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Police shoot, wound man in San Diego area; protesters gathering
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EL CAJON . (AP) — Police shot and wounded a man they said was acting erratically in a San Diego suburb on Tuesday, drawing an angry cluster of protesters that believed it to be another instance of law enforcement shooting an unarmed black man.
Several dozen people, most of them black, gathered and some cursed at officers guarding the scene in El Cajon after the shooting.
No arrests were immediately made, and no additional officers were called out. Police promised a thorough investigation.
Police were called to the area of the Broadway Village Shopping Center shortly after 2 p.m. by reports of a man acting erratically, “walking in traffic, that kind of stuff,” Lt. Rob Ransweiler said.
The man, believed to be 30 years old, was taken to a hospital. There was no word on his condition.
One officer shot the man. Details of the confrontation weren’t immediately released, and Ransweiler declined to say whether the man had a weapon.
Some people who said they witnessed the shooting told reporters that he was unarmed.
One woman who appeared in a video posted by Rumbie Mubaiwa on her Facebook page is heard telling police at the scene that the man was ordered to take his hand out of his pocket.
“I said: ‘Take your hand out your pocket, baby, or they’re going to shoot you.’ He said ‘no, no, no,’ “ the woman said. “When he lifted his hand out ... he did have something in his hand but it wasn’t no gun, and that’s when they shot him.”
Michael Ray Rodriguez told the San Diego Union-Tribune (http://bit.ly/2dy1LAQ ) that he saw a shirtless black man with his hands up and an officer firing seconds later.
The officer “let go of the trigger and shot him again and again,” Rodriguez said, adding he heard five shots.
On Mubaiwa’s tape, a woman wearing hospital-style scrub clothing who said she was the man’s sister appeared distraught, repeatedly shrieking and crying, telling officers that she had called them to help her brother.
“I just called for help, and you came and killed him,” she said.
“Don’t you guys have crisis communications teams to talk to somebody mentally sick?” she asks.
A witness voluntarily handed over a cellphone with video of the shooting, but it must be evaluated by investigators before it is made public, Ransweiler said.
A new policy by the San Diego County District Attorney’s office requires release of such officer-involved shooting footage, but it was unclear when that would happen, he said.
The police department is working on a program to have officers wear body cameras, but none have been issued, Ransweiler said.
El Cajon is a city 15 miles northeast of San Diego and has a population of about 100,000. It is 69 percent white and 6 percent black, according to 2010 census figures. It has become a common home for refugees fleeing Iraq and, more recently, Syria.