LOS ANGELES (CNS) - Former San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon, a candidate for district Attorney in Los Angeles, has pledged to reopen four deadly police shooting investigations that current Los Angeles County District Attorney Jackie Lacey declined to prosecute.
Among those cases were the killings of two unarmed people captured on video.
“They open up significant questions for me," Gascon told KABC-TV.
Among the cases is the 2013 killing of Ricardo Diaz Zeferino by Gardena police. Officers believed he and two other men were suspects of a bicycle theft. But Zeferino's brother was the victim. Zeferino was not armed. After dropping his hands against officers orders, he's shot while his hands are down, palms facing out.
“You can see somebody whose hands are coming down and he's shot and killed -- I find it offensive,'' Gascon told the station.
Gascon also said he'd reopen the investigation into Brendon Glenn's killing in Venice in 2015. For months, Katherine Mader, former LAPD inspector general and retired judge, and Je Long Jung, senior trial attorney under President Barack Obama's civil rights division of the Department of Justice, reviewed dozens of cases, Gascon said.
During his time as San Francisco District Attorney he did not prosecute any officers who killed someone. But Gascon said there are distinctions between San Francisco and Los Angeles.
“First of all, I've never had a case presented to me where the police shot an unarmed person... But in some cases, I came out publicly and said this is an unnecessary shooting,'' he told the station.
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