What Happened

"I saw the police report, I read it. It wasn’t like that, the way they were saying … I saw it on the news—I said, 'No, this is not right—this is not what happened'."
"I felt that my life … with this information, might be … in danger. I thought about erasing the video and just getting out of the community of North Charleston and living someplace else."
"I put myself in the position of the family … I wanted them to have this and do something about it. Because I knew if I didn’t give it to them, nothing would happen."
Feidin Santana, U.S. immigrant from Dominican Republic

Screenshot/MSNBC    Feidin Santana

Because, after all, this was a police officer, and who was he to interfere with what was happening? What was happening was outright murder. And to witness something like that is to feel fear and foreboding deep in one's viscera. The natural impulse is to leave, as quickly as possible. Adrenalin rushes in, and the imperative to preserve yourself compels the action of fleeing as an autonomic response; it's nature's primary imperative; survival.

Screenshot via New York Times    Michael Slager (right) is seen shooting Walter Scott in the back in North Charleston, South Carolina, on April 4, 2015   

Mr. Santana, however, had filmed the episode he saw, before leaving. And that evidence of what really occurred, that a white policeman who had stopped a black driver for a minor traffic infraction; his BMW had one broken taillight; became unaccountably and viciously violent. The black man, black like himself, was intimidated, and likely with good reason, since constable Slager was a brutally intimidating man. A man who deliberately shot a frightened man in the back, eight times.

And when that man fell forward as he was shot, the policeman approached him instructing him to place his hands behind his back so he could be handcuffed, as he lay dying. And then the policeman casually walked back to where his taser had fallen, picked it up and dropped it again, beside the dying man. As evidence that the man he had just murdered, Walter Scott, had resisted him, had threatened him, had taken possession of his taser, so shooting him was entirely justified.