Showing posts with label charlotte. Show all posts
Showing posts with label charlotte. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 27, 2016
Cianna Oliphant (sp?) Explains It All For You
At the Charlotte City Council meeting last night.
Damb. I couldn't keep the tears back myself...
Monday, September 26, 2016
An Absence of Empathy
The National Conversation that has been roiling for years now over the constant litany of police killings of so many black men and others seems to be getting us nowhere. The killing continues like clockwork, three a day on average, day in and day out, year by year. Bam! Another one dead, another family loses their father, brother, son. Another grieving widow. Another question, "Why?"
And so it goes, over and over. Americans become desensitized to the killing. It's normalized for the most part. The narrative is already written, the sequence of events laid out. A disobedient Negro refuses to follow this or that command by police. The police see a gun, whether there is one or not, and they fire as the Negro attempts to comply. Or the Negro is running away. Or he's standing still and confused. He may be mentally ill or on drugs, or maybe he's just been in a car wreck and is injured and disoriented. Doesn't matter. If he doesn't obey -- or even if he does obey -- he's a dead Negro because cops are scared witness and mindless by the sight of or even the report of a Bad Negro -- or sometimes any Negro -- on the lose.
He is axiomatically a "threat to be neutralized" -- even when he's no threat at all. (I don't mean to leave out the many women who have been killed by police during this period of National Conversation. Black males are the iconic emblem of police killing, and they die in numbers far out of their proportion of the population. Too many women die at the hands of police as well.)
The common thread that runs through almost all these killings is an absence of empathy.
Police are rigorously conditioned to have no empathy for those they encounter, harm or kill. Those who fail conditioning and maintain some empathy for those they encounter are weeded out or placed in positions where their empathy will not interfere with its absence elsewhere.
"De-escalation" is one of the buzz-words we hear a lot in this National Conversation over Race and Policing (and Other Matters), and in so many of the cases that come to National Attention, the police are not de-escalating, they're deliberately escalating the situation.
It happened in the case of Joseph Mann in Sacramento where police are seen to be escalating the confrontation from their first encounter with him.
It happened with Terence Crutcher in Tulsa, where the officer who shot him is yelling at him and threatening him with her gun, while he calmly walks to his vehicle with his hands up. He is in no way threatening her, and when her back up arrives, she shoot him. It's almost unbelievable to witness but it happens more often than we realize.
In Charlotte, once again we see the police escalating a situation, yelling and screaming at Keith Scott, threatening him with their guns, while he sits apparently quietly in his car, until slowly and carefully, he gets out of the car, while police continue shouting at him. He looks around, sees multiple men with guns drawn, and slowly takes a step or two backwards with his arms at his side. Bam! He's shot four times from behind. He may not even have seen the officer who shot him.
He may or may not have had a gun in his hand. Whether he did or not, he was not visibly threatening the officers or anyone else. He was not being aggressive. The officers were threatening him. They were aggressing against him. And they escalate their threats and aggression as more officers arrived on scene.
In these and so many other instances, there was no rational cause for police to kill their subjects. There was no objective threat to officers or anyone else -- or in the case of Joseph Mann, the potential threat was largely contained, and I'll try to get into that in a bit. All the escalation was done by police in an essentially misguided effort to gain dominance and control of a person or situation, regardless of the outcome -- which in each of these cases was the death of the subject. How often this happens each year is really anybody's guess, as not all of these encounters end in death. Those that don't go largely unreported.
The common theme is a total lack of empathy on the part of police, and lack of empathy leads directly to the tragic outcome. Over and over and over again.
I'll try to use the Joseph Mann case as a teaching tool. There have been many similar cases, so it's not an outlier.
Joseph Mann was a 50-something homeless black man suffering from mental illness that was described a bit like schizophrenia. He also may have been under the influence of an illicit substance. He was reported to police by residents of an apartment house in a fancy neighborhood in north Sacramento who said he was acting strange and had a knife and a gun. They said they were scared for the children in the area. They did not say he was threatening anyone. They said he was acting strange. This is important.
A police cruiser arrived within minutes and residents told the officer that Mann was just down the street. Sure enough, there he was. The officer, through the loudspeaker of the cruiser ordered Mann to "drop the knife." He did not comply. Instead, Mann crossed the street and walked away. The officer followed, continuing to order Mann to "drop the knife."
