Politics Ferguson

It just seems to me that we are even coming close to comparing the two things is scary as hell.
That a soldier can look at police officers and find what they are doing disquieting seems like something we should take seriously.

 

Saw there were eight pages to read in this thread and said "not now" quickly.
I haven't followed this very much, but I did see where they were saying that the shots were fired at a close range. In any event the jury had access to a full spectrum of information and made their decision accordingly.
If this prompts more police departments to use body cams, then that will be a positive thing to come out of it.

 

From what I can tell some where fired at close range while others at a distance.
But we will never know because it will never know because the prosecutor actually allowed defense information into the grand jury process.
In 2010 there were 162,000 grand juries and only 11 declined to prosecute.
Either this guy was incompetent or he didn't want it to go to trial.
My guess is the second.

 

Yeah, this "not even gonna have a trial" decision is bullshit.

 

I dunno. If the prosecutor's statement fairly summarized the evidence (a big IF admittedly), it would be awfully tough to get a conviction.

If I were a prosecuting attorney, I sure wouldn't want to go to trial if that's all I had.

 

I found this piece worth the read:

Personally, I think if the shooter who killed Brown had been a civilian and not a cop, and especially if he'd been a person of color, the Grand Jury would've indicted him in 15 minutes and been home for dinner the same day.

 

All this is right at the heart of what is so troubling about the Ferguson case, and so many others like it. The cops seem to kill quite a number of people, all things considered, and though the government apparently claims it has no statistics on this, various social action nonprofits have indicated that according to their analyses of the numbers, a disproportionate number of those police shoot and kill are young black men. Which seems to me to say that something is very much amiss in the US of A.

Part of this, IMO, is attributable to the paranoid-level tension created in a society excessively hyper-permeated with guns. But I think there's much more to it than that. To some small degree, it is true that there is a lot of violence in lower-income, heavily black communities, and thus it makes some sort of sense that there will be correspondingly more police violence-- though I think leaving it at that ignores both the necessity to fix the multitude of broken things about our society that cause black people to be disproportionately poor and undereducated, and also the fact that some number of the young black men killed by police are neither poor nor violent.

I was troubled to see that when the hacktivist group Anonymous publicly "unmasked" members of the Ferguson area KKK, publishing their names and faces online, several of them were either serving police officers, or former police officers. Racism has historically always been a problem in our law enforcement and military organizations (which I mention only because of the high numbers of former military personnel who end up in law enforcement), and in our justice system at large, and though it seems to have gone underground more nowadays, it also seems like it has not ceased, only become less visible. I don't think it can be ignored as a major contributory factor in both the shootings of young black men by police, the inability of said police to be indicted and successfully brought to trial for those shootings, and also for the disproportionate numbers of black people-- especially young black men-- who are imprisoned in this excessively incarceratory nation of ours.

Something needs to be done.

 

I won't disagree that sometimes officers shoot innocents. That being said, this was not one of those situations. The jury made the correct decision. Brown assaulted Darren Wilson.

 

Even if that were the case, which I am by no means convinced of, could Wilson not have tasered him? Could he not have subdued him with pepper spray/mace? Could he not have subdued him with his baton?

As far as I understand, the police are deliberately given several alternative means of self-defense as part of their regular equipment, precisely so that they don't have to fall back on deadly force in every altercation.

 

I can't understand how anyone could look at how local law enforcement community has responded to this situation and also believe they have any credibility. Their whole response seems to have been designed to ensure that Darren Wilson sees as little as possible in the way of consequences.

I'm not sure how grand juries work, but if Darren Wilson's colleagues were responsible for collecting the evidence that was presented to the grand jury, then I don't know that the choice to not indict has anything to do with whether the shooting was justified.

 

From my perspective: I have a collapsible asp, resides on my belt behind my gun. In a car seat, I can't reach it without leaning forward and reaching behind me. There would be no room to deploy it, and, no way to wield it with authority. Pepper spray in a semi closed car would blow back on me, leaving me just as vulnerable. Taser would be an option. However we carry ours in a crossdraw. That way it's a deliberate motion with our gun hand. So if I were right handed, it would be on my left side. Towards the window. Also, our dept does not carry pepper spray and a taser. Some pepper sprays are flammable. Tasering someone who has been pepper sprayed could set them on fire.

 

Here's the point of a grand jury, it is not to provide defense information.
It is to decide if there is probable cause to go to trial.
Just in what the prosecutor said in his rambling, screwed up speech it sounded like there was probable cause for a trial.

I don't judge if Officer Wilson could have used different methods because we will never really know, because the question will never be asked and answered under oath in court.
I did notice one thing from the records is how everyone made such a big deal about how big Brown was but it seems Wilson is the same height and about only 60 pounds lighter, so the whole 'he looked like Hulk Hogan and a monster thing' seems a bit out of whack.

The prosecutor didn't want this case to go to trial so it didn't, plan and simple.
Now they are going to release a bunch of second hand information all targeted to make Brown look as bad as possible and hope that will be the end of it.

By releasing the news at night under the conditions they did they knew the organizers wouldn't be able to control the looters so they can tar anyone who complains with that brush.

 

You know the lifetime/oxygen/whoever covers this area film showing the police officer as a horrible monster is already in the works out there. And someone is no doubt working on a screenplay as well portraying this kid as a hardened felon that planned to murder the officer and steal his car.

 

On the civilian side the guns and attendant violence are a result of the spread of things like drug trafficking and organized crime... problems that come as a result of policy failures like our profit motivated runaway incarceration (which overwhelmingly targets blacks and men) and dysfunctional public policies. There's also the cyclical effects of these things leading to cultural problems which in turn tend to reinforce themselve, things like the glorification of criminal culture and considering success to be "acting white". On the non-civilian side the problem is an equally dysfunctional law enforcement culture and doctrine which causes most of the problems it purports to be reacting to, as discussed in the police thread. When you combine the two of those and each side is predominately composed of different groups historically at odds with one another you get problems.

People always think of violent crime in the US as the disease when it's just a symptom. Crime comes from somewhere, there's reasons why we have so much more than other western industrialized democracies. It isn't just something in the water over here.

As for racism this case is a textbook example of the difference between traditional racism and racial biases which exist as an undercurrent in society. I would be perfectly willing to believe that the officer here wasn't remotely racist... but he was nonetheless still inculturated with a racial bias that treats black men as exaggeratedly dangerous and threatening.

 

Just learned something interesting, the prosecutor, McCulloch is the son of a police officer who was shot in the line of duty. In his 24 years as prosecutor, he has never recommended charges against any police officer. How did that happen? It happened in large part because these cases are not handled like other cases.

You might think he would want to recuse himself from cases like this all things considered.

This is a great article about the questions the press should have asked but didn't.

The questions no one asked St. Louis prosecutor Bob McCulloch