University Of Cincinnati Officer Indicted For Murder Of Motorist/School Evacuated

We haven’t been following the killing of Sam Dubose, the black motorist who was shot by a University of Cincinnati police officer, as there simply wasn’t a lot of information about it until recently.

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UC police officer Ray Tensing had claimed that Dubose was dragging him with his vehicle, forcing him to fire and kill Dubose in self-defense.

Tensing’s body camera, however,  told a radically different story, and prosecutor Joe Deters seems to want his head on a platter:

“It was so unnecessary for this to occur,” Joe Deters, the Hamilton County prosecutor, said at a news conference Wednesday.

Sam Dubose, 43, was shot and killed during a July 19 traffic stop by Officer Ray Tensing. The officer initially said he was dragged by Dubose’s car, leading to the shooting. Deters said that Dubose “was subdued,” adding that Tensing had his license plate number.

“This office has probably reviewed upwards of hundreds of police shootings, and this is the first time that we’ve thought this is without question a murder,” he said.

In addition, Deters said Tensing was not dragged by the car, saying instead that he fell backwards after shooting Dubose in the head.

Deters called the situation “a pretty chicken-crap stop,” saying that if Dubose began to leave, the officer should have just let him go rather than shoot him in the head. He also said that an arrest warrant had been issued for Tensing.

“I’m treating him like a murderer,” he said. “They’re out to get him.”

Authorities are going to be releasing that body camera footage today, which is apparently so inflammatory that the University of Cincinnati campus is not just shutting down, but is being evacuated in advance, for fear of rioting.

Why are there fears of rioting when the prosecutor so unequivocally agrees with the community that Dubose was murdered by a bad cop, and indicates that the criminal justice system has Tensing firmly in its sights? Probably because some people just want to watch the world burn, and the professional Marxists of “Black Lives Matter” thrive on anarchy and riots, not peaceful protest or a justice system that works.

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This case is the latest in a long line of incidents that proves the importance of a body camera worn by officers. Body cameras have both exonerated and damned law enforcement officers in numerous incidents, and while they are far from perfect and not an infallible and omniscient perfect witness that captures all sides and angles of an incident, they do provide a partial view from the officer’s perspective, which can tell prosecutor’s relatively quickly if the officer’s post-incident statement is relatively accurate.

We won’t have the video until later this afternoon, but when it is released, we will post and analyze it.

Prosecutor Deters has made it perfectly clear that Officer Tensing didn’t have the remotest justification for shooting Mr. Dubose to death. It will be a sad forensic analysis of what not to do in an encounter where deadly force was not justified.

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