Americans of a certain age have most likely heard some version of the following story. Somewhere in the South, two white sheriff’s deputies discover the body of a black man hanging from a tree. There is a rope tied around his neck, his hands are bound and he has also been stabbed in the back. The younger deputy looks at the body and says, “Damn! we have one hell of a mystery here.” The older sheriff replies, “Yup — looks like a n***er version of Harry Houdini. How the hell did he manage to tie his own hands together, stab himself in the back and then jump off of that there tree to commit suicide?”
It would seem that the video-recorded killing of a black man, Walter Scott, by a white police officer named Michael Slager is a 21st-century version of this tale.
In April 2015, Scott’s vehicle was pulled over by Slager, a police officer in Charleston, South Carolina. Scott had $ 18,000 in outstanding child-support payments. After being confronted by Slager over a broken taillight, Scott ran away. He was unarmed. Slager gave chase and there was a brief struggle. Slager then pulled out his pistol and proceeded to shoot Walter Scott in the back multiple times from a distance of about 20 feet. Slager then put a weapon near Scott’s body in order to make it seem as though he was somehow in fear of his life.
Slager’s partner, Clarence Habersham Jr. colluded with him to alter the crime scene and falsify the subsequent report. Unbeknown to Slager, he was being recorded by a bystander as the latter hid behind some nearby trees and bushes, shocked at the cold-blooded police killing of an unarmed man and subsequent cover-up.
On Monday, a jury in Charleston announced that after 22 hours of deliberation it was unable to reach a decision in the trial of Slager for the first-degree murder of Walter Scott. It appears that of the 12-person jury, only one member refused to render a guilty verdict. In a note, this juror told the judge that he could not “with good conscience consider a guilty verdict.”
Video evidence and eyewitness testimony of the cruel and unnecessary killing of an unarmed black man was not sufficient to achieve a guilty verdict. Such an outcome should not be a surprise. In the United States, police have a de facto license to kill without consequence or responsibility. They are rarely if ever held accountable for such actions; this is especially true if the victims are black, Hispanic or Latino or First Nations people.
over, in an effort to conceal the true scale of the killings and other injurious behavior committed by America’s police against a public they are supposed to “protect and serve,” no nationwide database for keeping such information is maintained or required.
We are left then with another “teachable moment” in what feels like an endless parade of them. Another entry in the necropolis of black and brown — those struck down by police thuggery and violence — in the age of Barack Obama and now the age of Donald Trump.
In many ways the tragic case of Walter Scott is a macabre political and social morality play about America, the law, justice, the color line and power.
There is the victim, Walter Scott. Unfortunately, he is not alive to share his thoughts, fears, and worries — or what went through his mind as he heard the gunshots behind him and then lay on the ground as his life bled out from the holes in his body. He was 50 years old, a former member of the U.S. Coast Guard and a father.
Did his mind revert to “the talk” that most if not all African-Americans have received from their parents, other trusted kin or mentors about how to survive encounters with police? Did he think about the perils and threats black folks face when confronted by state power in a country where they have historically been treated as less than full human beings? When he decided to flee from Michael Slager, did Walter Scott have a premonition that the cop wanted to do great harm to him? Was there something in Slager’s eyes that signaled malice?
There is the police shooter Michael Slager. He lives in a world described by the narrator of Paul Thomas Anderson’s film of Thomas Pynchon’s novel “Inherent Vice”: “All this strange alternative cop history and cop politics, cop dynasties, cop heroes and evildoers, saintly cops and psycho cops, cops too stupid to live and cops too smart for their own good, insulated by secret loyalties and codes of silence from the world they’d all been given to control.”
Slager recited the magical phrase that he was “in total fear” during his confrontation with Scott — words that every cop knows will exonerate him when he kills a person of color. They seem absurd next to any fair measure or observation of the facts. Slager escalated his encounter with Walter Scott, shot a fleeing man in the back and then planted evidence near his dead body to conceal the crime.
Slager is a product of an American culture where Negrophobia is rampant, subconscious white racism the norm, and excess melanin transforms human bodies into fiends and monsters, as seen through the white gaze. For Michael Slager and so many others, blackness and black humanity are provocations and excuses to kill.
As a police officer, Slager knew that he would be protected, from the district attorney through the most senior levels of his department down to his fellow street cops. He gambled that it was much more likely than not that he would be able to kill Walter Scott and not be punished for doing so. It would appear that his instincts were largely correct.

Source: Salon: in-depth news, politics, business, technology & culture > Politics
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