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Videos circulating on social media show the exact moment federal agents fatally shot a man on Saturday. And there is no indication that the use of force was necessary, according to American media analyses.
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What we see
The man, Alex Pretti, is apprehended by officers while filming them on his phone. The police appear to shove him before surrounding him and pushing him to the ground while hitting him. The officers can be heard shouting that he has a gun. One of them pulls out a gun in the melee, while the other officers appear to pin Alex Pretti firmly to the ground.
The reaction of the police
While Alex Pretti is held on the ground by the police, “two different officers clearly fire their weapons” in his direction, and “at least ten shots are fired in total,” according to an analysis by Bellingcat, an NGO specializing in fact-checking. “Most” of the shots rang out while “the man was already lying on the ground without movement.”
Tear
The Department of Homeland Security said Alex Pretti “approached U.S. Border Patrol agents with a 9mm semi-automatic pistol” and that they attempted to disarm him. However, an analysis of the sequence carried out by the New York Times shows that the man was clearly holding a phone in his hands when the police approached him. In addition, the fatal shot rang out after the police had extracted a firearm from the melee, while Alex Pretti was already immobilized. “We don’t see him searching his pockets, we don’t see him pointing a weapon,” notes Stéphane Wall, retired supervisor of the Montreal Police Service (SPVM).
The federal government’s reaction
The Trump administration gave its version of events in the hours following the incident. However, it is still much too early to make such declarations, underlines Stéphane Wall, who recalls that the role of elected officials in this type of situation is to “collaborate in the investigation” and “wait for the results”. “Can we trust investigations in the United States now? I don’t know. But given the way the country is governed, I have doubts that it could be objective,” he adds.
With The New York TimesAgence France-Presse and CNN
