Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 72

'Don't Shoot Him. Don't Shoot Him'

Keith Lamont Scott’s wife can be heard pleading to officers not to shoot him and police are heard urging the 43-year-old black man to “drop the gun” in new cell-phone footage of the moments leading up to the fatal shooting on Tuesday.

The footage was captured by Rakeyia Scott, Scott’s wife, and shows the events before and immediately after his shooting by an officer from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department. The footage does not show the actual shooting and it neither contradicts nor bolsters the version of events offered by the police department. It was provided to NBC News, The New York Times, and other organizations by Scott’s attorneys.

At one point, Rakeyia Scott can be heard saying: “Don’t shoot him. Don’t shoot him. He has no weapon. He has no weapon. Don’t shoot him.” Later, officers can be heard shouting: “Drop the gun.” When gunshots are eventually heard, Rakeyia Scott can be heard shouting:

“Fuck. Did you shoot him? Did you shoot him? Did you shoot him? He better not be fucking dead. He better not be fucking dead. I know that fucking much. I know that much. He better not be dead. I’m not going to come near you. I’m going to record, though. I’m not coming near you. I’m going to record, though. He better be alive because … I come. You better be alive. How about that? Yes, we here, over here at 50 ... 50 … 9453 Lexington Court. These are the police officers that shot my husband, and he better live. He better live. Because he didn’t do nothing to them.”

The officers cannot be clearly heard after this.

You can watch the video below, and though it does not show the actual shooting, it is disturbing.

More from the Times:

The lawyers said the cellphone video was shot by Rakeyia Scott, Mr. Scott’s wife on Tuesday afternoon. Mr. Scott had parked his car in a visitor’s space in their apartment complex, where he often waited for one of his children to return home on a bus. The police were there to serve a warrant on someone else.

The lawyers said Ms. Scott had come out of the apartment with a cellphone charger for her husband and noticed that police officers were around the truck.

As we have previously reported, the circumstances surrounding Scott’s death are unclear—with police and his family offering different versions of what happened.

Police had been at the apartment building where the shooting occurred looking for a different man who had an outstanding warrant. They said Scott was walking from his truck holding a handgun, and did not put the weapon down despite multiple warnings, compelling Officer Brentley Vinson, who is also black, to shoot him. Vinson, in line with department policy, has been placed on paid leave. Scott’s family says he was reading a book when he was shot. Police say they recovered a handgun, but no book, from the scene of the killing.

A photograph of that handgun was obtained by WCNC, the local NBC affiliate, soon after the shooting. But the cell-phone footage made public Friday does not appear to show anything resembling that object.

Compare this photo from the newly released video (on right) to photo that came out earlier this week with circled object (on left) pic.twitter.com/ic28gIdZdf

— Justin Green (@JGreenDC) September 23, 2016

Meanwhile, Kerr Putney, Charlotte’s police chief, said Friday it was only a matter of time before the police body-cam video of the shooting would be released.

“It’s a matter of when and it’s a matter of sequence,” Putney said. He said the video would be released when the State Bureau of Investigations (SBI) “have all the pieces of the puzzle so that they can then give the fuller picture of exactly what happened.”

Putney previously said the footage, which Scott’s family viewed on Thursday, would not be made public while the investigation was ongoing. In Thursday’s news conference, the police chief said the footage did not offer “absolute definitive, visual evidence” that Scott pointed his weapon at officers, as they had claimed, but “when taken in the totality of all the other evidence, it supports what we’ve heard and the version of the truth that we gave about the circumstances that happened that led to the death of Mr. Scott.”

Scott’s death resulted in two consecutive nights of protests, though Thursday night was relatively peaceful. One person, identified as Justin Carr, 26, was killed, and Kerr said Friday that a man, Rayquan Borum, had been arrested in connection with that death.

Pitch Is a Baseball Drama With Only One Real Twist

Fox’s new baseball show Pitch feels like a perfect inspirational sports film straight out of the 1980s, save for its gender twist. The story of an underdog pitcher who becomes the first woman to play in any of the major American pro leagues, Pitch isn’t afraid to lean into the tear-jerking tropes of its genre, or to embrace the Cinderella narrative that SportsCenter hosts love so much. But its main appeal lies in its heroine Ginny, a fictitious insta-icon to a generation of American women—suggesting that the show’s best hope for long-term success is digging into the thrill, and the burden, of the mantle she takes up.

Like another flashy big-budget drama of this fall season, ABC’s Designated Survivor, Pitch works partly because it indulges a compelling fantasy, only this one is a lot less bleak. The idea of Ginny, a female pitcher signed by the San Diego Padres, is not completely far-fetched—there’s no reason, outside of social pressures, why a woman wouldn’t be able to hold her own in the entirely male institution of baseball. As played by the relative newcomer Kylie Bunbury, Ginny is a delightfully flinty and occasionally nervy champ to root for, and she helps Pitch’s pilot episode overcome some of its biggest clichés through sheer charm, even if the show’s long-term future is murkier.

Pitch was co-created by Dan Fogelman, the suddenly ubiquitous TV writer behind projects such as the alien-invader sitcom The Neighbors and the medieval musical spoof Galavant. But it feels most similar to another show he has debuting on NBC this fall, the family drama This Is Us, which my colleague Megan Garber aptly described as “must-weep TV.” Pitch doesn’t lunge at the heartstrings with quite the same ferocity of that show, but it’s playing on similar tropes: The kinds of movies viewers saw as children that follow a classic three-act-structure of expectation, adversity, and eventually, triumph.

In Pitch, Ginny Baker’s debut on the mound for the Padres is a national event, selling out tickets, packing the stands with young girls inspired by her example, and prompting sportscasters to compare her moment to Jackie Robinson famously breaking baseball’s color barrier in 1947. The show takes ample advantage of Fox’s resources to replicate the broadcast experience of a real game, down to interjections from talking heads like Katie Nolan and Colin Cowherd. At times, the entire thing feels like a massive cross-advertisement for Fox Sports 1, but that sort of synergy is so common in the industry today that it’s hard to object.

Plenty of things go wrong for Ginny, of course. Most of the team is skeptical that her inclusion is anything but a publicity stunt. The aging star catcher Mike Lawson (a neck-bearded Mark-Paul Gosselaar) can’t help but condescend, even after Ginny tells him she bought his rookie card as a kid; the manager Al Luongo (a grouchy Dan Lauria) is planning to bump her back down to the minors once an injured pitcher is back on the roster. Ginny’s biggest fans are her sharp-elbowed agent Amelia Slater (Ali Larter, her face in a permanent grimace) and the Padres owner (Bob Balaban), who knows a branding opportunity when he sees one. Behind it all is the looming specter of her father Bill (Michael Beach), who pushed her into the sport as a youngster with troubling intensity.

This is a show that’s confident in the power of its central image.

Fogelman and his co-creator Rick Singer lob the clichés so hard and fast, it’s hard to be offended by any particular one. Ginny’s banished to a broom closet while the team figures out where to put its woman’s locker room…but then she’s won over by the sight of her new uniform. An early rough patch sees her throw three wild pitches as she struggles to settle her nerves…but settle them she does. Lawson doesn’t think she can handle the heat…but by the end of the episode, she’s begun to prove herself. Pitch is absolutely uninterested in upending its sports formula outside of changing the gender of its lead character, but there’s a good reason for that. It’s undeniably exciting to see Ginny on the field in a Padres uniform, with the crisp Fox broadcasting logos around her. This is a show that’s confident in the power of its central image.

It’s Pitch’s future that’s more concerning. The most successful fictional TV shows about sports usually operate on the sidelines in some way, like HBO’s Arli$$ (about agents) or ABC’s Sports Night (about the behind-the-scenes of broadcasting). The great Friday Night Lights, about the culture of high-school football in West Texas, didn’t know what to do with its team by its second season, and only succeeded by rebooting its premise entirely in the third (essentially creating a whole new team from scratch). That would be tougher to pull off for Pitch, since major-league sports are at their very core consistent: A team’s quality may ebb and flow, but it’s going to try and do the same basic thing year every year, meaning Pitch might eventually run out of material for Ginny.

