At the entrance to the lot were a new chain secured by a new padlock and a bunch of flowers, now drooping, wrapped in plastic and wedged into the chain-link fence. This was the officer’s point of view as he steadied himself, raised his .45-caliber Glock 21, and fired eight times at the man running away from him. In the near distance, just to the left of the paved track that bisected the grass, was a small memorial at the spot where Scott fell.

This was not only the scene of a cri.e. It also made visible certain things that were not apparent in the video: the last view Scott saw, the exit from the lot, the unnerving quietness of the area, the banality of dying in a small lot off a side street in an unremarkable town. But being there also revealed, in the negative, the peculiarities of the video, peculiarities common to many videos of this kind: the combination of a passive affect and a subjective gaze, irregular lighting and poor sound, the amateur videographer’s unsteady grip and off-camera swearing. Taken by one person (or a single fixed camera) from one point of view, these videos establish the parameters of any subsequent spectatorship of the event. The information they present is, even when shocking, necessarily incomplete. They mediate, and being on the lot helped me remove that filter of mediation somewhat.

Later that day, back in Columbia, I had dinner with Tony Jarrells, a professor of English literature at the University of South Carolina. Jarrells suggested I read “The Two Drovers,” a story by Sir Walter Scott (whose name had come up because of the coincidence). The story, first published in 1827, was about a pair of cattle herders, or drovers, working in the borderlands of England and Scotland. Harry, a Yorkshireman, and Robin, a Highlander, had a dispute about pasturage for their cattle. Harry challenged Robin to a fistfight and, when Robin refused, knocked him down. Robin, in response, walked “seven or eight English miles,” got his dirk (a short knife), walked back, and stabbed Harry dead. This was the core of the story, Jarrells suggested to me: the stretch of time over which Robin intended his crime, those hours of premeditation. When there is premeditation—over hours or over a few seconds—the final moment is accompanied by the weight of the moments preceding it, moments necessary to establish that quantum of moral disregard out of which one person kills another. The video from North Charleston seemed to enact this disregard, this voiding of empathy, in seconds that felt like hours, seconds in which the shooter could have stopped and reconsidered, just as the murderous drover Robin could also have stopped and reconsidered, but didn’t.

— Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things, Faber & Faber, Ch. Death in the Browser Tab, 2016