New Footage In Michael Brown Case Raises Serious Questions About Ferguson PD's Actions
The death of Michael Brown may be one of the most dissected police violence cases in history, and yet, over two years after the incident, new evidence is still coming to light.
A documentary filmmaker has found tape that shows Brown in the same liquor store he ‘fled’ nearly twelve hours before his death, and that footage could support one of the family’s key claims.
In case you need a refresher, Brown was shot and killed by Officer Darren Wilson, a white police officer from Ferguson, Missouri. Brown was unarmed, but that didn't stop Wilson from firing a total of 12 bullets. Wilson was eventually found not guilty of any wrongdoing, although he still retired from the police force.
The incident that started this altercation was a liquor store robbery. The original footage, which was released to the public years ago, shows Brown shoving the store clerk and making off with several packages of cigarillos. At the time, there was widespread fury about the police releasing this tape; many considered it character assassination of Brown, a thinly veiled attempt to bolster Wilson’s innocence.
This new tape, however, makes the original circumstances even more murky. The footage shows Brown in the same store at 1:00am (the ‘robbery’ occurred around noon the same day), seemingly making an exchange with the clerk. He appears to hand something to whoever’s behind the counter, and in exchange is handed a bag of cigarillos. Just as Brown’s about to leave, he seems to change his mind about something, then hands those cigarillos back to the store owner.
The filmmaker who found this tape, Jason Pollock, says he thinks Brown traded the clerk some marijuana for cigarillos, then decided to leave his new goods at the store for safe keeping. Brown’s mother, Lesley McSpadden, seconds this notion. “There was some type of exchange, for one thing [or] another,” she says in the new documentary.
Of course, this does little to clear up the he-said she-said of Officer Wilson and Brown’s fatal encounter, but it does cast even more doubt as to whether police were justified in releasing the original tape of Brown running out of the store. If Brown was owed those cigarillos, the decision to show cherry-picked footage that made him look bad is even more egregious.
All that said, the lawyer for the liquor store disputes all of these new claims. “There was no transaction,” according to the attorney. “There was no understanding. No agreement. Those folks didn’t sell him cigarillos for pot. The reason he gave it back is he was walking out the door with unpaid merchandise and they wanted it back.”
The documentary, Stranger Fruit, premiered at Austin’s 2017 South by South West Festival. Both director Pollock and Brown’s mother were in attendance.
