Ferguson MO

Even if Wilson had 80 pounds on Brown it wouldn't matter because Brown showed that he wasn't afraid to attack a police officer. That initial scuffle in the car is the most important and damning evidence in this case and there's no doubt that it occurred so Wilson couldn't be making that part of the story up.

I'm sick of hearing this more than you can imagine.

His hands were not up when Wilson shot him. This is almost completely indisputable.

First off, no police officer on the planet would shoot over a suspects head. They are trained to fire center mast, as in the chest area, and Brown had wounds to his arm. That means his arms were at his side or in front of him which would be consistent with Wilson's statement that he had his right arm down holding his pants so they wouldn't fall down as he ran which leads me to the next point.

Brown had a wound on his upper arm and one on his chest. It's believed that one of the bullets hit his arm, passed through and hit his chest. How in the holy hell can that happen if he had his hands in the air?!?!?!??!?!?!??!

Some of the eye witnesses say Brown put his hands up momentarily then put them down to charge Wilson. This may be the closest he ever came to putting his hands up, but it's obvious from 3 autopsies that his arms were down while the shooting occurred.

If you want to have a debate about this, don't bring up stupid crap that anyone can see isn't true. I've had to listen to "Hands up, Don't shoot" for months and it's just ridiculous.

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Hey, don't try to put logic in their slogans. If you take away the "Hands up don't shoot myth" and you will be left with is "Black Lives Matter" and "No justice. No peace".

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great read

I gave up on reading that after I failed to fit in with literally all of the author's "reflex" paragraphs.

I do know that black people are treated differently than white people, not just by the police but by a lot of people including other black people. I know Trayvon Martin should still be alive. I know we all harbor racists notions and prejudices.

So what? It doesn't change the facts in the Ferguson shooting. If the protesters were smart they'd move this to New York or Cleveland where genuinely disturbing things were done by police that are getting almost none of the attention that Ferguson received.

So what's your point?

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Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0

Are you being serious?

The point is, if you are willing to ignore the physical evidence, the only bit of legitimate evidence that exists in any case (eyewitness testimony is the worst evidence in any case, every law enforcement official and lawyer will tell you that and this case proves it), then you aren't seeking truth, you are just blindly pushing an agenda. The reason this matters is the people who's minds you want to win over won't take you seriously if you are chanting "Hands up, Don't shoot."

When the local protesters started protesting the shooting death of Vonderrit Myers the cause almost lost my sympathy and I know for a fact it did lose sympathy from a lot of people. Unlike Mike Brown, at the time of this shooting we all knew Myers shot at the officer so we knew this was a justified shooting. But, when people took to the streets they almost lost the war of public opinion, which is the only war that matters. I stressed that because that's the key answer to your question.

The war of public opinion needs to be won by the protesters to enact change. They have to win minds over to their cause who were on the fence about it or not engaged at all. The problem arises, though, when they ignored hard evidence then they are no longer taken seriously and people check out. That's his point and mine.

I haven't read this whole thread, so I don't know if anyone responded to this, but the grand jury trial didn't prove the cop's innocence any more than it proved his guilt; that's not what grand juries are for. There's no defense attorney, so how could it? The prosecutor presents his evidence and the arguments for trying this case, and the jury decides whether there will be a criminal case. Since there's no defense attorney present, the prosecutor has a lot of latitude to make a case, and grand jury trials are usually open and shut. (An example where it might not be, might be if they were indicting a mob boss, where the evidence linking them to a crime might be especially complicated, witnesses might be reluctant to come forth, etc.) My wife was a public defender for 6 years, and the running joke amongst her co-workers (besides the truism that prosecutors don't like to indict cops, because they have to work with them) was that if a prosecutor wanted to, she could indict a ham sandwich -- and with some of the cases that get to trial, they might as well have. Again, an indictment by the grand jury wouldn't have meant that guilt was determined either way, just that they bought the prosecutor's argument that there should be a trial. What some people find fishy about this failure to indict is that it's generally pretty easy for prosecutors to get an indictment (again, no defense attorney present), so the fact that this D.A. didn't (and basically presented the cop's defense), indicates that they didn't want an indictment in the first place, and sunk the case at grand jury (instead of just not pressing charges), to make it look like they didn't have a choice.

But if the physical evidence implies no crime was committed then the prosecutor wouldn't have pressed any charges to begin with. Even if they had ignored the grand jury there was no crime with which to charge Wilson.

My understanding is that the whole reason there's a "hands up, don't shoot" thing going on is because of the incredibly higher chance of a black person being shot by police than a white person, often with the flimsiest of justifications. Even in the case of Vonderrit Myers, which you say was justified due to Myers having used a gun, it seems especially egregious considering how the police originally claimed that Myers was facing forward when he was shot yet the autopsy later revealed that he was shot from behind. That's without mentioning the fact that most of the shots were in the lower extremities while the fatal shot just happened to be through the face. Even so, consider how often white people have actually fired guns at living targets (or at least wielded them in a threatening manner) yet are taken into custody alive while black people get shot dead for something as simple as carrying a toy sword as part of a cosplay. Then the media jumps in and decides to frame the dead black person who got shot as a thug by digging up whatever dirt there is on them while a white guy shooting up his classmates is portrayed as a nice kid who just so happened to have mental issues, which also contributes to the demonisation of mental illness.

