Video of the Day – Arizona Cop Executes Terrified Man in Cold Blood

Correction: Since I published this post, a material mistake in my analysis has come to light. It affects the entire tone of my writing, and is thus significant enough to highlight and address.

It appears the psychopathic officer yelling the preposterous demands and needlessly escalating the situation toward an execution of a U.S. citizen, was not the cop who shot and killed Daniel Shaver, but another officer, Sergeant Charles Langley. Sergeant Langley has since retired from the force and moved to the Philippines. Not kidding.

While this makes the overall situation far more disturbing, it also makes they jury’s decision more complex than assumed. If this was just the individual actions of one crazed, murderous cop, that’d be bad enough, but this was actually a tag team of two crazed, murderous cops. Which means this is systemic, and Mesa, AZ obviously has no idea what it’s doing when it comes to hiring and training police.

Oh, and something else I didn’t mention in the original piece. The officer who did kill Shaver, Philip Mitchell Brailsford, had “You’re Fucked” etched into the dust cover of his service weapon. The judge did not allow the jury to see that.

The full post as published originally is below:

The events in the video below took place in January 2016. Every U.S. citizen should watch this and share. It’s horrifying that a person hired to “protect and serve” seems to derive so much pleasure from demeaning and then executing someone he swore to defend.

This police officer acts as if he’s mentally deranged, and based on his statements before killing the terrified, crawling victim, it seems he was looking for any excuse to shoot. Then, after he does shoot and kill, he doesn’t flinch. At all.

Even worse, this cop was just found “not guilty” by an Arizona jury.

The officer’s name is Philip Mitchell Brailsford, which you should be aware of in case he comes looking for a job in your town. The executed citizens’ name is Daniel Shaver.

Read more on the story over at Reason.

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In Liberty,
Michael Krieger

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45 thoughts on “Video of the Day – Arizona Cop Executes Terrified Man in Cold Blood”

  1. I think many of such cops get off on the training they get and just want to be bad-ass. I can imagine some of them, as they are being taught in training to view and treat every civilian as an enemy, as they are being taught how to wield their high-powered weapons, imagine “Man, I am BAD-ASS”, and actually hope they get an opportunity to be so. I think their attitude is “Why go through all this training and not get a chance to use it?”

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  2. Public Service Announcement:

    If the cops have weapons drawn on you, do NOT reach behind your back. If you do and happen to live through it, do NOT do it again.

    New Mandatory Police Policy 2017.1:

    Complicated, changing, instructions cannot be followed perfectly. The public is untrained and are more scared than you are, considering the considerable power differential between an AR-type weapon and anything that can fit unseen in a waistband.

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    • Nothing this person did could have stopped him from being executed, take you apologist bullshit elsewhere.

  3. That cop is a psychopath with a uniform and a gun. He’s also a chickenshit coward who should be doing hard time for that.

    Right away it was very clear that he was the one who is criminally insane, not them.

    Reply
    • You are 100% correct!
      He sounded like a psychopath!
      He acted like a psychopath!
      He is a danger to the American public & something must be done to him!

  4. The bottom line, like it or not, the guy who got shot did not follow instructions – he reached toward the small of his back with his right hand. The instructions were clear and simple. The cop sounds like a real jerk regardless, but I can see why a jury acquitted him – he followed the law and proper protocol. Cops don’t know what kind of miscreants their dealing with, and they have to take maximum precautions or it might be them lying there dead.

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    • Bullshit, when his arms were over his head you can see there is nothing in his waist band. A cop could execute a baby and a puppy and you’d find a reason to kiss his ass. Coward.

    • The instructions were anything but clear and simple. Try to cross your legs while keeping your hands in the air, and then put yourself in kneeling position and crawl, not uncrossing your legs and not lowering your arms. Don’t make a mistake, or you will be killed.

      Can you tell, what exactly prevented the cops from approaching Shaver when he was standing with his arms in the air, or stretched to the sides? If you can come up with any reason other than creating an opportunity to murder him, for not following “instructions”, we are all ears.

