Body Cam Footage Shows Confrontation With Snow Shovel Before Utah Police Shooting

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Footage from a cop's body camera shows the confrontation that led to a fatal officer-involved shooting this week in Salt Lake City.

In the video, the officer approaches a house in the Avenues neighborhood of Utah's capital to question a man wearing a blue parka and holding a large plastic snow shovel. The man claims he is working to remove snow, though it appears that the paths and sidewalks around the yard have already been cleared.

"You're suspicious in the neighborhood," the officer says. "I had neighbors call saying you were knocking on doors yesterday." The officer then asks for the man's name.

"I'm not giving you my name because I'm just doing my business," the man, later identified as 42-year-old James Dudley Parker, repeatedly responds with rising anger.

"I'm doing my business, okay? I'm trying to make a living," Parker shouts. "Go back to your car. I'm doing my business. You can't get in my face!"

Parker then swings his shovel at the officer, knocking off the body camera and ending the recording.

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Parker hit the officer with the shovel "several" times before he was shot, police told Utah's KSL.

Parker had been arrested once before in Utah for a minor violation, reportedly for disturbing the peace and then refusing to give his identity to cops. In that December 2013 incident, Parker walked into part of a chocolate store that was off-limits to customers and started "severely disrupting operations," a document obtained by KSL said.

Dozens of people — including members of the activist groups Utahns Against Police Brutality, and Friends of Parker — protested the shooting Saturday in Salt Lake City. They voiced concerns that the incident was the latest in a string of encounters that involved unnecessary use of force by police, local radio station KUER reported.

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"Reasonable people can agree that the civil servant ought not to have been attacked with a plastic snow shovel, while at the same time asking critical questions about the conduct of a civil servant which led up to the encounter," the group Utahns Against Police Brutality wrote on their Facebook page.

"This isn't about an eye for an eye, it's about trying to learn lessons from a senseless tragedy, lessons Salt Lake City Chief [Chris] Burbank needs to teach to his officers to avoid future failures," the group continued.

A spokesman for the Utah Fraternal Order of Police responded that the video proved the officer "was doing his job."

"Officers have a job to do, and frankly the amount of victim blaming on the officer is ridiculous and doesn't leave much air in the room for a rational discussion," the spokesman told KSL. "That officer did nothing to provoke such an aggravated assault."

Follow Meredith Hoffman on Twitter: @merhoffman