Early Helping of Spin: Salinas Police shooting leads to community enraged.

Weekly Facebook commenter Teri Short was to the point: “There should be a warning that this video is graphic.” She was right. The video she refers to was shot with a cellphone camera and uploaded to YouTube by a user named Curt McHenry; we then linked it on our Facebook page and website. The graphic video shows a man wielding a pair of gardening shears leading police on a slow-speed foot pursuit through a residential area about noon on Tuesday. The officers get within arms range and he turns on them, waving the shears with blades opened. The officers back off a bit, and the pursuit continues. This happens multiple times as the man walks across the scrubby lawns in the working-class East Salinas neighborhood.

When the man nears the corner of Sanborn Road and Del Monte Avenue, a busy street especially in the middle of a workday afternoon, he appears to turn a final time; the officers, who have their weapons drawn, shoot him. I hear five or maybe six shots on the video; the mortally wounded man falls to the ground outside a neighborhood bakery and dies.

The video cuts off after the unidentified woman who shot it unleashes a string of expletives at the police. “You didn’t have to shoot him,” she wails.

What’s not on the video is what prompted the call for police in the first place: the man, who remained unidentified as we went to press, had reportedly jumped over a fence and into a backyard, where he tried to attack the resident’s dog with the shears. A press release issued late tonight by the police also states the man had exposed his genitals to the homeowner.

And, the release states, that police used a taser on the man, but it failed to stop him.

As outlined by Weekly reporters Sara Rubin and Dave Schmalz in this week’s paper, dropping Thursday morning, Salinas residents—particularly those of East Salinas—are enraged; it’s the second fatal shooting by police in as many weeks, and the third of the year. Numerous commenters call the most recent one an execution, a murder, an assassination and say the cops are trigger happy and out of control.

I’m not an apologist for a rogue department, but I don’t think that’s what the Salinas P.D. is. I live in a fairly sketchy Salinas neighborhood and have had to call them enough because of it, and they’re always professional. (Yes, I know, I’m a middle-class white woman and maybe it’s different for me. There. You don’t even have to email me that one.) Protesters who gathered at City Hall have called for a federal investigation into the department; I think the always smart Salinas Chief Kelly McMillin should call for one too, to assuage the community’s outrage and to clear his cops.

More on this in Thursday's newspaper and online at www.mcweekly.com.