Apparently there are credibility questions surrounding the witness who caught it on camera:
"S.C. officer faces murder charge after traffic stop; Video shows black man was shot as he was fleeing" by Michael S. Schmidt and Matt Apuzzo, New York Times April 08, 2015
WASHINGTON — A white police officer in North Charleston, S.C., was charged with murder Tuesday after a video surfaced showing him shooting in the back and killing an apparently unarmed black man while the man ran away.
I have to tell you, I wanted to believe, wanted to feel the cops are going to be held accountable, wanted to think they finally got caught, but none of this feels right coming from the agenda-pushing paper.
The officer, Michael T. Slager, 33, said he had feared for his life because the man had taken his stun gun in a scuffle after a traffic stop Saturday. A video, however, shows the officer firing eight times as the man — Walter L. Scott, 50 — fled.
The North Charleston mayor announced the state charges at a news conference Tuesday evening.
The shooting came on the heels of high-profile instances of police officers’ using lethal force in New York; Cleveland; Ferguson, Mo.; and elsewhere. The deaths have set off a national debate on whether police are too quick to use force, particularly in cases involving black men.
And it's getting people upset to the point where martial law might be needed to control controlled-opposition protests that in turn give the authorities the casus belli to intervene.
In other words, you're being played.
A White House task force has recommended a host of changes to the nation’s police policies, and President Obama sent Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. to cities around the country to try to improve police relations with minority neighborhoods.
Like federal goons who are worse than the locals are going to show 'em how to do better.
And think of that for a moment; could this all be what I say it is, thus giving the feds a reason to infiltrate police departments and maybe find the wrong kind of cop (one who believes in his oath and the Constitution)?
***************
The shooting unfolded after Slager stopped the driver of a Mercedes-Benz with a broken taillight, according to police reports. Scott ran away, and Slager chased him into a grassy lot that abuts a muffler shop. The officer fired his Taser, an electronic stun gun, but it did not stop Scott, according to police reports.
Moments after the struggle, Slager reported on his radio, “Shots fired and the subject is down. He took my Taser,” according to police reports.
But the video, which was taken by a bystander and provided to The New York Times by the Scott family’s lawyer, presents a different account.
After seeing all the staged and scripted school and mall shootings, as well as fake Syrian videos, etc, I just don't believe videos cited by the ma$$ media. Sorry.
The video begins in the vacant lot, apparently moments after Slager fired his Taser. Wires, which carry the electrical current from the stun gun, appear to be extending from Scott’s body as the two men tussle and Scott turns to run.
Something — it is not clear whether it is the stun gun — is either tossed or knocked to the ground behind the two men and Slager draws his gun, the video shows. When the officer fires, Scott appears to be 15 to 20 feet away and fleeing. He falls after the last of eight shots.
The officer then runs back toward where the initial scuffle occurred and picks up something off the ground. Moments later, he drops an object near Scott’s body, the video shows.
Like cops planting evidence is something new, or is this to discredit that theory?
The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, the state’s criminal investigative body, has begun an inquiry into the shooting. The FBI and the Justice Department, which has opened a string of civil rights investigations into police departments under Holder, also are investigating.
All this hustle and flow from a federal authority that is dropping drone missiles and air bombs on black and brown people across the planet -- but they looking' out for ya' at home, yup.
The Supreme Court has held that an officer may use deadly force against a fleeing suspect only when there is probable cause that he “poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.”
Slager served in the Coast Guard before joining the force five years ago, his lawyer said. Because police departments are not required to release data on how often officers use force, it was not immediately clear how often police shootings occurred in North Charleston, a working-class community adjacent to the tourist destination of Charleston.
The police chief of North Charleston did not return repeated calls.
Scott had been arrested about 10 times, mostly for failing to pay child support or show up for court hearings, according to the Post and Courier, the Charleston newspaper. He was arrested in 1987 on an assault and battery charge and convicted in 1991 of possession of a bludgeon, the newspaper reported.
Scott’s brother, Anthony, said he believed Scott had fled from the officer Saturday because he owed child support.
“He has four children; he doesn’t have some type of big violent past or arrest record,” said Chris Stewart, a lawyer for Scott’s family. “He had a job; he was engaged. He had back child support and didn’t want to go to jail for back child support.”
I don't think they put you in jail for that, and it seems like a pretty lame rational to run. That's not coming up on the arrest record.
Then again, I don't want to spoil the narrative for you.
Stewart said the coroner had told him that Scott was struck five times — three times in the back, once in the upper buttocks, and once in the ear — with at least one bullet entering his heart.
It is not clear whether Scott died immediately. (The coroner’s office declined to make the report available to The Times.)
Police reports say that officers performed CPR and delivered first aid to Scott. The video shows that for several minutes after the shooting, Scott remained face down with his hands cuffed behind his back.
