Video Shows San Francisco Police Officers Firing on Man with Knife Surrounded

Update 10:09pm CT, Dec. 2: “Based on that snippet of video, it does seem that that person was not posing a direct threat and certainly didn’t have to be shot”, San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi said in a press conference Wednesday.

Officers went to the area Wednesday afternoon to check on a report of a stabbing.

“It looks like an execution”, a San Francisco resident who viewed the footage, told the San Francisco Police Commission during a discussion of body-worn cameras for police this evening.

Police said the man had threatened them with a kitchen knife when they confronted him on the side of a Bayview street, according to SF Gate. Several officers surrounded him at gunpoint and ordered him to drop the knife. But when an officer tried to cut off the man’s path, and the man moved toward him carrying the knife, five officers opened fire, killing him.

Video purportedly showing officers attempting to apprehend the suspect, shot from a Muni bus window, immediately surfaced on Instagram.

In the video, police are seen surrounding the man and appear to shoot at the ground.

In the video, someone urges the man to “just drop it”, then seconds later a number of shots ring out.

The 2011 shooting death of Kenneth Harding by police in the city’s troubled Bayview District sparked protests after the community reacted with anger to a video that showed the 19-year-old bleeding helplessly in the middle of a street while police stood around him with guns drawn and a crowd gathered.