Dashboard video recorded an officer saying ‘Fuck this guy, I’m going to hit him’ before the fatal police shooting of Joseph Mann, a 51-year-old homeless man

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

In the last seconds before he was shot 14 times, Joseph Mann dodged the police cruiser once, then twice. Dashboard video recorded the officer’s words inside the car: “Fuck this guy. I’m going to hit him.”

“OK, go for it. Go for it,” his partner replies.

The Mann family’s attorney amended his complaint against the city of Sacramento on Friday and sent a letter to the justice department requesting a civil rights investigation into the Sacramento fatal police shooting of Mann, a 51-year-old homeless man with a history of mental illness.

“It’s disgusting,” attorney John Burris told the Guardian. “It raises the question that this might have been a deliberate, premeditated murder, that they intended to do what they did.”

It’s disgusting. It raises the question that this might have been a deliberate, premeditated murder John Burris

Burris said the video and audio, first published by the Sacramento Bee on Friday, suggested that officers Randy Lozoya and John Tennis “had no regard for him as a human being, and no consideration that he might be mentally impaired from the way he was non-responsive, waving his hands, making karate chops, giving obvious signs of a disability”.

“A reasonable person would have said this person has a problem.”

Lozoya and Tennis were not the first officers to arrive at the scene on 11 July, when police received reports of a man standing in the street with a knife. “The initial officer acted fine,” Burris said. “These two are acting like cowboys.”

When the officers first tried to hit Mann, he was pacing in the street and backing away from officers. As the car sped into a turn toward him, Mann slipped away. “We’ll get him. We’ll get him,” one of the officers can be heard saying.

When officers tried to hit him a second time, he jumped over a median, prompting officers to abandon their car in the middle of oncoming traffic. Mann was quickly chased down by officers, who fired 18 times and hit him with 14 bullets. He died in the street. The shooting itself not captured by the dashboard camera.

Sacramento police told the Bee that Lozoya and Tennis had been placed on “modified duty”, pending investigation of the case.

On Monday afternoon, Sacramento police released a statement to say: “If deemed necessary, the department welcomes a review of the case by any state or federal law enforcement authority.”

A review by the district attorney’s office would determine whether to bring charges, the department said. “We continue to encourage anyone with information about the event to contact our investigators so that the most accurate and complete account of the events can be considered during that assessment.”

The police also offered condolences to the Mann family, saying “any loss of life is a tragedy”.

The Counted: people killed by police in the United States – interactive Read more

Shelly Orio, a spokeswoman for the Sacramento district attorney’s office, confirmed that they had received the video, audio and other case materials, including “approximately 50 multimedia disks containing photographs, diagrams, transcripts, statement summaries, and other evidence”.

“We are in the process of our review and continue to balance our desire to complete this investigation in a timely manner,” she said, “with the overarching need to ensure any conclusions we reach are the result of a thorough and methodical evaluation of the facts and the law.”

The Mann family has filed a civil suit against the city of Sacramento, and Burris said they hope the officers will face criminal charges. “They are officers that shouldn’t be in uniform,” Mann’s brother Robert said at a press conference last week.

Mann had held steady jobs for most of his life, at a department store and as a disc jockey, among other jobs, Burris said, until “a psychotic break when his mother died”. In the last four to five years, he said, Mann had moved around mental health clinics and homeless shelters. Police said they later found methamphetamine in his system, and that he refused to comply with officer commands to drop a 4in knife.

In their lawsuit, Mann’s family says he displayed “obvious signs of mental distress”.

“Inexplicably, the officers failed to contact any properly trained mental health counselors or make any attempt to use less than lethal force and ignored the established police protocols to make attempts to de-escalate the situation.”

Sacramento police had released soundless dashcam video two weeks ago, bowing to public pressure over the July shooting. In southern California, El Cajon police quickly released video last week of the police killing of Albert Olango, an unarmed black man whose shooting prompted days of protests.

Eight hundred and fourteen people have been killed by police in the US in 2016, according to research by the Guardian, and young black Americans have been killed at the highest rate.