I guess a lot of (white) people support the death penalty for second-degree robbery (by a young black male).
There does seem to be a bit of an underpants gnome theory of revolution going around.
1) Go to St. Louis
2) Provoke the police into overreaction
....
3) Collapse of the state and class society.
1. That would be "robbery". The quotes are important.
The problem with arresting cops is that they generally start off doing things that we want them to be doing till they fuck up. In this case, it is acceptable that he get in an altercation with mike brown, rev up his own fight or flight, then threaten mike brown with a gun. After that he fucked up.
Don't pull a gun on someone you are mad at is a pretty good rule, but it doesn't always apply to cops.
He certainly should be fired. Maybe he should go to jail. I can see why he wont go to jail though.
2: the actual population of Ferguson seem to have a very sensible view of the likelihood of a revolution a) happening or b) doing them any good.
3 is not terribly believable, unless it's customary in Missouri for shopkeepers, after a normal transaction, to come out from behind the counter, try to stop the customer leaving and have to be shoved out of the way.
3: I don't find that interpretation very persuasive. And I thought Michael Brown's friend (Dorian Johnson) had admitted that the two of them stole the cigars?
But I also don't see how the convenience store robbery (or "robbery") is relevant to the shooting.
I don't know what's customary in Missouri, but I would expect a shopkeeper who had been the victim of a robbery which included a physical altercation to report it to the police. Apparently this guy confounded my expectations in this regard.
It shouldn't surprise us too much that an ethnic shopkeeper's first thought wasn't "get me Ferguson PD!"
I don't know - it's not that hard for me to understand.
You've got a case where a couple dollars of merchandize were stolen and someone was shoved (but not really harmed), quite possibly by someone the store owner knew (or knew his family), in a community with a police force known for being untrustworthy and openly hostile to the people in it.
I mean, if the choice he had was "young person in the community with a promising future will be arrested and charged with a felony" and "next time I see his mom I'll tell her and she'll make him apologize and pay for whatever he stole" I can see him opting for the second.
I could sort of imagine a shopkeeper coming out because he doesn't want to break up the box of cigars even if Brown left enough money on the counter for a partial box. But the police report says the witness heard Brown being told "he had to pay for those cigars first", and I feel like if there was more to know we would have heard it from Dorian Johnson by some means by now.
Johnson has admitted through his lawyer that it was a robbery. Don't make me find the link.
unless it's customary in Missouri for shopkeepers, after a normal transaction, to come out from behind the counter, try to stop the customer leaving and have to be shoved out of the way
And what, when you're shopping you don't reach over the counter to grab stuff and then leave? Weird.
But I also don't see how the convenience store robbery (or "robbery") is relevant to the shooting.
Because it addresses the repeated accusations from his family and a bazillion other people early on that this was probably just some racist cop stopping him for being black. Brown was in fact a suspect in a robbery that had been broadcast on the police radios. It also addresses the assertions from his family and friends that this gentle giant of their was an angel incapable of violence and that this accusation that he assaulted the officer was grossly out of character. As Ajay pointed out in the other thread, Brown assaulting someone attempting to detain him seems a bit more likely considering he did exactly that then minutes before encountering the police. I also don't buy the contentions that this was normal teenage aggression. I got into my share of fights growing up and this is different. I didn't have a problem taking a swing at someone my age if I thought they had it coming but not in a million years at 18 would I have had it in me to blatantly start taking things from behind a store counter and then go after a store owner for attempting to stop me.
People, the shop owner might not have called the cops because he could see and/or hear someone else was already calling.
Hasn't the Ferguson PD said that Wilson didn't know about the robbery?
What's maybe most interesting to me is that this has now gone on for so long. I can't really remember a comparable recent situation in the US, in which things seem to have just stayed on the borderline between protest and riot for such a long period of time.
It's going to go on, I imagine, until they indict or don't indict Wilson. Then people will either go home or riot.
15: What they said was that wasn't the reason for the initial stop but that Wilson realized they were possibly the suspects during the course of the encounter.
The chief said so unambiguously at first, but I think he walked that back later. Seems like he's saying Wilson initially stopped them purely for walking in the street but at some later point saw the cigars in Brown's hand and connected it with the robbery.
Um, he wasn't stopped for being a suspect in the robbery (according to the police chief, unless that story has changed again), he was stopped for jaywalking (while black). The police officer supposedly heard about the robbery while interacting with him.
It's not even clear from the police report if the witness statement they describe comes from an employee of the store or not. (I can't tell from the redacting. It looks like the story starts with the clerk, but then shortly afterwards looks like it's being told by someone else in the store. But then it attributes something to the owner as well, so I'm not sure who is telling the officer what.)
Because it addresses the repeated accusations from his family and a bazillion other people early on that this was probably just some racist cop stopping him for being black. Brown was in fact a suspect in a robbery that had been broadcast on the police radios
But the police officer did not stop Brown in connection with the convenience store robbery. He stopped him for walking in the middle of the street.
Re: "just some racist cop stopping him for being black." That is not quite the accusation that I would make. I'm willing to believe that the cop had reason to stop Brown for jaywalking. But, from what I have read, I am not at all willing to believe that the cop had reason to shoot Brown, much less shoot him dead. And I strongly suspect that race was a factor in the cop's escalation of the confrontation (from a routine stop to a deadly shooting).
That TPM article is a little confused on the law, but does anyone really expect this prosecutor to indict?
I had somehow forgotten until just now that an excessive force appeal I handled several years ago involved the St. Louis County drug task force, which google tells me the current Ferguson police chief commanded at the time. It was small potatoes (injuries mainly to pride rather than body) and my client appeared to be a complete dickhead, but boy did it seem like those cops were just gratuitously sadistic and contemptuous of the riffraff.
Yes, the circumstances of the robbery are almost certainly not going to justify the shooting in any way.
Not sure if this has been linked before: how the election schedule helps keep Ferguson's government white.
Also, further consolidation of the city isn't a bad idea.
In what other metros is consolidation badly needed?
City, but 4 miles from Ferguson. Police saying the person was brandishing a knife.
He stopped him for walking in the middle of the street...and then realized Brown was a robbery suspect. It's not a routine stop anymore.
And Dorian's Johnson's account of the cop's escalation seems weird from my perspective. Michael Brown was 6'4 and 300 pounds, the size of an NFL lineman. Go sit in your car and imagine trying to grab that guy by the neck and pulling him through the window. It's a bizarre way to try and arrest someone. It's counter to the basic tactics cops get trained in and there's like 0 chance of pulling off things like handcuffing the guy. And Johnson's account is that now Brown is merely pulling away from Wilson and not assaulting him or grabbing at his weapon in any way. And yet he also says he heard Wilson tell Brown multiple times to stop or he was going to shoot. This is also odd. People pull away all the time. They don't want to be put in cuffs, tense up, pull away, etc. It's totally routine and it would out of the ordinary for a guy with half a dozen years on the job to have someone just pull away from him and immediately think "now I must shoot this guy".