At one point on his leisurely stroll, Mann engages a telephone pole with karate moves. Clearly this fellow is not in his right mind, a clue -- if any were needed beyond the prior statements of residents -- that Mann was mentally ill and possibly under the influence.
During his stroll, too, Mann comes close to encountering several pedestrians. He threatens none of them. This was observed by the officer following him in the police car, and it should have been another clue that even though Mr. Mann (apparently) had a knife in his hand, he was not threatening others. Indeed, in the calls to 911, residents described him as "throwing the knife in the air" and catching it, not directing it at anyone else. They also said he had a gun -- but that was false. I'll try to get into false reports like this and their consequences before the end of the post.
Shortly, Mann reaches the main street, the police cruiser still following him and orders still coming at him from the loudspeaker to "drop the knife." Mann finds an object in the median and throws it at the police car. The object, later identified as a mug, strikes the car -- though it was initially reported to have struck an officer.
Mann runs from the police car as others start arriving. He comes within a few feet of pedestrians but makes no threatening gestures toward them. He is pursued slowly by several police cars as they attempt to corral him. He runs away and in doing so, he runs toward a police car, gesturing toward it as if to say "get out of the way!"
He runs across the street and along a sidewalk as police cars continue to follow. He stops at one point, apparently to catch his breath, and the police cars converge, attempting to corner him, but he runs away, and makes it a few dozen feet down the sidewalk, still followed by police cruisers, when suddenly two officers run up on him and from about 20-30 feet away shoot him dead.
Until that moment, it appeared that the police had the situation well in hand. Mr. Mann was eluding them and was being disobedient, true, but he was not threatening anyone, and he was not so elusive as to be un-apprehendable. It may have taken time to tire him out enough to make apprehension possible, but his actions were not those of someone who posed a serious threat, nor were they ones of someone trying to hide from police.
The sudden appearance of officers on foot who shot and killed him was a shock. Where they had come from and who had directed them to shoot -- if anyone -- is still a mystery. If it had not been for the Sacramento Bee finding and publishing surveillance video of the shooting, we would not have known this had happened, as the SPD were refusing to release any video of the incident and had already fabricated lies about what happened (detailed in a previous post.)
Their false narrative essentially blamed Mr. Mann for his own death, which is Standard Procedure in almost all cases of police homicide. The victim is always and completely at fault.
Victim-blaming is so routine it almost goes unnoticed. The public takes it for granted, no matter what happens or how much the visual evidence contradicts the police narrative.
"If he had just obeyed, this wouldn't have happened." We know that's not necessarily true, but it's beside the point as well. Not every suspect or subject is capable of obedience either immediately or at all. When that's the case, police too often resort to summary execution, not as a last resort but as an expedient one.
That appears to have happened in this case.
It appears to have happened in the case of Keith Scott. He was said to have suffered a traumatic brain injury in an accident the previous year, he may have been smoking marijuana and he may have been taking other medication that made it difficult for him to comprehend what was happening and may have made it impossible for him to immediately and completely comply with shouted orders from gun-wielding police. At any event, he was not threatening police or anyone else, even if he had a gun -- which is not at this point established or certain by any means.
It appears to have happened in the case of Terence Crutcher as well. According to reports -- and we don't know how true or false they are because they come from police -- Mr. Crutcher stopped his car in the middle of a more or less rural road in Tulsa, got out and was wandering around apparently bewildered when confronted by the officer who eventually shot and killed him. She ordered him to show his hands and get on the ground, but he did not immediately do so. When video of the incident emerged, however, he had his hands high over his head and he was slowly walking away from the gun-wielding officer toward his car (which was reported to be idling with its front doors open, but in the videos, the doors are closed, and it is impossible to tell whether the engine is running.) When Mr. Crutcher reaches the car, he puts his hands on the car and appears to be waiting to be searched or arrested. The officer apparently continues screaming at him to do something or other as her backup arrives. Mr. Crutcher starts to put his arms down, perhaps in an attempt to comply -- after disobeying -- and he is immediately shot with both a taser from the backup officer, and a bullet from the initial officer.