    • “Cops don’t know what kind of miscreants their dealing with”

      The only “miscreant” in that video was the gutless POS masquerading as a Peace Officer.

      “Cross your left leg over your right leg”? WTF is that about?! He could have cuffed that guy with no problem in the first 30 seconds.

      If that was my son I would make it my life’s work to make sure that the only employment that former police officer Philip Mitchell Brailsford would be able to find for the rest of his miserable life would be bussing tables at a crappy Mexican restaurant in some backwater town in the middle of nowhere.

      Take your bullshit elsewhere, Pensiamentopeligroso. And take George with his public service announcements with you.

  5. This is clearly insane. And yet, one reply terms it “complicated.”

    Whether by design or accident, mental illness has taken over the country.

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  6. I read elsewhere that the cop was found not guilty. And the video was released after the trial so the video had no influence on the outcome .. unfortunately. Seems a bit harsh. The dead guy apparently was drunk and maybe trying to adjust his shorts while crawling – bad move.

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  7. Michael, you are wrong. The officer who was talking was not the one who fired the shots. All the talking was done by sergeant Langley, while the cop who fired the shots and was tried in court was Brailsford.

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  8. What a terrible tragedy. There needs to be better screening, training, and accountability so this type of thing never happens.(I wonder if a civil rights case could be pursued in this instance?) Otherwise, our citizens will end up fearing the police and we’ll see the formation of more organizations like the Black Panthers and the militias.

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  9. NOW LISTEN UP!
    America is a FASCIST Country and its army and police are Nazis.
    On the wall behind the Speaker’s podium in the US House of Representatives is a pair of fasces!
    Operation Paperclip brought thousands of Nazi War Criminals to America via the Vatican Ratline.

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  10. “Mesa, AZ obviously has no idea what it’s doing when it comes to hiring and training police” 1st, a quibble. Mesa is not a personality. Real human beings hire and train police. 2nd, politicians and members of the power class are not idiots. It is far more parsimonious and realist to take what we observe in police behavior as the revealed preferences of those in power.

    Reply
    • You are correct, real human beings at the Mesa, AZ police department set the stage for this execution. By hiring two clearly unstable, murderous people and also setting the stage for how the officers act. Like in a corporation, police departments have cultures, and those cultures are formed via the actions of the senior people in the organizations.

      Did nobody know this guy had “You’re Fucked” written on the dust case of his AR-15? I find that hard to believe.

      As far as “what we observe in police behavior as the revealed preferences of those in power,” I completely agree.

  11. According to the Mesa Times, the officer was just 24 yrs at the time of the shooting. I sense there were baby’s killing baby’s , both the men involved were very young. It’s very sad, for all, I am sure. Read the news, local. That shows who’s pulling the strings. It’s just like war, the old men and women sit back and let the children die. We are dealing with generational violence. It’s generational. It’s not gender, it’s not cops, it’s generational violence.

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  12. “Which means this is systemic, and Mesa, AZ obviously has no idea what it’s doing when it comes to hiring and training police.”

    Michael, there’s nothing unique about Mesa, AZ. What the cops did here, was the direct result of the training they received. Which is the same training as receive all cops nationwide. This was actually addressed at the trial: “Brailsford followed the tactics of a well-trained officer. If jurors believe the training is wrong, that’s not something Brailsford should be accountable for.”

    Find the article “How police training contributes to avoidable deaths” published in TheAtlantic several years ago, and you will see that all recent horrific scenarios of police killing civilians are 1:1 what police officers see in their training videos. You will recognize Lisa Mearkle, Ian Birk, Betty Shelby, and even Sean Groubert despite the fact that the latter pled guilty. They all saw these scenarios they became later involved in, in the training videos, that very convincingly showed them how they would be killed if they did not fire first.

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    • While I take your point, and will look up the article, I don’t agree with the premise that “place” doesn’t have an impact on how local police act. As someone who spent 28 years in NYC, and also 7 in Boulder, CO, I can tell you with certainty that place matters as far as how the average officer treats the average citizen. The notion that all police act like these two psychopaths just because they get similar training is simply not true. The people who hired these lunatics absolutely share in the responsibility of what happened.

