Dashcam footage shows Sacramento police try to run down a homeless man before shooting him

A Black Lives Matter protester in London holds a sign about the correlation of mental illness and police shootings

(Image credit: DANIEL LEAL-OLIVAS/Getty Images)

published 1 October 2016

Dashcam footage released by police in Sacramento, California, shows two officers attempting to run over a mentally ill homeless man before fatally shooting him. The encounter with law enforcement that left Joseph Mann dead happened July 11, and the police video was first reported by local news outlets this Thursday.

In a captioned version of the video with enhanced audio published by The Sacramento Bee Friday, one of the two involved officers, Randy Lozoya and John Tennis, can be heard saying, "f--k this guy" as they approach the scene in their cruiser. The driving officer then says, "I'm going to hit him," and the other cop replies, "Okay. Go for it. Go for it." The car swerves at Mann, who was African-American, and misses. Moments later, Mann was fatally shot 14 times. He was discovered to be armed with only a 4-inch knife.

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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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