A second officer arrives, puts on blue medical gloves, and attends to Scott, but is not shown performing CPR. As sirens wail in the background, a third officer later arrives, apparently with a medical kit, but is also not seen performing CPR.
That sure is strange, almost as if they didn't really have to.
"The debate over police use of force has been propelled in part by videos like the one in South Carolina. In January, prosecutors in Albuquerque charged two police officers with murder for shooting a homeless man in a confrontation that was captured by an officer’s body camera.
That was an aberration.
Federal prosecutors are investigating the death of Eric Garner, who died last year in Staten Island after a police officer put him in a chokehold, an episode that a bystander captured on video.
A video taken in Cleveland shows the police shooting a 12-year-old boy, Tamir Rice, who was carrying a fake gun in a park."
There is the egg of censorship on Globe face.
--more--"
Cleaning up some egg:
"Trial begins in police killing of pair in Cleveland" Associated Press April 07, 2015
CLEVELAND — A Cleveland police officer feared that his life and the lives of fellow officers were in danger when he fired the final shots of a barrage of police gunfire that killed two unarmed suspects, his attorney said Monday during opening statements in the officer’s trial.
I guess the "they're coming right for us" defense is good enough.
The tactics of Michael Brelo, 31, have been called into question, given that Brelo exposed himself to danger when he stepped onto the hood of a beat-up Chevy Malibu to fire 15 rounds into the windshield of the suspects’ vehicle, attorney Patrick D’Angelo said.
This guy has been watching too many cop movies!
But Brelo and 12 officers who shot a total of 137 rounds into the car in November 2012 had ample reason to believe that Timothy Russell, 43, and Malissa Williams, 30, were shooting at them, D’Angelo said.
D’Angelo said he was not calling what Brelo and the other officers did that night heroic. ‘‘They are simple, ordinary people who try to do the best they can and are put in very dangerous situations,’’ he said.
OMG!
Brelo, charged with voluntary manslaughter, is the only officer charged because prosecutors said he waited until after the initial salvo had ended to reload and discharge the last of the 49 rounds he fired that night.
Just got caught up in the fun, huh?
A judge will decide whether Brelo is guilty or innocent. He faces a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison if convicted.
Rick Bell, an assistant Cuyahoga County prosecutor, revealed that experts have concluded that another officer fired three rounds during Brelo’s 15-shot volley, something defense attorneys have argued in motions. Bell said a medical examiner has concluded that Brelo fired ‘‘kill shots’’ into Russell and Williams and that they were still alive when Brelo fired.
Just wondering what the racial make-up of the situation was re: black and white.
--more--"
Back to South Carolina:
"S.C. officer involved in fatal Walter Scott shooting is fired; Investigation turned over to state agency" by Frances Robles and Alan Blinder, New York Times April 09, 2015
NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. — It was at a vigil Sunday for his slain brother that Anthony Scott found out what he had believed was true all along.
The day before, he had heard 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 recently bought. Then came the growing doubts about the police story that his brother had endangered the officer. Then came the video.
I have growing doubts about this whole thing. This is about getting the cameras on the cops and having the control freaks running society getting even more surveillance because videos can be -- and have been -- faked.
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!” 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 the video, a white police officer, Michael T. Slager, was seen shooting and killing Walter Scott, 50, as he was running away from him Saturday after a traffic stop for a broken taillight. The authorities brought murder charges against Slager on Tuesday, the same day the video was released to the public. And today, the city said the officer had been fired, though he will continue to receive health benefits for his pregnant wife until the child is born.
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 public scrutiny of police violence in the wake of police killings of unarmed black men in Ferguson, Mo.; New York; and Cleveland.
Those other guys still dead if those stories are to be believed.
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At the news conference at North Charleston’s City Hall, there were pointed questions about when — and if — first aid was provided to the victim and if Slager’s version of events was ever in doubt before the video emerged....
In an interview with NBC News on Wednesday, the man who videotaped the shooting, Feidin Santana, said he saw Slager and Scott struggling on the ground before the shooting began. “I remember the police had control of the situation,” Santana said. “He had control of Scott, and Scott was trying just to get away from the Taser.”
Santana, who offered the video to Scott’s family, said the decision to charge Slager with murder was “something no one can feel happy about.”
Slager stopped the driver of a Mercedes-Benz for a broken taillight, according to police reports. According to the report, as soon as the officer stopped the car, Scott fled and 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 Scott, according to police reports.
In the report and in newspaper coverage, Slager said he felt threatened and fired the fatal shot when the driver he had stopped tried to overpower him and take his Taser.
But Anthony Scott never believed that. He described his brother as a “friendly, loving father who got along with everyone,” played drums, and participated in community theater.
