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Charlotte Officer ‘Acted Lawfully’ in Fatal Shooting of Keith Scott Charlotte Officer ‘Justified’ in Fatal Shooting of Keith Scott
(about 9 hours later)
RALEIGH, N.C. — A Charlotte, N.C., police officer will not face charges in the fatal shooting in September of a black resident, Keith Lamont Scott, a prosecutor said Wednesday. RALEIGH, N.C. — There is no doubt that officers surrounded him. That they shouted at him. That they shot him. But a crucial question about the fatal confrontation between Keith L. Scott and police officers in Charlotte, N.C., has always been whether Mr. Scott was wielding a gun.
The Sept. 20 shooting of Mr. Scott, who the police said had a handgun when he was killed, set off days of unrest in North Carolina’s largest city and led to immense public pressure on the police to release dashboard and body camera recordings, which did not prove that Mr. Scott had been armed. On Wednesday, in a 40-minute news conference that at times took on the feel of a courtroom argument, R. Andrew Murray, the district attorney for Mecklenburg County, laid out a case that Mr. Scott, who was black, had a gun in his hands and had not heeded warnings to drop it when he was shot and killed.
Still, the decision not to prosecute the officer, Brentley Vinson, who is black, was not a surprise. In September, the chief of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, Kerr Putney, said that the officer was “absolutely not being charged by me at this point.” “It’s a justified shooting based on the totality of the circumstances,” Mr. Murray said. No charges, he said, will be filed against the officer, Brentley Vinson, who is also black.
R. Andrew Murray, the district attorney for Mecklenburg County, said during a lengthy news conference on Wednesday that Officer Vinson was justified in using deadly force against Mr. Scott, saying that he feared for his life and those of his fellow officers. He issued a report of his findings after the news conference. Mr. Murray made his case with an elaborate presentation of videos, enhanced digital images and other evidence, a reflection of the increasing sophistication of prosecutors who must also sway a public skeptical of police accounts of fatal shootings.
“Officer Vinson acted lawfully when he shot Mr. Scott,” Mr. Murray said. The Sept. 20 shooting of Mr. Scott was one of several deadly police interactions with African-Americans that have sparked waves of street demonstrations and an impassioned national conversation about race and the use of deadly force by police officers.
Mr. Murray said that despite claims that Mr. Scott was not carrying a gun, he had a .380 semiautomatic handgun with a round of ammunition in the chamber. “All of the credible and available evidence suggests that he was armed,” Mr. Murray said of Mr. Scott. Mr. Murray’s announcement came as a jury in Charleston, S.C., about a three-hour drive southeast of Charlotte, was preparing to hear closing arguments in the case of Michael T. Slager, a former North Charleston police officer who was on duty when he shot and killed Walter L. Scott, a black man who was not related to Keith Scott, during a traffic stop and foot pursuit.
A surveillance video, recorded at a nearby convenience store shortly before the shooting, was shown to support the statement about the gun. Mr. Murray said that the video strongly suggested that Mr. Scott had been wearing an ankle holster, adding that Mr. Scott had illegally bought the handgun online. In Charlotte, North Carolina’s largest city, the shooting of Keith Scott set off days of protest, some of it violent, and led to immense public pressure on the police to release dashboard and body camera recordings of the episode.
Mr. Murray briefed Mr. Scott’s family on his decision, which he said was supported by more than a dozen career prosecutors, before he addressed reporters in Charlotte. He described the family as “gracious.” Members of Mr. Scott’s family had claimed he had no gun at the time of the shooting, or they were unaware that he owned one. And when the recordings were released, they did not conclusively show whether Mr. Scott had a gun as the police had asserted.
In a statement, the Scott family said it was disappointed with the decision not to file charges. But on Wednesday, Mr. Murray laid out the most detailed case yet that Mr. Scott, 43, was armed when officers confronted him while he was in his parked S.U.V. at his apartment complex in Charlotte’s University City neighborhood.
“While we understand that many in the Charlotte area share our frustration and pain,” the family said in a statement, “We ask that everyone work together to fix the system that allowed this tragedy to happen in the first place.” Mr. Scott’s gun, a Colt .380 semiautomatic, fell to the ground after he was shot, Mr. Murray said. It was later determined that the gun was cocked, with the safety off. Subsequent analysis found Mr. Scott’s DNA on the weapon.
The family also asked for calm and that any protests remain peaceful. “Responding to violence with violence is never an appropriate response,” the family said. Mr. Murray said the authorities traced the gun and discovered that it had been stolen from a home and then illegally sold to Mr. Scott 18 days before the shooting.
The shooting, at an apartment complex in Charlotte’s University City neighborhood, happened after two plainclothes officers determined that Mr. Scott, 43, was a potential threat to public safety because they saw him with a gun and what they believed was a marijuana cigarette. At the news conference, Mr. Murray exhibited a Facebook conversation he described as involving the gun’s seller and a third person, and said that the seller appeared to admit the transaction had occurred. The authorities, Mr. Murray said, also found records at a sporting goods store that suggested Mr. Scott had purchased a magazine and ammunition for a .380 caliber handgun. Mr. Murray said some ammunition was found stuffed in a cigarette box in Mr. Scott’s vehicle.