For now, though, Fogelman seems to know what he’s doing. Just like This is Us, Pitch ends with a surprising emotional twist that suggests a canny, if mawkish, attitude toward plotting. Though Ginny has started on the path toward impressing her teammates, there will be plenty more obstacles, big and small, for her to overcome in the coming episodes. If the pilot is any indication, Pitch will be slickly presented, rife with heartwarming moments, and feature a magnetic lead on the mound every week. In other words: so far, so good.

Syria's Government Has Launched an Offensive on Aleppo

NEWS BRIEF Dozens of people have been killed and several others wounded in airstrikes carried out by the Syrian military in rebel-held parts of Aleppo, less than a day after international diplomatic efforts in New York to restart a cease-fire failed.

The BBC reports at least 27 civilians were killed in Friday’s airstrikes, though others are reporting a higher death toll. This latest offensive in eastern Aleppo, the battleground of some of the civil war’s most intense fighting, was announced by the Syrian defense ministry overnight as an attempt by President Bashar al-Assad’s regime to retake control of the city, which has been divided since 2012, and is one of the last major rebel strongholds.

The government cautioned the city’s civilian population—some 250,000 people—to avoid rebel-held areas.

The Syrian Civil Defense, a group of volunteer rescuers known commonly as the White Helmets, said three of its four centers were targeted in the bombings.

3 of the 4 @SyriaCivilDef centers in Aleppo city targeted this morning. 60 air strikes in East Aleppo pic.twitter.com/g5seYilDbY

— The White Helmets (@SyriaCivilDef) September 23, 2016

Meanwhile, in New York, U.S. and Russian officials announced that efforts to revive the cease-fire had failed.

“We can’t go out to the world and say we have an agreement when we don’t,” John Kerry, the American secretary of state, said Thursday following a meeting with Sergey Lavrov, his Russian counterpart, and officials from the 23-member International Syria Support Group.

Kerry reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to bringing an end to the Syrian civil war, which is entering its sixth year, but cited the need for Syrian leaders and their Russian allies to “do their part.”

Kerry and Lavrov met again on Friday, though it remains unclear if the two architects of the original cease-fire came to an agreement. Tensions have remained high between the two countries since the end of the cease-fire and the bombing of a U.N. humanitarian convoy, an attack which both countries claim they were not responsible for.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German foreign minister, issued a statement Friday calling on world leaders—specifically those in Washington and Moscow—to honor the shared consensus to “not leave Syria in the lurch.”

FM #Steinmeier after the „very open+controversial“ discussion during the #ISSG meeting: We are not allowed to leave #Syria in the lurch. pic.twitter.com/CyqaL8H8Je

— GermanForeignOffice (@GermanyDiplo) September 23, 2016

Absent an agreed upon cease-fire, hostilities in Syria are unlikely to subside given the Assad’s intent to regain as much lost territory as possible. As my colleague Krishnadev Calamur noted,“Assad is now more firmly entrenched as Syria’s president than at any time since the civil war began in 2011, and he has little incentive to stop the fighting.” Indeed, with his Russian and Iranian military backers, Assad has wrested back much of the territory lost since the fighting began in 2011.

The Syrian conflict pits Assad, backed by Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah, against several rebel groups, backed by the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar.

A Death From Charlotte Protest Violence

NEWS BRIEF The man who was shot during Wednesday night’s protests in downtown Charlotte has died, police say.

Justin Carr was shot in the head in the midst of violent protests, where police fired tear gas and some demonstrators looted. CNN describes the scene:

Carr was discovered at the Omni Hotel uptown, and because the crowd was too thick for paramedics to access the scene, he had to be evacuated by a SWAT armored personnel carrier, [Police Chief Kerr Putney] said. Authorities have said he was shot by another civilian.

He died of his wounds in the hospital Thursday. He was 26.

Police have launched a murder investigation. No arrests related to the shooting have been made.

Demonstrators are taking to the streets of Charlotte for the third-straight night, protesting the fatal shooting of Keith Lamont Scott at the hands of a police officer Tuesday. Police claim Scott was armed and posed a threat when he was shot.

Putney, the police chief, said Thursday that bodycam videos of the shooting does not show Scott holding a gun. But, he says, the video still supports the police department’s version of what happened.

