A 33 year white police officer in North Charleston, S.C., Michael T. Slager, has been charged with first-degree murder on Tuesday after a video emerged showing him shooting in the back and killing a clearly unarmed black man, Walter Scott, 50, while the man was running away.
The graphic video of the incident, obtained by the Post and Courier, shows the moments shortly after Scott, a former Coast Guard officer and father of four, reportedly ran away from officers at a routine traffic stop around 9:30am Saturday morning.
Slager, had said earlier he feared for his life after Walter Scott, took his stun gun during a scuffle after a traffic stop on Saturday. A video, however, shows the officer firing eight times at Scott’s back as he fled, with the latter man apparently unarmed.
Police reports indicate Slager had stopped Scott over a broken taillight on his Mercedes-Benz. When Scott fled from his car, the officer chased him to a grassy empty lot and fired a Taser at Scott, which failed to stop him, the reports said.
In the shaky three-minute clip, shot by an anonymous witness, the two men look to be grappling at each other’s hands. Scott, dressed in a green t-shirt and black tracksuit pants, is then seen bolting away from Slager, but takes less than 10 steps before he is gunned down.
Slager fires seven shots rapidly. The eighth is delivered after a brief pause.
Demonstrators outside North Charleston City Hall on Wednesday morning to protest systemic racial killings of African-Americans. Credit Chuck Burton/Associated Press
A lawyer representing Scott’s family told reporters Tuesday that he was struck by five of eight of the bullets the officer fired. Four entered his back, and one swiped his ear, the lawyer said, according to the Post and Courier.
The video then shows Slager raising his arm to radio for backup. “Shots fired and the subject is down,” the officer relayed to dispatchers, according to police reports.
“He took my Taser,” Slager said.
In the footage, the officer can be heard after the shooting yelling at Scott to put his hands behind his back, before he handcuffs Scott, who is face down on the ground. Slager is then seen walking back to the scene of the scuffle and picking something off the ground. The officer then returns to Scott and drops an item on the grass near the man, the footage shows.
Police stated that officers who arrived at the scene attempted to revive Scott until paramedics showed up. In the video, Slager and a back-up officer can be seen checking Scott’s pulse and lifting his t-shirt to examine his injuries as he lies dying on the ground. However, at no time were the officers filmed attempting to administer CPR.
North Charleston Mayor Keith Summey said at a Tuesday news conference that Slager had made a “bad decision.”
“When you’re wrong, you’re wrong,” Summey said, as reported by The Post and Courier, South Carolina. “If you make a bad decision, [I] don’t care if you’re behind the shield or just a citizen on the street, you have to live by that decision.” But African-American analyst have slammed the response from the city police as that of reactionary from a video evidence rather than one of responsibility or accountability.
The population of 103,000 people in North Charleston is 47 percent black and 37 percent white. The police force is 80 percent white, The New York Times reported, citing Justice Department data.
UPDATE: The police officer who was arrested on Tuesday after shooting and killing an unarmed black man has been fired from the department and the police chief here said Wednesday that he was appalled by what a video of the encounter revealed, The New York Times reports.
“I have watched the video and I was sickened by what I saw,” Eddie Driggers, the North Charleston police chief, told reporters, at an emotional and often chaotic news conference, with protesters repeatedly shouting and interrupting. “And I have not watched it since.”
Undated photo of late Walter Scott
