Judge unseals disturbing video of California police shooting unarmed man

(Image credit: Gardena Police Department/AP Photo)

published 15 July 2015

A federal judge has ordered the release of graphic video footage capturing the death of Ricardo Diaz Zeferino, an unarmed man who was shot to death in 2013 in Gardena, California, by police who mistakenly believed he had stolen a bicycle. Diaz Zeferino was helping his brother look for the bike police were also attempting to find when he was detained and shot eight times by officers who believed he perpetrated the theft.

While the victim's family won a $4.7 million settlement from the city in the wake of the shooting, Gardena police attempted to keep the video away from public eyes. But U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson ruled that "the fact that [Gardena police] spent the city's money, presumably derived from taxes, [on a settlement] only strengthens the public's interest in seeing the videos."

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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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