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Charlotte police release videos of deadly shooting

The man gunned down by Charlotte cops never raised his hands before being shot, police video shows.

It’s unclear from the footage police released late Saturday whether or not Keith Lamont Scott had a gun before being killed.

The handgun police say Keith Lamont Scott possessed.

Witnesses claimed Scott had a book, not a gun, when he was shot dead by police while waiting for his son to come home from school on Sept. 20, and in an earlier video released by his wife, she can be heard telling police that he did not have a weapon. But police say he did have a gun, and the weapon recovered at the scene had Scott’s DNA and fingerprints.

Charlotte-Mecklenberg Police Chief Kerr Putney said Scott “absolutely” had a handgun.

The audio of the new footage clearly has cops repeatedly shouting, “Drop the gun!” as they surrounded Scott’s SUV.

Police also released three crime-scene photos: a gun,a bloody holster and the partially smoked marijuana joint that first drew the officers’ attention when they arrived in the neighborhood.

Putney said not all of the video footage recorded during the incident would be released.

One video came from a cop’s body cam, but that of Officer Brently Vinson, who fired the fatal shots.The second video was from a patrol car dashboard.

The videos were released after days of protest, some of it violent, in Charlotte.

Putney said the footage was being released in the spirit of transparency, but even before it was made public, critics complained that only some of the videos recorded that day would be made available.

“I stand behind the truth,” Putney said at a press conference before the footage was released. But he acknowledged that nothing he was putting out in the public was definitive evidence on its own.

A marijana “blunt” cigarette that police said was in the possession of Keith Lamont Scott.

“The footage itself will not create in anyone’s mind absolute certainty” about the chain of events leading up to the shooting, he said. Instead, it must be seen in light of other evidence to create “the entire picture.”

“You have to make your own judgments.”

The chief said that officers arrived in the neighborhood and initially did not act when they saw Scott with marijuana in his car, but when they also saw a weapon, it escalated the situation.

North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory released a statement supporting the decision to release the tapes after he was assured that doing so would not compromise the investigation.

A cell phone video shot by Scott’s wife, Rakeyia Scott, released by her attorney on Friday, showed her trying to approach the scene, shouting “Don’t shoot him!” to officers and claiming that he did not have a gun, but had traumatic brain injury and had just taken his medication. A second video shot by a bystander surfaced Saturday, but showed only officers standing over Scott’s body after the shooting took place.