When Walter 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, he called his mother to let her know. “He probably thought he was getting arrested,” Anthony Scott said.
The mother sent her grandson, Walter’s nephew, to check it out. The nephew was nearby, on his way to choir practice. The nephew called the family to let them know “something didn’t look right.”
When Anthony Scott arrived about 11:30 a.m., he found out that emergency medical personnel had been there and left — which he knew was a bad sign. He held out hope that Walter had been taken away in a police cruiser.
He soon learned that wasn’t what happened.
At that point everyone in the area was saying that the police version of events was that Walter Scott had grabbed the officer’s Taser and there was a struggle. Anthony did not believe it for a second. He thinks his brother, who was employed as a forklift operator, ran the first time from the police because of the warrant, and ran again because he had been hit by the Taser.
I've seen demonstrations of that thing and I don't see how someone keeps running after being jolted by that torture device -- and yet, if true, this proves they don't work and should be abandoned.
After Scott saw the video, he and Santana agreed to wait another day to see if there was any need to release it. If the police stuck to the struggling-for-the-Taser story, then the man would give the video to the family despite his trepidation that the officer would come after him.
“I had to hold my breath and let him go,” Anthony Scott said.
By Sunday night 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.
On Monday, the statements from the Police Department had not changed. “It was obvious that we didn’t even have to ask him for it,” Scott said. “He was still hesitant, but he gave it to us.”
Stewart gave the video to the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, which had taken over the inquiry. He said he is still in awe of what Santana did.
“He feared for his life,” he said. “He witnesses a cop murder someone.”
“I knew this family would never get justice, and this guy just hands us justice,” Anthony Stewart said. “He handed us justice.”
He handed somebody something, all right.
--more--"
Globe goes over it frame-by-frame with the movie critic?
"S.C. shooting video reveals an awful truth, frame by frame" by Ty Burr, Globe Staff April 09, 2015
It’s the casualness that sickens you to your core.
In the cellphone video captured on Saturday by a bystander, Officer Michael T. Slager of the North Charleston, S.C., police force lifts his pistol and fires off eight quick shots at Walter L. Scott, who is running away from him at a slow clip. Four shots hit Scott from behind; at least one pierces his heart.
Slager will later state that Scott, who had been pulled over for a broken tail light and who apparently ran because he had outstanding child support payments, attacked him with the officer’s own Taser. The one that, in the video, Slager appears to drop next to Scott’s cooling body.
And here we are again.
The difference, this time, is that it was seen in all its awful totality. Not just seen — witnessed, recorded, and then published Tuesday by The New York Times.
All the more reason to doubt its validity.
No matter how a defense attorney may try to skew it in days to come, the video is incontrovertible. It is horrible, necessary proof of so many things, rippling out in a widening arc from the murder itself: the ease and entitlement with which a white officer can gun down a black man running away from him; the obfuscations of a police department that, until the video was made public, said Scott had wrested control of Slager’s Taser and CPR had been administered (it hadn’t); the “wall of blue” that protects bad cops on the good forces and the entire infrastructure of the rotten ones.
Been happening for a long, long, time and all of a sudden they propaganda pre$$ has discovered it. Hmmmmm.
Does anyone actually think the truth of this shooting would ever have come out without a citizen video?
It would have been an officer’s word against a dead man, and so the death of Walter L. Scott would have joined the endless line of African-Americans killed in murky circumstances over the years and decades. The North Charleston video disproves the official story and in so doing casts every official story in doubt. This moment of accountability has been a long time coming. That a man who had trouble paying child support had to die for it makes it that much more tragic.
I'm astonished at the statements regarding official stories.
The videographer, identified as Feidin Santana, who can be heard swearing softly in disbelief on the tape, initially chose to remain anonymous. One can hardly blame him, given that Ramsey Orta, who videotaped the police-chokehold death of Eric Garner in Staten Island, N.Y., last year, has since been arrested twice on charges he maintains are false. (He is on hunger strike in a New York City jail, fearful that police will poison his food as they allegedly have done to prisoners at Rikers Island.)
What is that, some sort of story from some kid?
The larger point — and it applies to the police as well as to all of us — is that eyes are now everywhere. The ubiquity of cellphones and surveillance cameras, of lenses on every corner of our lives, means that we are all seen, for better and for worse. In “1984,” George Orwell envisioned a future state where Big Brother was watching, and based on what we’ve learned of the National Security Agency and other government bureaus obsessed with monitoring us, he was right. But Little Brother and all his cousins are able to watch right back, and so the playing field tilts back toward something a little closer to level.
I'm astonished he admitted that because the government claims not true, not true!
This has consequences for privacy, for free expression, for the right to protest against one’s government or the right to behave like a dolt in public. The eyes watch citizens in Putin’s Russia, in Erdogan’s Turkey, and in the People’s Republic of China. You’d better believe they watch us here, to what extent we still very much deserve to know.