He falls to the pavement while the officers who shot him and other arriving officers back away slowly. The two officers who fired on him eventually hide crouched behind a police patrol car while other officers take over the scene, and two of them begin to render first aid to the dying Terence Crutcher.
Mr. Crutcher was unarmed and he is not reported to have threatened the officers in any way. He simply did not obey sufficiently fast enough to satisfy the officers who shot him with a taser and a bullet simultaneously. Given the fact that he was later said to be impaired by an illicit substance -- whether true or not, we don't know -- it's likely he could not obey directly, but from the available visual evidence he appears to have attempted to obey indirectly, only to be shot and killed for his efforts.
As in the case of each of the other incidents detailed here, the police initially issued false narratives about what happened, narratives which essentially absolved the officers involved of any culpability and placed all the blame on the victim.
Those narratives were contradicted by video evidence. Tulsa's PD promptly released video evidence which showed their initial narrative to be false. As they corrected the record, an arrest warrant was issued for the officer who shot Terence Crutcher to death.
In the cases of Joseph Mann in Sacramento and Keith Scott in Charlotte, police departments issued false narrative (ie: lies) about what happened and adamantly refused to release any police video of the incidents citing "integrity of the investigation." This is nonsense because they have already compromised the integrity of the investigation by issuing lies about what happened.
In the face of this kind of stonewalling in both instances, other video was produced which demonstrated that the initial police narrative was false. Both police departments held to their refusal to provide evidence from police cameras as long as they could -- in Sacramento's case, it was months, in Charlotte's it was days -- but in both cases, police eventually yielded at least partially and produced video evidence which showed that their story was not... what happened.
It became obvious that police escalated situations which were otherwise under control, or at least were not threatening to them or others. The "fault" in other words lies at least as much with the police as with the supposed culprits. The police were the threatening parties in all three instances. The police were aggressive while the supposed culprits were simply disobedient.
Of course the fact that they were black factored into the police aggression.
In all three instances, the police who fired the fatal shots displayed no empathy at all with the plight of their victims. Some of the other officers on scene interestingly did show traces of empathy, however. First aid was rendered by other officers in Tulsa and Charlotte (so unusual as to be remarked upon as officers routinely do not render first aid to those they have shot). It's not clear whether any officers in Sacramento rendered first aid to Mr. Mann. From the video evidence and the later narrative provided by SPD -- which corrected some of their initial lies -- officers waited for the arrival of EMTs some five minutes after Mr. Mann was shot 14 times. But prior to the shooting, apart from yelling at Mr. Mann over their loudspeakers, the officers arguably behaved appropriately in trying to corral Mr. Mann rather than harm him. While they weren't completely successful, they were were able to tighten the cordon gradually.
Experts in the control of mentally ill or substance impaired individuals could easily have advised other methods that might have worked better, but they were not consulted or on scene. People who work in the field know how to do it without harming or killing their patients/clients. Police do not, or they have those skills, their firearms skill too often overrides their other means and methods.
It's an empathy and a priority issue. The "sanctity of human life" is not a priority for many police officers and police departments. Asserting command and control is, regardless of the consequences to human life.
In our ongoing efforts to change the situation, the Conversation needs focus on the purpose of police and a definition of their primary objective. Right now they believe it is command and control, self-protection, and the protection of property, when in fact it should be -- must be -- the preservation of human life and protection of public well-being, including the lives and well-being of suspects and subjects.
They must be sensitized once again to empathize with people who aren't like them, maybe don't like them, and who perhaps cannot obey them instantly or at all.
It's not an impossible task but as the National Conversation continues, this task must come to the fore.
And so it goes, over and over. Americans become desensitized to the killing. It's normalized for the most part. The narrative is already written, the sequence of events laid out. A disobedient Negro refuses to follow this or that command by police. The police see a gun, whether there is one or not, and they fire as the Negro attempts to comply. Or the Negro is running away. Or he's standing still and confused. He may be mentally ill or on drugs, or maybe he's just been in a car wreck and is injured and disoriented. Doesn't matter. If he doesn't obey -- or even if he does obey -- he's a dead Negro because cops are scared witness and mindless by the sight of or even the report of a Bad Negro -- or sometimes any Negro -- on the lose.
