US presidential nominees Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have postponed their planned trip to Charlotte, North Carolina, which has been rocked by unrest following a fatal police shooting of a black man.
On Friday, Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts asked the two major-party presidential candidates to delay plans to visit her city, which has been rocked this week by unrest following the police killing of Keith Lamont Scott.
Hours later, the campaigns of Trump and Clinton announced they were dropping plans to visit the city in the upcoming days.
"We appreciate the support of the candidates. We appreciate that they are concerned about Charlotte," Roberts said in a CNN interview. “At this point, we do have very stretched resources for security and they are working around the clock. If there would be a way to delay those visits in terms of giving us a chance to get our city back to order and back to more of a state of normalcy, that would probably be ideal."
A Clinton campaign spokeswoman said she will instead visit Charlotte on October 2. A Trump campaign official said the trip will be postponed indefinitely.
The shooting death of Scott by police on September 20 has sparked demonstrations in Charlotte and other US cities over the use of lethal force by police, particularly against African-Americans.
A video has been released showing the moments before and after the fatal shooting of Scott.
The footage shows the wife of Keith Lamont Scott repeatedly telling officers he is not armed and pleading with them not to shoot her husband as they shout at him to drop a gun.
The video, recorded by Scott’s wife and released Friday by his family, does not indicate whether Scott had a gun. Scott’s wife, Rakeyia Scott, tells officers in the video that he has a TBI, or traumatic brain injury.
On Thursday, prosecutors in Tulsa, Oklahoma, charged a white female officer with manslaughter for killing an unarmed black man on a roadway last week.