Charlotte police videos of Scott shooting are made public
Questions still abound over whether he was holding a gun as police have said and his family has denied
Police officials relented amid increasing pressure on Saturday and released two videos showing the shooting death of a black man by police five days ago that has sparked several nights of sometimes-violent protests.
The videos — one taken from an officer’s body camera and another from the dashboard camera of a police vehicle — show Keith Lamont Scott, 43, exiting his vehicle and falling to the ground. But they do not answer a crucial question about whether Scott was holding a gun as police have said and Scott’s family has denied.
The encounter
The police department also offered fresh insight into how the encounter happened. Plainclothes officers were sitting in an unmarked car at an apartment complex preparing to serve an arrest warrant against someone else when Scott pulled in beside them, the department said. The officers initially noticed that the 43-year-old was rolling a marijuana “blunt” in his car — and then saw him raise a gun, the police said. The combination of the gun and the marijuana created a public safety hazard, the officers concluded. The officers left and returned in vests and equipment that identified them as cops.
That is when the encounter began, police say. “There was a crime that he had committed [possessing marijuana] that caused the encounter, and then the gun exacerbated that encounter,” said CharlotteMecklenburg Police Chief Kerr Putney at a news conference.
Putney’s office also released photos of a gun, an ankle holster and a “blunt”. The gun was loaded and had Scott’s fingerprints and DNA, say police.