It is as if nothing’s changed since 1860

HERE WAS Walter Scott, a black man in America running for his life even if he didn’t know it at the time, running the way black men probably ran from men with guns 150 years ago in South Carolina.

Here was Walter Scott about to take four bullets in the back and one to the ear, the victim running away from the white cop this time instead of coming at him, the way Michael Brown did in Ferguson, Mo., before another white cop who said he feared for his life took out Brown. There was no video like this in Ferguson when Officer Darren Wilson shot Brown dead in the street. But there was in North Charleston, S.C., a young man named Feidin Santana shooting video of Officer Michael Slager with his phone as Slager was putting one bullet after another in Scott’s back. So this was another home video sent out by America to the rest of the world it still says it wants to lead in something other than shooting people dead, sometimes in broad daylight.

This really was Walter Scott getting gunned down like it was 1860 in South Carolina, by a white cop who thought he could get away with doing that because of a dispute that started with a traffic stop. Maybe this is one South Carolina version of modern policing — broken tail-light policing, instead of broken windows. You stop the black man in the car and Taser him and then give him a running start — in the opposite direction, in that way the opposite of Ferguson — before you open fire.

“This is what passes for progress right now in America, even if it’s morbid progress,” Wesley Bell of Ferguson, Mo., says. “This happened on Saturday and already the officer has been charged with murder.”

Bell is a 40-year-old professor of criminal justice and legal studies at St. Louis Community College, one of two African-Americans elected this week to the Ferguson City Council, out of Ward 3. He lives about a 10-minute walk or a 2-minute drive from where the white cop shot the black teen dead in Ferguson.

“What happens now in South Carolina sickens me,” Bell says. “This is the kind of tension we have been talking about in Ferguson, that we talked about in the campaign, the tension that constantly exists in poor communities.”

This was the first election in Ferguson since Wilson shot 18-year-old Michael Brown. Bell ran because he wanted to change things in Ferguson, and not just between cops and its citizens, but also help change the way the rest of the country looks at Ferguson. Now it happens again in North Charleston, and it is even worse this time because we see Slager pull out his gun after his Taser is on the ground and calmly start shooting. Maybe he thought it was more competitive because Scott was on the move, even if Scott wasn’t moving very quickly as the first bullets began to put him down.

“A fleeing suspect who’s not a threat to the community doesn’t justify deadly force,” Bell says, “whether he’s Carl Lewis or Fat Albert.”

This wasn’t the manslaughter charge never brought against a New York City cop, Daniel Pantaleo, because he put Eric Garner down on a Staten Island street — this city’s video sent out to the world — and Garner died. This wasn’t the manslaughter charge brought in Brooklyn by ambitious DA Kenneth Thompson against Officer Peter Liang, who accidentally discharged his weapon in a darkened stairwell in the Pink Houses that killed Akai Gurley.

“This was murder in South Carolina,” Wesley Bell says.

It was murder in North Charleston in the middle of the morning. This time, the bad guy with the gun was a police officer, an execution at the end of an encounter that began with a traffic stop because of that tail light, and escalated from there. Walter Scott was worried about being a deadbeat dad, not knowing that he was about to be shot dead.

“You see what this is about, and not just in Ferguson,” Bell says. “It is about the bad officers who give a black eye to all the hardworking ones protecting the streets of my city and yours every single day. I keep saying that somehow we have to get to a place in this country where we judge the police not by the number of tickets they write, but by the number of people they know in their own community.”

This wasn’t just video sent out to the world this week because Santana wasn’t afraid to start filming as Slager started shooting at Scott. This was more, and worse, a snapshot of life in this country, the reality of life in places like North Charleston, as brutal and grotesque as murder by the masked men of ISIS wearing black. Our executioner was a white cop, dressed in police blue.