Whoever shot this video is a motherfucking hero, and a much, much braver man than I.

Video seems fake. I'm not saying it IS FAKE, just that it has a staged feel to it. I hope I am right.

Horrifying.

So fucking casual. DWB in SC has long been a capital crime. Disgusting.

He was shot in the back eight times. How many times can we watch this happen before we see the smallest reform? Those who repeat history are doomed to fail.

@2:

Well, yeah. The cops in this video were staging something alright...

I only hope this cowardly son-of-a-bitch gets what's coming to him; spending the rest of his worthless life behind bars.

To the fake video expert @2: what are your eagle eyes seeing that the goddamn New York Times' vetting efforts failed to pick up on? Do enlighten.

Jesus motherfucking Christ. I've known that police violence against blacks has been systematic since always, but the last two years has made a serious difference re: actually SEEING the violence thanks to the people who are brave enough to whip out their phones when shit goes down.

I hope to Christ we can actually CHANGE SOMETHING with all this proof.

Murder. Cold blooded murder.

@10 Imagine all the people who will be happily supporting the cop damning video or no.

Agreed @10. The more of this kind of shit that is documented, the more depressed I get. Paradoxically, it is probably a sign of change for the better. You'd have to be a pretty poor excuse for a human if you can watch that and not see a murder.

@16: Being a white guy who was beaten and pepper-sprayed in Seattle during Mardi Gras while walking away from cops - who literally did not say a word before smashing the guy next to me with that same billy club as we sat there talking doing nothing on a park bench, directly leading me to getting up and trying to walk away swiftly since it seemed they didn't want us there - it's pretty easy for me to buy into that. The narrative may be "... a few bad apples here and there...", but those bad apples are changing peoples lives forever.

Dropping the stun gun by the body, that's the thing that's finally going to get a policeman convicted. Without that, the cop just says "in the instant before the video starts, I was locked in a life or death struggle with a violent felon", just like Mehlman's favorite cop said, "and the shots fired were just the tail end of that fight, which I was losing! I couldn't risk him coming back to finish me off." And, the fact is, he probably would have skated on the murder charge. Juries are just that friendly to police. But, dropping the stun gun, that's just a little too cool and collected to go with the "I was terrified!" narrative that worked so well on the Missouri grand jury, and on Mehlman.

It occurs to me, that if you ever should happen to video an incidence of police misconduct, you should not produce the video right away. Keep it to yourself for a day or two (although you might want to make a few copies and mail them to friends.) Give the bad apple in question, and his partner, a chance to cop-splain away their actions. Because the other thing that's going to hang this cop, and his partner, is that they lied about what happened. This is a situation where there will actually be some consequences for the partner who aided in the cover up. They won't give him immunity for his testimony -- they don't need it. Yes, convicting bad cops of murder is important, but convicting a few bad-cop enablers of obstruction of justice could really help change the culture.

The "real" Ferguson begins.

Walter Scott "family man"
Four children by three women, massively delinquent on child support with a 10-arrest record including assault and weapons charges. In his latest escapade, fleeing police on warrants and refusing to obey a lawful order. Sorry, but the blacklivesmatter shit rings hollow until young black men start to act like there lives matter. Liberal Seattle are the first to profess outrage in these circumstances, but would fully shit a brick if Walter "Family Man" Scott moved into their Wallongord, Madison Park, Queen Anne, enclaves.

@ 21 - Is that sufficient motive to shoot someone eight times in the back, though? That's the only question that matters.

Murder is murder is murder.

@21: You seem to be saying that black lives matter only if they are blameless, or that no lives matter unless they are blameless. These are not views held by the rest of civilized society, or (in theory at least) the law.