      I do agree that there appears to be a nationwide problem with how police are being trained though. Do all police everywhere in the U.S. receive the exact same training? Is that a choice by local departments, or is it incentivized somehow by the Feds? Any detailed information on that would be helpful.

      No question that this is WAY bigger than Mesa, AZ, and if the Feds are encouraging insane training across the country this needs to be studied and addressed.

    • Come on you guys. It’s obvious from the video this kid was scared shitless. To make matters worse there were numerous opportunities to just cuff the kid. He’s kneeling there with his hands locked on his head, how much easier does it get? Keep in mind they didn’t appear to have a problem cuffing the gal. Then to have the police, while they’re pointing a rifle directly at you, close range, bark out one command after another. Ya think maybe the kid might have been a little flustered and nervous. In the same situation do you think maybe you would have been? Just maybe or are you going to be cool, calm and collected and follow instructions to a tee? When someone has a gun pointed directly at you, guaranteed you’re shaking like a leaf. And then to finish it off the cop pumps five rounds into the kid at point blank range because he was concerned about where the kids hands were going. At point blank lets just hope he wasn’t concerned the first few rounds were going to miss. You think just maybe one or two rounds, just to disable the kid, might have been sufficient?
      Using a firearm on another person should be the very last resort after all other options are extinguished. I know it is for CCL holders and it should be for law enforcement personnel as well.

  13. Probably nobody knows for sure. Local leadership definitely plays a role as well. For instance, one of the “epicenters” of police abuse is Euclid OH, population 47K.

    > if the Feds are encouraging

    Not sure about the Feds, but there’s one more important player in this: Israel. American cops from all over the country travel to Israel to learn the tactics Israelies are using on occupied territories, plus Israeli officials come here to train our PD’s. Google “us cops training in israel” to see the scale of this effort. Remarkably, in many cases it’s Israel who is paying for the trip. Why?

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  14. People act shocked and surprised at the “Not guilty” verdicts agaisnt LEOs. The issue is not the juries, but the law. In many (most?) localities, “shooting when scared” is a perfectly acceptable legal defense, because it is a perfectly acceptable use of lethal force situation in most jurisdictions. So if a police manual says it is legal, than it is impossible for a well-meaning but fair jury to hold the officer accountable without unreasonable doubt. The solution is that police manuals/guidance need to be approved and/or written in coordination with the citizens that they are sworn to protect and serve. They also need to be re-written when shown to be faulty such as cases like this.

    People need to stop getting angry at juries because of “Not guilty” verdicts and get to the root of the problem.

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  15. I don’t think anybody seriously thought that these cops barking one threat after another were scared. Rather, it’s accepted that the cops can kill whoever does not comply with their commands. In fact, this point of view is present even in the comments to this very video on various websites – look, at this particular second he did not comply with the order not to lower his hands, so it’s his fault.

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  16. If you look into it, you will find that a lot of the federal police like HS and border patrrol, et. al. are actually taken to Israel for training. I had a border patrol guy tell me about it.

    This makes us the new Palestinians.

    Reply
  17. This is a case of extremely bad training. The cop doing the yelling is making the cop holding the gun and the victim extremely nervous. Both the shooting cop and victim are scared of getting shot. The victim is scared of the cop with the big gun and the cop is scared the victim might try and pull a secret weapon out on him.

    The cop giving the commands needs to act in a calming manner keeping everyone calm. This decreases the chance of a sudden incident based off fear like is what just happened.

    Really even the cop that is shouting is extremely scared and agitated because of this. Some people just dont handle life and death situations well. There needs to be somebody in charge of this group that is cool and calm under pressure. That cop shouting was the wrong person for the job.

    End of Story.

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  18. About 5 years ago I was standing behind an off duty cop at the checkout line in a grocery store wearing a t-shirt that said; “A lion doesn’t concern itself with the opinion of sheep” on the back of the shirt along with the local police departments logo featured prominently.

