Police Chief: Media Not Reporting Race Of Man Police Stopped From Committing Suicide In Abington
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Montgomery County Police Chief Bill Kelly accused multiple media outlets of hiding the race of a suicidal individual who police wrestled a gun away from Sunday night after an encounter with an officer in Abington.
Kelly told Dom Giordano on Talk Radio 1210 WPHT that their policy is always to report the race of the individual, but news outlets extracted that detail from their reporting.
"When we put the story out, like we always did, we talked about the fact that the gentleman was a 32-year-old black male...In every case we put that out and in every case they deleted the race of the individual."
He was disappointed that fact was overlooked or excluded given the number of recent police shootings of black men that have drawn outrage of spurred protests around the country.
"We thought that that was an important part of the story considering everything that's been going on. Yet, everyone of the news outlets that we'd seen had deleted the race of the individual when they were telling the story."
Kelly credited the officers involved with using the best judgement to end the confrontation without using their weapons.
"Something that people have to be thinking about is that the officer has an equal right to want to survive these scenarios as much as he citizen does and in some of these cases, to go any further than they would is sometimes risking their own life. These officers did that. They thought it was a risk worth taking. They did it and it worked out just fine."