He is axiomatically a "threat to be neutralized" -- even when he's no threat at all. (I don't mean to leave out the many women who have been killed by police during this period of National Conversation. Black males are the iconic emblem of police killing, and they die in numbers far out of their proportion of the population. Too many women die at the hands of police as well.)
The common thread that runs through almost all these killings is an absence of empathy.
Police are rigorously conditioned to have no empathy for those they encounter, harm or kill. Those who fail conditioning and maintain some empathy for those they encounter are weeded out or placed in positions where their empathy will not interfere with its absence elsewhere.
"De-escalation" is one of the buzz-words we hear a lot in this National Conversation over Race and Policing (and Other Matters), and in so many of the cases that come to National Attention, the police are not de-escalating, they're deliberately escalating the situation.
It happened in the case of Joseph Mann in Sacramento where police are seen to be escalating the confrontation from their first encounter with him.
It happened with Terence Crutcher in Tulsa, where the officer who shot him is yelling at him and threatening him with her gun, while he calmly walks to his vehicle with his hands up. He is in no way threatening her, and when her back up arrives, she shoot him. It's almost unbelievable to witness but it happens more often than we realize.
In Charlotte, once again we see the police escalating a situation, yelling and screaming at Keith Scott, threatening him with their guns, while he sits apparently quietly in his car, until slowly and carefully, he gets out of the car, while police continue shouting at him. He looks around, sees multiple men with guns drawn, and slowly takes a step or two backwards with his arms at his side. Bam! He's shot four times from behind. He may not even have seen the officer who shot him.
He may or may not have had a gun in his hand. Whether he did or not, he was not visibly threatening the officers or anyone else. He was not being aggressive. The officers were threatening him. They were aggressing against him. And they escalate their threats and aggression as more officers arrived on scene.
In these and so many other instances, there was no rational cause for police to kill their subjects. There was no objective threat to officers or anyone else -- or in the case of Joseph Mann, the potential threat was largely contained, and I'll try to get into that in a bit. All the escalation was done by police in an essentially misguided effort to gain dominance and control of a person or situation, regardless of the outcome -- which in each of these cases was the death of the subject. How often this happens each year is really anybody's guess, as not all of these encounters end in death. Those that don't go largely unreported.
The common theme is a total lack of empathy on the part of police, and lack of empathy leads directly to the tragic outcome. Over and over and over again.
I'll try to use the Joseph Mann case as a teaching tool. There have been many similar cases, so it's not an outlier.
Joseph Mann was a 50-something homeless black man suffering from mental illness that was described a bit like schizophrenia. He also may have been under the influence of an illicit substance. He was reported to police by residents of an apartment house in a fancy neighborhood in north Sacramento who said he was acting strange and had a knife and a gun. They said they were scared for the children in the area. They did not say he was threatening anyone. They said he was acting strange. This is important.
A police cruiser arrived within minutes and residents told the officer that Mann was just down the street. Sure enough, there he was. The officer, through the loudspeaker of the cruiser ordered Mann to "drop the knife." He did not comply. Instead, Mann crossed the street and walked away. The officer followed, continuing to order Mann to "drop the knife."
At one point on his leisurely stroll, Mann engages a telephone pole with karate moves. Clearly this fellow is not in his right mind, a clue -- if any were needed beyond the prior statements of residents -- that Mann was mentally ill and possibly under the influence.
During his stroll, too, Mann comes close to encountering several pedestrians. He threatens none of them. This was observed by the officer following him in the police car, and it should have been another clue that even though Mr. Mann (apparently) had a knife in his hand, he was not threatening others. Indeed, in the calls to 911, residents described him as "throwing the knife in the air" and catching it, not directing it at anyone else. They also said he had a gun -- but that was false. I'll try to get into false reports like this and their consequences before the end of the post.
Shortly, Mann reaches the main street, the police cruiser still following him and orders still coming at him from the loudspeaker to "drop the knife." Mann finds an object in the median and throws it at the police car. The object, later identified as a mug, strikes the car -- though it was initially reported to have struck an officer.
Mann runs from the police car as others start arriving. He comes within a few feet of pedestrians but makes no threatening gestures toward them. He is pursued slowly by several police cars as they attempt to corral him. He runs away and in doing so, he runs toward a police car, gesturing toward it as if to say "get out of the way!"
