HAMDEN, Conn. (WTNH) — Protests erupted in Atlanta over the weekend after a police officer was fired for shooting and killing a black man who took the officer’s stun gun.
According to body camera footage, two officers, David Brosnan and Garrett Rolfe, responded to a Wendy’s after an employee called about a man passed out in his car in the drive-thru, blocking customers.
That man was 27-year-old Rayshard Brooks.
In the beginning, everything started cordially.
Brooks said he visited his mother’s grave and went to his daughter’s birthday party, but he failed a sobriety test, and when the officers tried to arrest him, a struggle started.
That led Brooks to take an officer’s stun gun. Surveillance video shows him running away, but the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said the footage also shows Brooks point the stun gun back at the officers.
Officer Rolfe used his gun, shooting and killing Brooks, who was shot twice in the back.
Many were upset by the news, including Kalfani Ture.
Ture, an assistant professor of criminal justice at Quinnipiac University, was once a police officer in Georgia.
He said he would like to see changes made to how police are trained to try and prevent something like this from happening again.
Ture said he believes the lethal force was legal; however, he said the officer failed when it came to exploring other options.
“This is a lawful shooting perhaps, at least the way I see it, but it’s an awful shooting, and I think officer Rolfe did not exhaust many of the possibilities that were at his advantage,” he said. “We should think about de-escalation, and de-escalation doesn’t begin at the point of conflict. We should be proactively thinking about de-escalation well before things fall apart.”
Rolfe has since been fired. Brosnan is on administrative leave, and the police chief resigned hours after the shooting.