Members of Scott’s family were able to watch the video Thursday. Afterward, a lawyer for the family said they have “more questions than answers,” claiming it is “impossible to discern from the videos what, if anything, Mr. Scott is holding in his hands.” The lawyer also says that when Scott was killed, his hands were at his side and he was backing away slowly. Family members pleaded with protesters to act peacefully moving forward.

Charlotte police have not said whether they will release the videos to the public. As protests started Thursday night, some demonstrating chanted, “Release the video.”

The Handshake Behind a Swiss Controversy

NEWS BRIEF A Muslim teenager in Switzerland must shake the hand of his female teacher, a local school council said this week.

The 15-year-old boy had previously objected to the traditional Swiss gesture, which is mandatory before class begins, on a religious basis. A strict interpretation of Islam does not allow members of the opposite sex to touch unless they are family.

In May, the school in Therwil, a municipality an hour west of Zurich, told the boy and his older brother that if they didn’t comply their family could face a $5,000 fine. Their parents soon appealed the decision, and the older brother left the school in June.

This week, the school council rejected their appeal, ordering the 15-year-old boy to shake his teacher’s hand or face disciplinary action. Following Swiss tradition is a “standard of decency,” council head Monica Gschwind said in a statement after the decision was announced. She added:

Shaking hands with teachers is deeply rooted in our society and culture... For me it is clear: the handshake is enforced—no ifs, no buts.

The family has 10 days to appeal the council’s decision, which would then go to regional government. Officials there have previously said “the integration of foreigners significantly outweighs the freedom of conscience of the students.” Switzerland’s efforts to integrate the country’s 5 percent Muslim population have been the source of controversy before, including when voters banned the construction of minarets and when one region banned burqas.

A Manslaughter Charge for the Cop Who Shot Terence Crutcher

Tulsa Police Officer Betty Shelby, who on Friday shot and killed Terence Crutcher, has been charged with felony first-degree manslaughter, the Tulsa County district attorney announced Thursday afternoon.

If convicted, Shelby would face a minimum of four years in prison, and a maximum of life. Oklahoma law differentiates between murder and manslaughter largely on the matter of intent; manslaughter in most cases is homicide committed without the design to kill. In an affidavit, District Attorney Steve Kunzweiler wrote:

Your affiant feels that Officer Shelby reacted unreasonably by escalating the situation from a confrontation with Mr. Crutcher, who was not responding to verbal commands and was walking away from her with his hands held up, becoming emotionally involved to the point that she over reacted.

Kunzweiler said a warrant had been issued for Shelby’s arrest, and that negotiations were under way for her to surrender to the Tulsa County Sheriff.

Crutcher, who was black, was unarmed and had his hands up when he was shot. Shelby, who is white, gave a statement after the shooting saying that she feared for her life. She was placed on paid leave after the shooting. Shelby has worked for the Tulsa Police since 2011. Before that, she was a county sheriff’s deputy.

The charges against Shelby come unusually quickly—just six days after the shooting. Prosecutors tend to move particularly deliberately in cases involving police officers. In several high-profile deaths at the hands of police, prosecutors have opted to take cases to grand juries rather than to bring charges themselves. But Kunzweiler said he had made his determination after reviewing video from dashboard cameras and a helicopter as well as 911 calls.

Tulsa Police on Monday released footage of the shooting, which was captured by a police car’s dash cam and which showed Crutcher walking away from officers with his arms raised over his head. His death, paired with the shooting of Keith Lamont Scott in Charlotte, North Carolina, has returned the matter of police killings of black people and particularly black men to the headlines. Tulsa has a long history of racial tensions, including one of the largest race riots in the nation, in 1921. In that incident, a white mob descended on the city’s black quarter, killing hundreds and destroying the neighborhood.

Yahoo's Half-a-Billion Hack

NEWS BRIEF A “state-sponsored actor” stole personal data from at least 500 million Yahoo user accounts, the troubled tech company said Thursday.

The pilfered data contains a wealth of personal information, including “names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords […] and, in some cases, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers,” Bob Lord, Yahoo’s chief information security officer, said in a statement.

The hacker (or hackers) do not appear to have obtained data about users’ credit cards or bank accounts, Lord noted, which he said are stored on a separate system.