He runs across the street and along a sidewalk as police cars continue to follow. He stops at one point, apparently to catch his breath, and the police cars converge, attempting to corner him, but he runs away, and makes it a few dozen feet down the sidewalk, still followed by police cruisers, when suddenly two officers run up on him and from about 20-30 feet away shoot him dead.
Until that moment, it appeared that the police had the situation well in hand. Mr. Mann was eluding them and was being disobedient, true, but he was not threatening anyone, and he was not so elusive as to be un-apprehendable. It may have taken time to tire him out enough to make apprehension possible, but his actions were not those of someone who posed a serious threat, nor were they ones of someone trying to hide from police.
The sudden appearance of officers on foot who shot and killed him was a shock. Where they had come from and who had directed them to shoot -- if anyone -- is still a mystery. If it had not been for the Sacramento Bee finding and publishing surveillance video of the shooting, we would not have known this had happened, as the SPD were refusing to release any video of the incident and had already fabricated lies about what happened (detailed in a previous post.)
Their false narrative essentially blamed Mr. Mann for his own death, which is Standard Procedure in almost all cases of police homicide. The victim is always and completely at fault.
Victim-blaming is so routine it almost goes unnoticed. The public takes it for granted, no matter what happens or how much the visual evidence contradicts the police narrative.
"If he had just obeyed, this wouldn't have happened." We know that's not necessarily true, but it's beside the point as well. Not every suspect or subject is capable of obedience either immediately or at all. When that's the case, police too often resort to summary execution, not as a last resort but as an expedient one.
That appears to have happened in this case.
It appears to have happened in the case of Keith Scott. He was said to have suffered a traumatic brain injury in an accident the previous year, he may have been smoking marijuana and he may have been taking other medication that made it difficult for him to comprehend what was happening and may have made it impossible for him to immediately and completely comply with shouted orders from gun-wielding police. At any event, he was not threatening police or anyone else, even if he had a gun -- which is not at this point established or certain by any means.
It appears to have happened in the case of Terence Crutcher as well. According to reports -- and we don't know how true or false they are because they come from police -- Mr. Crutcher stopped his car in the middle of a more or less rural road in Tulsa, got out and was wandering around apparently bewildered when confronted by the officer who eventually shot and killed him. She ordered him to show his hands and get on the ground, but he did not immediately do so. When video of the incident emerged, however, he had his hands high over his head and he was slowly walking away from the gun-wielding officer toward his car (which was reported to be idling with its front doors open, but in the videos, the doors are closed, and it is impossible to tell whether the engine is running.) When Mr. Crutcher reaches the car, he puts his hands on the car and appears to be waiting to be searched or arrested. The officer apparently continues screaming at him to do something or other as her backup arrives. Mr. Crutcher starts to put his arms down, perhaps in an attempt to comply -- after disobeying -- and he is immediately shot with both a taser from the backup officer, and a bullet from the initial officer.
He falls to the pavement while the officers who shot him and other arriving officers back away slowly. The two officers who fired on him eventually hide crouched behind a police patrol car while other officers take over the scene, and two of them begin to render first aid to the dying Terence Crutcher.
Mr. Crutcher was unarmed and he is not reported to have threatened the officers in any way. He simply did not obey sufficiently fast enough to satisfy the officers who shot him with a taser and a bullet simultaneously. Given the fact that he was later said to be impaired by an illicit substance -- whether true or not, we don't know -- it's likely he could not obey directly, but from the available visual evidence he appears to have attempted to obey indirectly, only to be shot and killed for his efforts.
As in the case of each of the other incidents detailed here, the police initially issued false narratives about what happened, narratives which essentially absolved the officers involved of any culpability and placed all the blame on the victim.
Those narratives were contradicted by video evidence. Tulsa's PD promptly released video evidence which showed their initial narrative to be false. As they corrected the record, an arrest warrant was issued for the officer who shot Terence Crutcher to death.
In the cases of Joseph Mann in Sacramento and Keith Scott in Charlotte, police departments issued false narrative (ie: lies) about what happened and adamantly refused to release any police video of the incidents citing "integrity of the investigation." This is nonsense because they have already compromised the integrity of the investigation by issuing lies about what happened.
