Video alleges police coverup in fatal Wisconsin police shooting

Since his namesake son was fatally shot by Kenosha police in 2004, Michael Bell has waged a campaign for greater accountability when police use lethal force.

The latest salvo came this week, 13 years after his son's death, as Bell released a 20-minute documentary alleging a police coverup.

The officers who killed Bell's son were quickly cleared of wrongdoing after an internal investigation by officers within their own department.

Kenosha officials have denied a coverup in Bell's case.

In 2010, the city settled a lawsuit with Bell's family for $1.75 million. His father has put much of the money toward police reform efforts.

Bell's activism led to a first-of-its-kind law that requires outside investigation when people die in police custody.

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A retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, Bell is working with a group of experts in policing, aviation and other fields that carry life-and-death risk to use airplane crash investigations as a model for reviewing officer-involved shootings. The approach focuses on learning from mistakes to prevent them from being repeated.

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Bell also has continued to demand that the officers involved in his son's death be held accountable.

He redoubled those efforts earlier this year, after a former Kenosha County district attorney, Robert Zapf, was found to have committed misconduct related to the 2015 prosecution of two men involved in a 2014 shooting death.

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A Kenosha officer planted evidence at the site of the suspects' arrest. Zapf did not disclose that fact to the defense or to the court until five days into the trial.

Zapf was not the district attorney who reviewed Bell's case. But a referee in Zapf's misconduct hearing concluded that evidence suggested the police department tried to cover up the officer's misconduct.

Bell's video, "Forensically Impossible: How a Police Cover-up Occurs," uses depositions, video re-creations and other evidence from the civil case to bolster the allegation that a police coverup also occurred after the younger Bell was shot.

The documentary was released online this week in feeds targeting not only Wisconsin but also New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis.