Charlotte back to normal Friday after a peaceful night of protests

The protests were widely peaceful following two nights of violence on Tuesday and Wednesday night in response to Tuesday’s fatal police shooting of a black man.

Though the curfew went into effect after midnight early Friday, police did not force protesters to leave because they remained peaceful.

According to The Charlotte Observer, at around 5 a.m. Friday the state troopers who had guarded the EpiCentre, which is the uptown mall that had sustained the most damage and seen the most violence overnight Wednesday, had been replaced with the normal security guards.

On Thursday night, only faith leaders were seen leading prayers near the EpiCentre.

Police presence was limited throughout uptown Charlotte as people awoke on Friday, according to reports.

Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts told CNN on Friday that the curfew would be in place again Friday night.

Roberts added that she is in favor of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department releasing the dashboard camera video footage showing the incident involving Keith Lamont Scott, a 43-year-old black man who was fatally shot allegedly by Officer Bentley Vinson, who was also black.

Police Chief Kerr Putney told reporters at a news conference on Thursday he has no plans to release the video of Scott’s shooting just yet for fear it could jeopardize the investigation.

“Transparency’s in the eye of the beholder,” Putney said. “If you think we should display a victim’s worst day for public consumption, that is not the transparency I’m speaking of.”

He later told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that the investigation is being turned over to North Carolina’s State Bureau of Investigation, so the video may be released soon anyway.

Putney, Roberts and Scott’s family have seen the video.

Police say when they approached Scott’s vehicle parked near his apartment complex he was armed with a handgun and repeatedly ignored demands to drop the weapon. Scott’s family say he was reading a book when officers shot him, though no book was found at the scene.

According to both Putney and Roberts, it is not clear in the video if Scott is indeed pointing the handgun at officers. The family has agreed that they cannot tell what is in his hands either when he was fatally shot. A handgun was recovered at the scene.

Activists have now turned to protesting the failure to release the video, heard chanting on Thursday night, “We want the tape!”

Republican Gov. Pat McCrory in July signed into law legislation that blocks the release of police videos from body or dashboard cameras with limited exceptions. However, the law doesn’t go into effect until October.