SHOOTING

he better not be (expletive) dead.”

Soon, she was using the phone to call 911, her husband’s body splayed on the ground.

Attorneys for the Scott family on Friday released the first publicly available video of Tuesday’s shooting as Charlotte continued to reel from days of protests that have focused, in part, on city officials’ refusal to release police footage of the incident.

“Release the tapes!” has become a familiar refrain on Charlotte’s streets. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has called for an end to “the rioting” in Charlotte, while Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton zeroed in on the video, calling for release of the footage “without delay.”

The debate in Charlotte has once again highlighted the uneven level of transparency that exists in cases of police shootings across the U.S.

The public now may have media tools as good as or better than those of the police. Encounters with police are sometimes now livestreamed as they happen, a tactic clearly intended to influence the outcome in real time.

After a shooting, members of the public can release their own footage when they believe that police have not described an incident truthfully.

Such pressure is unusual for police investigators, who in other kinds of cases are typically allowed to hold off on releasing video recordings of an incident. The reasons are many. A video of a crime, for example, can often be used to test whether a suspect is lying or a witness is remembering an incident accurately.

Indeed, release of a video may cause confusion about whether a witness is describing what they saw during a crime or what they saw on the video.

Charlotte Police Chief Kerr Putney has said release of the official video would be counterproductive and could potentially compromise the integrity of the investigation — though in a small concession, he did permit Keith Scott’s family to view it.

“It’s not that I want to hide anything,” Putney said at a news conference Friday morning. “I want to be more thoughtful and deliberate.”

Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts said she believes the tape should be made public, though not necessarily right now. “I lean towards transparency in everything our city does,” Roberts said Friday.

According to the police account, Scott stepped out of the truck with a gun, and then got back in the truck. Police said that they told Scott to drop the gun but that he got back out of the vehicle with the weapon and “posed an imminent deadly threat.”

Scott’s family has insisted he was holding not a gun, but a book.

Neither the official video, as the police describe it, nor Scott’s wife’s cellphone footage appears to answer the question definitively.