Video shows police shooting another unarmed black man in the back

published 24 April 2015

Less than a month after the death of Walter Scott, another video has surfaced of a similar shooting. The new clip shows Dontrell Stephens, 20, of Palm Beach County, Florida, being shot in the back by a police officer while armed with nothing more than a cell phone. This incident occurred in September 2013, but the officer's dashcam footage was only this week obtained and released by a local news station.

Stephens survived the incident, but it left him paralyzed from the waist down. The video shows that his encounter with the officer began when he noticed a police car following him while he rode his bicycle. He stopped, got off the bike, and began to walk toward the car to speak to the officer. At that point, he steps out of frame for a moment, only to reappear, fleeing; he then appears to be shot four times.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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