Dolton police shooting: video shows man shot by officers had gun, wouldn’t drop it

Police body camera video released Friday shows a 19-year-old man being shot multiple times by Dolton police after raising a gun in the direction of officers last week.

The footage, released by the village of Dolton, showed officers commanding Carterris Doty to drop the gun dozens of times.

“Why would I drop my gun for?” Doty responded, seconds before being shot.

While on the ground, Doty held on to the gun even as police asked him to drop it, so officers fired at him once more. After being shot, the man yelled in agony before tossing the handgun to the side.

“What the f---, man. Come on!” an officer said after shooting him. “F---, come on man! Just drop the f------ gun.”

Dolton Mayor Riley Rogers said the video “exonerates” the officers of any wrongdoing, and he commended them for their restraint in not immediately shooting Doty after he initially pulled the gun from his waistband.

The video shows the vantage point of three different officers chasing after Doty as he jogged away from them on Oct. 31.

A call was made to Dolton police that day about a man wearing a red hoodie walking down a street with a gun. When police first arrived, Doty refused to remove his hands from his pocket and dodged officers attempts to grab him.

Police repeatedly commanded he show them his hands; instead, at one point he brandished a handgun from his waistband and pulled it out. He held the gun down beside his legs for most of the pursuit while holding a cell phone in his other hand.

Officers fired a barrage of bullets at Doty but Rogers said he didn’t know how many.

“You may want to say, ‘why so many gun shots’ but officers are trained to fire until the threat is extinguished,” Rogers said. “As you can clearly see in the video the offender – even though he had been struck several times by the officer’s bullets – he was on the ground, he raised up and still had the gun in his hand which also presents a continuing threat.”

Rogers also couldn’t give an update on the man’s condition or how many times he was shot.

Giavonni Nickson, spokeswoman for the village, said Doty has been charged with three counts of aggravated unlawful use of a weapon with more charges pending. He was taken to a hospital after the shooting, and his condition was stabilized, but Dolton police on Friday could provide no updates on his condition.

The two officers who shot Doty are on administrative leave; the third officer didn’t fire and remains on duty, Rogers said.

“These officers, I think, put themselves in jeopardy, by continuing to try not to shoot,” Rogers said. “I think they took an extended amount of time to get the [offender] to drop his weapon.”

Rogers said the officers could’ve shot the man as soon as he pulled the gun from his waistband because “at that point, it is like, who’s the quickest draw?”

“It is very important that the body cams are in use,” Rogers said. “In this case we feel it exonerates our officers. They did exactly what they were supposed to do.”

Dolton Police Chief Ernest Mobley credited his officers’ training with helping them show restraint in a difficult situation — especially this year, when fatal police shootings sparked protests across the country and around the world.

“So many times, we know the outcome of a [police] shooting is a person with a cell phone mistaken for a gun or with no weapon at all. And I like to think the training we give the officers played a part in it,” Mobley said. “I think with the temperature and climate across the nation also played a part in their mind because they didn’t want it to be a bad shoot.”

He added: “I would say 99.9% of law enforcement across the nation would have said they would’ve been taken him down at the point where they saw the weapon.”

Manny Ramos is a corps member in Report for America, a not-for-profit journalism program that aims to bolster Sun-Times coverage of issues affecting Chicago’s South and West sides.