And sure, some people suck at the job and do amazing stupid things and it's a possibility. But IMO people are way underestimating the plausibility of the police account vs the other.
The last time I checked, which was yesterday I think so it could be entirely different at this point, the police account appears to include the claim that Brown ran thirty five feet before he turned around, charged the officer and was shot in the head from above while running, and as a result ended up dying on the ground approximately thirty five feet from the car. People can increase their estimation of the plausibility of this account quite a bit before it starts to sound plausible.
Also, yes if that is what happened then, afterwards, it changed to one that wasn't a routine stop. But that doesn't exactly undercut the claim about why he initially stopped him.
But IMO people are way underestimating the plausibility of the police account vs the other.
One thing that bugs me is that you can make these kinds of arguments that the police may have been following their training and doing what they were supposed to do on a case-by-case basis, but taking a step back and looking at all of the events it's clear that police in the US frequently (and disproportionately often) kill unarmed, usually young, black men. This seems to indicate that either the way police are trained is contributing to the problem, or you should find it likely that in a reasonably large fraction of the cases in the news the police are making grave mistakes. If it's the latter, then it seems like there should be more distinguishing details about this case that lead you to the conclusion that the police account is plausible; if it's the former, then all your comments about what is standard and expected police procedure are not really going to mitigate the officer's actions.
As of at least yesterday, some white communists came to town, and apparently what they want is to provoke the police.
I hope they get the beat-down they so desire and that it doesn't spill over to include innocent bystanders.
Whatever account you believe, the folks involved behaved strangely.
Two seeming facts: The corpse was 30 feet from the car, and all of the entrance wounds were in the front. I wonder how many feet a charging suspect would cover before being hit six times. (I wonder how many shots were misses.)
Just given those facts, the "surrender" story sounds a whole lot more plausible than the "charging" story. Am I overlooking something?
Attention! We need all the communists to leave the designated Free Speech Zone, and move to the designated Severe Beating Zone. Thank you.
And the Staten Island DA is going to prosecute (or bring to grand jury - synonymous?) the killer of Eric Garner.
the police account appears to include the claim that Brown ran thirty five feet before he turned around, charged the officer and was shot in the head from above while running, and as a result ended up dying on the ground approximately thirty five feet from the car
I don't think they've been that specific on how far he made it before turning around. I think it's basically been along the lines of "Brown ran, Wilson pursued, Brown turns back, Wilson shoots him, body is 35 feet from the vehicle."
prosecute (or bring to grand jury - synonymous?)
No.
What 29 said. When you combine the probabilities of multiple events together, you multiply probabilities. It doesn't take many steps that each seem plausible by themselves before you get to an explanation that is implausible unless all the individual steps are actually just related parts of the same thing. The race of the guys getting shot by the police is the only obvious commonality.
If it's the latter, then it seems like there should be more distinguishing details about this case that lead you to the conclusion that the police account is plausible; if it's the former, then all your comments about what is standard and expected police procedure are not really going to mitigate the officer's actions.
I'm just throwing out possibilities here. We don't have the two official autopsies, police reports, etc. that might give us those details.
34: Aha. But what causes Brown to turn? The expectation that Wilson is going to catch him?
32:Attention! We need all the communists to leave the designated Free Speech Zone, and move to the designated Severe Beating Zone. Thank you.
Done in spirit years ago. You're welcome.
As a helpful incitement for further beatings, I see no problem in using Ferguson and its oppressed as a spark for the Greater Conflagration. The few sacrificed for the many.
Part of our problem is too much focus on individuals and individual cases. Other young black men have been shot or otherwise mistreated in the last few days, even in Ferguson, but we are still cosplaying Perry Mason. Make a slogan and battlecry of Ferguson, and move up and out
As for as duration, is Detroit still burning from 1968? Some of the riots lasted weeks.
So, really, this isn't a defense of the police or an argument for a different reading of the situation, it's a more abstract argument about epistemology generally?
29: It's plausible to me that the only good way to cut down on this is to just have a smaller (and more proportional) number of interactions between police and young black men, and that the percentage of interactions leading to unarmed people getting killed may be hard to change on the police training side.
Just given those facts, the "surrender" story sounds a whole lot more plausible than the "charging" story. Am I overlooking something?
Hopefully the official autopsies with all the info like trajectories of the bullets in the body will help with this. That chest shot look like (at least on the initial autopsy diagram from the family) a re-entry from one of the arm shots. If it turned out to have hit the arm and traveled front to back through the chest like Brown's arms were crossed up in front of him then I'd think there might be something to him charging back at the officer because IME that's not how people surrender. But if that bullet skimmed the arm and went sideways through the chest like his arms were up away from his body and he's flinching away from getting shot? Then yeah, I'd be much more inclined to think a cop just blasted a guy who was giving up.
So, really, this isn't a defense of the police or an argument for a different reading of the situation
I really am just pushing back against what I think is unwarranted certainty here. We totally might have a case here where a cop panicked and unjustifiably shot a guy.
34: Aha. But what causes Brown to turn? The expectation that Wilson is going to catch him?
Maybe, he doesn't look like much of a runner on that video. Or maybe he really was getting rounds cranked off at him as he ran and he stopped.
I really am just pushing back against what I think is unwarranted certainty here.
If that's what you're trying to do, then things like this
It also addresses the assertions from his family and friends that this gentle giant of their was an angel incapable of violencereally don't sound like it. What that sounds like is "dude was a sleazeball and deserved to get shot".
really don't sound like it. What that sounds like is "dude was a sleazeball and deserved to get shot".
Fact.
41 29: It's plausible to me that the only good way to cut down on this is to just have a smaller (and more proportional) number of interactions between police and young black men, and that the percentage of interactions leading to unarmed people getting killed may be hard to change on the police training side.
But I would have thought the only way to have a smaller number of interactions would also involve modifying the training or standard procedures.
it's a more abstract argument about epistemology generally?
That's certainly true of me. There's a certain epistemological humility that I think is called for in a situation like this.
My own uncertainty, however, is considerably less regarding subsequent actions by the Ferguson PD.
Also: I've seen up close setups like the one in Ferguson, where a predominantly African American populace is governed and policed almost exclusively by whites. Such arrangements are inherently corrupt. I'm not inclined to give the power structure there the benefit of the doubt on anything.
One thing that bugs me is that you can make these kinds of arguments that the police may have been following their training and doing what they were supposed to do on a case-by-case basis, but taking a step back and looking at all of the events it's clear that police in the US frequently (and disproportionately often) kill unarmed, usually young, black men.