    He was in his early to mid 20’s and about 5′ 4″ and maybe 150 lbs soaking wet and everything about his demeanor oozed Napoleon complex. The shirt just really rubbed my fur the wrong way. So I said; “You should keep in mind that some of those sheep are actually ravenous wolves in sheep’s clothing”.

    I’m 6′ 1″ 205, so when he spun around to look at me with a petulant look on his face I looked down on him right into his eyes with a somewhat purposeful predatory look in my eyes. That’s when I saw in his eyes what he really was. He was just a scared kid who’d been bullied his entire life because he was small.

    Far too often it’s people like him that want to become cops.The Marines have learned how to weed people like that out for combat duty because they know that those types of personalities don’t do well in combat and endanger the lives of their fellow Marines.

    Police departments need to take a cue from the Corp, instead of the damn Israeli’s. But that’s not going to happen at that pay grade, and far too many departments need warm bodies.

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  19. Some other notes. Cops are often stereotyped as muscled-bound idiots. That shirt doesn’t help. Lions live in a lot of places – places that don’t have sheep.

    Also, the problem is that the cops *know* that some “sheep” are actually wolves in disguise. The problem is that they can’t tell the difference, so they treat all sheep like deadly predators that can turn and the lion and kill him if they don’t attack first. They see a sheep crawling on the floor of a motel, and they thought “wolf”.

    Also, lions aren’t particularly brave. They tend to be lazy and drive other animals off they hard-fought prey through intimidating tactics. They kill each other’s young. Lions don’t care about anyone other than other lions. That’s what animal they pick? Maybe too accurate in some cases.

    Cops aren’t supposed to be lions, they are supposed to be sheepdogs. Sheepdogs protect and serve the sheep. And you can bet that a sheepdog can smell the difference between a sheep and a wolf in disguise a mile away.

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    • > They see a sheep crawling on the floor of a motel, and they thought “wolf”.

      From uber-arrogant comments uttered by Langley towards Shaver, no, it does not look like he thought “wolf”. From his multiple warnings about how Shaver wouldn’t survive if he did this or that, he rather saw him as a steak.

      As for which animal cops associate themselves in our jungle, here’s from the book “Arrest-Proof Yourself” by Dale Carson:

      “Cops are not ordinary people. They are licensed, paid,and trained by the state to hunt the two-legged beast—i.e., you. They enjoy hunting people and making arrests. It’s what they do. They’re evaluated and rewarded by their superiors almost exclusively on the number of arrests they make. This is no disparagement. Controlling bad guys with hunter cops is essential for civilization. Just think of the next police officer you meet as a polite great white shark with a well-pressed uniform. And you? You’re a struggling little fish. This will help you adjust your behavior accordingly.”

    • Yes. Police are supposed to protect and serve.

      The Lion also represents the King and royalty, and the sheep would be the Lion’s servants. So the very fact that a cop (especially a young rookie cop) would wear a shirt that says, “A lion doesn’t concern itself with the opinions of sheep” that also clearly shows that the person wearing the shirt is a policeman, delivers a message that is the opposite of protect and serve.

      So the message it clearly delivers is you had better serve me and my interests, or pay the price. And if you don’t like that message it means nothing to me because I’m a Lion and you’re just a lowly sheep whose opinion means nothing to me.

      Which actually describes how Statists view their world perfectly. Statism after all, is about highly centralized government control. The militarization of police departments after 9/11 reflects that reality.

      That’s why I get so annoyed at the “Hero” bullshit. Every service member is a “Hero”, and every cop is a “Hero”, just for doing their freakin’ job. This is foisted on society and culture purposefully by the Statists in DC and their Statist minions in the MSM to deliver a message that if you serve the government then you’re elevated to Hero status. But if you don’t, then you had better just thank those Heroes and serve them…..or else.

      Well, that shit’s not going to work with me, and I’m not the only one who feels that way.

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