As Mr. Scott’s lawyer says in this story, you don’t get to summarily execute someone for running–period.  It doesn’t matter if he punched the cop in the face and insulted the cop’s mother.  We are not put on this earth to obey cops.  In fact, it’s quite the other way around–they are supposed to work for us.  Every time I see a traffic stop now, I fear for the life of the person who has been stopped because of crap like this.

Here’s Chris Stewart, the Scott family’s attorney:

Regardless of why Walter Scott ran, “running from an officer doesn’t result in the death penalty,” family attorney Chris Stewart said.

Just as we don’t know what Scott may or may not have done to the cop that gunned Scott down like a dog, we don’t know what the cop did to Mr. Scott that may have made Scott fear for his life and give him the idea that his best option was to run away.  I’m sure Scott was aware of Michael Brown and Eric Garner and Tamir Rice and John Crawford and…on and on. Perhaps Scott thought, quite reasonably, that he might escape the fate of these others if he didn’t stick around to get shot. I’ve seen a lot of people in online comments ask if Scott had ever seen the show “Cops” because if he had, he would’ve known not to run. Really?  Every episode I’ve ever seen of that show involves the police chasing alleged perps, as here—notice the suspect does not get murdered (probably because of the camera crew):

Fred Hampton, another victim of police murder, had this to say:

And as Fred said, “you can kill a revolutionary, but you can never kill the revolution…”: