The groundsman of Springfield College in Massachusetts is charged with murder after shooting dead a 20-year-old college student.
The student, Daunte Wright, was shot by police in the early hours of the morning after an alarm had been activated.
The campus police officer then told the campus to “Get on the ground”, but allowed his gun to go off.
“The Springfield police officer, I believe, is a scapegoat for a bigger problem with our society today. The law enforcement profession as a whole has taken a lot of heat lately,” the station WGBH reported.
In the same hearing, Springfield College launched an independent investigation into the officer’s actions.
In an opinion piece published on Saturday in USA Today, Gerard Gil-Cohen, a professor at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, said he believed the US justice system “has become more unjust and less accurate in recent years”.
He added: “Shootings by police officers have captured media attention because the officers in many cases are armed with powerful weapons, their actions are viewed as reasonable by society and the media, and no one dies.”
In 2015, a former New York City police officer who fatally shot an unarmed black man during a street stop described killing him as “justified”.
Source: Reuters/BBC