Well-known activist investigating police shooting

The man shot by Rochester Police Monday remains in guarded condition, and has now been identified by police as 50-year-old C.W. Poole. News 8 Now’s Dave McKinley reports as police continue to investigate the incident, they’re not the only ones looking for answers.

Detectives returned to the home of Poole and his live in girlfriend Tuesday, hoping to speak with the woman whose 9-1-1 call that he’d threatened her, prompted the response by officers which lead up to the shooting. But, by that time, she’d already been called upon by someone conducting her own investigation.

“I’m Reverend Joy Powell, how you doing?” the well-known activist is rousting the neighbors, “Ma’am, you live around here?,” probing, “You think she’d talk to me?,” asking, “You know anything about the shooting last night?” 

All under the watchful eye of police, and unencumbered it seems by having recently been indicted herself for assault. She says she was railroaded. “Kill the message and destroy the messenger.”

Delivering the message, “The story just sounds fishy to me,” to anyone who will listen. “Because there’s a consistent pattern of people being shot by the police and the mayor and the police chief get on TV immediately and say it’s justified, tainting the investigation.” She says it happened again yesterday, just like it happened in the half dozen or so other police-involved shootings locally in the last two years.

“The story I’m hearing is quite different.” From people like Weeger Street resident Bo Jackson, “Police brutality that’s how the police is…that man had his hands in the air, you got three police officers in front of him…they threw him down to the ground and just started beating his head into the concrete.” Or so he heard from a neighbor, admitting he wasn’t home at the time. “I trust that person that told me. I believe everything she says so what I’m saying comes directly for her mouth.”

 [full transcript not available]

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