I know you don't want to, but let's go there:

1) this isn't some poor innocent soul.
2) When lawfully stooped -- he fled. So now the cops have a legitimate reason to be defensive (armed suspect)?
3) The film starts when the suspect stops fleeing. Why stop? "How bout, I'll Taze you?"
4) Immediately before the shooting, the film is clip edited (curious)
5) When the film re-starts, there is clearly a gesture of the suspect and cop swiping at something. That black object can be seen thrown behind the cop. The Tazer the suspect struggled to grab.As a Club we’re going to be pretty exacting in our schedule. Meeting at 7:00 am, means “ready-to-leave” at 7:00 am. We will not be shy about letting people know they are holding-up the program.
6) The officer shoots until a suspect stops, as trained.

I have no problem with this. It's unfortunate but a predictable outcome of police who deal with shitheads all day, who encounter a potentially lethal obstinate shithead.

@24 what happens after 7 am, and we're not ready?

@24, what you are describing isn't justice. It doesn't make one bit of difference if the murdered man is a saint or not. Our constitution is based on the concept of innocent until proven guilty. Why do you not understand that? Why are you so blind that you'd rather have people die to satisfy your concept of convenience? If you don't like America, why don't you move to Russia or China?

BTW, the cop has been charged with murder.

@21: "massively delinquent on child support with a 10-arrest record including assault and weapons charges"
Or, as the NYT put it in a much less slanted manner:
"Mr. Scott had been arrested about 10 times, mostly for failing to pay child support or show up for court hearings, according to The Post and Courier newspaper of Charleston. He was arrested in 1987 on an assault and battery charge and convicted in 1991 of possession of a bludgeon, the newspaper reported."
Your telling of his criminal record (pretty small change, really) makes it sound like he's some gangbanger who was caught with guns. What was the actual extent of it? He was behind on his child support payments, allegedly got into a fight (was arrested, not convicted, on the A&B), and got in trouble for having a nightstick. Oh, and he got caught driving on a suspended license once, and also had an open-container violation. Maybe a jerk, certainly not the model citizen, but if you think that not being a model citizen means the police get to shoot you if you act at all sketchy, you better be the first one lining up to take a bullet.

Police officers are trained on what's called a "use of force continuum", and they're trained to use PROPORTIONAL force. Events leading up to the shooting serve only to add context, not determine whether or not the officer was justified. A suspect could, hypothetically, be firing on police officers, but as soon as the gun was knocked away from him, the officers would not be justified in shooting him. Police use of force is governed by proportionality to the situation at the moment, not how it was ten seconds ago.

In which literally watching a video of a cop shooting a fleeing man in the back and dropping a service weapon at the dead man's feet, in complete contraction to everything written in the cop's report is still not enough to keep the local mouth-breather brigade from dragging out the "...but he was no angel" line.

As the kids say: SMH.

"...in complete contradiction", thanks ever so much auto-correct.

@25, re @24: What happens? It's a little incoherent, but if I understand correctly, Zok's point is that when a club officer (the treasurer? the vice president? Zok doesn't specify) has to deal with shitheads all day who are sometimes late, like even later than 7:10 a.m., well it's only reasonable that he gets to shoot some of them in the back. Zok has "no problem with it".

@29 No. You are wrong about when deadly force by the police is authorized by law.

I'm depressed by how relieved I was to see that this cop was actually charged with murder.

The other cop in the video should also be arrested, as an accessory to murder, if it can be proven that he witnessed the planting of the stun gun.

@34 probable cause is different from being a suspect. And even then, some warning must be given

Sorry. @36

@35: Amen. "Accessory after the fact" laws vary considerably from state to state, but there are plenty of other felonies he's surely guilty of, including false statements. I don't think we're ever going to make any progress against the blue line without taking down some collaborators. If he gets off minimal time in exchange for cooperation, I have no problem with that, but letting him off the hook entirely (or, worse yet, letting him stay on the job).

@40 and my point is that that is very illegal, unless that cop has probable cause (not reasonable suspicion) to believe that a serious crime has been committed

The explosion of cameras everywhere has produced some interesting results.

