Charges, reforms follow public fury
North Charleston mayor says all police officers will be required to wear cameras
A bystander’s camera brought down patrolman Michael Thomas Slager. And now cameras are about to become mandatory operating equipment for the rest of the force as a South Carolina police department struggles in the eye of a widening American scandal.
The pledge of cop-worn body cams capped a heated news conference Wednesday, as North Charleston Mayor Keith Summey answered public fury with hard policy reform aimed at ending discrepancies between what a police officer says and what a lens records.
Slager, 33, initially said he was in fear after he claimed a motorist seized his Taser following a routine traffic stop early Saturday. An escalating conflict ensued, ending in the shooting death of Walter Scott, 50.
But by Tuesday leaked cellphone video had fully upended that story, showing Slager in no apparent danger. Instead the footage shows the officer firing eight times as a suspect 17 years older than him stumbles away, back turned.
As Scott lay immobilized and dying from four bullets to the back and one to the ear, a second officer — AfricanAmerican, like the mortally wounded Scott — arrives on the scene. Slager, who is white, then jogs away to retrieve an object and returns to drop it alongside Scott’s body.
Unlike the waves of controversy that followed fatal encounters between police officers and black men triggered by the shooting last summer of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., the fury over North Charleston has left scant room for debate. Slager is now in custody facing a charge of murder and was fired instantly, officials confirmed Wednesday.
As the two men’s back stories were filled in, another dimension of the tragedy emerged: Slager and Scott, shooter and victim respectively, were both veterans of the U.S. Coast Guard, though there is no indication their service overlapped.
The South Carolina Law Enforcement Officers’ Association, which routinely provides legal representation to officers facing criminal proceedings, said it would not support Slager.
“It is sad for us when a police officer makes what appears to be a very bad decision that resulted in unnecessary death,” the group said in a statement.
“Working with the community and elected officials we can overcome this tragedy.
The swift decision to charge the officer demonstrates that law enforcement will not tolerate the tarnishing of the badge and oaths we all take so seriously.”
Questions lingered over the role of the second officer in the video, later identified as Clarence Habersham.
During questioning at Wednesday’s news conference, police Chief Eddie Driggers declined to say whether the second officer offered any statement contradicting Slager’s original account. “To my knowledge, nobody was witness to anything but Slager, to my knowledge,” he said.
Of the video itself, Driggers said: “I was sickened by what I saw.”
Driggers and Summey, the mayor, met earlier Wednesday with Scott’s relatives.
The mayor described them as “a wonderful, down-to-earth family, a wonderful group of people.
“We let them know how we felt about their loss, and how bad it was,” he said.
Summey’s decision to order mandatory body cameras underscores the sheer power of video in this case — and more broadly, throughout the U.S., as law enforcement adapts to the reality of civilian digital eyes, everywhere and always.
Though critics dispute the extent to which body cameras alone will address the country’s policing issues, some welcomed the move.