This is right in general, but also for the specific case. We have pretty good reason at this point to think that Ferguson PD in particular is not actually a very competent police force, both because of what's come out about the lead-up to recent events and the way they've handled the protests. So the argument that the murder version of events is implausible because incompatible with what any competent basically trained cop would do---and as far as I can tell this is basically what gswift is saying in 27---is not super persuasive, it seems to me, even if you don't step back quite as far as essear recommends.
On preview: 45 and 46 are right. Certainly that gswift is coming off as defending the cop, not counseling epistemic caution, anyway---I'm less sure about "deserved to get shot."
Not true! You could have a policy where police officers involved in violent altercations with black people have to wear a special hat with a flashing light and siren on it for the next two years so that black people know when they're coming and can leave the area.
What drives me crazy about 29 et al is that the recent round of killings by police of unarmed black men(link to Melissa Harris-Perry tribute) is happening in a context of the lowest level of violent crime in over 50 years. The Mike Brown and Eric Garner incidents escalated from, respectively, harassment over walking in the street and illegally selling cigarettes. Unlike when Ice Cube was releasing "Endangered Species", there's no crack epidemic or associated gang wars to rationalize the "vigilance". It's just unvarnished disciplining of poor black people for its own sake.
51: See also this chart. Key quote: " Police haven't been this safe since 1875."
My own uncertainty, however, is considerably less regarding subsequent actions by the Ferguson PD.
Right. I understand why people are doing it, but getting bogged down in lawyering the shooting itself is pretty silly given current information. What we do know is that this is a PD and a region that has done a stunningly crappy job at dealing with its community in general and at crowd control in this particular situation. That the PD (and, apparently, the St Louis County law enforcement system as a whole) sucks at dealing with its community and at crowd control is something that we really, clearly, do know, and that is obvious without waiting for subsequent reports.
Cops don't have anything better to do. We need to get a good crime wave going so they're too busy to bug harmless black people.
50 to 47.
It really is hard to believe that the argument is just a plea for epistemic humility, especially since it doesn't seem to be changing as each additional bit of evidence comes out. And if it is that then relying on statements to do it made by someone openly acting in bad faith sends kind of the opposite message.
Also, if it is just epistemology why not have fun with it the way epistemologists do?
You could argue that we're being too hasty in assuming that Brown was actually a human being prior to seeing the autopsy report. He could have just been a sentient gaseous entity from another planet living here under the supervision of his "parents" (actually robots). But he had become trapped in his protective camouflage suit as a result of an accident in the kitchen a year ago and so couldn't fit back into his ship to leave. Darren Wilson, upon being informed of this, simply acted in the purest of community service related motives, and punctured the suit in order to make it possible for him to leave. We just don't know for certain until we see the autopsy reports confirming that Brown had internal organs, that's all.
Incidentally, as long as we're on the "Brown was a violent criminal, no surprise that he'd attack an officer" thread---does this video show the alderman is among the most violent twentieth of the population? Should I adjust up my credence that, if he were to get shot by a police officer, it's because he attacked the officer?
On the larger problem of interactions with cops escalating out of control, this by a cop makes it pretty clear why. So much as disagreeing with a cop invites pure force. This is policy. The entire paradigm needs to be rethought.
45: I do think he's a sleazeball, but I'd like some more facts as to whether I think it was a justified shooting.
I think it's helpful to have reminders that it's black men and women being killed by police.
I do think he's a sleazeball
And you thought that before there was any evidence *other than the fact that he'd been shot*. You see the problem here?
I do think he's a sleazeball
Wonderful. Seriously? Not even "I think he was sleazy" but "I think he [was] a sleazeball"? This doesn't seem like the world's most awesome attitude to cultivate toward human beings who never did anything to you or anyone you care about. He's a sleazeball if he stole some cigars and shoved a guy?
45: What that sounds like is "dude was a sleazeball and deserved to get shot". → "These guys were bums... I think it is important for the public to know that these two and others like them for years have spread destruction in the community dealing crack cocaine and heroin."
It's hard to view what's going on in St. Louis County as having any relation to the professional-if-hardnosed policing that I think gswift is fondly imagining. Note that then as now the response was to stonewall and issue misleading press releases. (An investigation held that the car was driving away, not towards the police officers as was originally claimed; McCulloch declined to prosecute.)
60: Your mind reading powers I'm sure are well honed but I thought that after seeing a video of the guy forcibly stealing from a man half his size.
57- Wow, that guy is so full of shit he needs a personal outhouse.
"Don't argue with me, don't call me names, don't tell me that I can't stop you, don't say I'm a racist pig, don't threaten that you'll sue me and take away my badge."
...
"you don't have to submit to an illegal stop or search. You can refuse consent to search your car or home if there's no warrant"
I eagerly await his explanation of how to not submit to an illegal search without arguing.
He's a sleazeball if he stole some cigars and shoved a guy?
Yes! It's a shitty thing to do!
57: It took me a few paragraphs of that one to be sure it wasn't satire.
57 - That article has the most amazing comparison between paragraphs.
Paragraph 5
if you don't want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you. Don't argue with me, don't call me names, don't tell me that I can't stop you....Most field stops are complete in minutes. How difficult is it to cooperate for that long?
Paragraph 6
And you don't have to submit to an illegal stop or search. You can refuse consent to search your car or home if there's no warrant (though a pat-down is still allowed if there is cause for suspicion). Always ask the officer whether you are under detention or are free to leave. Unless the officer has a legal basis to stop and search you, he or she must let you go.
To be fair to Oppressor Swift, I don't read the linked comment as passing judgment on Brown. It's just saying that even if he were a shitbag/sleazeball (I do not approve of these terms in all circumstances) his family and friends would protest his innocence and good character.
66: No it fucking doesn't. What Ogged said.
And to continue being fair to gswift, while he does say he thinks Brown was a sleazeball, the comment to which he responded continued "and deserved to get shot," and I don't think he's endorsed that second statement. All he's saying is that the shitty behavior Brown appears to have engaged in 10 minutes before he got shot might inform our judgment on the credibility of his friends' account of his shooting.
Conversely, the local and county PD have also revealed themselves to be incompetent assholes with no ability (or apparent inclination) to relate to the community they're supposed to serve. Maybe that should also inform our judgment about the credibility of their account of the shooting, no?
71: Yes! So how 'bout we maybe wait for some autopsies and stuff before we charge anyone with murder.
68 - It makes you feel good about the quality of instruction the Homeland Security majors of Bovine Colorado Technical University are getting, doesn't it?
I just find it depressing how fast a lot of people (mostly on Facebook) seem to be willing to shrug off Brown's death. Oh, he stole something? Probably completely justified shooting then, because that follows.
75: Right. That's precisely the context that leads me to react the way I do to comments here.