In the face of this kind of stonewalling in both instances, other video was produced which demonstrated that the initial police narrative was false. Both police departments held to their refusal to provide evidence from police cameras as long as they could -- in Sacramento's case, it was months, in Charlotte's it was days -- but in both cases, police eventually yielded at least partially and produced video evidence which showed that their story was not... what happened.
It became obvious that police escalated situations which were otherwise under control, or at least were not threatening to them or others. The "fault" in other words lies at least as much with the police as with the supposed culprits. The police were the threatening parties in all three instances. The police were aggressive while the supposed culprits were simply disobedient.
Of course the fact that they were black factored into the police aggression.
In all three instances, the police who fired the fatal shots displayed no empathy at all with the plight of their victims. Some of the other officers on scene interestingly did show traces of empathy, however. First aid was rendered by other officers in Tulsa and Charlotte (so unusual as to be remarked upon as officers routinely do not render first aid to those they have shot). It's not clear whether any officers in Sacramento rendered first aid to Mr. Mann. From the video evidence and the later narrative provided by SPD -- which corrected some of their initial lies -- officers waited for the arrival of EMTs some five minutes after Mr. Mann was shot 14 times. But prior to the shooting, apart from yelling at Mr. Mann over their loudspeakers, the officers arguably behaved appropriately in trying to corral Mr. Mann rather than harm him. While they weren't completely successful, they were were able to tighten the cordon gradually.
Experts in the control of mentally ill or substance impaired individuals could easily have advised other methods that might have worked better, but they were not consulted or on scene. People who work in the field know how to do it without harming or killing their patients/clients. Police do not, or they have those skills, their firearms skill too often overrides their other means and methods.
It's an empathy and a priority issue. The "sanctity of human life" is not a priority for many police officers and police departments. Asserting command and control is, regardless of the consequences to human life.
In our ongoing efforts to change the situation, the Conversation needs focus on the purpose of police and a definition of their primary objective. Right now they believe it is command and control, self-protection, and the protection of property, when in fact it should be -- must be -- the preservation of human life and protection of public well-being, including the lives and well-being of suspects and subjects.
They must be sensitized once again to empathize with people who aren't like them, maybe don't like them, and who perhaps cannot obey them instantly or at all.
It's not an impossible task but as the National Conversation continues, this task must come to the fore.
Sunday, September 25, 2016
Charlotte -- More Fog Than Sunshine
News report from Charlotte
I'm not impressed with Charlotte-Mecklenberg Police Chief Kerr Putney. He's been obfuscating from the beginning of the controversy over the police shooting of Keith Scott, and he outdid himself yesterday when announcing the immanent release of partial police video of the incident -- an incident which has understandably been interpreted by many as police murder.
Putney has said that his "job" is protecting his officers, and so much of what he has been doing since Scott's death is trying to divert attention from what his officers did.
This has been standard protocol for most police departments for many years; officers are presumed to be blameless by their departments. The victims are always and fully at fault for what happens to them.
That's been slowly changing in some cities where protests have followed some of the more egregious killings, but any change in the assumption of police blamelessness and victim fault is strenuously resisted by police unions, officers, and often by chiefs themselves. They simply cannot accept the idea that they are capable of doing anything wrong, particularly when they kill people.
Part of that blameless attitude is due to (Lt. Col.) David Grossman who travels the country promoting his "Killology" concepts to police officers and departments in lectures and trainings which assert that police kill when they have to, only when they have to, and there is no dishonor in doing so. Even, apparently, when they kill the innocent (I guess it's just "collateral damage," too bad so sad) they are serving a higher calling as "sheepdogs" protecting the "flock." This is literally insane, and yet it is the grounding philosophy of much of the policing in this country. (If you've ever seen Grossman speak, it's obvious he's not too tightly wrapped.)
In Charlotte, the police chief attempted to stonewall the public after his officers seemingly arbitrarily shot and killed Keith Scott last Tuesday. He refused to provide more than a very sketchy and incoherent outline of what happened. It was not backed up with any evidence, and he adamantly refused to release police video of the killing, claiming -- absurdly -- that he didn't want to violate the family's privacy and grief.
Not too surprisingly, this stonewalling -- as well as the killing itself -- led to protest. Some of the protest turned violent which got a lot of attention in the media, but overall the protests were non-violent and specific. The protesters wanted the video evidence of what happened, and they wanted accountability by and from the police. Simple, straightforward honesty was what they were and are still after.
