Many unanswered questions

Our Opinion

Friday, Nov. 6, 2009

It was a Friday afternoon in October and police were making a routine traffic stop in Pisgah. According to the first reports of the incident, drugs were found in the stopped vehicle and there was some kind of altercation between the driver and the police officers on the scene. What happened next is still sketchy.

We do know 44-year-old Cornelius Warren was shot at 11 times by two of the three police officers, and he died from gunshot wounds a short time later.

Warren's family has been disputing the police account of the shooting since the day it happened more than a month ago. They have solicited the services of an attorney and the local branch of the NAACP in order to get information from the Charles County Sheriff's Office about the incident.

Little by little information is coming out about the shooting. Police were very tight-lipped early on. Very little information was shared with the press. Sheriff Rex Coffey did meet with the head of the local NAACP whose organization had some concerns after being approached by the victim's family and members of the community. Since the initial meeting, members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People were allowed to view the dashboard camera footage taken during the shooting. They agreed before viewing the 20-minute-long video that they wouldn't publicize what was on the tape. But whatever they saw led the NAACP to question the police account of the shooting.

That move by the sheriff's office was intended to open the lines of communication between police and the NAACP. But that is not what has happened. What the NAACP members saw convinced them that the shooting was unwarranted and they have now called for a federal investigation of the incident. The sheriff has already said he is having an outside laboratory examine the evidence.

That is probably the right move if he expects the public to believe what the investigation concludes.

"There's no justice to the family for them to hear what a department-backed investigation is going to tell them," William Braxton, president of the Charles County NAACP, said early on in the investigation. "They already know what it's going to tell them."

The trickle of information from the sheriff is further enhancing the perception that the police have put up a wall between themselves and the community which it serves. It took them weeks to release the names of the officers involved or any other details. Police say threats made against the officers were the reason for not revealing their identities. In the meantime, rumors were, and still are, running rampant. There are still many unanswered questions. The police should be able to release more information without it impeding the investigation.

Warren's family and the public deserve to know what happened that day and why police officers responded they way they did. The family deserves to hear what, in the honest assessment of law enforcement officials, went wrong. For its part, the public deserves to hear what police will do differently the next time a similar situation arises.