Reaching High For an Imaginary Gun in the Sky? From {CHN] Federal prosecutors said Friday they will not pursue charges against former Tulsa cop Betty Shelby for killing an unarmed black motorist, after his car stalled on the road, ending a years-long civil rights investigation.

Shelby shot and killed Terence Crutcher in September 2016 during a traffic stop where he refused to follow her commands and walked towards his disabled SUV in the middle of a street.

Police dashboard and helicopter video show Crutcher walking away from Shelby with both arms up in the air before he was shot. Shelby insisted she fired out of fear he was reaching through the window for a weapon inside the car. No weapon was found on Crutcher or in the car. As video clearly depicts he was not close to the car. She never saw a gun. He never said he had a gun. A federal investigation was launched shortly thereafter.

DIFFERENT STANDARDS OF MORALITY & LAW APPLY TO RACE SOLDIERS. U.S. Attorney Trent Shores [in photo] in the Northern District of Oklahoma concluded “federal investigators determined that there is insufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt a violation” of civil rights laws.

“The evidence, when viewed as whole, is insufficient to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that Officer Shelby’s use of force was ‘objectively unreasonable’ under the Supreme Court’s definition, nor is the evidence sufficient to rebut her assertion that she fired in self-defense with the mistaken belief that Mr. Crutcher reached into his vehicle in order to retrieve a weapon,” Shores said in a statement. “The evidence is also insufficient to establish that Officer Shelby acted with the specific intent to break the law.”

Federal prosecutors informed Crutcher’s family of the decision Friday before the announcement was made.

Shores said federal prosecutors and FBI agents examined all evidence “including witness statements, audio and video recordings, dispatch records, crime scene evidence, ballistics evidence, and medical reports” established by local and state authorities.

Police stated that Crutcher kept reaching into his pocket, refused to show his hands, walked towards his vehicle despite being told to stop, and then angled towards and reached into his vehicle. Critics have disputed this saying that the driver's side window was up when Crutcher was shot. Another white cop Turnbough tased Crutcher, and Shelby shot him.

Shortly before the shooting, officers in the helicopter conversed with each other: "This guy's still walking and isn't following commands." "It's time for a taser, I think." "I've got a feeling that's about to happen." "That looks like a bad dude, too, could be on something." Approximately two minutes after the shot, an officer checked Crutcher's pockets, and approximately 45 seconds later, someone crouched to offer aid. Police said Crutcher died in the hospital later that day. [MORE]

Police claimed that he was high on PCP. [MORE] [And the best method of dealing with anyone high is to shoot them in the back with their hands up.] In her courtroom testimony, Officer Shelby recounted smelling an odor of PCP on Mr. Crutcher, causing her further alarm about the threat he might pose. But Officer Shelby neglected to mention this detail in her initial interview with Sgt. Dave Walker shortly after the incident. Instead, she suggested to Sgt. Walker that she thought Mr. Crutcher might be experiencing a mental health issue or was high on PCP. It was only later, after the widely-publicized discovery of a vial of PCP in Mr. Crutcher’s vehicle, that she claimed to remember the scent. The timing raises the question of why she would have originally suggested that Mr. Crutcher was mentally ill if she had in fact smelled PCP.

Officer Shelby also gave inconsistent explanations of why she failed to turn on her dashboard camera. At one point, she said that there wasn’t an enforcement issue, just an abandoned vehicle to attend to; later she indicated that the scene was far more complicated than simply an abandoned vehicle. In another instance, she suggested that she attempted to turn the camera on but it did not work. [MORE]

In spite of the lack of a weapon, a Tulsa County jury acquitted Shelby of first-degree manslaughter in May 2017. She faced up to life in state prison. A mostly white jury [9 whites] decided that it could not convict Shelby of manslaughter in the case despite the video evidence. Defense attorneys persuaded jurors that Crutcher had made a move toward the open driver’s-side window of his stationary vehicle, and that Shelby’s decision in that moment to kill him was justified by what she perceived to be a reach for a gun that did not exist.

During the weeks-long trial, Shelby’s attorneys elicited groans from the [white’s in the] gallery when asking an investigator if a screwdriver found [out of view and never seen when shot] on Crutcher’s center console could be considered a weapon.

In a highly unusual move, the jury entered a letter into the court record stating that Shelby was nonetheless “not blameless” for Crutcher’s death and asked whether she had “other options available to subdue” him before he reached into his car.  

The jury foreperson wrote that Crutcher’s life would have been spared if he was shot with a stun gun, but he could not determine beyond a reasonable doubt she did “anything outside of her duties and training” in that situation.

Crutcher’s family sued Shelby and the city for federal civil rights violations one month after her acquittal. They claim he was subjected to excessive force and his equal protection rights were denied.

Shelby resigned from the force two months after her acquittal in what was deemed a “satisfactory separation.” She had been restricted to desk duty after the shooting but was later reinstated.

Shelby later was hired as a sheriff’s deputy in nearby Rogers County. She again made headlines in August 2018 when she taught a four-hour class to other deputies entitled “Surviving the Aftermath of a Critical Incident.”  

Shelby said at the time that the class would talk “about the challenges that I face[d] after my critical incident, the challenges that my husband and I were not prepared for,” alluding to the legal and financial stresses she experienced in the racially charged aftermath of the shooting.

“When I was told that I would possibly never be in law enforcement again, I needed to find a purpose,” she said at the time. “So I made a commitment to help my [white] brothers and sisters [murder non-white people subjected to white supremacy]”