Dashcam video of Philando Castile shooting released

June 20 (UPI) — The police dashcam video of the fatal police shooting of Philando Castile has been released after St. Anthony, Minn. police officer Jeronimo Yanez was acquitted of second-degree manslaughter.

The video shows Yanez pulling over Castile for a busted brake light on July 6, 2016. After he asks for Castile’s license and registration, Castile calmly warns Yanez that he has a firearm on his person.

Yanez then gets visibly agitated and tells Castile, “OK, don’t reach for it.”

“I’m not pulling it out,” Castile says.

Yanez, sounding agitated, again says not to pull the gun out and immediately fires eight shots into the car.

Yanez’s partner, Joseph Kauser, was standing on the passenger side of the vehicle when Yanez opened fire but never pulled out his gun. He instead jumped out of the way of Yanez’s bullets and as Yanez was frantically screaming expletives and “Don’t move!” Kauser returned to the vehicle to pull out the 4-year-old daughter of Diamond Reynolds, Castile’s girlfriend.

Kauser would later say that he was “absolutely” surprised when Yanez opened fire.

As Castile was dying from the gunshot woulds, Reynolds, sitting in the passenger seat, began a Facebook Live stream and to broadcast the incident. That video brought national attention to the Castile shooting, which many deemed another example of police overreacting out of fear of black men.

Yanez, who is Latino, was charged with second-degree manslaughter and endangering safety by discharging a firearm. But a mostly white jury found him not guilty of the charges.

Despite the not guilty verdict, he was fired from his job as a St Anthony cop.

“The City of St. Anthony has concluded that the public will be best served if Officer Yanez is no longer a police officer in our city,” the city said in a statement.

Although many already believed the not guilty verdict was a miscarriage of justice, the public release of the dashcam video reiterated those feelings.

Tyrone Terrill, president of the African-American Leadership Council, told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune that the video will further the gap between the black community and local police.

“No, no, no,” Terrill said after viewing the video. “You don’t have to remain calm on this one. You have a right to be outraged. You have a right to be angry. And I would be disappointed if you weren’t outraged, if you weren’t angry. It raises the question — how will you ever get a guilty verdict?”

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