As you may know, on Tuesday afternoon, Charlotte resident Keith Scott was shot to death by police at his apartment complex in the northeastern portion of the city. Police say he had a gun, but a number of family members and witnesses say Scott was unarmed. Those questions led to three days of protests, the first two of which turned violent. Well, recently released video from the cell phone of Scott’s widow just added a very important question to the mix. Specifically, did the police do all they could to avoid shooting Scott, regardless of the circumstances?
Attorneys for Scott’s family released the footage taken by Scott’s widow, Rakeyia, which recorded the moments before and immediately after the shooting. Watch it here, courtesy the New York Times (warning, NSFW).
Rakeyia started rolling on her cell phone as an officer was yelling for her husband to put his hands up. She started yelling, “Don’t shoot him! He has no weapon!” Apparently an officer thought Scott had a gun, because he started yelling, “drop the f**ing gun!” By then, Rakeyia was getting very concerned. She then told the officers who were rolling in, “He has a TBI! He’s not going to do anything to you guys. He just took his medicine.”
According to the family’s lawyers, Scott suffered a traumatic brain injury in a motorcycle accident last fall. To my mind, this raises a very important question. Did the police do what they could to deescalate the situation? In an age when people are more aware than ever of the damage that concussions and other TBIs can do, you would think that police departments–especially in major cities like Charlotte–would train officers on what to do when they encounter someone who has suffered one.
Maybe it’s just me, but when the officers heard Rakeyia say that her husband had a TBI, they could have asked her to come and help. Or they could have tried to take things down a notch. After all, if Scott had suffered a particularly severe TBI, he might not have been able to process what was happening–either because of the injury itself or as a side effect of his medicine.
I watched this video several times, and unless I’m very wrong, the officers screwed up this situation a dozen ways to Sunday. They could have asked Rakeyia to help them calm Scott down, or they could have tried to talk him down. But this cell phone video appears to show that they did neither. Unless there’s another angle from one of the cops’ body cams, it looks like the officers could have done a lot more to avoid shooting Scott–and didn’t.
(featured image: screenshot courtesy Rakeyia Scott via WBTV)