Yet the eyes — citizen cameras and retail-shop surveillance cams — also picked the Tsarnaev brothers out of the Boston Marathon throng.
Uh-huh. That's how they decided to frame 'em.
They witnessed the police shooting of Oscar Grant on a 2009 San Francisco subway platform. The eyes saw the death of Tamir Rice in Cleveland last October, of John Crawford at a Walmart in Dayton, Ohio, last August, of Antonio Zambrano-Montes in Pasco, Wash., earlier this year.
See: Final Shots From February
Still, even in the cases in which a citizen journalist captures what appears to be obvious evidence of wrongdoing by authorities, the justice system can look away. This is what makes the images of Walter L. Scott’s murder different. Santana was far enough away to hold both Slager and Scott in the frame, yet close enough to show what appears to be the Taser being dropped at the dead man’s side. There are no edits, although Santana lowers the camera every so often, dropping his “eyes” so he won’t be seen watching. It’s all there. This is the cinema of evidence.
Is the laughing in our faces staged and scripted or just Improved?
The Scott video joins and amplifies the history of indelible images that testify to the abusive treatment of the poor and powerless in America, especially those whose skins are other than white. That history goes back to engravings of slavery’s horrors made by abolitionists in the 19th century; it encompasses the grainy photos of lynched black men in the 1930s and the professional news photos of civil rights protesters assaulted by fire hoses and dogs in the 1960s.
Does anyone remember?
The history includes George Holliday’s consumer-cam recording of the beating of Rodney King in 1991 (and by necessity also includes the news-chopper video of the beating of Reginald Denny by an African-American mob after a jury found King’s police attackers not guilty). Each new image, enabled by each new technology, brings a picture of social injustice into sharper focus.
Our technology imprisons us but it also empowers us; we work out the paradoxes on a daily basis. Who wants to live their lives knowing they are watched? Yet who isn’t coming around to the idea that there should be a cop-cam on every street officer in America? Even the mayor of North Charleston said so, issuing an executive order to that effect. To be seen is to be held to account, a “threat” that one hopes may curb the worst police abuses before they happen. It’s a development that should be welcomed by every honest officer.
If you have nothing to hide, copper.
Because of the latest citizen-journalist video — one pair of horrified eyes behind a dispassionately recording camera lens — there will be more eyes in the days ahead on those who wield the power of a badge and a gun. Maybe then we’ll see something like the truth of the matter.
I know where I won't be seeing it.
--more--"
Suspicions should be raised simply on the basis of the Globe pimping the video.
The other question is why is the Boston Globe censoring so much of the coverage?
"The video captures the moments leading up to a fatal shooting that has sparked outrage as the latest example of a white police officer killing an unarmed black man. The shooting itself was captured by an eyewitness on his iPhone and provided the impetus for the officer to be charged with murder and fired. But questions had remained how the traffic stop turned deadly. The dash cam video provides a more complete picture of the encounter. There is almost nothing in Slager's police personnel file to suggest that his bosses considered him a rogue officer capable of murdering a man during a traffic stop. In the community he served, however, people say this reflects what's wrong with policing today: Officers nearly always get the last word when citizens complain. The mostly black neighborhood where the shooting took place is far from unique, said Melvin Tucker, a former FBI agent and police chief in four southern cities who often testifies in police misconduct cases."
Hmmmmm.
Related: Releasing videos in police shootings must happen
Worcester police officer charged with assaulting prisoner
Also see: Quick Updates on the Walter Scott Shooting Event and the Whitey Ford Soundtrack
UPDATES:
Hundreds mourn S.C. man fatally shot by police officer
Critics call for 2nd officer to be prosecuted in Carolina shooting
Is S.C. police shooting an aberration or all too normal?
Did you know there was a passenger in the car?
"The passenger who was sitting in Walter Scott’s car when Scott was shot and killed by a North Charleston police officer told investigators he heard the crackle of electricity from a Taser and a series of gunshots, but did not see the encounter, the man’s lawyer said Wednesday. His lawyer, Mark Peper, said Pierre Fulton did not know why Scott ran from his car before Officer Michael Slager shot him eight times. Fulton sat calmly in the car as the episode unfolded because he had no reason to think his friend was in danger, Peper said. “The best explanation for that is because they weren’t doing anything wrong, and there is nothing to indicate this is anything but a routine traffic stop,” Peper said."
I hate to blow Peper in your face, but the routine seems to be blowing them away.
What this little blurb says to me is what we have here WAS IN FACT a STAGED HOAX -- complete with crisis actors like Fulton. He reacted that way BECAUSE it was a STAGED and SCRIPTED FAKE!
‘‘We need body cameras on all police.’’
That's the agenda. Total surveillance.
