Police shootings roil country (again):

Charlotte, North Carolina (CNN): Videos released Saturday by the Charlotte police department of the fatal encounter between Keith Scott and officers do little to answer some of the most significant questions about the shooting.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Kerr Putney has said as much since the Tuesday shooting that sparked protests and brought nationwide media attention once again to the use of deadly force by law enforcement.

Authorities have said an African-American officer shot Scott, who was black, when he made a threatening move with a gun. Saturday, police released photos of a pistol and ankle holster recovered at the scene.

Scott’s family has said he had no gun, that he was reading a book and was being non-aggressive when police were surrounding him.

Longtime readers of the SOFREP News Roundup will know that I constantly hammer taking each case and scrutinizing it on an individual basis. So it is with both of last week’s shootings—one in Tulsa, and the other in Charlotte. I’ve made no secret of the fact that most of the time, I’m inclined to side with law enforcement, but that doesn’t mean that I’m giving them a free pass. Neither of these look especially good, in my opinion. But there really isn’t enough to go on. The Charlotte police chief keeps talking about “the totality of the evidence” and how it supports the officer. Except we haven’t really seen a lot of that evidence. They say there was a gun recovered at the scene with Scott’s fingerprints on it, but that alone doesn’t mean anything if it wasn’t on him at the time.

I’ve watched all the videos like 10 times. They really don’t show anything definitive. All you can really see is Scott sort of backing away from the cops, hands at his sides. The cops are yelling “drop the gun” over and over again, but I can’t see one. The thing that strikes me is the vast, VAST difference between the story coming from the family and the story that the police put out, which, of course, led to the mayhem in Charlotte this last week. The family is claiming he was sitting there reading a book. The cops said he was rolling a blunt and had a handgun. The gun has been produced as of this writing, but the book has not. And, as a convicted felon, Scott was presumably barred from legally owning a firearm. That doesn’t mean he deserved to get shot, but it does help to paint a picture of what was going on.