Nearly a week of recurring protests over the police killing of a black man in Charlotte, North Carolina, showed no signs of abating on Sunday after police released videos of the shooting that did not resolve the question of whether the victim had a gun.
Hundreds marched through the centre of Charlotte on a fifth night of demonstrations that stretched into Sunday morning, including white and black families protesting police violence.
One sign read “Stop police brutality” and another showed a picture of a bloody hand-print with the phrase #AMINEXT, a social media tag about the fear of becoming a victim of police.
Curfew imposed
For the first time in three nights, police enforced a curfew, saying they would arrest violators. A crowd gathered outside police headquarters dispersed without any violence shortly after midnight. The streets were quiet on Sunday morning.
Charlotte police released two videos on Saturday showing the fatal shooting on Tuesday of Keith Scott (43).
The death has made Charlotte the latest flashpoint in two years of tense protests over U.S. police killings of black men, most of them unarmed.
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Kerr Putney acknowledged that the videos themselves were “insufficient” to prove that Scott held a gun but said other evidence completed the picture.
“There is no definitive visual evidence that he had a gun in his hand,” Mr. Putney said. “But what we do see is compelling evidence that, when you put all the pieces together, supports that.”
Police said officers trying to serve an arrest warrant for a different person caught site of Scott with marijuana and a gun, sitting in a car in a parking lot.
Both Scott’s family and protesters have disputed the police statements that Scott was carrying a gun.
Photos of weapon
Police released photos of a marijuana cigarette, an ankle holster they said Scott was wearing, and a handgun, which they said was loaded and had Scott’s fingerprints and DNA.
But Scott’s family, which released its own video of the encounter on Friday, said the police footage showed he was not acting aggressively and that the police shooting made no sense, with no attempt to de-escalate the situation.
The family video, shot by Scott’s wife, was also inconclusive on the question of a gun.
In one of the police videos, a dashboard-mounted camera from a squad car showed Scott exiting his vehicle and then backing away from it. Police shout to him to drop a gun, but it is not clear that Scott is holding anything. Four shots then ring out and Scott drops to the ground. A second video, taken with an officer’s body camera, fails to capture the shooting.