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South Carolina Police Officer Charged with Murder After Shooting Unarmed Man in the Back
Here is a story that once again demonstrates that the most important public service you can perform is to record the police at every opportunity. I was first alerted to this story by Ace, who has a portion of the video at his site. A longer version of the video is available at the New York Times, who apparently were the original recipients of the video. Normally I would embed the video here but I can’t figure out how to do it with the weird NYT proprietary video feed so I will just encourage you to go watch the NYT video if you have questions about anything I say here. I will warn you that it is not for the faint of heart and that you will clearly see a man being shot to death.
Here’s a basic synopsis of what you will see on the video: A black man (who we later learn is Walter L. Scott), in clear headlong flight from a police officer is shot multiple times in the back and falls to the ground, clearly dead or dying. As the officer and his partner afterwards mill about the scene, the officer clearly moves something that looks for all the world to be a taser and drops it right next to the dead man. Why is that relevant? Because the officer’s defense in this case is that he was justified in shooting Mr. Scott because Mr. Scott took his stun gun.
Obviously, this is a terrible set of facts – one so terrible that the officer in question has actually been charged with murder, a nearly unprecedented event for a cop in an officer-involved shooting. And, to date, I have not seen anyone offering a defense of the officer, who definitely appears to have shot a man in the back and then planted evidence on him afterwards.
But let’s engage in a hypothetical here. Let’s suppose that some private citizen had not happened to catch this incident on video (at a sufficiently safe distance that the police do not seem to notice him until the incident is over). What then?
Well, then we would be left with the typical scenario we have in this situation – which is that a pretty significant chunk of conservatives would, without thinking, believe the officer’s story, assume that witnesses to the contrary were lying, and scoff at the idea that cops would plant evidence on an unarmed person that they just shot (in full view of their partner, who offered no obvious objection to what was occurring in front of him).
Moreover, even when the cop’s stated excuse obviously did not justify the shooting, people would still tend to buy it in the absence of this officer (apparently) planting his stun gun. In this case, the officer says: “Well, you see, he took my stun gun, so I had to shoot him several times in the back as he ran away,” and a not insignificant number of people would respond: “Seems legit.” Nevermind that cops take the position that the use of a taser is not lethal force and therefore by definition even if the guy was actually brandishing a taser at the officer, shooting him would not have been legally justified. Nevermind that the fact that Mr. Scott was shot in the back multiple times is a pretty clear indicator, even in the absence of video, that he wasn’t doing anything threatening to the officer even if he actually had taken his taser.
How do I know this? I know it from the reaction of many to the Eric Garner case, in which many otherwise serious people contended that the act of turning away from the cops justified the application of a potentially fatal carotid arm bar, not to mention the callous indifference of the cops as Eric Garner slowly died on the sidewalk while they all milled around conspicuously not performing CPR on a dying man. All because Garner “resisted arrest.”
Let us grant for a moment that Eric Garner technically “resisted arrest,” as did Walter Scott (I don’t know why he ran away from the cop in the first place but it seems in retrospect that his instinct was pretty sound). We have to get through our heads that not every instance of “resisting arrest” is created alike and that doing so does not grant the cops a license to play judge, jury, and executioner and kill you on the spot.
And let’s lose this ridiculous notion that cops are entitled to some extraordinary level of deference in terms of their justifications for killing citizens. This is dead, completely, 180 degrees wrong. If a free society is to survive, then those who we trust with the force of law – including lethal force – must be held to a higher standard of scrutiny than private citizens. Holding them to a lower standard – including the incredible deference shown by some to their implausible justifications for deaths caused to private citizens – is an invitation to tyranny.
The post South Carolina Police Officer Charged with Murder After Shooting Unarmed Man in the Back appeared first on RedState.
Source: http://www.redstate.com/2015/04/08/south-carolina-police-officer-charged-murder-shooting-unarmed-man-back/
