Walter Scott's life should have mattered more

We have had a black president in the US for the better part of a decade. Black people run leading corporations, coach professional sports clubs and host television network newscasts. A lot has changed in the decades since Martin Luther King dared to dream in public.

Yet for all the progress we have made in creating a society where Americans can be judged by the content of their character rather than the colour of their skin, it remains the case that black lives are not valued in quite the same way as white ones are in this country.

If you think that I'm exaggerating, then you probably haven't seen what happened to Walter Scott, 50, an unarmed black man who was shot and killed by a white police officer in North Charleston, South Carolina, last Saturday, on what also happened to have been the 47th anniversary of King's assassination in Memphis, Tennessee.

People around the world have been able to witness Scott's death because Feidin Santana, a young man with a cell phone and a social conscience, happened upon the scene as he was walking to work and began recording it. The resulting video, delivered to the Scott family's attorney and then to The New York Times, which posted it online, gives us all a glimpse of what it is like to be a black man on the streets of the US.

According to the initial official version of events, Scott was driving a Mercedes-Benz with a broken brake light when he was pulled over by Michael Slager, a 33-year-old police officer and Coast Guard veteran. Scott - a forklift operator who had failed to make child support payments and feared being sent to prison as a result, according to his relatives - ran away. But the officer caught up with him in a vacant lot behind a pawnshop. Mr Slager claimed Scott then grabbed his stun gun, known as a taser, putting him in fear of his life. He said he responded by firing his pistol, killing Scott.

The video picks up the action in the vacant lot. We can see the two men struggling, before Scott breaks free, leaving a black object that might be a taser on the ground. As Scott runs away, Mr Slager repeatedly shoots him in the back, firing eight rounds in all.

Scott then falls to the ground, several meters away from Mr Slager. The officer walks toward the fatally wounded man, repeatedly shouting: "Put your hands behind your back." When Scott fails to comply, Mr Slager handcuffs him. With Scott lying face down in the grass, Mr Slager runs over to recover the black object on the ground and returns to drop it by Scott's side, as another officer, a black one, joins him by the body.

The release of the video prompted a quick response by officials in South Carolina, who were obviously hoping to prevent the kind of unrest that followed last year's killings of unarmed black men by police in Ferguson, Missouri, and Staten Island, New York.

Murder charges were filed on Tuesday against Mr Slager. The next day, he was fired from the police force and North Charleston's mayor ordered all officers to be equipped with body cameras. For good measure, the mayor and the police chief visited Scott's family and the city said it would continue to provide health insurance for Mr Slager's wife, who is eight months pregnant.

But it will be difficult to repair the damage. The casual brutality displayed in the video corroborates the complaints of many black Americans that they are treated unfairly by the police. It will make it tougher to believe official accounts in the future. It will make it easier to recall our history - of slaves counted as three-fifths of a person by our constitution.

Mr Slager will have his day in court, as he should, but in the meantime his former brothers and sisters in law enforcement will have to deal with the consequences of his actions. The spectre of the Scott video will only make life harder for conscientious cops who want to protect good people from the bad guys. I suspect Eddie Driggers, North Charleston's white police chief, was speaking for many practitioners of his trade when he said: "I have watched the video, and I was sickened by what I saw."

Whatever his faults, Scott committed no capital crime and clearly posed no threat to Mr Slager as he ran away from the police officer. As a middle-aged man myself, I couldn't help but notice how slowly Scott moved as he tried to escape, the first step of youth a thing of the past. By contrast, Mr Slager appeared on top of his game. Standing up straight, he extended his arms and squeezed his shots off deliberately, reminding the dead man's father, Walter Scott Sr, of a hunter bagging game.

"The way he was shooting that gun, it looked like he was trying to kill a deer or something running through the woods," the elder Scott said on NBC's Today Show. "I don't know whether it was racial, or if something was wrong with his head, or what."

Imagine how that must feel. Mr Scott is not only a parent who faces the sad task of burying a child. He is a black man left to wonder whether his son was struck down like an animal. His is a particular kind of made-in-America pain.

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