The murder of Walter Scott

Here are some things that we know about Walter Scott.

Scott was a 50-year-old black man, pulled over on Saturday in North Charleston, S.C., by a white member of that city's predominantly white police force, for driving with a broken tail light.

He was not armed.

He was wanted on a Family Court warrant, presumably for past non-payment of child support -- and family members say he desperately did not want to be arrested.

We know that after a brief encounter with Officer Michael Slager, he turned and tried to run away from the lawman at top speed.

And here's one other thing we can say about Walter Scott with an unwavering sense of certainty: He absolutely did not deserve to die.

Yet the South Carolina man might have been just another statistic -- just another one of the 100 or so Americans killed now every month in a police-involved shooting -- were it not for one thing. This time, the final critical moments of  Walter Scott's life -- including the eight shots that Slager fired at Scott's back as he fled -- were captured clearly on a cell phone video.

And so this case is going down very differently from the deaths of Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and other unarmed black suspects -- deadly force that has caused a national uproar about policing in 21st Century America.

This time, Officer Slager has been arrested and charged with murder.

"When you're wrong, you're wrong," Keith Summey, the mayor of North Charleston, told a news conference last night. "And if you make a bad decision, don't care if you're behind the shield or just a citizen on the street, you have to live by that decision."

The murder charge against a South Carolina lawman comes just as it seemed the controversy over police shootings might be easing up. The U.S. Justice Department had just issued two reports on Ferguson, Mo., where last August's shooting of unarmed 18-year-old Brown had sparked days of unrest. Federal investigators found systemic racism in policing there--  but also reported the officer who killed Brown had indeed feared for his life and that Brown probably did not have his hands up.

The tragedy in North Charleston started to play out along numbingly familiar lines. Slager initially told investigators that Scott had successful grabbed his stun gun and was about to turn it against the officer, causing him to respond with deadly force. The police chief issued a press release that "this is the part of the job that no one likes..."

What Slager and his boss apparently didn't know was that almost all of the encounter had been captured on video by a close bystander. When that video hit the home page of the New York Times tonight, it was hard to know what was more shocking: The eight shots that the cop fired at Scott -- five apparently struck him -- as his continued to run, or what happens a minute later, when Slager is clearly shown tossing a metallic object next to Scott's dying body. The Times said it appears to be the officer's stun gun, the one he would claimed Scott had wrestled from him.

It's easy to dismiss Slager as "one bad apple," and certainly it's hard to believe that most officers would make the same terrible choices that he made. But this incident is also a clarion call for those seeking meaningful changes in policing, that now is not the time to let up. If nothing else, police forces in too many places doesn't look like the public they serve. In North Charleston in 2007, the Times reported, whites comprised 37 percent of the population but 80 percent of the police force.

Yes, the murder of Walter Scott is different. This time, his grieving relatives may see justice. But what really matters most is the thing that's no different about Walter Scott from Tamir Rice or from Eric Garner and from far too many of the others.

He simply did not deserve to die.