The death of Andrew Brown Jr. in Elizabeth City, North Carolina got a lot of attention from the media because any time a black person gets into an interaction with the police (which nationally, this is a situation they are far more likely to find themselves in) everyone in the media seems to want to cry foul, even if there is no evidence that there was actually any wrongdoing on the part of the police.
I think that Elizabeth City did the right thing by not revealing all the information that they had at the time including many angles of bodycam footage and especially not to the press, who would almost certainly edit it to fit a particular narrative of police brutality even if it isn't true.
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Thus far the protests have remained peaceful, although once the people in attendance started using the usual and annoying tactic of intentionally blocking traffic (how does this help anyone) their gathering was declared an "unlawful assembly" and the crowd was dispersed without much incident. I am proud of Eastern North Carolina for behaving like grown ups and not looting and rioting (thus far.)
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why always block traffic? This is your own community and you are only inconveniencing your own people
So I am proud of my part of the state for keeping this reasonably grown-up but at the same time one of the big disputes was the fact that the activists and the family of Andrew Brown were demanding that the Sheriff's office release the bodycam footage. They eventually complied but only provided 20 seconds or so of the encounter.
The 20 seconds that was shown to a limited audience shows a very violent Brown attempting to flee the scene and shows that he was indisputably in the wrong for what he did. The body cam footage is shaky (according to those that have seen it) but it clearly shows that he hit the gas and fled the scene and this is when officers began shooting at him. Apparently one of the shots hit him and he later died from the wounds.
This brings about a couple of scenarios in my mind because yet again we do not have any information about if Andrew Brown was armed and this information would be extremely helpful in deciding how to feel about this. The bodycam footage does NOT show him firing on officers and well, this could be conceived as an escalation of violence on the part of the officers. However, at what point does a person evading and resisting arrest become something that cops should put a stop to? Were they just supposed to let him get away and be like "oh well, maybe we'll get him some other time."
Could they have handled it better? Well, it is impossible for anyone to know because of the times that we live in. The media is going to repaint this story the same way that they did with any other similar situation to make the person who got shot look like an angel and the police look like trigger happy, evil people.
Activists and some politicians are calling for a release of all the bodycam footage but I think that the Sheriff's department is going the right thing by not doing so. The relevant bodycam footage has already been released - the part where Brown resists arrest and attempts to flee the scene. The mob wants all of the footage so they can dox the officers and potentially turn it into a race thing IMO. The media would LOVE that.
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After what we saw with the trial in Minneapolis it is easy to see that revealing who the officer was that pulled the trigger doesn't really change anything other than public outrage towards that officer and potentially an unfair trial. There is a lot of talk about the fact that a guilty verdict happened in the Minneapolis case simply to avoid more rioting and looting and burning of stuff. Even the judge in that case stated that the case had been compromised by the media. It wouldn't surprise me if an appeal determines the conviction to be a mistrial... but it will be done quietly.
Also we gotta stop pretending as though Andrew Brown Jr was sort of innocent neighbor that was randomly targeted because of his skin color. According to officials he has a criminal rap sheet 180 pages long (mine is zero pages long) and it dates back all the way to 1998. That's more than 20 years of criminal activity folks. This was no innocent neighbor folks and it kind of makes me think that the justice system and the prison system, isn't doing its job very well. How can a person spend 20 years of their life in and out of jail and still not have some sort of life change?
They were serving a warrant because they had evidence, some of it video, of multiple drug deals involving him captured by a confidential informant. They had enough to put him away, again and although I am not terribly familiar with North Carolina drug laws, it was likely going to be a long time.
Personally, I think that all drugs and all drug deals should be legal but they aren't and neither is not complying with the instructions of officers serving a warrant. If you want the laws to be different than work on changing those. In the meantime, selling crack, cocaine, meth, and heroin is not legal and you can expect the police to take issue with you doing so.
What the mob is asking for is unreasonable. If the media gets a hold of the full bodycam footage you can rest assured that they will not use it to tell the truth. They are already twisting this story into a pretzel and we don't even have very much information. Imagine what they will do once they have it? Do you think they will report it accurately? Of course they wont.