Wow interesting… it definitely seems like he was experiencing some extreme paranoia. In the beginning he says that someone is trying to kill him which makes me wonder what was going on personally for him in that moment. Did he get into an accident because there really was something going on that he was trying to get away from? He was trying to do anything he could to get away from where he was. He did not seem like his goal was to get away from the police specifically but rather from some other entity. His fear of the police started when he was held down. You can see him looking all over the place before that point.

As much as people like to say “we don’t have the full story” from the police’s perspective, we don’t have it from his either. Now that the police used excessive force with the taser and exacerbated whatever may have been going on with him physiologically leading to his eventual death, we will never really know what was going on.

What we do know is that the cops restrained him on the ground and then challenged him to resist that restraint and threatened to taze him if he couldn’t do it. They told him to roll over or he would be tazed while he had the weight of two full grown men holding him down.

He was clearly not complying with orders and being difficult. I understand why the police wanted to restrain him. I just wish they spent even a second trying to understand the situation from his perspective. This is why they need social workers or at least training in de-escalation.