Former North Charleston police officer Michael Slager has already been fired and charged for the murder of Walter Scott. Still, one has to wonder: “Would this guy have gotten away with this without the video?”
Nonwhite America has watched police lie compulsively about incidents like this for as long as there have been police. You can open the law books and find cases like the Scott murder in almost any state of the union, in almost every year, going back decades and decades.
The only difference is that in the past, before everyone above the age of two had a cell phone, the insultingly lame explanations of the police (“The gun just went off”; “The suspect suddenly took a swing at me”) were almost always swallowed whole, by juries and the media alike.
—Matt Taibbi
Are Cell Phones Changing the Narrative on Police Shootings?
While I absolutely can’t stand Chuck Todd’s aggressiveness when it comes to center-right framing of things such as electability of politicians, I have to give credit where credit is due. Yesterday’s Meet the Press featured a professionally-done video production of what coverage of the Michael Slayer incident would have looked like were there no amateur video footage and the network had only information from official sources with which to report the story. This is seriously “alternative timeline” and a surreal thing to view:
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/walter-scott-shooting/how-walter-scott-shooting-would-have-been-reported-if-video-n340146
That is an interesting video, thanks!
I can’t see any Baltimore politician without imaging them in “The Wire.”
Thanks. FAIR ran an article last week going over how the incident actually was reported before the video came out, and this video is exactly how it was reported. The police apologist on the panel was pathetic. The police department should be applauded for doing its job once the video came out? Give me a break! As Maria Hinojosa noted: the police department wasn’t interested in the video when it was offered to them. But David Brooks made sense for once. Perhaps there is a God!