Sasquatches found: 0
Police found shooting people to death for no reason: dozens
Police found beating people for no reason: thousands.
Lawyers still using the argument "are you sure about what you saw?": 0

@40: No, you've been watching too many action movies, and so has this cop.

@28: Another way to look at it is that he's been the victim of police harassment on numerous occasions and can't afford to have a lawyer on retainer. Honestly, "possession of a bludgeon?" What, you mean he was carrying a baseball bat back from the park? Or a golf club? What was the probable cause, "looking sketchy?" In which case, we basically know what that means.

And honestly (this has nothing to do with your comment, by the way @28), how fucking hard is it to have a police force that's even vaguely representative of the racial makeup of the population they're "protecting"? Let me guess, they're having trouble hiring black cops because hardly any of them volunteer for the job to begin with, right? Or maybe some people at the top are too afraid that they might take over and they don't want to give them too much authority?

Police harassment, ah yes. Which would in no way explain the assault and serial delinquency in providing for his kids under court order, or fleeing a lawful stop. But feel content in your excuse making....

The gun is the problem. Guns kill people . . . no doubt about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp5JCrSX…

If there wasn't a camera, it would be business as usual for this policeman. Just imagine all the officer involved shootings where there weren't cameras present.

@1 & @48 - Bobby Seale and Huey Newton would be very pleased - this is the real Black Self-protection League. Very brave and so, so long overdue. This time the deniers can no longer pretend that somehow it's the victim's fault. Finally, a murder charge.

i'll say it again: the cops are using military protocols like they're dealing with ISIS militants. they're jumpy as fuck, the adrenaline gets going, and they go where any testosterone-addled macho asshole gangbanger goes: their firearm.

@50 - that's because so many of them are returned vets or wannabe crusader warriors. There is a serious recruiting/selection bias problem in this country.

If there isn't already some protocol for officers to arrest each other on the spot for shooting people in the back, there should be. In the moments after gunning that guy down, this officer was an armed and dangerous murderer and should have been treated like any other.

@52: According to Ken Mehlman, his partner should have immediately shot him in the back.

And according to Zok, his partner should have immediately gotten down and licked his boots clean.

To all the cop-gobbling police statists here: There is NO legally justifiable - or tactical - reason whatsoever to shoot a FLEEING suspect IN THE MOTHERFUCKING back, 8 fucking times.
He may have been a less than upstanding citizen, indeed he may have been a scumbag, but cops do not have any reason to mete out capital justice on the spot, that is for juries.
What the fuck is the matter with you?

"but cops do not have any RIGHT to mete out..."

I'm willing to entertain the idea of violent murderous cops for just a little while longer if could only mean one of them would fucking shoot Zok already.

@21:

So, are we to take it from your comment that you believe all men who fall behind on their child support payments should be subject to summary execution at the hands of Law Enforcement? Because, that's pretty much what you seem to be advocating for here.

Hey guys - he was fleeing from the police because he thought he owed money. This police brutality show is just a sideshow man. Look what kind of world we live in.

@58:

Yeah. *Sigh!* We're starting to make living in Mega City Two seem like paradise in comparison.

Here is helpful information, citing the relevant court cases, that create boundaries around when police can and can't legally shoot, and when it is lawful to shoot a fleeing suspect in the back. A little dispassionate examination is helpful to balance our horror and outrage.
http://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world…

How bad a shot does a cop have to be, to need eight shots to bring someone down? I thought they had to pass tests to show that they can shoot properly (and how hard can it be, when toddlers seem to kill parents and siblings effortlessly with one bullet?) Eight shots? That's 'roid rage.

@61. A standard requirement is to get 5 of 6 shots into a 6" circle at 21 feet shooting in 6 seconds. That is about the maximum effective range of a pistol although under the right circumstances, pistol rounds can and do wound and kill at much greater range, but it is increasingly improbable.