...if you don't want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you. Don't argue with me, don't call me names, don't tell me that I can't stop you....Most field stops are complete in minutes. How difficult is it to cooperate for that long?
I know I am always compliant as shit, even waving and smiling to cops as they pass by. I obey every order instantly and enthusiastically, cause I know every single one of the fucks can and will shoot me dead in a heartbeat, laugh, and walk away scot-free.
It's like trying to argue with a mashup of a grizzly, a computer, and a civil service bureaucrat. And maybe a lawyer. Does yelling at a brick wall prove you are "free?" I have never gotten the point. I would much rather they think I like them. There is some kind of revenge in stealing their affection, in using the evil fucks.
You sneak up behind or under them in the dark or from a great distance. Followed by things I can't say in a place that likes even a single pig.
72: Well, sure, prosecutors need to have evidence before pressing charges, but in the court of public opinion people will have ideas before that happens. I think the problem folks here are having with your call to caution is a matter of prior assumptions.
For most of us, "unarmed teenager shot dead and left to rot in the street for four hours" presents a strong case that the cop who shot him did wrong. Your resistance to that case seems to depend on giving some (at least preliminary) credence to the cops' account of the shooting -- which I was trying to suggest in 71 might be misplaced. Given your professional experience it's understandable that your first reaction will be to side with the cops in this kind of dispute, but these cops don't seem to deserve that benefit of the doubt.
And sure, some people suck at the job and do amazing stupid things and it's a possibility.
Like, say, shoot down an unarmed, handcuffed teenager lying down on the floor of a metro station just because you wanted to taze him for a bit but where too dumb to know the difference between your gun and your taser.
Or taking a guy in a choke hold your police force had made illegal for decades and having him die on you.
Or...
The truth of the matter is, that when it comes to a shooting of any young black man in the US by the police you can never, ever trust their reporting because you lot have shown to be extraordinarily careless with the lives of your black citizens and time after time cops have lied about what happened and walked away with what in any other circumstance would've been murder.
On the larger problem of interactions with cops escalating out of control, this by a cop makes it pretty clear why. So much as disagreeing with a cop invites pure force. This is policy. The entire paradigm needs to be rethought.
And you see the results of this policy and mentality in gswift's arguments of course and reflexive need to defend fellow cops.
Us against them, thin blue line, yadda yadda.
Bruce Wilder has an interesting comment over at CT. I am not sure he is right, but it is a decent starting point.
"We do not get excited about authoritarianism, until race is a dominant part of the context.
...
Stop-and-frisk policies make for terrible policing, and are facially unconstitutional violations of the fourth amendment, but a successful lawsuit requires proof of racial profiling.
Race is the last backstop for our sense of solidarity with the victims of authoritarianism.
Implicitly, though, I wonder if there's also a message going out through American society, to the effect that we of the 99% are all black now."
Me:We Most want to keep the system while reforming it, and in that sense we are oh maybe the top twenty or ten per cent.
In addition, as said in Vampire Castle, neoliberalism personalizes and individualizes everything, so the problem becomes a single bad cop, bad prosecutor, an injustice against an individual.
We can't seem to cope with or conceptualize systemic or totalizing evil anymore.
left to rot in the street for four hours
Is tv giving people the impression that a homicide scene gets processed in like ten minutes or something?
Uh, I think it's fair to expect the cop to try to get an ambulance on the scene pretty quick after he shoots somebody, and the reporting I've seen does not suggest that the reason Brown was still there was the scrupulous forensic work going on.
But really, that fact is in no way important to my point.
It's so typical of the peace police to cry and cry about the nasty outside agitators who want to fuck shit up, but when you see it actually happen, it's always the liberals who resort to violence and aggression first. And I don't even like the fucking stals.
http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/r/ferguson/index.html
When I was there it seemed to be the bulk of the demonstrators, and certainly the local community leaders, who wanted the demonstrations to remain peaceful.
84: Eh, I've just seen similar comments bandied around like it was indicative of something nefarious or callous. If someone is obviously beyond medical help then they're part of the crime scene and processing homicide scenes just flat out takes a long time.
What the hell is "the peace police" and "the fucking stals"?
The peace police, they live inside of my head
The peace police, they come to me in my bed
But I assume it means "people who tell anarchist shit-starters to knock it off."
Hey, you can tell me to do whatever, but physically attacking me because you're "sure" I'm going to do something illegal? That I have a problem with. It's not like this is the first time. Pretty much any big, multi-lateral demonstration has its contingent of cop-worshipping liberals who are sure that they have to physically attack the "violent" radicals.
We had a well-known incident a few years back here in MN, where the so-called "Minnesota Peace Team" physically inserted themselves between Neo-Nazis and counter-protestors, ratcheting up the level of violence and causing a young anarchist to be singled out by the cops and arrested. These types frequently report anyone doing minor vandalism or engaging in any other real or imagined illegal activity to the cops, degrading the security situation for anybody. I'm sure this is not the first time this has happened during these protests, it's just the one caught on video.
And you see the results of this policy and mentality in gswift's arguments of course and reflexive need to defend fellow cops.
This seems to be the rap on gswift, but his reflexive need to defend fellow cops is invisible to me.
The Ferguson PD released the convenience store video in an effort to excuse their cop's actions. Gswift did not cite that recording for the same purpose.
MHPH's mockery of the idea of epistemology is where the real divide is. MHPH knows what happened on the street, and further knows that we all know it. Per 55, any disagreement with MHPH is tantamount to making up absurd stories about sentient gaseous entities from another planet.
On the FB reactions, a lot of people are heavily invested in the "if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear [from the police/state]" narrative. Brown having done something wrong, even something only vaguely tied to the retribution and entirely out of proportion, restore the balance. We just want to believe the universe is just.
I see no problem in using Ferguson and its oppressed as a spark for the Greater Conflagration. The few sacrificed for the many.
Part of our problem is too much focus on individuals and individual cases.
I know I am always compliant as shit
You sneak up behind or under them in the dark or from a great distance. Followed by things I can't say in a place that likes even a single pig.
bob mcmanus everybody: leading the way.
Go wank in blood somewhere else. I hear there are folks who might even appease you hanging out in Mesopotamia right now. Find your level.
If this French guy likes beating up Communists so much, maybe he oughta leave the alderman business and take up with the KKK.
Hopefully the official autopsies with all the info like trajectories of the bullets in the body will help with this
Would you care to clarify the differences between official and unofficial autopsies?
This thread is fracturing along some really interesting lines.
99: Do you ever go back and read these comments when you're less, I don't know, engorged or whatever?
When you read things like this story where the Ferguson PD charged a man with property damage for bleeding on their uniforms after they beat him in a jail cell and then denied that he bled on them at all when he sued them for the beating, it's hard to see how anyone can give these guys the benefit of the doubt.
