A pair of deadly shootings of African Americans by police officers over the past week has underlined the critical role of video evidence in resolving controversial cases and potentially preventing civil unrest.
Police in North Carolina are resisting growing pressure to release video footage of the fatal shooting on Tuesday of Keith Scott, soon after recordings from the deadly shooting of Terence Crutcher in Oklahoma contradicted the initial version of events given by authorities.
Kerr Putney, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg police chief, told a press conference on Thursday that the bodycam or dashcam footage did not definitively show Scott pointing a gun at officers but did support their basic version of events – that Scott was undoubtedly armed and refusing to cooperate.
Asked by a reporter, following two nights of violent unrest in the city, when the public should expect the video footage to be released, Putney was defiant. “You shouldn’t expect it to be released,” he said at a press conference.
Putney, who said he would try to have the video shown to Scott’s family privately, had claimed on Wednesday that the footage “can’t be released” until the conclusion of the department’s investigation into the shooting.
The decision has enraged civil liberties campaigners, who stressed that a controversial new North Carolina law signed in July, which declares that police video recordings are no longer public records and can only be released through a court order, does not actually come into effect until October.
“In the interest of transparency and accountability, and particularly in light of conflicting accounts about the shooting, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg police department should quickly release any and all footage it has of the events leading up to the shooting, as well as the shooting itself,” said Karen Anderson, the executive director of the ACLU of North Carolina.
Since and including the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, following the fatal police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in August 2014, some of the most serious unrest over killings by officers has come in cases where no official video footage existed, where authorities declined to release footage, or where amateur recordings challenged the official version of events.
Police said Scott, 43, got out of his car armed with a gun and refused to drop it when mistakenly confronted by officers seeking to arrest a different man. Scott’s family, however, said he was holding a book and did not pose a threat. Relatives said officers involved were completely in plainclothes; authorities said they wore vests clearly identifying them as police.
The lack of transparency meant that even as city authorities were stating Scott’s shooting was justified, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton included Scott’s name in a tweet declaring: “This has got to end.”
Reluctance among protesters to believe the police’s account of what happened without supporting video evidence also looked increasingly understandable following the release in Oklahoma of footage showing the fatal police shooting of Crutcher in Tulsa on 16 September.
Authorities there initially claimed that Crutcher, 40, refused to obey commands to put his hands up after officers encountered him beside his vehicle, which had stalled in the middle of a street. Dashcam video, however, showed Crutcher with his hands in the air before being shot.
So disturbing was the video footage that even Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who has styled himself as “the law and order candidate” and pledged to hand power back to police officers, said he was “very, very troubled” by the incident.
“This young officer, I don’t know what she was thinking, I don’t know what she was thinking,” Trump said during a campaign event in Ohio on Wednesday, referring to Betty Shelby, the Tulsa officer who shot Crutcher. Shelby has claimed through attorneys that she fired because Crutcher tried to reach into his vehicle.
Yet the swift release of the footage, along with announcements that Oklahoma state officials and the US Department of Justice are investigating the shooting, appeared to have contributed to a non-violent public response in Tulsa.
Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, said his group advocated the use of cameras provided that complications, such as ensuring privacy for children and victims of sexual crimes, can be resolved.
“Most police do understand the benefits but they also want clear policies that protect the constitutional issues,” said Wexler. “Cameras and the storage of data is very expensive and the need to fund them is sometimes cost prohibitive.”
The pair of fatal shootings followed the killing by an officer of Tyre King, a black 13-year-old, in Columbus, Ohio, last week. Police said King pulled a BB gun resembling a real pistol from his waistband as the officer investigated an alleged armed robbery by him or other teenagers.
The officer who shot King was not wearing a body camera, leading activists and demonstrators once again to cast doubt over the official version of events. “The story the police gave is the story the police always give,” one student said.