Yahoo believes the data was stolen in “late 2014.” It’s unclear when the company first became aware of the breach; a pseudonymous hacker first publicly offered to sell Yahoo data last month. The Wall Street Journal has more:

No evidence has been found to suggest the state-sponsored actor is currently in Yahoo’s network, and Yahoo didn’t name the country it suspected was involved. In August, a hacker called “Peace” appeared in online forums, offering to sell 200 million of the company’s usernames and passwords for about $1,900 in total. Peace had previously sold data taken from breaches at Myspace and LinkedIn Corp.

A Yahoo spokesman said at the time that the company was aware of the claim and was “working to determine the facts.”

In 2012, Yahoo had more than 1 billion user accounts in its databases. User passwords were protected via a cryptographic algorithm called MD5, which can be cracked using the latest password-breaking techniques, said a source familiar with the situation.

Disclosure of the breach comes two months after Yahoo, once among the most powerful tech companies in Silicon Valley, said it would sell its core internet business to telecom giant Verizon for $4.8 billion. It’s unclear how the hack could affect the yet-to-be-finalized sale. Verizon said Thursday it learned of the breach “within the last two days” but that it had few details.

“We will evaluate as the investigation continues through the lens of overall Verizon interests, including consumers, customers, shareholders, and related communities,” the company said in a statement. “Until then, we are not in position to further comment.”

It Would Take the Old MacGyver to Save the New MacGyver

I’ll get right to it and answer the main question you probably have about the new MacGyver, which is really the only question that matters when it comes to the new MacGyver: No, Mac no longer has a mullet.

That’s not the only disappointing aspect of CBS’s reboot of the long-running ’80s action-adventure show, though. The new MacGyer is, on the one hand, a perfectly serviceable answer to the old one, often slick and occasionally exciting and certainly at home in a sea of mediocre procedurals; it is very rarely, however, anything more than that.

The new MacGyer is at home in a sea of mediocre procedurals; it is very rarely anything more than that.

Mac, this time around, is played by X-Men’s Lucas Till; he nails the nerdy hero’s affable, aw-shucks charm. And while the original MacGyver was largely a loner, the new one operates as part of an ensemble: There’s Jack (George Eads), Mac’s wacky sidekick; and Wilt (Justin Hires), his roommate; and Nikki (Tracy Spiridakos), his girlfriend; and Riley (Tristin Mays), a hacker; and Patricia Thornton (Sandrine Holt), his M-esque boss. (Her name is a nod to the original Mac’s best friend, Pete Thornton, the only character in the show who appeared regularly with Richard Dean Anderson.)

That it-takes-a-village shift certainly gives the show’s writers more room to play and experiment with Mac and his adventures; it also, however, makes the show read distinctly like … nearly every other procedural in recent memory. CSI? NCIS? Quantico? MacGyver may bring more chemistry—or, more precisely, more vaguely mansplainy discussions of chemistry—into the mix; beyond that, though, it’s hard to tell the new show apart from the many other shows that have, in the decades after the old MacGyver ended, swooped in to fill its void.

Related Story

Mullet Over: The Lonely Brilliance of MacGyver

Nearly everything here feels familiar. In the reboot’s pilot episode, Mac and his team are dealing with a biological bomb that threatens to detonate in San Francisco. (The device contains the same fluorescent-green material that was the stuff of The Rock’s biological bomb that, yes, threatens to detonate in San Francisco.) In the course of preventing that from happening—in order to prevent, as Thornton puts it, “a damn catastrophe of Biblical proportions”—Mac attends a high-society party in Lake Como, in the manner of James Bond. He leaves that party via speedboat, also in the manner of Bond (and also in the manner of Jude Law’s Spy-based parody of Bond). He uses a waiter’s tray as a shield against bullets, in the manner of Archer. He fist-fights an enemy, in the manner of Bourne. He also tracks down an agent who has gone rogue; and frees a hacker from prison; and jumps onto a moving airplane.

Do you think he does all this breezily, peppering it with witty banter? Yes, yes, he does.

There’s something soothingly predictable about all this: We’ve seen it all before. Only here, there’s a strain of camp. Here, the writing varies from the uninspired to the actively groan-worthy. Sample lines:  

That dress may look dangerous, but trust me: The woman inside it is way more deadly.

