Last Wednesday evening’s mass shooting in downtown Seattle has brought a lot of attention to Seattle’s gun violence problem. But there’s one thing that that has been largely missing from the wall-to-wall TV coverage of the day of deadly shootings: the cops were firing their weapons apparently as much as the alleged criminals.

Three hours before a gunfight between alleged gangs erupted on the corner of 3rd and Pine, less than a mile away the Seattle Police Department (SPD) opened fire on a man who was seated in a car. SPD released body cam footage Saturday afternoon of the incident, showing a traffic stop that turned bloody after a man tried to flee in his car and then a handful of officers fired a barrage of bullets into the vehicle, injuring the 25-year-old man inside.

The police shooting involved a hail of bullets that left one SPD officer yelling “Everybody chill!” at the top of his lungs.

Multiple officers from the SPD and the King County Sheriff’s Department opened fire on the man but neither agency has released the names of the officers involved.

SPD body camera footage shows that the traffic stop appeared, at first, to be nearing a peaceful conclusion after an identification check on the driver apparently found that he had no warrants for his arrest. But less than a minute later, the man tried to flee in his car and officers opened fire.

The traffic stop started at around 2:45 p.m. near the corner of corner of 3rd Avenue and Blanchard Street after officers apparently found a car owned by someone with an active arrest warrant.

“The owner of this car has a [Department of Corrections] felony warrant right now,” one officer tells the driver in a body camera footage. "Your license is valid and you’re not wanted for anything."

The driver tells officers that he’s on his way to take care of the problem but one officer tells the man that “these guys have another reason they want to talk to you.”

Two other officers then approach the driver’s window and begin talking to him, which is not captured on any of the body camera footage released by SPD. These officers may have been King County Sheriff’s deputies, who do not wear body cameras like SPD officers.

Less than a minute later, the driver tries to flee and drives his car into a parked SPD cruiser in front of him. The officers do not immediately open fire and instead circle the driver and yell commands. A moment later, with the car now pinned against the SPD cruiser, one officer yells “Gun!” and a blaze of gunfire erupts, lasting over 10 seconds.

The police gunfire didn’t end until one officer called the other cops off.

“Hey! Everybody chill!” the officer screams. “He’s not moving. Come to my side. We’ll move up and look at him. I’m moving up.”

Officers then approach the car and pull an apparently unconscious man out of the driver seat. There, the released body camera footage ends.

SPD has said the shooting is being investigated by the South King County Valley Investigative Unit, a police unit staffed by a collection of the county's police departments. SPD is no longer able to investigate shootings involving their own officers after Initiative 940 mandated that all officer-involved shootings must be investigated by an independent party.

A detective with the South King County Valley Investigative Unit did not return a request for comment Monday.

SPD has said that the man suffered “non-life-threatening injuries” but a spokesperson for the department declined to answer any questions regarding the incident, pointing to the fact that a separate unit is conducting the investigation.

SPD’s officers have gotten in trouble in the past, and even fired in at least one incident, for shooting into fleeing vehicles. One of police chief Carmen Best’s first acts as police chief was to fire two officers who shot their weapons into a fleeing car in October of 2018. Best fired the two officers for what she described as creating “a deadly force situation that unnecessarily threatened public safety," according to the Seattle Times.