105: she knows bob too, I see.
Here, let me fix 96 up for you:
MHPH's mockery of the idea of epistemology is where the real divide is. MHPH knowswhat happened on the street, and further knows that we all know it.that in empirical cases you can make reasonable judgments based on plausibility rather than absolute certainty, and has directly made the argument for the plausibility claim, repeatedly. Per 55, anydisagreement with MHPHattempt to shift the terms of debate from empirical questions and balancing plausibility of stories to epistemological debates about whether or not we can really make judgments about things without certainty is frivolous at best or even tantamount to making up absurd stories about sentient gaseous entities from another planet in an attempt to evade the question in the hopes that new evidence will come forward that will justify their position.
There we go! All done!
The Ferguson PD is a bunch of assholes who do not deserve the benefit of the doubt.
Robbing a store does diminish not only your personal credibility, but that of those who vouch for you.
The odds are pretty good that the officer who shot Brown was way out of line and acting on an unprofessional cocktail of fear and bigotry. I'd give it 95% that he would deserve/receive some kind of punishment if the whole incident was on extremely clear videotape. My guess is that Gswift would also give that statement a high probability - my guess of Gswift's guess would be about 70%. Natilo might give it 110%. But it feels like everyone agrees that the guy probably fucked up, and the rest of the argument boils down to the exact likelihood and the semantics of the word "doubt".
The Ferguson PD is a bunch of assholes who do not deserve the benefit of the doubt.
Now I can't not think of *actual* assholes undeserving of the benefit of the doubt.
Just to be clear, when I said I hate the fucking stals, I meant I really hate the fucking stals. Showing up in this situation to take advantage of the media presence to advance your own adventurist, vanguardist agenda is stupid, venal, counter-revolutionary and authoritarian. HOWEVER, just because I hate the fucking stals doesn't mean I can't also hate the lying, sellout, careerist politicians who are doing EXACTLY THE SAME FUCKING THING to advance their own agendas and media presences. The hypocrisy of peace police assholes like French just bothers me a little more right this minute, because his actions are putting decent people in jail too.
103: NO! I live my life in a state of constant, overwhelming outrage. Like Puck in Alpha Flight, the effort required to repress this outrage has squashed down my physical body until I am a tiny version of what I would otherwise look like.
29 is the crux of the matter. Getting hung up on whether Mike Brown makes the most clear cut poster child ever just distracts from the fact that there's an actual, statistical, extremely racist legal and justice system in this country that ruins young black lives in horrifying numbers.
Has anyone linked this? It's The Root, compiling eyewitness accounts -- Johnson, a woman who was driving by, a woman who saw it from her apartment balcony, the guy who tweeted it (just his tweets), and another acquaintance of Brown's who saw it. They're unanimous that they didn't see him charging, and three of them aren't people who knew him. I can see not trusting friends and family about how someone isn't the kind of person who would have done something wrong, but on describing a sequence of events, five consistent accounts seems like a lot of consistent accounts. Like, against any defendant but a police officer, if there was that much eyewitness testimony supporting a version of the facts consistent with the physical evidence, I'd call it overwhelming.
Gah. If you want to start your commie revolution, do it in your own neighborhood. If someone in Ferguson provokes the cops, it's the black residents of that neighborhood who are going to suffer for it. They don't believe in your revolution, they just want better living conditions. The Ferguson cops have already agreed to wear cameras. That's good, and that's the kind of result protests are supposed to get.
http://www.clickhole.com/article/10-beautiful-interracial-arrests-798
That Root piece is, indeed, overwhelming evidence. Sounds like Wilson just lost it, got pissed, killed Brown.
115 is amazing in its own way.
What is the Outside Agitator ...Richard Seymour
"Because racial situations unfold in heavily structured political spaces in which the definitions and boundaries of the 'local' serve the existing forms of dominance."
"The obvious liberal response to this sort of line was that injustice anywhere was a problem everywhere, that all citizens had moral agency and a stake in freedom, that there is nothing sacrosanct about 'the local' (and appeals to it are usually reactionary), and that red-baiting had proved itself to be an attack on all democratic forces."
"So what does it say that a great many of today's liberals unthinkingly regurgitate the stuff about 'outside agitators' in Missouri?"
If the people in the community are calling you an outside agitator, then you're an outside agitator. Maybe you know better than they do. Maybe they're going to throw you on your ass.
that there is nothing sacrosanct about 'the local'
Good to hear. Go shit-stir somewhere else, then.
If someone in Ferguson provokes the cops
Like, oh, say, Antonio French, for instance?
I don't know what you intend by that, brother Natilo.
I mean, if the choice he had was "young person in the community with a promising future will be arrested and charged with a felony" and "next time I see his mom I'll tell her and she'll make him apologize and pay for whatever he stole" I can see him opting for the second.
No doubt the shopkeeper thought that involving the police would be both bad "community relations" and a waste of time, which look like good predictions in light of the subsequent looting of the store and the cops not stopping the looting of the store, and the shopkeeper is clearly signaling "not a snitch" to the community - through the communications from the lawyer, making the cops get a warrant for the security video etc. - but it seems kind of delusional to construct all that as moment of folksy solidarity against the cops or the criminal justice system.
Chozen Botley, 34, of the St. Louis suburb of Jennings, said that police were looking for a reason to crack down on protesters.
"There is no outside instigator," he said. "Mike Brown is in all of us. He's with all of us. The brutality that we face as black Americans, you can face the same brutality as a white American. I just want to let the world know that all of the stuff that's going on in Jennings, in Ferguson -- there is no outsiders because we are all one."
What kills me is that earlier this week, peace was breaking out and protesters were taking selfies with state troopers. The very next day, Ferguson PD decided to blow the dog whistle, and the whole thing went to shit.
I mean, of course the robbery thing was going to come out, but they could waited a couple days for the new mood to take hold and the spotlight to dim a bit and people to start going home. Instead they decided it was a good idea to kick the hornets nest again.
It's difficult to keep up with these threads, but on a different tack, I've been most struck by voter registration efforts in Ferguson in the last few days.
Call me a whitey -- I am -- but this seems like one part of a start toward change. Among the issues highlighted recently are that institutional representation in towns like Ferguson lags behind demographic changes. Changing that is only one part of addressing the problem; among the other issues are that so much of the funding in such towns is generated from traffic stops and court fees; as well as the obvious stuff like police militarization.
Still, changing voting patterns strikes me as quite positive. Thanks to Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton et al. for that. It's been derided by the usual right-wing assholes, of course.
113: Interesting that the witness Tiffany Mitchell corroborates the bit about Brown being grabbed by the cop through the car window.
Be cool, Nat; not everyone can be an activist like me or French, but we all have our parts to play.
