“I can tell you a weapon was seized – a handgun”, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Kerr Putney said in Wednesday’s press conference.
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“Don’t release some info, don’t play hide the ball”, said Justin Tyler Bamberg, an attorney representing Scott’s family, before joining the family to privately view the police footage yesterday. He added: “You can not let the mob run how a police department runs an investigation”.
Relatives of a black man shot dead by police have watched a video of the shooting and say he had his hands by his side at the time.
The emergency medical service in Charlotte says a man has been taken to the hospital with life-threatening injuries from an apparent gunshot wound Wednesday night in ongoing protests over the fatal police shooting of a man.
Charlotte is the latest USA city to be shaken by protests and recriminations over the death of a black man at the hands of police, a list that includes Baltimore, Milwaukee, Chicago, New York and Ferguson, Missouri.
The curfew prohibits “travel upon any public street, alley or roadway or upon any other public property” and will be in effect every night until 6 a.m. until the state of emergency is over.
Tulsa County prosecutors have charged a police officer who shot Mr Crutcher with first-degree manslaughter.
His family had previously said he was holding a book, not a firearm, when he was killed. Two different outcomes that raise some key questions: How soon are police obligated to release the recordings and why might they keep a lid on it?
“What I can tell is what I saw, the video does not give me absolute definitive visual evidence that would confirm that a person is pointing a gun”. But he added: “When taken in the totality of all the other evidence, it supports what we said”. The police chief has refused to publicly release the videos but showed it to Scott’s family. He said Scott gets out of his vehicle calmly. “It is impossible to discern from the videos what, if anything, Mr. Scott is holding in his hands”, Bamberg said in a statement. Bamberg gave no details on what the wife saw.
“It is not a very clear picture and the gun in question is a small gun”.
Experts who track shootings by police noted that the release of videos can often quell protest violence, and that the footage sometimes shows that events unfolded differently than the official account.
In this era of a 24/7 cycle of citizen journalists and live video feeds, civil rights activists are saying the refusal to release video nearly immediately underscores the fractured relationship between police and the community they serve.
Protesters in the southern U.S. city fled after police with rifles fired the tear gas and what appeared to be rubber bullets, an AFP reporter on the scene said. For them and others calling for a fair investigation, just leaving it up to police won’t do.
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“The key thing that people need to understand is that the integrity of the investigation is the most important thing”, said David Klinger, a University of Missouri-St.
