The Jan. 18, 2016 shooting of Daniel Shaver by a police officer in Mesa, Arizona has brought police brutality back into the national spotlight because of the diligence of the Black Lives Matter activists.

On Friday, Dec. 8, graphic video of the Shaver shooting showed that police brutality is a national issue regardless of race and the BLM fights police brutality no matter who is the victim.

In 2016, police came to Shaver's hotel room after reports claiming that the 26-year-old Texas man had pointed a rifle out his window. But the weapon was a pellet gun he intended to use for his pest control job. He was showing it off to a friend when neighbors reported him. Six officers came to the La Quinta Inn and Suites and saw Shaver and a woman walking into a hallway.

Warning: The following video contains graphic content.

The body cam footage from the incident showed that Philip Brailsford, a two-year veteran of the Mesa Police Department, was pointing an AR-15 rifle at the couple. Shaver begs and pleads with officers to not shoot him but when he attempted to follow a command to crawl toward the police, Brailsford fired five times according to his testimony.  

Twitter users were outraged when the officer was acquitted of murder and manslaughter charges in the killing of Shaver. After incidents like this, BLM supporters are usually met with vitriol for bringing up police brutality. All Lives Matter critics were surprisingly silent. 

Shaver died from the shooting. The officer responsible claimed that Shaver made “a very similar motion to someone drawing a pistol from their waistband” but there was no weapon. Even though Arizona is an open-carry state, the NRA has not made a statement on the issue either.

The Mesa Police Department fired Officer Brailsford two months after the shooting, but Shaver's family will get no justice.

Black-lives-matterDaniel Shaver