I've been quieter about most of this than I maybe would have expected because I just can't, but who wanted him to be a perfect victim? Yes, gswift was right that practically every jerk has a grandma who will sing his praises and I'm not convinced that's a bad thing in the scheme of things. I don't know, this will be a stupid comment because I don't even know what to say anymore. It's double standards all the way down.
If I understand correctly, Ms. Mitchell also thought Brown was hit once before turning. Otherwise, her testimony matches the autopsy, which hadn't yet been released at the 8/14 date of the interview. That seems pretty decisive to me.
(I suppose you can still wonder about gunpowder residue from the shot fired in the car, but it seems like everybody agrees that such a shot was fired.)
I hope the Democratic Party is putting some effort into finding out what other towns are out there with politics lagging so far behind demographics. I wonder if its a lot more common than people realize?
131: I think it is. See again this Washington Post piece outlining the historico-political reasons for circumstances in a town like Ferguson. It's lifting a bit from the Jeff Smith piece in the NYT.
129: I find bloodthirsty the ceaseless calls for the black community to provide sacrificial innocents as a precondition to being treated with a minimum of respect and decency.
Okay, I have one controversialish thing to say, which is that people who are putting up #iftheygunnedmedown photos where both are attention-seeking selfies are doing it wrong. Possibly I'm just annoyed at this facebook friend I've known since high school gay youthgroup who hashtags all her pictures with two separate personal tags about how great she is, including this one. There's actually not such a fine line between taking hurt personally and getting that it's not all about you, right?
133: I really, really, really don't want to get into the marijuana issue, but our county is one of many the ACLU went after for arresting black people for possession/use at something like 20 times the rate white people do. And I'll just say that it's not a surprise that some of my kids' parents have tested positive for the stuff, but I sort of suspect our SWPL neighbors in the same age group would do so at a higher rate, just nobody ever tests them or takes away their kids. And they shouldn't, which is the point, but again it's just gross and awful.
I have a not-very-similar-gripe in that a girl I could not stand in high school is now a woman I still cannot stand, who posts to FB extremely pro-Palestinian things in ways I can't fault, but grate solely because everything she does grates. Can't she be on the wrong side of things?
I secretly think Mississippi god damn is an annoying song.
I've been quieter about most of this than I maybe would have expected because I just can't, but who wanted him to be a perfect victim?
All the white people whose support dissipated once the robbery thing was announced.
138: I know, I know, and that's what makes it so depressing because they're so racist and awful and upsetting that I can't handle it without fury.
Yes. UGH UGH UGH UGH UGH a thousand horrible ughs of misery and ugh.
// Hey parsi, have you been reading about Amanda Curtis? Is there anyone out there folks should be more excited about? />
Surely the Canadian police are better on average than American ones?
gswift, don't fuck me like this. you're a reasonable man. read the link in 113 and come back on here. that's not his grandma, dude. that's just some people around. this guy fucked up some. he fucked up the day he got shot! that sucks! but he's not a fucking sleazeball, and saying "he's a sleazeball" when his unarmed ass got shot in the street a bunch of times and the cop who shot him called in for riot control before even reporting an officer-involved shooting (anonymous is batting.500, but they got us plenty of audio) is bullshit unworthy of your gentlemanly name. every year black men and women are getting shot by white cops all out of proportion to every crime. shot dead, chocked, left to die in a cell without their insulin, shot, shot, choked, shot. can it really be the case that whenever we look at any specific case, we find the cop was almost entirely in the right? whatever case we choose? you can't think that. because what are the fucking odds, dude? don't do this to me, man.
AAAAAH I CAN'T EVEN WITH THE IT'S OK BECAUSE HE STOLE SOME CIGARS I'M DYING.
125: Ferguson PD decided to blow the dog whistle, and the whole thing went to shit.
And attempted to justify it with "the power of FOIA requests for something people didn't know existed compels us."
And as to "knowing" that Wilson realized that Brown was the suspect during the event, we "know" that because the Ferguson police chief belatedly mentioned it some time after he belatedly mentioned that the stop was not related to the robbery. Solid information that.
Yeah, I think it's abundantly clear at this point that, regardless of anything else, the Ferguson PD is hardly a reliable source of information on anything.
http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/r/ferguson/index.html
I forget who originally posted the above link. I took a look at it. I am kind of stunned at how effective it was in convincing me of the opposite of what it ostensibly was arguing. I don't usually think of myself as being on the side of authority or privilege, but maybe I have to rethink that.
I took another look and I guess it doesn't go off the rails until about halfway through when it seems to be calling for the abolition of police, hierarchy, and private wealth seemingly. I still find both the article and my reaction to it weird.
This is food for thought. So is this. I imagine Ferguson PD neither knew nor cared when they started this that they would be giving some of the world's nastiest regimes a stick to beat the United States with. So it goes.
150: There's a "cold war civil rights" thesis, that one reason national-level political elites (e.g., Eisenhower, LBJ) were willing to do so much to help advance the cause (*) was that the anti-civil-rights backlash made us look really, really bad abroad, especially in third world countries we were trying to keep out of the Soviet sphere. I haven't read any of the relevant histories so I don't know how firm the evidence is, but it fits with my prejudices.
*: Not to say that what they drove it, or that what they did was adequate, etc.
Mary Dudziak's book, appropriately titled Cold War Civil Rights, seemed pretty well-sourced when I read it during the read quickly and come up with one thing to say in seminar today phase of grad school.
you're a reasonable man. read the link in 113 and come back on here
Looking at something like that link and thinking you're getting a solid idea of what happened IME is a good way to get nastily surprised when the actual investigations and official autopsies come out.
Out of those five accounts, one is the guy who was with him at the robbery and another is literally an anonymous call to a news station days after the incident. The third is a series of tweets without much detail and not an actual interview or statement where we can get a good idea of what he actually saw.
The two females likely have the best potential. But there are things we don't know yet that could change a lot. Their distance, line of sight, etc. When were they interviewed by investigators? How long after the incident? Out here homicide interviews are recorded. Are those initial statements to law enforcement consistent with they're saying in front of a news camera? Was the level of agreement with Dorian Johnson's account there from the get go or does this only materialize later on after Johnson started making public statements?
Another thing we don't know yet is how many witnesses are there? We know about the ones in a bunch of news interviews but people often don't like doing that. Do we have two witnesses we haven't heard about? Ten? Did they tell the same story as those two women in 113 or are there half a dozen people who were closer and said Brown turned around and came back at Wilson?
What about the crime scene? What, if any, injuries does the officer have and what is nature and severity of those injuries? What are the actual findings of the two official autopsies?
I'm telling you people, again, that in my professional opinion the level of certainty being bandied around here is unwarranted.
he fucked up the day he got shot! that sucks!
