Former FBI profiler Jim Clemente assesses the police interrogation techniques used on the girlfriend of John Crawford, who was shot and killed by police while carrying a toy gun in an Ohio Walmart.
“When you can take a situation where there’s a caller who says something and makes a claim, and the cops come in and immediately shoot first and ask questions later, it’s just outrageous,” Clemente said of the events in the case.
“He keeps calling (Crawford) that man, knowing that this is her boyfriend – knowing that this man is dead - and he’s talking to her this way,” he said about the officer’s interrogation of the girlfriend, Tasha Thomas.
“And then he’s like, ‘We’re going to discuss a serious incident, and you may be on your way to jail.’” He frontloads all this information to make sure when he asks the questions, what he’s trying to get her to say is that he had a gun, or that he made indications that he was going to threaten somebody,” Clemente observes.
“So all he’s looking for, if he get’s that, then he’s going to say, ‘Great, thank you very much, we now have confirmation, we can basically whitewash this whole thing.’”
The interrogating officer is trying to get the girlfriend to say that Crawford brought the gun in with him, Clemente says, which was not the case at all – the victim had picked up the pellet gun inside the Walmart.
“And I can’t imagine how many times – hundreds of thousands of times, people bring guns in to Walmart. Millions of times people buy guns in Walmart. To say that somebody carrying around a gun in Walmart is something that you need to have a SWAT response to, is ridiculous.”
Watch the full episode to also hear Clemente explain why he thinks the Sony hack attack was the crime of the year.
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