Video of police killing unarmed man

With the dashboard camera in their car rolling, police pulled a Jaguar over for running a stop sign on a dark night. Things turned tense when one of the officers warned his partner he could see a gun in the glove compartment.

Screaming over and over “Don’t you fucking move!” and “Show me your hands!” at the man in the passenger seat, the officer reached into the car and appeared to remove a silver handgun.

Faintly on the video, the passenger can be heard telling the officer: “I ain’t doing nothing. I’m not reaching for nothing, bro. I ain’t got no reason to reach for nothing.”

The passenger, despite being warned repeatedly not to move, stepped out of the car, his hands raised about shoulder level. The officers opened fire, killing him.

The video of the December 30 killing of Jerame Reid in Bridgeton, a city of 25,000 people south of Philadelphia, was only released this week, raising questions and stirring anger over another death at the hands of police.

The nearly two-minute deadly standoff came after the killings of black men in New York and Ferguson, Missouri, triggered months of turbulent protests and calls for a re-examination of police use of deadly force.

Reid, 36, and the man driving the car were black. The Bridgeton officer who spotted the gun, Braheme Days, is black; his partner, Roger Worley, is white. Both are on leave while prosecutors investigate.

“The video speaks for itself that at no point was Jerame Reid a threat and he possessed no weapon on his person,” Walter Hudson, of the civil rights group the National Awareness Alliance, said yesterday. “He complied with the officer and the officer shot him.”

A Philadelphia lawyer, Conrad Benedetto, said he has been hired by Reid’s wife, Lawanda, to investigate. He said in a statement that the footage “raises serious questions as to the legality and/or reasonableness of the officers’ actions that night” because Reid was shot as he raised his hands.

Reid spent about 13 years in prison for shooting at three state troopers when a teenager. Days knew who he was; he was one of the arresting officers last year when Reid was charged with several crimes, including drug possession and obstruction.

In Bridgeton, where two thirds of the residents are black or Hispanic, the killing has stirred protests, including a demonstration on Wednesday, shortly after the video was made public at the request of two newspapers under the state’s open records law.

The Cumberland County prosecutor’s office previously said a gun was seized during the stop but would not comment further on the investigation. Bridgeton police would not answer any questions about the video and said they opposed its release as neither “compassionate or professional.”