He didn't just fuck up. He roughed up an old man half his size in order to steal some cigs and I can't see any extenuating circumstance. He's not a desperate junkie rooting through someone's car for some cash for a fix or a young mom shoplifting some formula and panicking when she gets caught.
I have to wonder if this level of charity would be shown if you were watching a video of a hulking white redneck rough up a little old black store owner.
That's right. Commenters here are the real racists.
And, I know the thread's getting old and I think I'm getting repetitive. I likely won't engage much or any more on this for now. I think I've made my reasons fairly clear and we'll see how things pan out as the grand jury gets going.
155: I make no pretense that I'm as race aware and enlightened as yourself so I do think looking at my own reaction to this video is an exercise I should engage in.
Personally, if I watched some redneck assault an old black owner just to take some cigs I'd have a powerful urge to take a crowbar to that motherfucker's knee. Looking at the Brown video, is my reaction different? Should it be different? For me, with the store incident in isolation from the rest of that day, I'm not seeing a reason why my reaction should be different. YMMV.
145- I have a better one to set you off, Al. In my FB feed someone posted a story about a cop in upstate NY who was killed Monday by a crazy person grabbing the cop's gun and shooting him. This was presented as, "See, people do snatch guns from cops and try to kill them, so that's probably what happened with Brown!"
Did they tell the same story as those two women in 113 or are there half a dozen people who were closer and said Brown turned around and came back at Wilson?
There was a story in the Times yesterday that said "accounts differ" of the shooting. The only 'different' account, though (barring the police version) that was given said Brown, rather than turning around and remaining motionless with his hands up, turned around and stumbled toward Wilson. I wouldn't want to count "stumbled" as "came back at Wilson" -- I think the charging element of the police story as I understand it is key to any hope of calling the shooting justified.
To put it another way, I still haven't seen anyone quoted saying they saw Brown charging, so that Wilson might reasonably have thought that shooting him was necessary. There could be intimidated witnesses who haven't come out of the woodwork yet, but as far as I can tell, there's literally no support for the charging aspect of the police version at this time. (There's also no support for the initial struggle for the gun, but that's less of a problem, given that that would have been harder to see and before people realized there was much going on.)
159
I saw the same(?) "accounts differ" story in the Times and the Boston Globe this morning and it said he "moved toward Wilson, possibly in a threatening manner," not "stumbled."
As for the grand jury sorting it out, USA Today reported that 98% of 400 cases where police killed suspects were found to be "justified." One hundred of these were white police officers killing black suspects. (Caveat: a small fraction of all police departments report police killings to the database.)
One may look at that number and nod appreciatively, or hit one's head against the wall multiple times.
The story in the Times says:
Some witnesses say that Mr. Brown, 18, moved toward Officer Wilson, possibly in a threatening manner, when the officer shot him dead. But others say that Mr. Brown was not moving and may even have had his hands up when he was killed.
Which doesn't attribute 'threatening' to any individual, and certainly doesn't say 'ran toward' or 'charged toward'. The only individual story it gives that talks about motion toward the officer says:
James McKnight, who also said he saw the shooting, said that Mr. Brown's hands were up right after he turned around to face the officer.
"I saw him stumble toward the officer, but not rush at him," Mr. McKnight said in a brief interview. "The officer was about six or seven feet away from him."
I'm counting that as no support for ran or charged toward. Maybe the Times was aware of other stories that made Brown's actions look more aggressive, but they didn't talk about them or quote them.
I think the charging element of the police story as I understand it is key to any hope of calling the shooting justified.
I thought the fallback argument was that the alleged gun-grabbing independently justified the shooting, because someone who would grab a cop's gun is obviously too dangerous to the community to let get away. Which is ridiculous and disgusting on several levels but it wouldn't surprise me if it worked under the relevant (grossly inadequate) legal standards, once you insert enough "reasonable officer"s and "heat of the moment"s and so on.
No -- even if he was too dangerous to let get away, the police aren't allowed to choose freely between arrest and summary execution. To justify a shooting, police need either (1) ordinary self-defense, or (2) the suspect is both (a) too dangerous to allow to escape, and (b) shooting is necessary to prevent escape.
The 'grabbed for the gun' story justifies the initial shots under 2(a) and you can get 2(b) out of Brown's running away. Once Brown has stopped and turned around, the cop has to stop shooting under (2), because a non-fatal arrest has become possible. To be justified in continuing to shoot once Brown isn't fleeing, the cop needs to get back into ordinary self-defense, for which I think he needs charging -- demonstrated continuing aggression.
Now, I find the whole 'grabbed for the gun' story really implausible, but it's obviously hard to refute given that Wilson killed the best other witness to it (and assuming we're disregarding Johnson as biased in Brown's favor, but not disregarding Wilson as biased in his own favor.) But on the 'charging' story, there seem to be multiple eyewitnesses, and no support that I've seen has shown up yet.
Of course that should be the answer, but (at least in the 4th amdt context, I assume something similar under state criminal law) the "no 20/20 hindsight" and "heat of the moment" rules do a ton of work. I'm not at all confident a judge (much less jury) would slice things up so finely.
Oh, at this point I'm believing Wilson will walk. Just saying that the story he needs is that he reasonably believed that Brown was too dangerous to let escape and that he couldn't practically have been arrested (which I think requires him to have stopped shooting when he became aware that Brown had stopped fleeing -- credit for 'heat of the moment' would have to be that he didn't realize Brown was no longer getting away, which seems unlikely given the number of shots in the front), or that Brown was an immediate threat to Wilson's safety, which requires some demonstration of aggression. Unless some very different eyewitness accounts emerge, Wilson's going to walk on the basis of a claim that he was reasonably afraid that Brown was going to hurt him despite the fact that Brown was initially fleeing, and doesn't appear to have given up fleeing in favor of charging back at him.
James McKnight, who also said he saw the shooting, said that Mr. Brown's hands were up right after he turned around to face the officer.
"I saw him stumble toward the officer, but not rush at him," Mr. McKnight said in a brief interview. "The officer was about six or seven feet away from him."
Now that's interesting because some of the discussion has been focussing on "he couldn't have been a threat because he was 35 feet away when he was shot". He was 35 feet from the police car. But it sounds like the policeman wasn't right by his car. So you have, pretty much agreed by everyone as far as I can tell: struggle in the car and through the car window; shot fired; Brown leaves the car and runs, getting about 35 feet (so not very far; really just a few strides); Wilson gets out of the car and heads in the same direction as Brown, catching up with him; Brown stops and turns round to face Wilson from about 6-7 feet away; Wilson shoots Brown.
(That's backed up by at least one of the other witnesses, Crenshaw: she said Brown was being chased by police.)
