He was stopped for walking down the middle of the road and blocking traffic. This really doesn’t change much about whether the shooting was justified or not but it’s another new detail.
Via CNN:
The Ferguson police officer who shot Michael Brown didn’t stop him because he was suspected in a recent robbery, but because he was “walking down the middle of the street blocking traffic,” the city’s police chief said Friday.
Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson told reporters the alleged “robbery does not relate to the initial contact between the officer and Michael Brown.”
So why did Ferguson police decide to release surveillance video of the alleged convenience store Friday — the same day that they named, six days after the shooting, the white police officer who fatally shot the African-American teenager — if the two incidents are not related?
Jackson said he released the videotape “because the press asked for it,” noting some in the media had filed Freedom of Information requests for the footage and that he couldn’t withhold it indefinitely. The chief added “we needed to release that at the same time we needed to release the name of the officer involved in the shooting,” though he didn’t elaborate more on why.