After four nights of protests and calls for the Charlotte Police Department to release its visual recordings of the Keith L. Scott shooting on Tuesday, authorities finally obliged, making some of the evidence public on Saturday evening, [September 24]. Of the material put out, there included several photographs, including one of a marijuana blunt, one of an ankle holster, and another which shows a gun on the ground. But an essential bit of evidence came in the form of a dash-cam video and a body-cam video that will undoubtedly be the source of debate for months to come, barring the release of what additional footage authorities possess.
Along with the visuals came details on the confrontation that had not been disclosed before. While the statements given by witnesses, most of which officials confirm have already been interviewed, should come into play in the State Bureau of Investigations' probe into whether or not the shooting was justified, there are also the accounts of officers at the scene. According to police reports, police were in the area to serve a warrant to a nearby resident when they passed Scott's vehicle and allegedly noticed him in possession of marijuana and the presented firearm. "They look in the car, and they see the marijuana," Charlotte Police Chief Kerr Putney maintained during a Saturday afternoon press conference, before asserting that the officers "perceived a lethal threat by a handgun."
Scott's family was presented with the newly released recordings on Thursday, at which point they posed in a statement that seeing it raised more questions than answers. While the dash-cam clip is not centered, nor positioned to capture the events playing out from the closest proximity, it does manage to show the moment Scott finally exits the vehicle and begins backing away from from the car before multiple shots are fired and send him to the ground. While the quality of the recording, and its angle makes it difficult to determine whether he is at any point holding a gun, his hands never raise from beside his hips. It is also difficult to find anything conclusive from the second clip, which is recorded from one of the officer's bodies cameras. While the view from that recording is obscured as he stands perched behind a vehicle, he does move into the lane of vision which captures Scott at the moment he exits his car and begins walking backwards. From that clip, viewers get the point of view of the officer facing him from a closer distance. Even from that angle, it is difficult to tell whether he is holding anything. “The footage itself will not create in anyone’s mind absolute certainty as to what this case represents and what the outcome should be,” Chief Putney told reporters while announcing the release of the recordings. He asked viewers to take what the department has presented thus far into consideration, stating, “The footage only supports all of the other information.”
On Friday, Scott's wife leaked her recording of the incident. Over the course of 2:44 seconds, she could be heard warning the officers not to shoot as they stood calling for him to come out of his car and "put the gun down." The view of Scott is obscured in her video, but it does give audio evidence, with Mrs. Scott informing the police that her husband suffered a traumatic brain injury. Since the shooting occurred, the family had maintained that Scott was disabled, and alleged that he was sitting in his car waiting for his son to be dropped off by a school bus when police approached him. They have maintained that he did not have a gun, but rather, a book.
While there is indeed more footage of the moments before, and after the incident, Putney has said that he will only be releasing that much which he might deem "relevant" to the case. He has not given indication as to whether any more of it will be made public, and the timing may not be in favor of the possibility that the public will get to see it, as a law that will require the public to appeal to a judge for access to police video in North Carolina, kicks in on [October 1].
Source: youtube.com