Putney refused, citing the ongoing investigation which he said would be compromised by premature release of information and evidence. He promised "transparency" but not "full" transparency. Of course this led to more and more boisterous protest. WTF? Right?
Ultimately, on Friday, Keith Scott's wife Rakeyia Scott released her own video of the incident. Until that time, I don't think anybody outside her circle knew she had video of the police killing her husband.
Stonewalling and misdirection and withholding information is not limited to the Charlotte-Mecklenberg Police Department it would seem...
Pressure mounted on Putney to release police video as well, but he continued to refuse until yesterday.
Mrs. Scott's video does not show her husband until after he has been shot and is lying on the pavement, but it is graphic in that her pleas to the police not to shoot her husband go unheeded. She tells them he is not armed, that he has suffered a TBI (traumatic brain injury) and has just taken his medication. She pleas with her husband to be cooperative, get out of his vehicle and do what they say. The police keep screaming at him to "drop the gun," but Rakeyia Scott keeps telling them he doesn't have one, "he has a book."
All this is happening apparently while Mr. Scott is sitting in the passenger seat of a white
Nor -- until yesterday -- was there any indication of why the police were confronting Mr. Scott at all. It was a complete mystery, largely because of Putney's stonewalling and refusal to provide basic information about what the hell was going on. It was all under investigation, and he would not "compromise" that investigation.
Nevertheless, he insisted that Keith Scott was to blame for what happened to him because he refused to obey commands to "drop the gun," a gun which Putney acknowledged could not be seen in any of the police videos he had reviewed -- videos he refused to release.
He did, however, release a photo found on the internet which he said showed a gun, purported to be Scott's, lying on the pavement at his feet after he had been shot and police had established a perimeter.
Not helpful. In fact, the photo merely inflamed matters more. It was not clear that the object in the photo identified as a gun was in fact Scott's gun, or even that it was a gun at all. There was no way to tell. The photo was too blurry. No such object appeared in Mrs. Scott's video of the scene mere seconds after Keith Scott was shot in any case. What does appear is what looks like police officers on scene repeatedly dropping and picking up black gloves which led to speculation that the black object in the photo released by the police department was a glove not a gun.
As it stands, there is still no way to tell.
Why Putney thought it was appropriate to release that photo under his department's name and cite it as "proof" that Scott had a gun is unknowable. It's part of the bizarreness of this incident and the behavior of the police department in the face of scrutiny and demands of the public for information.
Scott's family insists he was not armed and did not have a gun at the time he was shot. They insist that he had -- if anything -- a book, the Koran as it happens, which he liked to read while waiting for one of his children to get home from school. He was innocently waiting for his child to get home, reading a book in his truck while he waited, when he was set upon by screaming police with guns drawn.
According to Putney, the police were on site to serve a warrant on someone else. He would not say why, instead of serving that warrant, they turned their attention to Keith Scott, ultimately killing him.
Again, Putney's stonewalling caused intense speculation and a widespread belief that the police had no business confronting Mr. Scott at all, that it was in essence a random and arbitrary execution of yet another black man.
That is what Rakeyia Scott's video seemed to confirm. The police were out of bounds and out of control, and they shot and killed Keith Scott for no reason at all -- except that they could and would be almost certain to get away with it.
While Keith Scott is not shown in his wife's video of the incident until after he has been shot and is lying on the pavement surrounded by police still yelling at him, he is shown very briefly in one of the police videos released yesterday. He is seen slowly and cautiously getting out of the passenger side of the
There is no apparent reason for the police to open fire. Mr. Scott may not be doing exactly as they say, but he is not visibly threatening (such as raising a gun toward police as some reports said he did.) He is simply walking slowly backwards with his arms at his side. It is clear that there is nothing in his right hand. His left hand is not visible in the video. At any event, no gun is visible in Scott's hand.
The other video released by police yesterday does not show Scott being shot, though one does hear the shots, but it shows the aftermath of the shooting from an officer's point of view. At one point, while officers continue to shout at Scott and handcuff him, he is heard moaning and a police officer's hand is briefly in view. It is covered with blood -- we can assume it is Scott's blood -- and the officer asks for his bag in the back of his own truck. He needs gloves and equipment to staunch Scott's wound.