And:

That old saying, ‘where there’s smoke, there’s fire,’ isn’t always true. Sometimes when there’s smoke, there’s just smoke. Muriatic acid mixed with ammonia and tin foil creates a chemical reaction that releases a lot of smoke—with absolutely no other byproducts!

And (to a hacker):

You know how you hack computers? Well I hack … everything else.

Oh, and (to Patricia):

It looks like ebola. Or like some kind of viral hemorrhaging fever.

These lines are … fine. And, to be fair, the old MacGyver was only fine. The show may have been beloved (and also, relatedly, widely mocked); it may have given rise to weird spinoffs and loving satires (MacGruber!) and a brand-new verb and, later on, so many memes. But it did all that—it had all that cultural impact—not because it was great, but because it was greatly unusual. Mac may have been an action hero; mostly, though, he was an unapologetic nerd. He loved chemistry. He couldn’t help but talk, excitedly, about the way chemicals can interact to make an improvised explosive device. He couldn’t help but be impressed with himself. He had a habit of saying things like, “Oh, what a life I lead: riding the rapids in the Pyrenees Mountains one day, and the next crossing half the world to help out a friend with a very weird problem in a very strange part of the Amazon. I think I should get an unlisted phone number!”

So the old MacGyver was not, by today’s standards, great TV. It was barely even good TV. What it was, though, was unique, and singular, and winsomely weird. It was, like MacGyver himself, unapologetic. The new version is the opposite: It is trying very, very hard to fit in. It has the right elements; what it hasn’t yet quite figured out yet, though, is how to combine them into something that will be truly explosive.

There's No 'Definitive' Proof Keith Scott Pointed a Gun at Officers

Charlotte’s police chief said Thursday that police bodycam video of the events that led to an officer killing Keith Lamont Scott does not show the 43-year-old black man brandishing a gun at police, but does support law enforcement’s version what happened on Tuesday.

Scott’s death has resulted in two consecutive nights of sometimes violent protests in Charlotte, North Carolina. One person was shot and critically wounded Wednesday night apparently by another protester. Several police officers received minor injuries. Businesses were vandalized, shops were looted, and police fired tear gas at protesters and arrested 44 people. The National Guard and the State Highway Patrol are helping local police and Governor Pat McCrory declared a state of emergency.

At a news conference Thursday,  Kerr Putney, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg police chief, said the bodycam videos he watched did not offer “absolute definitive, visual evidence” that Scott pointed his weapon at officers, as they had claimed.

“What I can tell you, though, is when taken in the totality of all the other evidence, it supports what we’ve heard and the version of the truth that we gave about the circumstances that happened that led to the death of Mr. Scott,” he said.

Police had been at the apartment building where the shooting occurred looking for a different man who had an outstanding warrant. They said Scott was walking from his truck holding a handgun, and did not put the weapon down despite multiple warnings, compelling Officer Brentley Vinson, who is also black, to shoot him. Vinson, in line with department policy, has been placed on paid leave. Scott’s family says he was reading a book when he was shot. Police say they recovered a handgun, but no book, from the scene of the killing.

Putney, the police chief, said Scott’s family would be allowed to see the video, but insisted the footage would not be made public while the investigation was ongoing.

McCrory, the governor, at a separate news conference Thursday, said the State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) would conduct an independent investigation of Scott’s death. Scott’s family had sought the investigation through the District Attorney’s Office.

“The SBI has been working with the city,” he said. “The SBI is currently participating and leading an investigation of the most recent incident that happened here in Charlotte Mecklenburg.”

McCrory said he spoke to President Obama on Thursday about the incident, calling the conversation “very nice.” Responding to the two nights of unrest, he said: “I just encourage patience for people.”

Scott’s killing Tuesday came just a day after Tulsa police released footage of an officer fatally shooting Terence Crutcher, an unarmed black man who had his hands up. According to a database maintained by The Guardian, more than 30 unarmed black men have been killed by police this year alone.

