No release on bail for police officer who shot black motorist

Former North Charleston police office Michael Slager, is lead into court, Thursday, Sept. 10, 2015 in Charleston, S.C. A judge reached no decision Thursday on whether to grant bail for Slager, a white former police officer charged with killing an unarmed black man following a traffic stop in coastal South Carolina. Grace Beahm/The Post And Courier via AP

WASHINGTON, United States—A US court declined Monday to release on bail a former US police officer who had shot a South Carolina man in the back in April.

Michael Slager, at the time a police officer in North Charleston, was fired, arrested and charged with murder three days after the incident after video emerged showing him shooting motorist Walter Scott in the back five times as Scott was trying to run away.

Slager, 33, is white and Scott, 50, was black, and the shooting set off protests in the city as a string of incidents around the country caused anger over police violence against African Americans to boil over during the past year.

If set free on bail, Slager would have represented “an unreasonable danger to the community, and the request for release on bond should be denied,” South Carolina Circuit Judge Clifton Newman wrote in the decision.