South Carolina's police state.

• Author: Gray, Kevin Alexander
• Position: Cover story

When accused murderer and former North Charleston patrolman Michael Thomas Slager's lawyer said his client "felt threatened he may have been telling the truth. But it wasn't Slager's life that was threatened. It was his sense of authority. Sometimes, that can spark a life-ending escalation.

Walter Lamer Scott, a fifty-year-old veteran and father of four, was running away when officer Slager shot him repeatedly in the back on April 4. Slager, thirty-three, fired his taser at Scott, hitting him at least once. When Scott kept running, Slager opened fire. Eight times. Four bullets hit Scott in the back and one hit him in the ear.

Then, after slapping on handcuffs, Slager placed the taser next to Scott's body. "Shots fired and the subject is down," he told the dispatcher. "He took my taser."

Unfortunately for Slager, a Dominican immigrant named Feidin Santana, on his way to work, captured the crime using the video-camera on his phone. The video proved what many blacks take as gospel: Police lie.

A Gallup review of polling data from 2011 to 2014 showed that 59 percent of whites had "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in police, compared with only 37 percent of black respondents. Also, blacks rated police officers lower for honesty and ethics than whites. In Gallup data from 2010 to 2013, "59 percent of whites say the honesty and ethics of police officers is very high or high, compared with 45 percent of blacks."

Slager's shooting of Scott, for which he is facing a murder charge, is not going to drive these numbers up.

It's bad enough that he shot his victim in the back. When I was growing up watching cowboy movies, the "code of the West" held that shooting someone in the back was a cowardly thing to do. But handcuffing a dead or dying black man lying face down in the dirt to cover up your misdeed is as low-down as you can go.

Other racial imagery comes to mind watching Santana's unwitting "snuff film." An enslaved African unsuccessfully trying to escape his deadly overseer. Or a black sharecropper or civil-rights worker trying to elude the Klansman's noose.

After the video became public, the reaction of local authorities was swift. "I was sickened by what I saw," said police chief Eddie Driggers. North Charleston Mayor Keith Summey announced that the city would be equipping all of its officers with body cameras.

Yet the nature of Slager's stop--a busted brake light-- and the actions of the officers who arrived on the scene immediately...