A white South Carolina police officer was arrested and charged with murder Tuesday after video showed him fatally shooting a fleeing, unarmed black man in the back.
North Charleston Police Officer Michael T. Slager, 33, can be seen shooting 50-year-old Walter Scott after a confrontation according to The Post and Courier. Slager chases Scott and shoots at him eight times in the video recorded by a passerby and obtained by The New York Times.
Scott died there, though it wasn't clear if he died immediately.
The graphic video raises questions about Slager's original assertion that he used his gun because he felt endangered.
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| Eddie Driggers of the North Charleston Police said he was sickened by a video of the killing. Credit Richard Ellis/Getty Images |
NY TIMES
It was at a vigil Sunday for his slain brother that Anthony Scott found out what he had believed was true all along.
First came the unfathomable news that his younger brother, Walter, had been shot to death by a police officer after being stopped in the early ’90s-era Mercedes he had bought just a few days before. Then came the growing doubts about the initial police story that his brother had endangered the officer. Then came the video.
It was delivered by a stranger who approached after family and friends placed flowers and said their prayers at the spot where Walter had died.
“I have something to share with you,” he said. They got into Anthony Scott’s car. Then the stranger showed him the video on his phone. “I knew it! I knew it!” Mr. Scott exclaimed, and what might have been another shooting of an obscure black man by the police suddenly became an astonishing glimpse of life and death, black and white, police and civilian.
In an interview with NBC News on Wednesday, the man who videotaped the shooting, Feidin Santana, said he had seen Officer Slager and Mr. Scott struggling on the ground before the shooting began. “I remember the police had control of the situation,” Mr. Santana said. “He had control of Scott, and Scott was trying just to get away from the Taser.”
The city’s swift response — which included voluntarily, and almost immediately, turning the investigation of the shooting over to a state agency — underscored not just the power of the video. It also showed the impact of intensified public scrutiny of police violence after police killings of unarmed blacks in Ferguson, Mo.; Staten Island; and Cleveland.
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| Barbara Scott, a cousin of Mr. Scott, placed flowers at the site of his death on Wednesday. Credit Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times |
Unlike officials in Ferguson, who were criticized for taking a pro-police stance immediately after Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was shot to death by a white officer in August, officials in North Charleston have sought to calm tensions; offered condolences to the victim’s family; made no attempt to publicly defend the officer; and said they handed the investigation over to the state, though they were not obligated to do so, to ensure an impartial and independent inquiry. The department will also provide a police escort for Mr. Scott’s funeral on Saturday. It is not clear how the case might have unfolded without the video.
Officer Slager stopped the driver of a Mercedes-Benz for a broken taillight, according to police reports. As soon as the officer stopped the car, the reports say, Mr. Scott fled and Officer Slager chased him into a grassy lot that abuts an auto shop. The officer fired his Taser, a stun gun, but it did not stop Mr. Scott, according to police reports. In the reports and in news coverage, Officer Slager said he felt threatened and fired when the driver he had stopped tried to overpower him and take his Taser.
But Anthony Scott, the eldest of three brothers and two years older than Walter, said he never believed that. He described his brother as a “friendly, loving father who got along with everyone,” adding that he sang, played drums and participated in community theater.
When Mr. Scott, who had a long arrest record, mostly for failing to pay child support or show up for court hearings, was pulled over for the traffic violation. Scott’s child-support debt was important because it may have explained why he fled a routine traffic stop; Mr. Scott’s brother made that connection in news interviews.
Mr. Scott was employed as a forklift operator and engaged to be married.
The family had made contact with an Atlanta lawyer who was experienced in cases involving police misconduct. The lawyer, L. Chris Stewart, got in his car and drove five hours to Charleston, arriving after 2 a.m.
Mr. Stewart gave the video to the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, which had taken over the investigation. He said he was still in awe of what Mr. Santana had done, saying “he feared for his life.”
“I knew this family would never get justice, and this guy just hands us justice,” Mr. Stewart said. “He handed us justice.”
Mr. Stewart said that there were so many signs that it was a problematic shooting that even without the video, the officer would most likely have faced immense scrutiny. “One thing they couldn’t deny or get around was that they had a victim with five holes in his back,” Mr. Stewart said.
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| Anthony Scott, whose brother Walter L. Scott was killed by a police officer in North Charleston, S.C., By Associated Press Photo by Chuck Burton/Associated Press. |
NY TIMES
Nothing has done more to fuel the national debate over police tactics than the dramatic, sometimes grisly videos: A man gasping “I can’t breathe” through a police chokehold on Staten Island, a 12-year-old boy shot dead in a park in Cleveland. And now, perhaps the starkest video yet, showing a South Carolina police officer shooting a fleeing man in the back.
The videos have spurred calls from statehouses to the White House for more officers to attach cameras to their uniforms. While cameras frequently exonerate officers in shootings, the recent spate of videos has raised uncomfortable questions about how much the American criminal justice system can rely on the accounts of police officers when the cameras are not rolling.
Many cities have installed cameras in their police cruisers for years, and some — an estimated 25 percent of departments that responded to a 2013 survey — require so-called body cameras. Those numbers are dwarfed by the millions of Americans who carry camera-equipped cellphones. As cameras become ubiquitous, the digital video is likely to become a go-to source of impartial evidence in much the same way that DNA did in the 1990s.
Video evidence is not new, of course; the tape of officers beating Rodney King in 1991 helped ignite the Los Angeles riots after the officers were acquitted. When departments began installing dashboard cameras in the 1990s, many officers opposed it. But they quickly concluded that the recordings often cleared them of wrongdoing after citizen complaints. “For the most part, unless you are behaving badly, those things are going to back you up,” said David Harris, a University of Pittsburgh law professor who studies police practices.
Many officers similarly opposed efforts to videotape confessions, but that resistance has been fading in recent years. Police organizations have endorsed the practice, and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. recently required the F.B.I. to start taping interviews.
But cellphone videos taken by bystanders tend to make many police officers uncomfortable, because they have no control over the setting and often are not even aware they are being filmed until later. Though the courts have held that people have a constitutional right to record the police, those who do are frequently challenged by officers.
Cellphone videos have captured police officers pushing and slapping a homeless man in Florida and shooting a man who threw rocks at officers in Washington State. In February, two Pelham, N.Y., officers retired after a video contradicted their account of an arrest of a black man.
“The ability to record has gotten so prevalent that police can no longer count on their account to be the truth,” Mr. Harris, the Pittsburgh professor, said.
The increase in cellphone cameras is one reason many police unions do not oppose requirements that officers carry body cameras, said Chuck Wexler, the head of the Police Executive Research Forum in Washington. “The big push for body cameras has been driven in part by the sense that citizens have their phones and can record, and it was only part of the whole story,” he said.
“We are very used to being videotaped,” said Lt. Mark Wood, the executive officer in the operations division of the Indianapolis Police Department, where the department is testing body cameras. “We are under the impression that we are always being videotaped, because we probably are.”
Data is still spotty, but an early study in Rialto, Calif., suggests that when officers carry body cameras, they are less likely to use force. Similar studies in Mesa, Ariz., and in Britain showed that citizen complaints also decreased.