Police in the US state of California have released video footage of a deadly encounter between officers and a mentally ill African American man, who was killed after being shot 14 times. The violent confrontation happened on July 11, when two police officers fired 18 rounds at 50-year-old Joseph Mann, after he failed to heed to their warnings. Disturbing footage from three police dash cams and a nearby surveillance camera, released Tuesday, showed the officers slowly chasing Mann for a few minutes and asking him to drop his knife before gunning him down from about 15ft (6 meters) away.

Sacramento Police Chief Sam Somers confirmed the news on Tuesday, saying the footage were released after conversations with City Manager John Shirey and Mayor Kevin Johnson. According to the videos, Mann’s arms were raised and he did not seem to threaten the officers with any weapon when he was shot. He collapsed and could be heard shouting in pain as the cops opened fire.

Prior to the incident, police had received distress calls about a man dwelling Del Paso Heights while holding a knife and gun in his hands. The knife was later found at the scene but Mann’s alleged firearm was never recovered by police. According to the media, the 911 callers had clearly pointed to Mann’s mental illness but the dispatch had failed to inform the officers of the matter.

“There’s a man outside of my apartment with a gun and a knife,” a 911 caller said in the recording. “There’s children all around, and he’s mentally ill.” Mann’s family has filed a civil lawsuit against the police and the city, alleging that the officers should not have resorted to lethal force because he was experiencing a mental crisis. “Any reasonable police officer should have noticed that he was mentally impaired” John Burris the Mann family’s lawyer said.

Mann’s family members described him as a smart college graduate who succeeded in several careers before deteriorating into mental illness about five years ago. The case is expected to stir more controversy and anti-police sentiments in the US, amid a public outrage against law enforcement agencies due to their unjustified killings of unarmed African Americans over the past months.

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The Human Rights Watch (HRW) says two recent summits on the global refugee crisis held at the United Nations (UN) were dismal failures. “This week’s summits on the global refugee crisis failed to meet the challenge of this critical moment in history,” read a statement released by the rights group on Tuesday, referring to two high-level summits attended by world leaders and held at the UN headquarters in New York.

The first meeting, held on Monday, was hosted by the outgoing UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. During that summit, countries reconfirmed their commitment to receiving and assisting refugees. But the HRW said it was “filled with dismal speeches that veered from vapid platitudes disconnected from real world challenges to get-tough pronouncements about securing borders and stopping irregular migration.”

The second summit, which was held on Tuesday and hosted by the outgoing US President Barak Obama, called on the participating countries to accept higher refugee relocation quotas, and to donate more money for refugees.

The Tuesday summit was also viewed by the rights group as a disappointment since it was expected to hear speeches from “world leaders about how they would support the countries where most refugees live,” but almost no such speech was delivered.

According to the statement, the crisis has reached a “critical moment” since many countries, which host the huge majority of the world’s refugees, have clearly said that they have reached the limit of their capacity.

It added that some of those countries, which have generously hosted refugees for years — or even decades — are now pressuring asylum seekers to leave, have shut down their doors to new arrivals, or have announced that they would be doing so soon.

In the second summit, however, some more concrete goals were put on the table, including getting one million refugee children into school, granting work permissions to one million of their parents, and resettling a significant number of more refugees.

“As laudable as these goals are, however, they are not an end in themselves,” since they in fact “will help to keep front-line host countries from becoming destabilized,” the HRW said.

“That is the best strategy for ensuring that their doors can remain open so that people fleeing threats to their lives in the months and years to come will still have a place of refuge,” it added.

Europe has been facing an unprecedented influx of refugees, most of whom are fleeing conflict zones in North Africa and the Middle East, particularly Syria. Last year alone, well over a million refugees made their way into the continent.

Many blame major European powers for the exodus of the refugees from their home countries as the conflicts and violence that force them out are usually a result of Western policies.

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