Keith Lamont Scott, September 2016

On the afternoon of September twentieth, twenty-sixteen, Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officers were at an apartment complex near the University of North Carolina Charlotte to serve an arrest warrant for a different man. In the parking lot they encountered Keith Lamont Scott, a forty-three-year-old Black man who was sitting in a vehicle.

What happened in the next few minutes is disputed in ways that the official investigation did not fully resolve. Police stated that Scott was armed with a handgun and refused commands to drop it. His family and some witnesses said he was holding a book and posed no threat. Officers struck him four times. He died at the scene.

The protests that followed began that night. Demonstrators blocked multiple lanes of Interstate Eight-Five in the early hours of September twenty-first. The unrest continued the following night in Uptown Charlotte. Twenty-three police officers were injured. In a separate incident during the protests, a man named Justin Carr was shot and killed. Governor Pat McCrory declared a state of emergency and deployed the North Carolina National Guard and State Highway Patrol.

On November thirtieth, twenty-sixteen, Mecklenburg County District Attorney Andrew Murray announced that the officer who shot Scott had acted lawfully and would not be charged. Murray released the investigative report and body camera footage, both of which were contested by Scott's family and their attorneys.

Scott's death arrived in a year already marked by widely publicized police killings of Black men across the country, and Charlotte's uprising was part of a national reckoning that would continue to accelerate in subsequent years. The public record of what Scott was or was not holding on September twentieth remains disputed.