While mostly peaceful, a far cry from the previous two nights, throngs of protesters expressed their outrage over Scott’s death by circling the police department and the city jail.
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The protests in Charlotte late on Wednesday saw one person critically injured after being shot. Firefighters rushed in to pull the man to a waiting ambulance.
The governor of the U.S. state of North Carolina has declared a state of emergency following a second night of violent protests in Charlotte over the fatal police shooting of a black man.
A long series of controversial fatal police shootings of black men across the United States has sparked more than two years of protests asserting racial bias and excessive force by police and giving rise to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Monnett represented the family of Jonathan Ferrell, the former FAMU football player who was shot and killed by a Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officer in 2013. No arrests have been made.
The police chief acknowledged that he has promised transparency in the investigation, but said, “I’m telling you right now, if you think I say we should display a victim’s worst day for consumption, that is not the transparency I’m speaking of”. Police say Scott emerged from his vehicle with a handgun and refused commands; his family contends he had only a book.
The family statement says it is “impossible” to tell if he is holding anything in the videos. The family’s viewing of the video came on the same day that a police officer in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was charged with first-degree manslaughter in the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man whose auto had broken down and blocked a road. Three people were arrested, and four law enforcement members sustained minor injuries.
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Kerr Putney said the video supported the police account of what happened, but did not definitively show Mr Scott pointing a gun at officers.
Numerous protesters dispute the official account of Scott’s death, but Putney told reporters he would not release the video at this time, in part to protect the investigation. Protesters rushed police in riot gear at a downtown Charlotte hotel and officers have fired tear gas t.
The protester was shot Wednesday night during a violent night of protests in Charlotte.
“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.
On Thursday night, hundreds of protesters were marching through the heart of Charlotte’s business district.
The video does not provide “definitive visual evidence” that Scott pointed a gun at police officers, including Vinson, who shot him, the police chief said.
President Barack Obama says recent reports of unarmed African Americans being shot by police “should be a source of concern for all Americans”.
Charlotte’s reluctance to release the video stands in contrast to Oklahoma, where officials on Monday released footage of the fatal shooting of Terence Crutcher by police after his vehicle broke down on a highway.
Numerous protesters also dispute the official account of Mr Scott’s death.
The largely peaceful Thursday night demonstrations called on police to release video that could resolve wildly different accounts of the shooting this week of a black man. “I can also tell you we did not find a book that has been made referenced to”.
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North Carolina recently passed a law that blocks the release of police recordings from body or dashboard cameras with limited exceptions. And if a video is released prematurely in the midst of an investigation, he said, there are constitutional issues of preservation of evidence as well as due process.
