Hey Governor McCrory? Say His Name! Keith Lamont Scott

With each passing day, North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory seals his fate and will very probably be drummed out of office in November.

First he passed Hate into law, and then lied about it; then he tried to divert funds from the state’s natural disaster relief fund to cover the costs of the lawsuit brought on by Hate, and then he accused every group who chose to take their business out of the state of extortion, and now this …

In the days following the shooting death by police officers of Keith Lamont Scott, McCrory held a news conference and never once mentioned the dead man’s name.

Instead, he scolded the media for not discussing the flooding in the northern part of the state and suggested they get out of Charlotte and make the floods the national news story … not the murder of another black man in America.

He continued, ignoring the big story, by heaping praise on the first responders to the flood relief and bragged about how they gave him a blue shirt; he bragged about getting a shirt just seventy-two hours after Keith Lamont Scott was gunned down.

A man was shot to death in the street, but I got this cool new shirt!

And then, making sure he’d be voted out of office in November, McCrory praised law enforcement officers — not citizens — for maintaining order during last Thursday night's peaceful protests; he went on to call those who caused damage “outside agitators” and “anarchists.”

“There are groups from out-of-state that want to cause anarchy. This state, this governor and Charlotte will not tolerate those individuals who want to cause harm to our basic society norms. … Thank you very much to National Guard. I saw people hugging, them hugging back. The best in America that we saw. We saw the best of Charlotte in tense situations, where we had community leaders and members of the clergy step in between the Guard and people who didn’t want to have a peaceful situation.”

And so as he talked about everything but Keith Lamont Scott, one news outlet online began posting split-screen images from the video taken by Rakeyia Scott, the wife of Keith Lamont Scott, and McCrory; they also posted images of the protests, and even of one man apparently trying to clean tear gas from his eyes.

All this was shown while McCrory praised Charlotte police officers for their efforts, and then offered sympathy and support to the police, noting what a challenging week this has been for them — without, again, ever mentioning the victim; no words of sympathy for the Scott family … not Keith Lamont Scott, not his widow, Rakeyia Scott, and not his seven fatherless children.

But why should he have sympathy for the family? He’s working, along with Charlotte police chief Kerr Putney, to keep the video of the shooting from ever being seen; McCrory signed a law, which goes into effect October 1, that makes it illegal for such videos to be released unless ordered by a judge.

So there will be no video of what happened, either to prove or disprove how the police say this went down.

Is that how we work to resolve this disconnect between the public and the police? By allowing police to hide evidence in these shootings?

Governor McCrory needs to go; when the governor cannot be bothered to even mention the name of a man gunned down by police, but instead, praises the police and signs an idiotic law that allows police to keep evidence of the shooting out of public view, he does not have the best interests of the people of North Carolina.

He needs to go, North Carolina, and you can do it.

NCRM