10 April 2015 - Video of Walter Scott shooting released
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Dash cam video shows officer pursuing man before shooting
Staff (The Chicago Tribune)
The traffic stop starts like any other: an officer pulls over a motorist, walks up to the driver's side window and asks for license and registration. What happened minutes later appears to take place without any obvious sign of provocation or conflict: The driver opens the door and runs, and the officer chases after him.
Video released Thursday from the dashboard of white North Charleston police Officer Michael Thomas Slager's cruiser captures the very first moments he and black motorist Walter Scott meet, a strikingly benign encounter at its earliest stages. It changes within minutes as Scott takes off running and the officer runs after him.
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Recording
Mark Berman (The Washington Post)
Slager is seen in the new video standing at the driver’s side window of a Mercedes-Benz for a little more than a minute. The officer explains that he pulled over the car because one of its brake lights was out. Scott then says that he has not formally bought the car yet, but adds that he is going to be buying it Monday.
A short time after the two men finish talking and Slager walks away from the car, Scott is seen opening his door and standing up before Slager orders him to stay in the car. Scott gets back inside and sits down, but about 20 seconds later, he opens the door and runs away from both vehicles.
Slager is heard on the radio calling in a description of Scott. Seconds later, Slager is heard yelling out: “Taser, Taser, Taser!” While the audio is hard to fully discern, due to the music playing inside Slager’s car and the rustling sounds heard from Slager, what sound like gunshots ring out seconds later.
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Analysis
Rebecca Carroll (The Guardian)
Walter Scott’s death – and Trayvon’s, Michael’s, Tamir’s and Eric’s, all of whom became so familiar to us in death that we refer to them by first name only – is the end of the promise of America. It’s the decay of whatever moral infrastructure we have left as a nation; it’s confirmation of the ugly truth that a nation, conceived in slavery and once dedicated to the proposition that not all men are created equal, will allow that divide to long endure.
So many white people, satisfied that they are on the right side of justice in the face of law enforcement, this week watched video footage of an unarmed black man getting shot in the back while fleeing from a white police officer and thought merely, “Well, that’s terrible”. “That’s terrible” is not enough. It has never been enough, but as the number of black men murdered by police escalates to numbers beyond reprehensible, beyond coincidental, watching another supposed citizen of this free country shot down with no regard for his humanity ought to elicit more than audible regret.
Yes, it is terrible. Of course it’s terrible. But that is the least of what it is.
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Context
Jack Hitt (The New Yorker)
The latest shooting of an unarmed black man by a white police officer comes this time from North Charleston, South Carolina. On average, the story of a white officer shooting a black man emerges about twice a week (according to USA Today, some ninety-six African-Americans were fatally shot by police every year from 2006 to 2012). There is a kind of familiar panic that kicks in when one of these shootings occurs, as we all scramble to fill in the particulars of this now well-known story. We struggle to gauge just how horrible it is. In this most recent case, the details are chilling.
On Saturday, a fifty-year-old black man named Walter Scott was stopped for a minor traffic infraction (a broken taillight). When he fled on foot, a police officer named Michael Slager nevertheless opened fire. The policeman fired eight bullets; four hit Scott in the back, one hit his ear. Scott was handcuffed facedown in the dirt where he died.
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10 April 2015 - Video of Walter Scott shooting released, La Clé des Langues [en ligne], Lyon, ENS de LYON/DGESCO (ISSN 2107-7029), octobre 2015. Consulté le 27/12/2024. URL: https://cle.ens-lyon.fr/anglais/key-story/archives-revue-de-presse-2015/10-april-2015-video-of-walter-scott-shooting-released