CHARLOTTE — As this city reels from a deadly police shooting that triggered violent demonstrations, the city's police chief said Thursday that officials had no plans to release video of that encounter, despite calls from civic leaders for more transparency.
Authorities, who are facing some of the most intense reactions seen in more than two years of protests over policing nationwide, vowed a strong law enforcement response to the unrest, declaring a state of emergency after two nights of chaos on the streets here. National Guard Humvees rumbled down streets still littered with broken glass Thursday, and Mayor Jennifer Roberts signed a curfew order from midnight until 6 a.m. as protesters gathered for the third night in a row.
With little information about the shooting forthcoming, questions persisted in the South's second-biggest city, which has more than 827,000 residents, a third of whom are black. Police said that they had made 44 arrests as of Thursday; one protester who was critically injured during a clash between protesters and police on Wednesday night was pronounced dead Thursday.
Police have said that Keith Lamont Scott posed "an imminent deadly threat" and refused commands to drop a weapon. Scott's relatives have said he was reading a book and unarmed when he encountered the black plainclothes Charlotte officer who fatally shot him on Tuesday. Officials say they found a gun, but not a book, at the shooting scene.
The State Bureau of Investigation has taken over the investigation into the shooting, authorities said Thursday.
Other officers at the scene were wearing body cameras at the time, though the officer who shot Scott — Brentley Vinson, who was placed on paid administrative leave — was not wearing any recording device.
Kerr Putney, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg police chief, said that video footage of the encounter did not give "absolute definitive visual evidence that would confirm that a person is pointing a gun," but he said that the footage and other evidence "supports what we've heard" about what happened.
However, Putney said the department has no imminent plans to let the public view this footage.
"You shouldn't expect it to be released," Putney said during a news briefing Thursday. He added: "Transparency is in the eye of the beholder. … If you think I'm saying we should display a victim's worst day for public consumption, that is not the transparency I'm speaking of."
In a statement, one of the family's attorneys, Justin Bamberg, said that they watched two videos captured by police cameras and have "more questions than answers."