The fatal shooting of an unarmed black man fleeing from a police officer has stirred outrage around the nation, but people in this South Carolina city aren’t surprised, calling it inevitable in a police department they believe focuses on petty crimes and fails to keep its officers in check.
“We’ve had through the years numerous similar complaints, and they all seem to be taken lightly and dismissed without any obvious investigation,” the Rev. Joseph Darby, vice president of the Charleston branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said Thursday.
The mostly black neighborhood in North Charleston where Officer Michael Thomas Slager fired eight shots at the fleeing Walter Lamer Scott on Saturday is far from unique in this regard, said Melvin Tucker, a former FBI agent and police chief in four southern cities who often testifies in police misconduct cases.
Nationwide, training that pushes pre-emptive action, military experience that creates a warzone mindset, and legal system favoring police in misconduct cases all lead to scenarios where officers to see the people they serve as enemies, he said.
“It’s not just training. It’s not just unreasonable fear. It’s not just the warrior mentality. It’s not just court decisions that almost encourage the use of it. It is not just race,” Tucker said. “It is all of that.”
Scott had been jailed repeatedly for failing to pay child support, but neither man had a record of violence. Slager’s file includes a single excessive use-of-force complaint, from 2013: A man said Slager used his stun gun against him without reason. But Slager was exonerated and the case closed, even though witnesses said investigators never followed up with them.
The officer, whose wife is eight months pregnant, is being held without bond pending an Aug. 21 hearing on a charge of murder that could put him in prison for 30 years to life if convicted.
As a steady crowd left flowers, stuffed animals, notes and protest signs Thursday in the empty lot where Scott was gunned down, many said police in South Carolina’s third-largest city routinely dismiss complaints of petty brutality and harassment, even when eyewitnesses can attest to police misbehavior. The result, they say, is that officers are regarded with a mixture of distrust and fear.
“It’s almost impossible to get an agency to do an impartial internal affairs investigation. First of all the investigators doing it are co-workers of the person being investigated. Number two, there’s always the tendency on the part of the departments to believe the officers,” Tucker said.
Darby and other civil rights leaders want North Charleston to create an independent citizens review board to review complaints against police, since “law enforcement is going to almost always give itself the benefit of the doubt.”
Such boards are few and far between in South Carolina.
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