Milwaukee police officer Christopher Manney has been fired following an internal investigation into the shooting that killed a mentally ill Black man named Dontre Hamilton.
CBS recently reported that Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn decided to fire the officer Wednesday, nearly six months after the shooting occurred.
According to Flynn, Manney did not follow through with police protocol regarding how to deal with a mentally ill suspect.
“You don’t go hands-on and start frisking somebody only because they appear to be mentally ill,” Flynn said during a news conference.
The incident started as the result of a call for a welfare check, CBS reported.
Hamilton was sleeping in a downtown park when Manney arrived on the scene and soon started to pat Hamilton down.
Reports suggest that there was some sort of physical altercation between the two and eventually Hamilton allegedly hit Manney on the neck with Manney’s baton.
That’s when the fatal shot was fired, CBS reported.
Hamilton’s family remains skeptical about the details released by police.
His family said that while he was indeed diagnosed with schizophrenia, he was never violent.
Family photo courtesy of Dameion Perkins/AP Photo
On Wednesday the family called for police to release photographs to serve as proof of the officer’s injuries.
Regardless of the details, however, the Wisconsin Division of Criminal Investigation found enough evidence to suggest Manney treated Hamilton like a criminal rather than someone who was emotional disturbed, CBS reported.
Further investigations are expected to take place after the Milwaukee County district attorney’s office asked for another investigator to do a second review of the case.
An attorney for Hamilton’s family also said that the FBI will be looking into the matter as well.
For now, Flynn is standing behind his decision to fire Manney but did not express whether or not he felt the officer should face any criminal charges.
He said that while the officer seemed to show “errors of judgment,” there did not seem to be any evidence of “malice.”
