Community, religious leaders say video shows Rahim not shot in the back, not on his phone at the time

.......crickets..........

As he was shot in the back. While talking on his cell phone.

Does this mean that man of religion lied to us?

This trend by BPD (and in this case, possibly the FBI) of immediately involving community leaders in the aftermath of these kinds of incidents is encouraging. No better way to nip the rumor mill in the bud. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and so on...

First off, to hopefully belay the (perhaps inevitable) blowback from the reactionaries - it certainly sounds like this Rahim guy was a dangerous nutcake. As the BPD has been fairly controlled in their use of deadly force lately, I hope that this was a case where there was no better alternative for the two officers.

However, I just looked at the Herald page you ref'ed, Adam, and the embedded video says nothing about the consensus of community/religious 'leaders' - while the accompanying text says, in its entirety:

"Hub community leaders today were shown video footage of yesterday's shooting death of a 26-year-old Roslindale man who was being monitored by terror investigators -- spurring some to dismiss claims by his family that he was shot in the back by police, while others reserved judgment, calling the video 'vague.' " (emphasis mine)

That seems quite a bit more ambivalent than what you've got at the top of the page there.

Is there a more specific breakout somewhere of what individuals present at the screening thought of the video, or a description of what it shows?

The FBI can't detect it's way out of a paper bag without dragnet warrantless surveillance, cash payoffs to snitches and a huge organized effort to coercively turn people into active informants. When even that fails they go out and make their own "plots".

This has been pretty clear in almost all of their recent "terror" arrests where the arrested peeps were mostly losers who would/could have done very little without the helpful informant egging them on and often providing the weapon/bomb/whatever

I admit to having a horrible suspicious mind but my first thought after learning that the shooting involved the FBI was that the dude they shot was someone they were cultivating coercively to be an informant who ended up snapping and attacking the people who were trying to "make him an offer he can't refuse..."

Looks like my horrible thoughts are wrong though (and I'm happy about that). I'm still mildly interested in how he came to the task force attention. An informant would be the easy answer but it's also equally likely that this dumbass was doing stupid stuff on the internet and came to their attention that way ...

In roughly 24 hours from the incident, he's got the community people in watching video that apparently corroborates his (apparently accurate) initial description of the incident, and the community folks are out saying (more or less) yup, what the Commish said is what happened.

This goes to what I have said before (in a more thoughtful and detailed way) on UHub - that our police are simply better trained than the police in a lot of other places in the country.

On a related note, to my recollection, this is the second consecutive time that this type of speedy transparency has been delivered after an officer of the BPD was involved in a fatal shooting. This will go a very long way toward providing a store of goodwill when the BPD needs it next (e.g., when, as someone else pointed out, there is another use of deadly force and there is no video). The value of this should not be underestimated.