According to initial information, Harris, who was about to pick up his daughter from kindergarten, was completely unarmed when he got into a traffic stop with his dark blue Ford Escort at 3 o’clock p.m. (local time). However, Police Officer Michael Barth (44) did neither use his taser nor his duty weapon, and also renounced any way of abusing his powers otherwise.
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| Remained totally unharmed: Harris |
“I reckoned that the situation was about to escalate and aimed my cell phone camera at it”, an eye witness told the TV channel NBC. However, the friendly look of the Police Officer and the absent gunfire told him that something was wrong. “I then thought that maybe the black guy being stopped was in fact a white man with a black tattoo covering his entire body, as this would have explained the situation”, the eye witness said. “But the guy was definitely black. Even when he reached into his glove compartment to produce his driver’s licence, the Police Officer stayed unfazed.”
Why Barth deviated from the procedure for traffic stops of black people, which has been in use for decades, is still uncertain. Meanwhile, the Police Union severely criticized the Police Officer because of his recklessness.
According to the local Police Department, Michael Barth will be confined to doing office duty for an indefinite period, which should give him time to think about his errant behavior.
ssi; picture above: Dejan Stanic Micko / Shutterstock, picture on the right: FatM1ke, CC BY-SA 3.0; please note: first published 14/12/16
Read the German version HERE.
