BRIDGETON, N.J. — With the dashboard camera in their cruiser rolling, police pulled a Jaguar over for running a stop sign on a dark New Jersey night. Things turned tense when one of the officers warned his partner that he could see a gun in the glove compartment.
Screaming “Don’t you (expletive) move!” and “Show me your hands!” at the man in the passenger seat, the officer reached into the car and appeared to remove a silver handgun. Then, despite being warned not to move, the passenger stepped out of the car, his hands raised about shoulder level.
The officers opened fire, killing him.
The video of the Dec. 30 killing of Jerame Reid in Bridgeton, a struggling, mostly minority city of 25,000 people about 35 miles south of Philadelphia, was released this week, raising questions and stirring anger over yet another death at the hands of police.
The shooting came after the killings of black men in New York and Ferguson, Mo., triggered months of turbulent protests, violence and calls for a re-examination of police use of force.
Reid and the man driving the car were black. The Bridgeton officer who spotted the gun, Braheme Days, is black. His partner, Roger Worley, is white. Both officers have been placed on leave while prosecutors investigate.
“The video speaks for itself that at no point was Jerame Reid a threat and he possessed no weapon on his person,” said Walter Hudson, chairman and founder of the civil rights group National Awareness Alliance. “He complied with the officer, and the officer shot him.”
Reid, 36, spent about 13 years in prison for shooting at three state troopers when he was a teenager. Days knew who he was; Days was among the arresting officers last year when Reid was charged with several crimes, including drug possession and obstruction.
In Bridgeton, where two-thirds of the residents are black or Latino, the killing has stirred small protests in the past couple of weeks, including a demonstration Wednesday, a day after the video was made public on a request made by two newspapers under the state’s open-records law.
The Cumberland County prosecutor’s office previously said a gun was seized during the stop but would not comment further on the investigation. Bridgeton police would not answer any questions about the video and said they opposed its release as neither “compassionate or professional.”
