Audio: Hear what happened immediately after the police shot Ali Osman minutes before he died
CONTENT WARNING: This is an extremely sensitive matter. I obtained police audio from the Sept. 24 deadly shooting in Central Phoenix.
Note: I’m giving this post a content warning given these audio clips are what happened before, during and after the Phoenix Police killing of Ali Osman so please proceed with caution because it’s quite upsetting to listen to.
There are still many unanswered questions around the Phoenix Police Department’s shooting and killing of Ali Osman, an unarmed Black man, who allegedly threw rocks at officers before his untimely death at the hands of police officers on September 24.
Police released some body camera footage of the event which was heavily edited and spliced with narrated updates of how it apparently went down, according to the police.
You can watch that here, but again, proceed with caution because it is the killing of a human being.
For background if you’re not familiar with what happened:
Ali Osman, who may have been dealing with a mental health crisis, apparently was throwing rocks at police near 19th Avenue and Tuckey Lane.
There was nothing in audio clips or selectively released video that actually showed him throwing rocks
He allegedly hit and caused “criminal damage” to the Police Chevy Tahoes.
One officer later claimed he injured his shin in the incident, but in all of the times dispatch asked of officer injuries nobody said anything of the sort, just the car damage.
The officer who eventually fatally shot Osman can be heard saying,” let’s get this motherfucker” before driving closer to the corner Osman was standing.
As seen in the video footage, which again is heavily edited by police, Osman had his hands up. The officer pulled out his gun and is heard shouting, "Drop it." Osman then throws a rock at the officer and was immediately shot and dropped to the ground. You can read more about it here or here.
I obtained some additional audio of the night in question which adds a little more to the story, but I was not sent all of the audio as there are notable lapses of silence and sections of time completely missing from the night.
This post will focus on roughly the first hour of when the shooting happened as well as immediately after, but I will include all audio clips I received, which continue until about six hours after the ordeal began.
The audio begins at 6:40 pm on September 24, 2022. After about four minutes, an officer says, “we’ve got someone actively throwing rocks at us on 19th Ave and Tuckey,” an area in Central Phoenix near the Christown Spectrum Mall.1
Here's a chronological telling of what you can hear in the audio clips.
6:47 pm: “Subjects down. He's still moving. We're code 4 right now,” an officer says after Osman was shot three times. “He is not complying,” you can hear someone say before it trails off a bit.
Code 4 means everything is under control or the area is safe
A lot of the audio is muffled since it’s through the dispatch communications so I’m doing the best I can to transcribe as much as possible.
6:48 pm: “Is he complying yet or not?”
“He's down boss, but he’s not moving. He was awake earlier and he wasn't complying. He wasn’t showing us his hands.”
6:49 pm: “He’s not responsive.”
An officer calls to start blocking off traffic.
6:50 pm: “We have people yelling at us from the east side of 19th Ave and Tuckey so we need someone over there to control that.”
6:52 pm: “We have a weak pulse.”
“Can we notify the light rail that we're going to be all over the light rail tracks?”
Police started talking to witnesses
6:53 pm: “We're going to shut down all of 19th Avenue from Maryland to Glendale please and then we need to shut down traffic both east and west on Tuckey
7:01 pm: “Has anyone seen some black male with a white bike … Going southbound on 19th Ave right now. Can anyone verify if they talked to him?”
7:06 pm: “I'll start collecting body cams so that they're available for detectives. If whoever's out with the other shooters can grab those and then mark them in a bag so that we have them.”
“Just to verify if we have two shooters and one witness officer. Is there anybody else who was on scene we need to collect body cams from?”
7:23 pm:
“Subject’s been pronounced.”
7:58 pm: “I think we had some family of our suspect.”
“I don't want to release anything over the air but if you can do me a favor and just give me a call.”
At this point, the audio cut off where presumably there was a discussion for about six minutes. The audio picks up again around 7:58 pm.
The rest of the clips are in order here from 7:58 pm until 12:32 am on Sept. 25.
There is no audio between 8:42 pm and 9:13 pm; between 9:15 pm and 10:12 pm; and between 10:19 pm and 11:40 pm.
This is actually my neighborhood and I saw police SUVs after it happened, but didn’t know what was going on as I was driving to the East Valley that night.