HOTHEAD

S.C. Cop Faced Excessive-Force Charge

In 2013.

Michael Slager, the white officer who killed an unarmed black man in South Carolina last weekend, faced a complaint for use of excessive force two years ago. In the 2013 confrontation—also with an unarmed black man—Slager allegedly barged into the home of Mario Givens after waking him up and threatened to tase him if Givens refused him entry. “I didn’t want that to happen to me, so I raised my arms over my head, and when I did, he tased me in my stomach anyway,” Givens, now 33, told the AP. A spokesperson for the North Charleston Police Department said it will review the decision not to charge Slager in that case, during which the officer was looking for Givens’s brother Matthew, who was more than half a foot shorter than the man who was tased.