Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner called a sudden recess during a city council meeting in August 2016 after Nikita Braziel, the wife of Alva Braziel, spoke out about the way the mayor had described the video of her husband’s death. Alva Braziel was fatally shot by a Houston police officer on July 9.
According to KHOU, Nikita held a press conference outside City Hall before going into the chambers to demand more transparency around police body cameras. She told the council that her husband had a family and was providing for them, and that her children were seeing a psychiatrist since his death. She also said the mayor had not spoken with her or the family’s attorney, as he had stated publicly.
Nikita told the room that the video she was shown did not match what the mayor described. In her account, the footage showed her husband asking for help before he was shot, and it did not show him pointing a gun at officers. The Houston Police Department has not been reported to have responded to those specific claims at the meeting.
The footage released by HPD reportedly shows only the moments after the shooting and does not show what led up to it. Separate video that surfaced from a source other than HPD body cameras was reported to show a man believed to be Alva with his hands raised, turning around, before he was shot. The HPD video also shows a gun in his hand. Texas is an open carry state, which means having a gun visible is not by itself against the law.
Per HPD, officers must turn their body cameras on manually, and there is a delay of about 30 seconds, known as buffering, before footage is actually recorded. Nikita and the people who joined her called the rollout of the cameras a failure. They are asking HPD to release unedited footage within 24 hours of an incident.
The questions at the center of this story are about when officers turn their cameras on and how quickly the public gets to see the full picture. Baller Alert will keep following it.
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