Now add to the fact that you have a moving target, your fight of flight adrenaline kicks in, even a situation like this where the officer was not at threat. That raises the heart rate from 70 to about 130 bpm, the peripheral vision goes grey then black and the vision tunnels down to where you might only see the target through a narrow cone. Some people experience the vision blacking out nearly entirely. The other thing that high heart rate and adrenaline does is screw with fine motor control of the muscles. It wasn't the case in this situation, but you could add someone running at you with a club, knife, or a gun, them shooting at you, etc., and you can see why in the field, hits on a target become much less frequent.

Most studies of officer involved shootings have shown that 5 out of 6 on the range, at 25 feet, on a 6" target, that isn't shooting back, drops 1 in 5 in the field, anywhere on the human body, with the officer aiming at the center of the biggest target, the center of the torso.

The officer fired 8 shots. I would be surprised if more than 2 hit the victim, with only one being fatal. That was enough. A man is dead and the cop is charged with murder, and I am not trying to make light of that. But we need to understand the limits of handgun technology and human limitations, even with the best of training, to make informed evaluations and judgments about these incidents. Shoot to wound just isn't practical, in spite of what we see on TV.

It is also pretty common to put many handgun rounds into an attacker and have them either live, or live long enough, to kill the person firing in self-defense (which was not the case here), before the attacker succumbs. That is why a cop, or other trained shooter, is taught to fire for the center of mass until the person they are shooting at is down and not trying to get up.

For an example of what I am referring to, you can go to this video, where an officer on a routine traffic stop, in a totally different incident, has the person stopped pull a gun and fire first. The officer scores the first hit at about the 27 second mark in the 1:30 video. The suspect fires on, moving to the right, out of frame and shoots the cop. The suspect gets in the car (with his two kids in the back seat) and drives nearly a mile before dying from the officer's bullet and coasting to a stop on the side of the road. The officer lived, the kids were physically uninjured, but psychologically scarred for life. Between the two of them they fire about 12 rounds and score one hit each.

http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=vide…

Those are totally different facts that what occurred in South Carolina. The officer had no justification for drawing his gun, let alone firing any rounds, much less 8. The fact that his marksmanship in the circumstances was about normal, is very much not relevant to this tragic story.

@12 "Unlike Michael Brown this guy actually was shot in the back while he was running away"
@16 "The only difference a video would have made in that case is that Johnson would have been discredited a lot sooner"

The autopsy shows:
Gunshot wound to the upper right arm – trajectory backwards
Gunshot wound to the right arm [elbow area] – trajectory indeterminate
Gunshot wound to the right forearm – trajectory forwards
(http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1…)
Plus several witnesses said that gunshots were fired as the victim was fleeing, and seemed to hit him and cause him to spin around.

...So maybe Michael Brown was shot in the back (of his arm) while running away?? And perhaps a vid could have been helpful??

@62: Be surprised.
"Mr. Stewart said the coroner had told him that Mr. Scott was struck five times — three times in the back, once in the upper buttocks and once in the ear — with at least one bullet entering his heart. It is not clear whether Mr. Scott died immediately. (The coroner’s office declined to make the report available to The Times.)"
from the NYT article on the story

@64. Yeah, the ex- cop doesn't understand the lawful use of deadly force.and is.a superior marksman in the field. The latter is not be admired unless the officer understands and complies with the former. It is likely b that only one of the hits was fatal, but one is all it takes. That is why you don't draw one unless someone's life is at risk.

@54, Tennessee vs. Garner says that a cop can shoot someone fleeing ***IF*** that person is a significant threat. Obviously, it's not even remotely applicable in this case, but it can be. A illustrative example is Rashad Charjuan Owens. He mowed over a couple dozen pedestrians in his car in a desperate attempt to flee from the police, killing two and injuring 23. He has so many charges hanging over his head that it was a given he'd be put away for life if he was caught, and it created a sort of crazed desperation to escape or die trying.