The Police Department said that officers approached Mr. Scott in his vehicle because he was armed and that he ultimately defied “clear, loud and repeated verbal commands” to drop the handgun. Mr. Murray also played a surveillance video that showed Mr. Scott outside a convenience store just before the shooting, with a bulge in his pants near the ankle. Mr. Murray said it was consistent with the officers’ assertion that Mr. Scott was wearing an ankle holster.
Officer Vinson, the department said in September, soon “perceived Mr. Scott’s actions and movements as an imminent physical threat to himself and the other officers.” The officer opened fire as Mr. Scott, who had exited his vehicle, walked backward, his arms at his sides. In an investigative report released Wednesday, prosecutors noted that “every officer present reported seeing Scott holding a gun” after several of them surrounded his car. They had intended to investigate Mr. Scott after one officer saw him with a marijuana cigarette and a handgun. The videos of the episode show them yelling at Mr. Scott to drop the weapon.
The recordings that the Police Department released did not definitively establish whether or not Mr. Scott was armed, but the police distributed photographs of the ankle holster and handgun they said Mr. Scott had in his possession when he was killed. In a video that Mr. Scott’s wife, Rakeyia Scott, recorded during the confrontation, she can be heard telling the officers, “Don’t shoot him. He has no weapon.” Mr. Murray said that Mr. Scott never raised the gun at officers. But in a letter to the State Bureau of Investigation and the Charlotte police, Mr. Murray said that an officer, like any other person, is “justified in using deadly force if he reasonably believed, and in fact believed, that he or another person was in imminent danger of great bodily injury or death.”
Lawyers for Mr. Scott’s family have said it is possible that Mr. Scott did not understand the instructions because he was recovering from a traumatic brain injury that he suffered in a motorcycle accident last year. Ms. Scott told the officers during the episode that Mr. Scott had a “T.B.I.,” and that he “just took his medicine.” “Someone with a gun in his hand who does not comply with police commands to drop the gun can be reasonably considered to be an imminent deadly threat to officers,” Mr. Murray wrote, “and reaction-time studies show that a person can raise his gun and harm or kill officers before an officer could react to the threat.”
Mr. Scott’s death led to days of protests in Charlotte, some of which turned violent. The local authorities imposed a curfew, and the National Guard was deployed to the city. Mr. Scott’s family released a statement on Wednesday that thanked Mr. Murray and other officials for meeting with them, and explaining how they decided not to charge Officer Vinson, who was placed on administrative leave after the shooting. The family also said they were “profoundly disappointed” that Officer Vinson was not criminally charged.
“All our family wanted was justice and for these members of law enforcement to understand that what they did was wrong,” the family statement said.
Geoffrey Alpert, a criminology professor at the University of South Carolina, said on Wednesday that prosecutors most likely felt the available evidence would not earn a criminal conviction. “It’s a very high standard to indict a police officer for a criminal action in the line of duty,” he said. “But that has nothing to do with the righteousness or appropriateness of the shooting.”
A successful prosecution would be even more difficult, Dr. Alpert said, because the evidence indicated that Mr. Scott was armed, and that he did not comply with orders from the police to drop his weapon. But Dr. Alpert said he expected there would be a lawsuit, in which the legal standard is lower — a preponderance of evidence in civil actions versus evidence beyond a reasonable doubt in criminal cases.
While the issue of criminality has been resolved, Dr. Alpert said questions remained.
“Should they have called him out of the car? Should they have taken cover? What did they know about him at the time?” he said. “The question becomes, at what point does the officer feel threatened?”
Susanna Birdsong, the policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina, said the decision not to bring charges pointed to the need for policies to ensure that officers “employ de-escalation tactics, avoid implicit bias, and take into account how mental disabilities can affect a person’s behavior.”
Lawyers for Mr. Scott’s family held a separate news conference in Charlotte on Wednesday. They called for peace in the streets, and said they hoped to eventually obtain justice for Mr. Scott.
“We’re still in the process of investigating this case,” said Eduardo Curry, one of the lawyers.
Just after the shooting, several people in the apartment complex gave accounts that differed from the police officers’ version. In some cases, they shared their versions of events with the media.
Some of the witnesses said Mr. Scott was shot by a white officer. Some of them said that Mr. Scott was reading a book at the time he was confronted.
Mr. Murray said that subsequent interviews showed that a number of these witnesses had not, in fact, seen the shooting. He also said that there was no evidence of a book.
Mr. Murray also noted that Mr. Scott’s wife, Rakeyia, had said that she was “certain” her husband did not have any guns after January 2016.
“However, text messages between Mr. and Mrs. Scott the month before the shooting included an argument about a gun in Mr. Scott’s possession,” Mr. Murray said.