WARNING: THIS VIDEO INCLUDES GRAPHIC VIOLENT CONTENT AND DISTURBING IMAGES.
WSVN — 2016 will be a year remembered as one of unprecedented violence between police officers and the black community. Many of the incidents were captured on camera, went viral and fanned the flames of anger and distrust. Here’s a look back in tonight’s “7’s Top 7.”
Baton Rouge, Louisiana, July 5. Police respond to a 911 call of a man with a gun outside a convenience store.
A bystander records video showing two officers struggling with 37-year old Alton Sterling. He died at the scene, and angry protesters took to the streets.
Tensions escalated the next day with another police involved shooting, this time in Minnesota.
Diamond Reynolds: “Oh, my God. Please don’t tell me he’s dead.”
Thirty-two-year-old Philando Castile was killed during a traffic stop near St. Paul. His girlfriend says the officer shot him when he reached for his wallet.
Officer Jeronimo Yanez: “I told him not to reach for it. I told him to get his hand up!”
She streamed what happened afterward live on Facebook.
In Dallas, Texas, a peaceful protest of the two shootings turned into panic when Micah Xavier Johnson opened fire on police.
When it was over, five Dallas officers were dead and nine others were injured. Johnson was killed in the standoff.
Frustration mounted in cities across the country. Protests sparked in Chicago and Sacramento. Marches were held in Atlanta and Washington, D.C.
Protester: “Minority lives should all be valued.”
But there was yet another shooting, this time in Sacramento, California, as police confronted 51-year-old Joseph Mann, who was in the street waving a knife, July 11.
Dashcam video shows police shooting him 14 times as he tried to run away.
Another attack on police in Baton Rouge, July 17. Twenty-nine-year-old Gavin Eugene Long took aim with a semi-automatic rifle.
Six officers were shot. Three died.
Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards: “The hatred just has to stop.”
Long was killed in a shootout with police.
Here in South Florida, North Miami Police are called about a suicidal man with a gun, July 18. But the man, seen sitting in the road, was autistic. He was holding, not a gun, but a toy truck.
Video of the incident went viral. It shows behavioral therapist Charles Kinsey on the ground with his arms up, trying to help his patient.
Kinsey says he pleaded with officers to hold their fire. They didn’t; one shot hit Kinsey in the leg.
Charles Kinsey: “I was more worried about him than myself. I said, ‘I got my hands up. They’re not going to shoot me.'”
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement took over the investigation, and the officer, Jonathan Aledda, was placed on administrative leave.
Time went on and so did the violence, this time in Chicago. Eighteen-year-old Paul O’Neal died after he fled from officers in a stolen car.
During the chase, police hit the car head on, but O’Neal escaped and ran. Body cam video shows officers cuffing him as he lay on the ground bleeding from a gunshot wound to the back.
A stalled SUV in Tulsa, Oklahoma ended in death for 40-year-old Terrance Crutcher. He was shocked with a Taser, then shot as he walked toward his vehicle with his hands in the air.
Police say the officer who pulled the trigger thought Crutcher was reaching for a weapon, but he was not armed.
A wife recorded a confrontation of her husband with police in Charlotte, North Carolina, Sept. 20. Forty-three-year old Keith Lamont Scott died at the scene.
Rakeyia Scott: “Did you shoot him? He’d better not be [expletive] dead.”
And images of the shooting hit social media. Anger turned to outrage. Police and protesters clashed yet again, as an uneasy nation watched and waited to see what would happen next.
Wednesday, on 7’s Top 7, we take a look back at the terror attacks around the world in 2016.
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