Black Lives Matter activists and community members outraged over the recent police killing of Keith Lamont Scott Monday demanded the resignations of the city's mayor, police chief, and city council members for their handling of the investigation of the fatal shooting.
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Speakers packed a city hall meeting Monday to voice indignation over Scott’s killing at the hands of local police and the failure of city officials to adequately respond one week after the shooting.
"If you can't do your job, let's find someone who can," lawyer Darcel Chandler said to the city council amid activists’ calls for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Kerr Putney, Mayor Jennifer Roberts and other lawmakers to step down. "We can't choose who we want the laws to apply to.”
Activists stressed that it is the responsibility of city officials to hold police officers accountable and address the problems of racial discrimination plaguing the city.
Days of protests have rocked Charlotte since police gunned down Scott last Tuesday, pressuring authorities Saturday to release two police videos of the incident. Activists accused the police of worsening the relationship with the community by initially withholding the release of dashcam and body camera footage to the public. Observers have held up the release of the video, though a partial response to calls for justice, as a testament to the power of protests to pressure authorities to act.
The two videos, one from a dashcam and the other from a body camera, do not offer a conclusive account of what happened. Police say Scott was armed, but witnesses say all he had was a book. The videos that Scott got out of his vehicle and backed away slowly with his hands at his sides, but does not show whether or not he was holding anything.
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The body cam video has no sound for the first 30 seconds — during which four shots are fired at Scott — obscuring key details of the interaction that could offer evidence in the case. The Washington Post reported that the 30-second audio delay reveals that the officer did not activate his body camera until after the shooting.
Police have more footage that has not yet been made public.
Another video, filmed by Scott’s wife, Rakeyia, and released Friday by NBC News, likely played a part in forcing authorities’ hand to release the police tapes and offers a heart-wrenching play-by-play of the fatal shooting.
The disturbing video features Rakeyia narrating her partner’s death as it happens. As she films the scene, she is heard urging police not to shoot her husband, telling them that he has a traumatic brain injury, just took his medicine and will not do any harm to the officers. The police appear not to pay attention to Rakeyia, continuing to yell at Scott to “drop the gun” and get out of his car, even though his wife says he is unarmed.
Police then shoot Scott, and Rakeyia screams, “Did you shoot him? He better not be dead!” As her husband lay dying, police tell her to “back up” as she continues filming the scene.
Officers confronted Scott when they went to arrest another man with a warrant at the apartment complex near where Scott, a father of seven, was sitting in his car to wait for his children after school. Witnesses report that Scott routinely read a book while waiting for his children in the same place.
The ongoing protests in Charlotte over the killing come as Black Lives Matter actions also rock Oklahoma in the wake of the police killing of Terence Crutcher, another of the latest victims of the crisis of discriminatory policing and excessive use of force against people of color across the country.
According to a count by the Guardian, U.S. police have killed 798 people in 2016 alone.