The Walter Scott Murder
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD of the New York Times
The horrifying video of a white police officer in North Charleston, S.C., shooting and killing an unarmed black man — while the man is running away — may still come as a shock to many Americans. But this heinous act, which the officer tried to explain away by claiming that he feared for his life, strikes a familiar chord in communities of color all across the United States.
The case underscores two problems that have become increasingly clear since the civic discord that erupted last year after the police killed black citizens in New York, Cleveland and Ferguson, Mo. The first, most pressing problem is that poorly trained and poorly supervised officers often use deadly force unnecessarily, particularly against minority citizens. The second is that cops get away with unjustly maiming or killing people by lying about the circumstances that prompted them to use force.
The shooting death of Walter Scott on Saturday would have passed into the annals of history unremarked upon had a bystander not used a cellphone to document what happened after Mr. Scott encountered the police officer, Michael Slager, after a routine traffic stop.
Mr. Slager subsequently reported by radio that he had shot Mr. Scott after Mr. Scott wrestled away his electronic stun gun. The video, provided to The New York Times by the Scott family’s lawyer, shows a different story. The video begins in the vacant lot, apparently moments after Officer Slager fired his stun weapon at Mr. Scott. The two men tussle, an object that may have been the stun gun falls to the ground and then Mr. Scott turns to run away. He appears to be 15 feet to 20 feet away and fleeing when the officer fires eight times. Later in the video, the officer runs back toward the place where the initial scuffle occurred and picks up something from the ground and drops it near Mr. Scott’s body.
As The Times noted on Tuesday, police reports say that officers performed CPR and delivered first aid to Mr. Scott. But the video suggests that they were in no rush to help. For several minutes after the shooting, the mortally wounded man remained face down with his hands cuffed behind his back. A second officer arrives, puts on medical gloves and attends to Mr. Scott but is not shown performing CPR. As sirens are heard, a third officer arrives, apparently with a medical kit, but he also is not seen performing CPR. Stunned by Mr. Scott’s death, a brother is left to ask: “How do you lose your life at a traffic stop?”
Mr. Slager was charged with murder on Tuesday and subsequently fired by the North Charleston Police Department. The swiftness of the charge was encouraging. The F.B.I. and the Justice Department, which has opened several civil rights investigations into police departments under Attorney General Eric Holder Jr., is also investigating. On its face, the officer’s conduct seems inconsistent with rulings by the Supreme Court, which has held that officers can use deadly force against a fleeing suspect only when there is probable cause that the suspect “poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.”
Police departments all over the country clearly need to do a better job of training on how to de-escalate encounters with citizens and explaining when and how deadly force can be used. To get a handle on this problem, Congress must compel local police departments to report to the Justice Department all instances in which officers are fired upon or fire their own weapons at citizens. During the 1990s, Congress enacted legislation that was intended to aid the collection of data on officer-involved shootings. But many local governments do not provide the data because reporting it is optional. Mr. Holder was on the mark in January when he described this state of affairs as “unacceptable.”
Better tracking of shooting data is, of course, important. But states and local governments need to understand that the growing outrage over wrongful death cases, like the one in North Charleston, undermines trust in law enforcement and presents a clear danger to the civic fabric. The country needs to confront this issue directly and get this problem under control.