Videos Expose Charlotte Police Lies:
Keith Lamont Scott Was MURDERED!
September 26, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Video footage released over the past several days of the police killing of Keith Lamont Scott in Charlotte, North Carolina, has exposed the police claim that Scott represented an “imminent deadly threat” as a lie, and show that he was MURDERED. One is the video courageously filmed by Rakeyia Scott, his widow, the others are some of the body- and dash-cam footage police were forced to release on September 24, after days of stonewalling, by a national wave of protest and outrage.
Right after Scott was shot down on Tuesday, September 20, Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts and Police Chief Kerr Putney claimed it was a justified homicide. They said police saw Keith Lamont Scott sitting inside a car (smoking marijuana and holding a gun, they now claim). They said he got out of the car with a gun, and then got back in. They approached the car and told him to get out. He did—brandishing a gun, they claimed. Police yelled at him to drop it, but he didn’t. Police claimed Scott posed “an imminent deadly threat to the officers who subsequently fired their weapon striking the subject.”
The Scott family and their attorneys were able to see police video footage before it was released. Afterward the family’s lawyer, Justin Bamberg, said the video showed Scott leaving his car “in a very calm, non-aggressive manner” when the police ordered him to. When he was shot, “Mr. Scott’s hands were by his side and he was slowly walking backwards.” Bamberg said “it is impossible to discern from the videos what, if anything, Mr. Scott is holding in his hands.”
From BAsics, from the talks and writings of Bob Avakian:
Editor’s note: Tyisha Miller was a 19-year-old African-American woman shot dead by Riverside, California police in 1998. Miller had been passed out in her car, resulting from a seizure, when police claimed that she suddenly awoke and had a gun; they fired 23 times at her, hitting her at least 12 times, and murdering her. Bob Avakian addressed this.
If you can’t handle this situation differently than this, then get the fuck out of the way. Not only out of the way of this situation, but get off the earth. Get out of the way of the masses of people. Because, you know, we could have handled this situation any number of ways that would have resulted in a much better outcome. And frankly, if we had state power and we were faced with a similar situation, we would sooner have one of our own people’s police killed than go wantonly murder one of the masses. That’s what you’re supposed to do if you’re actually trying to be a servant of the people. You go there and you put your own life on the line, rather than just wantonly murder one of the people. Fuck all this “serve and protect” bullshit! If they were there to serve and protect, they would have found any way but the way they did it to handle this scene. They could have and would have found a solution that was much better than this. This is the way the proletariat, when it’s been in power has handled—and would again handle—this kind of thing, valuing the lives of the masses of people. As opposed to the bourgeoisie in power, where the role of their police is to terrorize the masses, including wantonly murdering them, murdering them without provocation, without necessity, because exactly the more arbitrary the terror is, the more broadly it affects the masses. And that’s one of the reasons why they like to engage in, and have as one of their main functions to engage in, wanton and arbitrary terror against the masses of people.
Bob Avakian, BAsics 2:16
Now that the police have been forced to release some of their video footage people can and should watch it for themselves: it shows police blowing Scott away 5-6 seconds after he gets out of his car and backs away from police with his arms at his side! This was a fucking execution!!
Anyone who has not watched these videos should do so right now.
Rakeyia Scott’s video
Police body-cam and dash-cam videos
Charlotte police claim they found a gun near Scott’s body with his fingerprints and DNA on it. However, lawyers for the Scott family have “brought attention to an object that they said could be seen on the ground near Mr. Scott after he was shot” in the Rakeyia Scott video, the New York Times reports (September 24). “They said the object seemed to appear in the video after the camera panned away briefly, in a place where no object was previously visible.” This has raised questions about this discrepancy and where this “object” or gun came from.
Even if Keith Scott had a gun, that in no way justifies his execution. In North Carolina it’s legal to openly carry a handgun. The New York Times (September 22, p. A23) published a picture of a white man, driving through downtown Charlotte during one of the protests, arm hanging out his driver’s-side window, openly holding a pistol. This didn’t raise an eyebrow! So we’re left to conclude that if a Black person has a gun, is near a gun, or police claim he had a gun, it’s a death sentence! The reality is that Black people have no rights, including the Second Amendment, which this system is bound to respect.
Police are still refusing to release all their video footage, arguing they need to “protect the integrity of the investigation.” And the North Carolina legislature has even passed a bill, which will take effect October 1, declaring police videos are not public property and cannot be released to the public without court orders.
First, since when have this system’s “investigations” of the police had any “integrity?” Overwhelmingly, murdering cops go un-indicted and unpunished. When these killers are fired, indicted, or in very rare cases jailed (and rarer still given jail time commensurate with their crimes), it’s almost always been the product of mass protest and societal outrage, not the normal workings of the system. And the system’s “investigations” certainly haven’t ended police murder and terror.
Second, Chief Putney admitted his real concern wasn’t his “investigation,” but the reaction of the people: “If I were to put it [the video] out indiscriminately, and it doesn’t give you good context, it can inflame the situation and make it even worse,” he said. “It will exacerbate the backlash. It will increase the distrust...” (New York Times, September 24)
And he’s right to be worried. The release of Rakeyia Scott’s video and some of the police video has sickened and enraged many, many thousands (at this writing each has been viewed over a half-million times), not pacified them.
The basic truth is that this system can’t do without murdering pigs and time and time again it goes through every contortion possible to protect police who murder, and to chill out, derail, and defang the righteous protests that erupt.
Any cover-up of the truth must not be allowed to go down. All the police videos of the Keith Lamont Scott killing must be released—NOW! The cops who killed him must be arrested and charged with murder!
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