Interesting...
Particularly interesting due to the claim that Scott's blood, DNA and fingerprints were found on a gun recovered at the scene, and that is claimed to be proof that Scott was armed at the time he was shot. Unfortunately for police, that is not proof due to the fact that an officer is seen seconds after the shooting with blood (presumed to be Scott's) all over his hand, and at no time is there any visual evidence that Scott had a gun in his hand -- or anywhere else on his person.
Police assert it, but they cannot show it.
Later yesterday, Charlotte police released a photo of a gun lying on pavement, a blood smeared holster and an alleged half-smoked blunt. They claimed that these were Scott's.
During his press conference yesterday announcing the imminence of the police video release, Putney for the first time stated why the police confronted Keith Scott rather than serve the warrant they were there to do.
It was, he said, because the police observed Scott with marijuana, saw him rolling a joint in his
Putney claimed that the presence of marijuana and a gun was criminal, and therefore the police had to act for "public safety" reasons.
According to some reports, they left the scene to put on their bulletproof vests and then returned to confront Mr. Scott.
According to Scott's wife, he did not have a gun, but the police on scene insisted they had seen one in the truck.
According to police, the photos they released yesterday of a gun, a holster, and a blunt were Keith Scott's and they presumably were presented as the evidence that justified the shooting.
But absent any visible linkage between these items and Mr. Scott, and given Putney's propensity to stonewall and obfuscate, who knows whether these items are in fact Mr. Scott's, and further, who can say whether mere possession of such items is justification for a summary execution?
That's the problem here. That's the problem in many police killings. While they may eventually be ruled "justifiable" -- or "within policy" -- and the victim may be blamed, the killing itself indicates again and again that the officers involved have no interest or concern for the sanctity of human life; their only interest is in neutralizing a perceived threat, whether on not there is any objective threat to themselves or anyone else.
In this case, it appears that Mr. Scott was not at any time threatening the officers in any way. It is not certain that he had a gun, nor if he did, is it clear that he "brandished" it or threatened the officers with it. There has been an unconfirmed claim that he "pointed" it at officers, but there is no proof, and it has not been claimed by the police that he threatened them with a gun.
What has been claimed is that Mr. Scott disobeyed the officers' repeated commands to "drop the gun."
He may or may not have disobeyed. It's impossible to tell. There is no visual evidence he had a gun in his hand when he exited the
There is visual evidence that he attempted to comply and was shot down as he did so.
There is testimony from his wife and others that Keith Scott was involved in a road accident (motorcycle?) about a year ago in which he sustained significant injuries including traumatic brain injury. Whether that affected his response to police "commands" is worth considering. At any rate, there is no sign at all that Mr. Scott was threatening or aggressive or even particularly defiant.
In other words, there was no objective and visual reason for the police to shoot him, even though the shooting may eventually be ruled "justified."
This goes on all the time, essentially every day, throughout the country and it is long past time for it to stop.
I've claimed and I continue to claim that 90% or more of police killings are unnecessary. They happen because police are scared out of their wits by their contact with the public -- fear and loathing which is partly due to their training and conditioning -- and they are expected to shoot when they are so frightened they "fear for their lives and the safety of others."
So long as they make that claim, they're almost certain to be absolved of criminal liability -- and they will often be praised and promoted for "keeping us safe." So what if some Negro is dead?
That's the commonplace attitude among officers and their commanders, and that is wrong. It is a moral abomination.
It must change.
Right now, I'm more involved in activism from a distance over the killing of Joseph Mann in Sacramento, and step by step, I and others are taking action (me mostly by writing) to try to ensure that nothing like that happens again.
The killing of Keith Scott in Charlotte is catalyzing similar activism, and hopefully the police culture that allowed that killing will change -- and sooner rather than later. I have zero confidence that Kerr Putney will be the change agent, but you never know.
In Tulsa, the killing of Terence Crutcher has led to the arrest of his killer, but whether that will significantly affect police culture in Tulsa is hard to say. She may be a scapegoat, and nothing will change. We'll have to see.
Meanwhile, here are the videos so far released of the shooting of Keith Scott: (Via NYT)
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