Charlotte, meanwhile, as my colleague David A. Graham reports, has “a tense relationship between the Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department and its black citizens.” Here’s more:

The chief of Charlotte’s police force, Kerr Putney, is black, as was his predecessor, Rodney Monroe. But recent experience in cities like Baltimore has shown that having black police chiefs, as well as black mayors, is not a panacea for racist law enforcement and racially based community tension. The department is also 76 percent white and only 17 percent black, while Mecklenburg County overall is 64 percent white and 28 percent black. Brentley Vinson, the officer who shot Scott, is black.

Our related coverage is here and here.

Shattering Charlotte's Myth of Racial Harmony

You often don’t have to scratch too hard on the surface of the New South to find the Old South right below it.

This is clear in Charlotte, North Carolina, this week, where intense demonstrations and riots have followed the shooting of Keith Lamont Scott by a police officer on Wednesday. The banking mecca—the Southeast’s second-largest city—has tended to see itself as an avatar of modernity and moderation in a state where both are uneven. Although Uptown’s gleaming skyscrapers and chain restaurants seem to suggest a city that is both without, and untethered from, history, the Queen City was built on slavery and its racial politics remain fraught, just like those of nearly every other city. It struggles with a history of segregation, racial tension, and difficult relations between African Americans and their police department.

Charlotte does have a history, one that stretches back to before the American Revolution; Mecklenburg County claims to have declared independence from Britain way back in 1775, though historians aren’t sold. At one time, it was just another small Piedmont town. That changed when railroads came through in 1852, transforming Charlotte into a central hub for the plantation economy. The ability to easily move the produce of the slave economy out of the region and to markets transformed the village into a prosperous hub, its population more than doubling between 1850 and 1860. On the eve of the Civil War, Mecklenburg County had nearly 7,000 slaves, accounting for about 40 percent of the population.

After the Civil War, African Americans briefly gained political power in North Carolina, but by 1900, Democrats had returned to power and purged blacks from government.

Charlotte was not at the forefront of protests during the height of the civil-rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Greensboro, with a large, middle-class black population and North Carolina A&T University, took the lead. Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools desegregated after Brown v. Board of Education, with Dorothy Counts enrolling at Harding High School, an all-white school, in 1957, surrounded by jeering whites. A photo ran in newspapers around the country.

By 1965, however, there were still 88 segregated campuses. That year, a black couple wanted to send their son James Swann to an integrated school, and were refused. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund sued the Board of Education, with the case eventually going to the Supreme Court six years later. The justices ruled that busing was an appropriate remedy for racial imbalances in school districts.

What followed in Charlotte was a surprisingly successful experiment. The city undertook busing, producing a school district that was both well-integrated and produced strong student outcomes. In stark contrast to violent and deadly riots in Boston over busing, Charlotte was widely known as “the city that made desegregation work.” In the meantime, Charlotte was becoming a gleaming, corporate city, home to corporate giants like Bank of America, Wachovia, and Duke Energy.

The rosy period of integration didn’t last. After a lawsuits in the late 1990s against the school district from parents who opposed busing, Charlotte-Mecklenburg returned to a “neighborhood school model.” The result was a massive reversal. As Scalawag reported in an excellent, deep examination of Charlotte’s schools:

Just before the end of court-ordered desegregation, during the 2001-02 school year, 10 Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools were isolated by race or poverty—or both, according to a UNC Charlotte analysis of data from the state Department of Public Instruction. By the 2013-14 school year, the number of racially or economically isolated campuses had quintupled, to more than 50.

It’s not hard to understand why this might be the case. Despite the city’s makeover, it remains extremely segregated, as this map from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte’s Urban Institute shows:

Racial Population of Mecklenburg County, 2010 Census

A 2014 paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics explored the results of the shift:

We find that the resegregation of CMS schools led to an increase in racial inequality. Both whites and minorities score lower on high school exams when they are assigned to schools with more minority students. Our estimates imply that rezoning in CMS widened the racial gap in math scores by about 0.025 standard deviation. Similarly, we find that white students are about 1 percentage point less likely to graduate from high school or attend a four-year college when they are assigned to schools with 10 percentage points more minority students. Finally, we find that rezoning in CMS led to a large and persistent increase in criminal activity among minority males—a 10 percentage point increase in share minority of a minority male’s assigned school led to an increase in the probability of incarceration of about 1.3 percentage points.

The result is that some African American residents of the city are actually seeing gains reversed.

