Bowing to demands for greater transparency into the circumstances surrounding a fatal shooting that sparked protests in Charlotte, North Carolina this week, the city’s police department on Saturday released video of the deadly encounter recorded by its officers.
Kerr Putney, chief of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg police, told reporters that the video was recored on two police cameras — one mounted on the dashboard of a police car and another on the uniform of an officer — after an undercover unit observed Keith Lamont Scott sitting in his car on Tuesday afternoon with marijuana and a gun.
“When you are in possession of marijuana and then you have a gun, that’s a public safety issue that our officers were going to address,” Putney said.
Neither of the video clips makes it clear if Scott was, in fact, holding a gun when he was shot, but it does appear to cast doubt on previous statements from the police that he posed an imminent threat to their safety, since he appears to have been backing slowly away from his vehicle, with his arms still at his sides when he was shot.
The department offered no explanation for the fact that audio is missing from the first 25 seconds of the bodycam video, which was recorded as the officer and a colleague first attempted to break the window of Scott’s car, and a third officer then opened fire.
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