Police Chief Kerr Putney added to that anger at a news conference on Thursday when he said that the video did not give him “absolute, definitive, visual evidence that would confirm that a person is pointing a gun,” though he insisted that there was evidence to suggest that the police account of the event was correct. A Scott family attorney said Thursday that the family was shown the video.

There is no legal reason to withhold the video from the public, and in this fraught situation, the best way to allay the community’s distrust is complete transparency. Unfortunately, the city’s mayor, Jennifer Roberts, seems largely at sea and distressingly out of touch with how lack of an open governmental response led to demonstrations in places like Ferguson, Mo., Cleveland and Baltimore. She said Thursday morning that she had not even viewed the video.

The folly of stonewalling is well demonstrated in Chicago, where a scandal stemming from the city’s mishandling of a police shooting of a black teenager in 2014 opened wounds that will take years to heal. The city maintained at the outset that Laquan McDonald, 17, was threatening police officers with a knife when they killed him. But when the video was finally made public 13 months later, it showed the young man moving away from the officers when one of them executed him.

The scandal has toppled a county prosecutor, discredited city government and further alienated Chicagoans from a Police Department long known for its brutality.

Some police departments are starting to understand that public trust depends on good faith and openness. In the Tulsa case, for example, the Police Department committed itself to “full transparency and disclosure.”