Meanwhile, socioeconomics aside, there has been a tense relationship between the Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department and its black citizens for years. Given the ambiguity around Scott’s death—police say he was holding a gun, but family members say he was reading—it might not immediately seem like an obvious rallying point. Police Chief Kerr Putney argued that protestors are reacting to a false narrative about Scott, but it seems likely that the incident was simply the trigger for protests rooted in years of resentment of police, similar to how the death of Freddie Gray exposed the deep cleavages in Baltimore for many years.

In September 2013, a black man named Jonathan Ferrell was in a car crash in Charlotte in the early hours of the morning. Seeking help, he banged on the door of a house. The resident called police, who shot Ferrell when they arrived. He was unarmed. The white officer who shot him 10 times, Randall Kerrick, was tried for involuntary manslaughter, but the case ended in a hung jury. Kerrick resigned from the police force under an agreement. The city also reached a $2.25 million settlement with Ferrell’s family.

A review by The Charlotte Observer in 2015 found that few officers were disciplined for shootings of civilians, even when the city was paying out large settlements:

The city has paid $3.4 million to families in settlements over the last decade in cases involving five shootings. Despite the payments, which meant the cases never went to court, Charlotte officers have rarely been suspended or fired for their use of deadly force.

The Observer obtained city documents listing current and former CMPD officers involved in 67 shootings since 2005. Only one police officer was fired. Another was suspended for two days.

A University of North Carolina study several years ago found that blacks were far more likely to be stopped by police in Charlotte, especially young black men, and that the racial disparity in traffic stops was growing. The city of Charlotte also considered instituting controversial “exclusion zones” for fighting prostitution in 2015, a solution that critics noted was likely to produce racially disparate results. The city eventually decided against the zones.

The chief of Charlotte’s police force, Kerr Putney, is black, as was his predecessor, Rodney Monroe. But recent experience in cities like Baltimore has shown that having black police chiefs, as well as black mayors, is not a panacea for racist law enforcement and racially based community tension. The department is also 76 percent white and only 17 percent black, while Mecklenburg County overall is 64 percent white and 28 percent black. Brentley Vinson, the officer who shot Scott, is black.

Putney has been outspoken about racial issues, weaving in his own experiences as both a black man and a cop.

“Even now when I see blue lights, it hits me in the stomach. I’ve had that reaction since I was eight years old,” Putney said in July, after police officers were killed in Dallas. “But what you don't know is I'm sometimes more fearful when I put this uniform on. I'm gonna tell you a secret, I'm always black—I was born that way, I'm gonna die that way, but I chose to put myself in harm's way with the honorable people who wear these uniforms to protect the people who need us most.”

Recently, the city has worked to cut a more progressive profile. Governor Pat McCrory, a Republican, previously served as mayor of Charlotte, operating as a pro-business moderate, though he has governed the state as more of a conservative. The current mayor, Jennifer Roberts, is a Democrat. In 2012, Charlotte hosted the Democratic National Convention. In early 2016, the city passed an ordinance banning discrimination against LGBT people and requiring that businesses allow transgender people to use the bathroom corresponding to the gender with which they identify.

In response, the state General Assembly entered a special session and passed HB2, a controversial law overturning the local ordinance and banning other cities from passing their own. It also required transgender people to use bathrooms in public facilities corresponding to the sex on their birth certificate. The backlash to the law has cost the state millions of dollars in economic benefits, many of which would have helped Charlotte, including the 2017 NBA All-Star Game. The contest will be played in New Orleans instead.

The LGBT ordinance highlighted Charlotte’s unusual position in the state. While North Carolina’s cities tend to be far more liberal than rural and suburban areas, this battle represented either Charlotte trying to lead the city in a more progressive, just direction (as its boosters argued) or the latest evidence that Charlotte was a self-righteous metropolis separated from the rest of the state.

It is true that the Queen City has tended to see itself as more progressive and less troubled by the old bonds of race than other cities, which is one reason the riots have shocked residents so much. In July, after the Dallas killings, Putney touted Charlotte’s efforts to fight racial bias.

“We're different in Charlotte, y'all,” he said “And we're a good kind of different. We're a good kind of different.”

It turns out Charlotte wasn’t as different as it believed.