A white police officer in South Carolina has been dismissed after a video showed him firing repeated shots at a fleeing, unarmed black man and killing him after a traffic stop.
"We do not condone wrong," North Charleston Mayor Keith Summey said Wednesday at a news conference. "It doesn't matter who it is."
Officer Michael Slager was fired and accused of murder in the killing last Saturday of 50-year-old Walter Scott after the policeman pulled him over for driving with a broken brake light.
The video, taken by a bystander with a cellphone camera, shows Slager firing eight times at Scott.
"I have watched the video and I was sickened by what I saw," North Charleston Police Chief Eddie Driggers said.
The South Carolina incident is the latest in a series of fatal encounters in the United States between unarmed black males and white police, including the shootings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio, and the chokehold death of Eric Garner in New York City. The incidents led to large protests across the nation over aggressive police tactics in minority communities.
Some protesters chanted "No justice, no peace!" at the North Charleston news conference.
Summey and Driggers said they had visited Scott's family to voice their sympathy over the killing, but declined to answer numerous questions about it. They said the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, the state’s criminal investigative body, has taken over the investigation and the Federal Bureau of Investigation has started a separate probe.
After Scott fell to the ground after the final shot, Slager walked over to Scott and handcuffed him, then returned to the spot where he opened fire. The officer picked up something from the ground, walked back to Scott's body, and dropped the object next to him.
Scott's father, Walter Scott, Sr., told NBC's Today show Wednesday that he believes his son may have tried to flee because "he didn't want to go to jail again" for child support payments he owed. "He just ran away."
Slager initially said he opened fire after Scott had taken his electronic stun gun during a scuffle.
The unidentified witness who took the video turned it over to Scott's family. A lawyer for the family turned the video over to The New York Times, which posted it on its website Tuesday.
"What if there was no video?," Chris Stewart, the attorney for Scott's family, told reporters late Tuesday night. "What if there was no witness, or hero as I call him, to come forward? Then this wouldn't have happened, because as you can see the initial reports stated something totally different, the officer said that Mr. Scott attacked him and pulled his taser and tried to use it on him, but somebody was watching."
U.S. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, an African American, said on Twitter that he had seen the video of the shooting. Scott said it was "senseless" and "absolutely unnecessary and avoidable."
