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WASHINGTON, July 7 (Xinhua) -- Governor of U.S. State of Minnesota Mark Dayton said on Thursday he believed race played a role in a fatal police shooting during a routine traffic stop on Wednesday in the northern state.
"Would this have happened if those passengers, the driver or the passengers, were white? I don't think it would have," said Dayton at a press conference.
The fatal shooting happened Wednesday night in Falcon Heights, Minnesota during a routine traffic stop that derived from a broken taillight.
According to initial investigation, a police officer shot Philando Castile, a 32-year-old African-American, several times when the latter sat in his car.
Castile's girlfriend Diamond Reynolds then live-streamed online the aftermath of the police shooting, recording a gruesome scene where her bloody boyfriend slumping next to her.
According to a video released on the website of The New York Times on Thursday in which Reynolds recounted the incident to others, Castile was shot when reaching for his driver's license and registration as required by the officer.
Reynolds said Castile had told the police officer that he was carrying a weapon but was licensed to do so.
Describing himself as being "deeply, deeply offended" by Castile's death, Governor Dayton said the incident fit a pattern of unfair and sometimes violent treatment of African-Americans in the country.
"This kind of racism exists and it's incumbent upon all of us to vow that we're going to do that whatever we can to see that it doesn't happen, that it doesn't continue to happen," said Dayton.
The deadly encounter happened only one day after another police shooting killed another African-American man, Alton Sterling, in Baton Rouge, the capital city of the U.S. state of Louisiana.
Sterling was selling compact discs outside a food store when he was gunned down following an altercation with two police officers early Tuesday morning, according to the state's daily newspaper The Times-Picayune.
The Justice Department had already launched a civil rights investigation into Sterling's death.
U.S. President Barack Obama wrote on Thursday on his Facebook page that "all Americans should be deeply troubled" by the latest police shootings, stressing that they were "symptomatic of the broader challenges" within the country's justice system as well the racial disparities facing the country.
