The man who took the video of the cop accused of murdering Walter Scott in South Carolina was about to erase the video and leave the community of Charleston. Feidin Santana might be from the Dominican Republic, but he's way too brown and street savvy to feel comfortable about his prospect's given the way Walter Scott was treated on his video.
Eventually he heard too many bad reports of what actually happened and read a copy of the officers report himself. The video he wanted so badly to erase told another story. At the risk of his own life, Santana took the crime video to the people who did the crime.
Obviously, not every cop did this crime, but the cop who did it was seeking to save himself from prison, or worse. Listening to the police's version left Santana with the concern that the nation that embodies justice was no better than his crime stricken homeland. If the police in America are corrupt, where do you go with the kind of information he had in hand?
The police are NOT corrupt, but every company has bad workers. After having recorded the actions of one of those bad workers, Santana didn't know who would be interested in justice or committed to saving their own, and their reputation at the same time.
If you think about it, the model for handling police shootings is terribly flawed. Although every cop deserves to be supported, even when they accidentally spill the milk- minorities, and those who love us, are not crying over the accidental spills from policing. Our scream is for the same people who spilled the milk to tell us EXACTLY what happened- but the story is becoming eerily familiar in every case.
I FEARED FOR MY LIFE so I emptied my gun.
Feidin Santana did not record a shooting from a cop who appeared to be in fear for his own life, yet the original narrative told the story exactly that way. South Carolina has an independent review board called SLED (South Carolina Law Enforcement Division) that might have eventually turned this narrative in the same direction that the video did first- but who knows. Nothing in the initial reports suggests that anything close to murder had occurred. South Carolina officials have promised to release their video from the dashboard camera today, which, to avoid further unrest, really needs to be a bad view of the incident.
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| Feidin Santana recorded the death of Walter Scott. |
If the dash-cam is as graphic as the video from Santana, we all will ask, "why did they wait to view it?". What nobody wants to learn from this incident is that the police saw their own video and still reported officer Slager's account of things. That thought is why Santana still fears for his life, and why what Santana is doing now, he's doing from conscious alone.
Why South Carolina police would have a video version that they did not view before releasing a statement is unconscionable. As someone who spilled a lot of milk in my youth, I can relate to their response. My typical reaction was always to fix the mess before mom ever found out. Whenever my spills got divulged, I was reticent to spill the beans on myself and often ended up sharing some half true accounting of things.
The police are creating the spill, cleaning the spill and explaining the spill when life and death- not tears- is at stake. From this day forward, even a chest camera might not be suitable to explain all the red milk of unarmed black men that continues to spill at the hand of white police officers. If America is simply crying over the inevitable spilled milk of police work, we should at least let an arbitrary reviewer (FBI perhaps) tell us if our tears are justified or not. With this latest video example of America's policing problem, its clear that the cops have way too much to lose.
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