Editor's note:
Some of the photographs and descriptions accompanying this article contain depictions of graphic violence and may be upsetting to some readers.
In a press conference held the morning after the city published body-worn camera footage of the Nov. 28 shooting of 15-year-old Jazmir Tucker, little was revealed beyond what the footage showed as Akron Police Chief Brian Harding and Akron Mayor Shammas Malik re-read the statements they issued on Thursday and took 10 minutes of questions.
The assault-style rifle that the Akron police officer used to shoot the North High School freshman on Thanksgiving night was likely purchased and privately owned by the officer, Harding said on Friday.
Malik refused to identify the officer who pulled the trigger. The mayor said they “weighed specific threats the officers are facing” against “the value that we do have in transparency” in the decision to not identify the shooter at this time.
Malik and Harding did not say whether specific threats have been made to any police officers, and their offices have not yet responded to Signal Akron’s request for more information about any threats against the officers involved.
The body camera footage, released on Thursday as required by city law, revealed that the officer who shot Tucker used a large black rifle from some distance away. Harding said it has become more common for officers to carry those high-powered firearms in recent years in response to the “complex situations” that “we’re seeing on the street.”
The police chief said he didn’t know the specific model of the rifle but that most officers buy their own firearms and can use them as long as they are trained to do so.
“A majority of the rifles are not department issued,” he said. “We have some, but a majority of officers purchased them themselves.” He said the officers have to “qualify” with the weapon in order to use it on the job.
The mayor and chief emphasized that they still can’t provide answers on a number of key aspects of the incident until the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation finishes its probe of the shooting and the facts are presented to a grand jury to assess potential criminal charges.
The body camera footage released on Thursday afternoon doesn’t show what Tucker was doing in the moments before his death — police did find a firearm zipped inside his coat pocket. In the statement released alongside the footage and re-read on Friday morning, the mayor questioned why the officers didn’t activate their cameras themselves and said that will be reviewed in the department’s internal investigation. The cameras were activated automatically when another cruiser turned on its lights, which was too late to meaningfully capture the interaction between Tucker and the officer who killed him.
The footage shows that officers waited seven minutes to approach the teenager after he was shot and officers repeatedly barked orders at him to put his arms out. It is unclear whether Tucker died immediately from the gun shot, but his body was motionless by the time a group of other officers, armed and carrying ballistic shields, reached him.
Officers did not attempt to provide aid to the teenager. They handcuffed him and searched all his pockets for weapons, eventually discovering a gun in the zipped up pocket of his green jacket.
Malik questioned the response time and why the officer fired on the teenager if the gun was in a zipped pocket.