‘Astronomical’: Investigators to watch many hours of footage from east Charlotte ambush

CHARLOTTE — On April 29, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department was flooded with 911 calls as law enforcement members were victims of an ambush in east Charlotte.

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“Police. It’s a lot of gunfire. Shots on Ruth Drive between Galway and Kerry Lane,” one resident said to the operator as a gunbattle was raging outside of her door.

Now nearly three weeks later the calls made by residents caught in the chaos have been released, adding another piece to the investigation.

While the analysis of that horrific attack on Galway Drive is still in its early stages, there’s a large piece of evidence that still needs to be scanned: body camera footage.

It’s hard for anyone to imagine the amount of body camera footage that has been pulled from the attack and investigators will have to rewatch each clip several times to make sure nothing is missed.

Dr. Janne Gaub is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in their Criminal Justice Department and an expert on police body cameras.

“I would assume that every officer in that encounter was wearing a camera,” Gaub told veteran crime reporter, Glenn Counts, “the sheer amount of footage is going to be astronomical.”

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Investigators have to look at every officer’s body camera footage the whole way from the moment they were dispatched to the moment the standoff ended.

“If you and I are both at an incident my footage is going to show something different than your footage simply because we are not in the same place at the same time,” Gaub said.

Officials say 12 officers returned fire during the incident, Gaub says all of the video is important even from officers who didn’t fire their weapons.

“When you see the footage from the perspective of someone who didn’t fire but is capturing something on the footage that’s important to provide context to the whole situation, why did these officers fire why did only these officers fire,”

Members of internal affairs, investigators, and upper ranks will all look at the footage multiple times.

“I actually feel really awful for all the people who have to sit there and watch all of that and watch it probably multiple times especially since they might know these people, and so that’s a really difficult thing to have to watch,” Gaub said.

Gaub told Counts it can take weeks even months for all of that footage to be properly reviewed and suspects only a small percent of it will be made public.

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‘One of the greatest’: Friends, family mourn CMPD officer killed in east Charlotte shootout

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