Footage show two officers fatally shooting Jason Harrison, who was holding a screwdriver, within minutes of arriving at home in response to emergency call

Video footage has emerged of Dallas police shooting dead a mentally ill black man holding a screwdriver six seconds after encountering him at his home.



According to a legal filing, Jason Harrison’s mother, Shirley Marshall, called emergency services on the morning of 14 June 2014, telling the dispatcher that her son was bipolar and schizophrenic and that she was worried about him, and he might need to be hospitalised.

Within two minutes of the officers’ arrival at the house, Harrison lay dying. He was killed by six gunshot wounds to the chest, arm and back, an autopsy found.

In the video released by the family, Marshall answers the door and walks out, telling the two officers that he is “off the chain … bipolar schizo”. Harrison stands in the doorway holding a screwdriver. The police immediately and repeatedly tell him to drop it, then quickly open fire. He falls to the ground. The officers continue to shout at him. As the 38-year-old lies dying, one is heard asking: “Do we handcuff him?”

Last October, Harrison’s father, David Harrison, filed a civil rights lawsuit against the city of Dallas and the two officers, John Rogers and Andrew Hutchins, alleging “excessive force in violation of the fourth amendment” and that the city failed to “institute, apply and conduct proper training of Dallas police officers”.

The suit also claims that Dallas police initially refused to release the video to the family and that the department has a history of using excessive force. The Dallas Morning News reported in 2013 that Dallas police killed 57 people in the previous10 years, 70% of them from ethnic minorities.

In 2013, a Dallas officer was fired for shooting Bobby Bennett, a schizophrenic man who was standing still in the street while holding a knife.

Amid the national focus on police shootings of ethnic minorities and the revelation that official statistics drastically underestimated the number of civilians in the US killed by police each year, shootings of the mentally ill have recently been in the spotlight in Texas. Last January in Longview, 128 miles east of Dallas, police shot dead Kristiana Coignard, a 17-year-old who had entered a police station during an apparent mental health crisis.

Police often act as first responders when mentally ill people are acting erratically, but not every officer has crisis intervention training, a course that teaches them how to de-escalate potentially violent situations, for example, by talking calmly and not behaving with sudden aggression.



“The footage speaks for itself,” the family’s attorney, Geoff Henley, told the Guardian. “The footage does not indicate that he was jabbing, stabbing or thrusting.”

Jason’s brother, Sean Harrison, said that Jason was off his medication at the time of his death but had no history of violence. “He never left the porch. They literally shot him off the porch,” he told the Guardian. “I feel it was preventable. They approached the situation wrong … You don’t yell like that when you’ve got a mentally ill man.” He did not think that race was necessarily a factor in the death: “Bottom line, it was just a situation that the officers didn’t respond to correctly.” He said that claims that the officers’ actions were justified is “a slap in the face. There’s no way you can look at that video and say they did the right thing.”