Charlotte-Mecklenberg police Chief Kerr Putney said Thursday that their videos of the incident do not provide “definitive visual evidence” that Keith Scott was pointing a gun at police officers, but he said other evidence and witness accounts suggest that Scott had a weapon.
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Bamberg said Thursday that the family wants the police videos made public.
Charlotte’s police chief said there is at least one video from a body camera and one other video from a dashboard camera that captured Scott’s shooting.
“The more information that is released, the less opportunity for rumors to spread”, said Eric Schneider, an urban and crime historian at the University of Pennsylvania. “The media does not care about us”, a protester said.
The Charlotte Observer reports that most of those arrested during the protests are local and do not have criminal records. Several businesses there were damaged Wednesday when protests turned violent. “It’s not clear what they are, we don’t know what they are”. It has stirred broad debate on race and justice in the United States and given rise to the Black Lives Matter movement. Police allowed Scott’s family to view the videos Wednesday but have so far declined to release the footage to the public. Law enforcement will still be able to show footage to victims’ families without releasing it publicly.
Earlier in the day, Scott’s wife released her video of the shooting.
The smartphone video does not conclusively answer the question of whether he was armed or not.
The video does not show a gun, which police maintain he had, but on air MSNBC notes that does not mean there was or was not one. They are also charged with breaking and entering, larceny after breaking and entering and conspiracy. The State Bureau of Investigation is leading a review into the shooting.
After the gunshots, Scott can be seen lying face-down on the ground while his wife says “he better live”. Still, the timing has to be right, he said. Activists and Scott’s family have been demanding that city officials release body-cam or dashcam footage of the shooting.
Protesters, Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts, and even Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton have called for authorities to release police tapes. Gray suffered a fatal neck injury while handcuffed in the back of a police transport van.
“To lump all body cam footage as part of criminal investigations doesn’t make a lot of sense and doesn’t serve the goal that body cameras are supposed to serve, which is accountability”, she said.
“It’s nearly the first response to call out the guys with the heavy-duty weapons”, the University of Pennsylvania’s Schneider said.
On Thursday night, a curfew order was issued in the city as hundreds of protesters marched peacefully through downtown to protest the fatal police shooting of a black man for the third night.
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No evidence has yet come to light proving the man was armed – as police at the scene claimed. Jonathan Ferrell was shot 10 times by Officer Randall Kerrick, whose trial resulted in a deadlocked jury in 2015. Then, they managed to calm that anger and channel it into improvements in police-community relations. “We’re working really hard to ameliorate that”, Roberts said.
