The Minneapolis branches of Black Lives Matter and the NAACP demanded Monday that a special prosecutor be appointed to reopen the investigation into the fatal shooting of Jamar Clark last fall by Minneapolis police.
Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman announced last week his conclusion that there were no grounds to charge officers Mark Ringgenberg and Dustin Schwarze in Clark’s shooting on Nov. 15. In a news conference Wednesday, Freeman said the officers struggled to restrain Clark after responding to an ambulance crew’s report that he was interfering with their treatment of a woman’s injuries, which Clark might have caused. Freeman said Clark, 24, got his hand on Ringgenberg’s gun during the struggle and Schwarze was justified in using deadly force to stop Clark.
In a statement Monday, Black Lives Matter and the NAACP said Freeman’s news conference statements showed that he was not fit to prosecute the Clark case.
“Mike Freeman spent thirty minutes demonizing Jamar Clark and invalidating community accounts of what transpired,” the statement said. “Mike Freeman basically functioned as a defense attorney for the police, and not as a prosecutor for the people.”
The groups also said Freeman deliberately mischaracterized Ray Ann Hayes, the woman being treated by the ambulance crew the night of the shooting, as Jamar Clark’s girlfriend. Hayes has publicly stated that she was not Clark’s girlfriend and he did not physically abuse her that night.
In his own statement Monday, Freeman stood by his finding that Hayes identified Clark to paramedics that night as “the guy that did this,” and the paramedics passed that information on to police.
“Officers’ actions are based on information they have at the time,” Freeman said in his statement. “The prosecutor’s job is to answer the narrow question whether the police officers reacted unreasonably and without justification at the moment they used deadly force. … I am convinced that if one reads the entire record available online and applies the mandated legal standard they will agree that no charges can be brought against the police officers.”