I have a problem with donniedarko saying that taking away "Hands Up, Don't Shoot" as a slogan just leaves them with "Black Lives Matter" and "No Justice, No Peace" as if those are easily dismissable slogans. The whole reason "Black Lives Matter" became such an important slogan is tied into what I said in that last paragraph - that black people often get killed for the poorest of reasons (if there's a reason in the first place) while white people who also endanger other members of the public at least get taken alive more often than not. The implication is that it's okay to kill black people because apparently nobody cares enough if you do, so "Black Lives Matter" came about as a way of contradicting this systematic racism - systematic racism that was ironically represented by non-black people trying to change it to "All Lives Matter" and missing the point severely.

First off, do you have actual statistics for how many black people are killed by cops versus how many white people are killed? Everyone has been throwing that around a lot without actually proving it. This may just be a perception thing, you realize that, right?

Second, I don't disagree with you. It's very obvious black people are treated differently by the police than white people. In fact, black people are treated differently by other black people. Go here for this quote about a game where you play a police officer shooting people and making decisions about who requires lethal force:

"In effect, we have a more impulsive trigger finger when confronted by black men and are more cautious with whites. This is true of black players as well, apparently because they absorb the same cultural values as everyone else: Correll has found no statistically significant difference between the play of blacks and that of whites in the shooting game."

On the Cracked.com podcast a few weeks back they talked about a study where people were flashed pictures of people and they had to hit a button in less than a second if they believed the person shown was perceived to be threatening. In that study black people and white people hit the button for pictures of black people more than white people.

The real problem with the black community in the US is one of perception (funnily enough, I think perception, or misperceiving reality, is the cause of pretty much every single thing that's wrong with society).

That said, I stand by what I said. No one who's on the fence about these issues wants to jump on board with a group of people who are ignoring facts.

Regarding Myers, he shot at the officer and that gave the officer the right to shoot him. The reason he was shot in the back was because it was dark and because the officer knew Myers was a danger because, well, he shot at the officer. It's always been the case that officers can use deadly force when the suspect is considered dangerous. Being shot in the back doesn't matter if Myers already showed that he was willing to kill someone.

Seeking an indictment means the prosecutor did press charges for a crime, so it's not clear what you're disagreeing with. In fact, there was evidence in the accused cop's favor as well as evidence against him. That is normal (it's why we have trials, to weigh both sides and determine within a reasonable doubt if a defendant is guilty). What is not normal is for the prosecutor to present the defense's evidence and arguments to a grand jury. I cannot make it clear enough that it is not what a grand jury trial is for, nor is it how a prosecutor acting in good faith (or competently) would use one.

I think I already said this but, did it occur to you that the prosecutor never believed a crime was committed at all?

Everything that was done in this case was done after nights of looting and rioting and every step they've taken seemed like a calculated step to try to lessen the violence. The shooting happened on Aug 9 (my birthday! ) and on the following night they burned down the QT and it snowballed from there. My guess is the prosecutor never had any intent of charging the officer because he believed no crime was committed but, in order to lessen the tension, they put this on the grand jury to give the appearance of action being taken.

If the prosecutor didn't "intend" to charge, he sure messed that up, since as I said before, he did in fact charge the officer. If you're arguing that the prosecutor may have charged the officer in bad faith you are actually agreeing with me, except that you have a theory that he did so as part of a benevolent conspiracy to "lessen the tension", that was justified because in your reading, "there is no physical evidence that a crime was committed." Another theory is that the prosecutor had the right amount of evidence to press charges in a normal situation (unarmed man shot to death after a struggle, physical evidence and witnesses linking the defendant to the shooting. This is all that's needed for a trial.), but treated the grand jury trial differently than he would in a normal situation, because the defendant was a cop or for some other reason.

There may be other possibilities as well, but I'm unwilling to jump further down this hole with you, so I'll point out again that a grand jury trial is not just a petit jury trial where we trust one person to argue both sides fairly and evenly. They don't decide questions of guilt because that would be to allowing the fox to guard the hen-house. That said, the fact that a grand jury is generally a rubber stamp that the prosecutor wields is not a problem if we can assume that he wants to press charges when he presses charges (and if he doesn't want to press charges, he conveniently has that option, so this is usually a safe bet); but if we can't assume that, it can easily become an opportunity for playing favorites, doling out one standard of justice (acting as prosecutor) for one person or group, another (acting as defense) for a different one (this is one of the reasons I keep re-iterating this point). So, even if I accepted your hypothesis that this prosecutor acted in bad faith for a good cause, there would still be serious concerns.

I really don't have much more to add to this discussion (which isn't to say I don't have more that I think about it, but emotions are already hot enough on this topic without me fanning the flames), so I'll let you have the final word.

By the way, my birthday's 2 days more auspicious than yours