This is really difficult to watch. What makes it worse is knowing if a bystander hadn’t taken this video, the cop’s version would have been the last word. Very sickening:
WASHINGTON — A white police officer in North Charleston, S.C., was charged with murder on Tuesday after a video surfaced showing him shooting and killing an apparently unarmed black man in the back while he ran away.
The officer, Michael T. Slager, 33, had said he feared for his life because the man took his stun gun in a scuffle after a traffic stop on 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 comes on the heels of high-profile incidents of police officers using lethal force in New York, Cleveland, Ferguson, Mo., and elsewhere around the country. The deaths have sparked a national debate over whether the police are too quick to use force, particularly in cases involving black men.
Also: Here’s how this story would have been written without the video.
I am sick to death of the knee jerk repetition that the “vast majority of cops are decent law abiding blah, blah, blah.” Demonstrably the vast majority of cops honor a thin blue line of self justifying lies when one of their own uses excessive force. Here it is two for two again only done in by a citizen who stuck his/her neck way out.
I know it’s been noted elsewhere, but I cannot get over how casual the killing is. Like another day on the shooting range, which in effect it was.
Ditto as far as good cops go. There might be some that are not bad, and some that don’t like the bad stuff, but virtually none are good enough to speak up when they see their own breaking the law. Same goes for their supervisors and the prosecutors and judges that work hand in glove with these cold blooded thugs.