NEW YORK
A graphic video has emerged, capturing eight white police officers shooting 46 times at a mentally-ill black man in the U.S. state of Michigan.
The video, released by the American Civil Liberties Union, accompanies an interview with the mother of Milton Hall, who was shot by eight officers in 2012 for refusing to drop his pocketknife.
It shows a confrontation between an anxious looking Milton Hall and eight police officers forming a line with their guns pulled, in a shopping plaza parking lot. Two minutes into the video, the uniformed officers start to fire at the man. They continue shooting at him even after he goes down.
"To have eight people stand in front of one human being and shoot at him 46 times and hit him 14 times... It has been devastating to our family," says mother Jewel Hall in the interview, which was released on Tuesday.
Milton was a homeless, mentally ill African-American man living in Saginaw, Michigan. The county prosecutor declined to bring charges against the officers involved, and the U.S. Department of Justice announced a decision in February that the officers would not face federal charges.
"His blood running down the street like water. And he wasn't a threat, I mean, he had a little pen knife. He had no idea that those policemen would do that to him," his mother says.
Police brutality particularly against blacks in the last couple of years has laid bare the delicate state of race relations in the U.S.
In August, the shooting of black teenager Michael Brown by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, in Missouri, revived already-underlying racial tensions in the country.
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