing our peo­ple based on alle­ga­tions that they, the police them­selves, made against the per­son. This police depart­ment has been and still is one of the most vio­lent, bru­tal, and lethal­ly unlaw­ful police depart­ments in the United States. That speaks vol­umes about the lethal­i­ty of the depart­ment based on the vio­lence that char­ac­ter­izes most, if not all of the over 18,000 police depart­ments across the country.
We know quite well that a large per­cent­age of cops are absolute­ly no good. We should stop these killings once and for all.(mb).’

Donovan Lewis was awake just long enough to be killed by police
Lewis was alleged­ly awake long enough to be killed in his own bed

AP Andrew Welsh-Huggins

Footage shows an offi­cer imme­di­ate­ly shoot­ing Donovan Lewis after open­ing a bed­room door. The city’s police chief claims Lewis appeared to be hold­ing a vape pen.

(AP) — A man fatal­ly shot by police in Ohio’s cap­i­tal city appeared to be hold­ing a vape pen in his hand, the city police chief said as an inves­ti­ga­tion was under­way into the shoot­ing. Donovan Lewis, 20, died at a hos­pi­tal fol­low­ing the shoot­ing ear­ly Tuesday morn­ing. Columbus police say offi­cers were at the scene to arrest Lewis on mul­ti­ple war­rants, includ­ing domes­tic vio­lence, assault, and felony improp­er han­dling of a firearm.

Police body-cam footage shows an offi­cer open­ing a bed­room door in an apart­ment and imme­di­ate­ly shoot­ing Lewis, who was in bed. Lewis appeared to be hold­ing the vape pen before he was shot, said Columbus police chief Elaine Bryant. No weapon was found.

The Columbus Dispatch obtained footage of the fatal shooting.

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Bryant has not addressed whether police believed the device was a weapon, a deter­mi­na­tion that will come dur­ing the probe by the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation. Bryant said the city was com­mit­ted to hold­ing offi­cers respon­si­ble if there was any wrong­do­ing, but the state inves­ti­ga­tion need­ed to play out first.

Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther, who hired Bryant last year, said that “regard­less of the cir­cum­stances, a moth­er has lost her son in the city of Columbus.”

The U.S. Justice Department agreed in 2021 to review Columbus police depart­ment prac­tices after a series of fatal police shoot­ings of Black peo­ple and the city’s response to 2020 racial injus­tice protests.