Will SC agents rubber stamp innocence or honestly investigate Georgetown police shooting?

The video looked like a scene staged by the Keystone Cops – until it didn’t.

After an alleged traffic violation, a South Carolina police officer decided that crime was worth a long high-speed car chase to apprehend the scoundrel who didn’t come to a complete stop in the face of an octagonal sign declaring he must. The cop and the assailant likely pushed their cars to speeds of at least 100 miles per hour. The rolling-stop crusader didn’t stop until his car ended up in a ditch on the side of a back road in a county outside the cop’s jurisdiction.

The cop jumped out of her car, gun drawn and pointed at the car whose left front tire was firmly in the ditch with the rear tires suspended in the air. As the cop approached, the passenger side front door slowly opened. She slipped in the mud, falling on her backside. She moved the gun to her left hand to balance herself on the ground with her right hand while yelling commands. It’s a comedy of incompetence – until things turned serious. As she struggled to stand up, her backside maybe a foot off the ground, she pulled the trigger as the man was exiting the ditched car. Afterwards, she yelled at the man, asking what was in his hands even as the man slumped lifeless onto the muddy earth.

It happened in February in a rural part of Georgetown County. The man was 46-year-old Robert Junior Langley of Hemingway, S.C. The officer was Sgt. Cassandra Dollard of the tiny Hemingway Police Department. The incident didn’t generate national headlines, though high-profile attorney Bakari Sellers led a press conference with Langley’s family to note the “cruel” and “unjust fashion” in which Langley had been killed. I will admit I only remembered the incident after hearing about a more recent shooting in Georgetown.

The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division said a Georgetown police officer killed 50-year-old James Frazier on July 16. SLED hasn’t released the name of the officer or many other details other than that Frazier was allegedly armed with a knife. It was the 18th time a police officer shot someone in South Carolina this year, though it was the first time involving the Georgetown Police Department. I don’t yet know what to make of the most recent shooting. We just don’t have enough details. Saying a man had a knife is not enough to declare the cop justified. This is bright red South Carolina. If the possession of a gun isn’t automatically considered a threat, neither should simply possessing a knife. What’s the evidence that Frazier was about to hurt someone? That information has not yet been released, so it’s far too early to make a sound judgment.

That’s why community trust in police is paramount, something that is lacking far too often. We have to believe SLED won’t conduct a phony investigation and rubber stamp a declaration of the officer’s innocence. My level of skepticism is high, given what I know about how such investigations have been handled within the state and nationally, making it difficult to hold cops to account. We give cops the authority to snuff out life. We must ensure they use that level of force only when necessary.

Dollard killed a man after a high-speed chase. She was rightly charged with involuntary manslaughter. That doesn’t make up for all the times cops were unjustly declared justified for killing someone. But it was a small step towards rebuilding trust that cops won’t be shielded from the consequences of bad acts. We should expect nothing less from the investigation of this recent shooting.

Issac Bailey is a McClatchy Opinion writer based in Myrtle Beach.