Footage has been released of a fatal police shooting of an unarmed man in California

Protest of the fatal police shooting of an unarmed man, Alfred Olango, in California
(Image credit: David McNew/Getty Images)

After four nights of protest in El Cajon, California, a suburb of San Diego, over Tuesday's fatal police shooting of Ugandan-born Alfred Olango, authorities released two sources of footage of Olango's death on Friday. The graphic video is available for viewing here.

Neither clip was recorded by official police cameras and much of the footage is silent. One video was obtained from a surveillance camera at a nearby taco restaurant, and the other is cell phone footage filmed by a bystander from a nearly identical angle. The grainy clips make it difficult to decipher Olango's behavior before he was killed, though it is clear the police officer responsible — who was summoned to the scene by Olango's sister out of concern for her brother's frame of mind — fired the fatal shots within 40 seconds of encountering the unarmed, mentally unstable man.

The officers involved have been placed on administrative leave and no charges have been filed to date.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.