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Charlotte police release videos but unsure if victim had a gun
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CHARLOTTE police have released two videos showing the fatal shooting of a black man that has unleashed days of protests, but the footage failed to settle the central question of whether shooting victim Keith Scott was holding a gun.
Protesters who have gathered in Charlotte every day since last Tuesday’s shooting demanding that police release the body-cam and dashboard video marched again on Saturday evening, with many carrying signs protesting police violence.
Both Scott’s family and protesters have disputed the police statements that Scott was carrying a gun.
The controversy over Scott’s death has made Charlotte, North Carolina’s largest city and a financial center, the latest flashpoint in two years of tense protests over US police killings of black men, most of them unarmed.
Before the release of the footage, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Kerr Putney acknowledged that the videos themselves were “insufficient” to prove that Scott held a gun. But he said that the totality of evidence, including eyewitness testimony, supported the conclusion that Scott was armed.
“There is no definitive visual evidence that he had a gun in his hand — you can see something in the hand — and that he pointed it at an officer. That I did not visually see in the video,” Putney said. “But what we do see is compelling evidence that, when you put all the pieces together, supports that.”
In a statement accompanying the video release, police said Scott was shot by Officer Brentley Vinson as he backed away from his vehicle.
“Officer Vinson perceived Mr. Scott’s actions and movements as an imminent physical threat to himself and the other officers,” the statement said.
Police released pictures along with the clips, including photos of a handgun and an ankle holster that authorities said Scott had been wearing at the time of the shooting.
They said that the gun recovered at the scene was loaded and had Scott’s fingerprints and DNA.
But Scott’s family, which released its own video of the encounter on Friday, said the footage showed the father of seven was not acting aggressively and that the police shooting made no sense. The family video, shot by Scott’s wife, was also inconclusive on the question of a gun.
The family said neither of the police videos answered key questions surrounding the case, and left them with insufficient information to form an opinion on whether the officer who killed Scott should face criminal charges. In one of the police videos, a dashboard-mounted camera from a squad car showed Scott exiting his vehicle and then backing away from it. Police shout to him to drop a gun, but it is not clear that Scott is holding anything. Four shots then ring out and Scott drops to the ground.
A second video, taken with an officer’s body camera, fails to capture the moment of shooting. It shows Scott standing outside his vehicle before he is shot.
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