BOB GARFIELD: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media.
Brooke Gladstone is out this week. I’m Bob Garfield.
In Charlotte, North Carolina this week, protest, disorder and violence, in the wake of the latest fatal police shooting of a black man in a parked car.
[CLIPS]:
MALE CORRESPONDENT: The victim was 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott.
MALE CORRESPONDENT: Police say that it all started when officers went to arrest another man and encountered Scott, instead.
MALE CORRESPONDENT: Police say this man posed an immediate risk to the officer who shot and killed him, but the man's family says he didn’t even have a gun. It was a book.
[END CLIP]
BOB GARFIELD: At various points, the anger boiled over into mob destruction, and one protester died at the hand of an unknown assailant, all because yet one more African-American, Keith Scott, was shot dead without provocation, or maybe because he was threatening police officers with a gun and refused to drop it. The cops say the latter, Scott's family, the former.
[CLIP]:
LYRIC SCOTT: The police just shot my daddy four times for being black. They’re gonna tell us my daddy had a f___ [BEEP] gun so that’s why they shoot him. My daddy ain’t doin’ nothing. They just pulled up undercover.
[END CLIP]
BOB GARFIELD: Scott’s daughter at the scene shortly after the shooting. The family said Scott was brandishing not a weapon but a book. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Kerr Putney.
[CLIP]:
POLICE CHIEF KERR PUTNEY: We did not find a book that has been made reference to, and we did find a weapon and the weapon was there. And the witnesses corroborated it too, beyond just the officers.
[END CLIP]
BOB GARFIELD: Nonetheless, he says, video of the incident from police body cams is inconclusive. He showed that video to Scott's family, presumably to put an end to the quietly-reading- in-his-car-while-executed narrative. But Chief Putney won't make the video public out of respect for Keith Scott. Transparency, he said, doesn't mean the public right to know everything.
POLICE CHIEF PUTNEY: If you think we should display a victim’s worst day for public consumption, that is not the transparency I’m speaking of, sir.
BOB GARFIELD: Or maybe he thinks the video’s inconclusiveness will let black citizens fill in the blanks with their own hard-earned reality. Radio Host Richard Fowler on Fox News.
[CLIP]:
RICHARD FOWLER: Once again, we have seen 400 years of compounded bigotry and racism play itself out in policies in police departments across this country. You have to be blind not to see it!
[END CLIP]
BOB GARFIELD: This is the larger truth explanation for civil disorder, that the particulars of Scott’s killing are less relevant than the daily African-American experience of being under suspicion and the recurring nightmare of police violence, in Ferguson, in Baltimore, Staten Island, Cleveland, Milwaukee, North Charleston, Tulsa - hence, a last-straw spasm of frustration and rage.
On Friday, a cell phone video of the Charlotte shooting incident emerged, recorded by Keith Scott's wife, even as she pleaded with her husband and the police to be careful.
[CLIP]:
RAKEYIA SCOTT: Don’t shoot him. Don't shoot him. He has no weapon.
POLICE OFFICER: Drop the gun!
RAKEYIA SCOTT: He doesn’t have a gun. He has a TBI.
[BOTH SPEAK/OVERLAP]
POLICE OFFICER: Drop the gun!
RAKEYIA SCOTT: He’s not gonna do anything to, you guys. He just took his medicine.
POLICE OFFICER: Drop the gun!
[END CLIP]
BOB GARFIELD: Harrowing, but taken at too great a distance to be especially clarifying. Meantime, there were some actual, if inconvenient facts to process. For one, the officer who fired was black. For another, North Carolina is an open carry state. Having a gun or even holding one is not, in itself, illegal, much less grounds for summary execution. President of the Charlotte branch of the NAACP Corine Mack.
[CLIP]:
CORINE MACK: In my mind and in most of the community’s mind, it really doesn’t matter if he had a gun. At the end of the day, we have the right, under the Second Amendment, to carry here in North Carolina. And so, I don’t want anyone to walk away from this conversation today thinking that a video showing he had a gun in any way says that he was guilty of anything.
[END CLIP]
BOB GARFIELD: In the murk of events themselves, such context stood out. Other voices merely played their partisan roles and filled the factual vacuum with polemic. And cable news, which is in the conflict business, was only too pleased to provide the forum. This was former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik on Fox, characterizing the protesters as cheap opportunism by the likes of Black Lives Matter.
BERNARD KERIK: They’re not from there. They come from outside. The instigators, they come from outside. We've seen this over and over –
[BOTH SPEAK/OVERLAP]
CHARLES PAYNE: They see an opportunity.
BERNARD KERIK: Right, an excuse to do this.
BOB GARFIELD: And if they were locals, then, really, Obama's big government is to blame because the few remaining programs designed to relieve poverty read not only “dependency” but “children of color,” destined for depravity. GOP consultant Ed Rollins.
[CLIP]:
ED ROLLINS: And a lot of the federal policies discourage families and basically put mothers into situations that they had multiple children and couldn't basically control the elements and, obviously, now see them rising up with no hope and no employment, no potential, and their dreams have been crashed, and they – and they think the only way is to get a gun, go rob something, go sell dope or go smash and burn something.
[END CLIP]
BOB GARFIELD: Conservative outlets, as a group, were deaf to the only two salient questions, whether Keith Scott would be dead today if he weren’t black and why so many African-Americans believe the answer to that question is no.
One Fox reporter on the street in Charlotte was schooled by a protester whose very presence at such a chaotic scene reporter Steve Harrigan was at a loss to understand.
[CLIP]:
STEVE HARRIGAN: If a man was shot about 50 yards over there – we don’t know by who - why are you here?
FEMALE PROTESTOR: Because I serve a purpose, sir, I serve a purpose. My father serves a purpose. My brother serves a purpose.
STEVE HARRIGAN: Are you –
FEMALE PROTESTOR: I’m here because, guess what, I could be at work, at school –
STEVE HARRIGAN: Are you –
FEMALE PROTESTOR: - if I cross I could still be shot there by the police. But I could get shot anywhere. Do you see this?
STEVE HARRIGAN: I do.
FEMALE PROTESTOR: Do you see me?
STEVE HARRIGAN: Yes.
FEMALE PROTESTOR: Do you see – we are not the same. We are human but I am black and you are white!
[END CLIP]
BOB GARFIELD: If we learned anything over the last few days, it was certainly that. The elusive details of Charlotte are the ultimate gray area, and yet, they’re also simply a matter of black and white.
[MUSIC/MUSIC UP & UNDER]
Coming up, recruiting terrorists from beyond the grave. This is On the Media.