The dispute is over: how did the initial shot get fired inside the car; why did Brown turn round (had he already been shot in the arm?); what happened between Brown turning round and Wilson shooting (did he charge, did he try to surrender).
I think Wilson could still plead self-defence, BTW: violent criminal, resisted arrest, fled and then turned round when they were pretty close to each other, he had a reasonable fear that Brown had stopped and turned round in order to attack him again and so had to fire immediately.
Seriously? Under that theory, there is literally, as far as I can tell, no space between circumstances where the police can shoot you because you're dangerous and escaping, and where the police can shoot you in 'self-defense'. If a policeman is going to arrest someone, at some point he's got to approach them, and as far as I can tell you've just defined being a dangerous person close to a police officer as enough to entitle the police officer to kill them in self-defense.
Given everything we know so far this [warning: Fox News] seems to me to be unlikely to be true, but I've seen it floating around Facebook now along with other links to right-wing news sources that claim the police officer's skull was fractured during the encounter. I haven't seen this reported in any news source I ever read.
I think I was most startled by the news that shooting a suspect to stop him escaping counts as a justified shooting. That wouldn't have been my guess. (Also, that's a lot looser than the rules of engagement of a lot of armies.)
I think the gap that 169 is looking for is where you stop, but don't then turn round and start moving towards the person chasing you who is six feet away.
Stupid subjective theories of criminal liability.
170: ABC has it too. Sounds like the same source though. http://www.wjla.com/articles/2014/08/ferguson-police-officer-darren-wilson---who-shot-michael-brown---had-serious-facial-injury-source-sa.html
And the NY Times had this in the "Shooting Accounts Differ" story (same source again probably):
"However, law enforcement officials say witnesses and forensic analysis have shown that Officer Wilson did sustain an injury during the struggle in the car."
173.last: I saw a lot of early reports saying "facial swelling". That seems pretty far from "fractured orbital socket", though. A Google News search turns up a bunch of articles about it, not all in right-wing sources--one is the Cleveland Plain Dealer--but all from the same anonymous source "close to the department's top brass".
Huh. Depending on the suspect, that doesn't surprise me much. It seems nuts in this case, but say, e.g., you have someone with a gun who has been picking off random people in the street -- a police officer gives chase, but isn't going to catch the guy. At that point, shooting him seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do -- even if he's not shooting anyone at that moment, he's clearly the kind of person with the intent and capacity to keep killing people. I doubt you'd be fazed by a police shooting that sounded like that.
The problem is how broadly the kind of dangerousness that permits the police to shoot you as you flee is defined. My sense of the probabilities on this case is that Wilson started to manhandle Brown for no terribly good reason -- jaywalking and then disobedience of Wilson's orders -- Brown hit or shoved him trying to get away, and then Brown was magically fair game for target practice.
The link in 170 lost any credibility it might otherwise have had with this (re: relase of the convenience store video):
"He [Chief Jackson] defied the FOIAs as long as he could," noted the insider.
171: Not just any suspect, it has to be a suspect the officer reasonably believes to be an ongoing and immediate serious threat. Which is fine if the guy is waving a gun around and shooting, but outrageous when the basis for the serious threat is "tried to grab cop's gun but failed".
On the facial injury -- Johnson's story is that Wilson pulled up right next to them, and threw the door open so it hit them and bounced closed again. If Wilson was sort of throwing the door open as he jumped out of the car, I wonder if he got the door in his face? That would fit with Johnson's story, and would also explain Wilson being surprised and in pain, which might explain some irrationally aggressive behavior on his part.
(And there's room in that story for some aggression from Brown that still doesn't, I think, justify the shooting -- the door hit them and bounced closed could be Wilson opened the door into them and Brown shoved it back closed. That still seems like primarily Wilson's fuckup to me, but would again explain a lot of anger on his part.)
177- gswift has already rejected that one.
I don't know if my Canadian-ness affects my opinion on this (almost certainly, I suppose), but I would find it a reasonable outcome given the confusion if the cop were allowed to walk but was essentially fired (forced into early retirement, say) and there was a widespread and sustained reworking of the Ferguson police department. Get the guy off the street, make it clear that even if a story can be woven together that makes it seem possibly perhaps defensible, shooting people should in fact be a last-resort measure, and help the community move towards a future in which they can trust their cops. That last piece seems like it will be hardest, long-term.
175.last: agreed, more or less. Except that, if someone hits you in the course of struggle to escape, runs away, you run after them, they turn around when you catch up with them less than ten seconds later - almost within arms' reach - is your first thought going to be "they're obviously about to surrender"? Or "they're obviously about to try to hit me again in order to keep escaping"?
say, e.g., you have someone with a gun who has been picking off random people in the street -- a police officer gives chase, but isn't going to catch the guy. At that point, shooting him seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do -- even if he's not shooting anyone at that moment, he's clearly the kind of person with the intent and capacity to keep killing people. I doubt you'd be fazed by a police shooting that sounded like that.
Sounds like this guy. And a lot of people were, in fact, fazed by it. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/oct/07/mark-saunders-timeline-barrister-shooting
180: Huh. There are other police shootings where I think the solution is firing but not prosecution. This one, I think, is either criminal homicide or legitimate policing (with my strong impression that it's the former). For it to be non-criminal, I think it's really got to be legit self-defense.
179: I guess I'm thinking of Wilson trying to sort of jump out of the car aggressively. Shoving the door open into Brown as he got out, so he would, naturally, be kind of leading with his head -- hand on the door, feet on the floor of the car. Brown being huge would factor in here; if Wilson were trying to use the car door offensively, to strike Brown with, he might have miscalculated how that would or wouldn't work given Brown's size.
181.last: Doesn't sound similar to me, really (might possibly have been a justified shooting, but the guy wasn't escaping anyplace).
I wouldn't expect a cop to shoot unless there was a real and immediate danger to life & the police officer felt it was necessary to do so to preserve life. Like, next ten minutes kind of thing. I would be very shocked if a policeman shot someone on the grounds that the person they had in their sights was generally the shooting sort of person.
Especially on the "he might be getting away" principle.
I wouldn't expect a cop to shoot unless there was a real and immediate danger to life & the police officer felt it was necessary to do so to preserve life.
I would expect it (sadly), but wouldn't endorse it, yeah.
183: not a perfect parallel, but it's the kind of "no clear and present threat, but still he seems to be a shooty sort of person, so slot him" argument that reminded me of it. "You will fire ONLY to protect yourself, other troops or persons under your protection from a clear and immediate danger of physical harm" is the phrase that gets drilled into you on Rules of Engagement.
On the trivial end of things, one of my Facebook friends who was all "whatabout Syria" and "maybe you should consider why you're paying so much more attention to what's going on in Gaza than these objectively more horrible situations" two weeks ago is NOW all social-justice-lefty all the time about Ferguson. Aargh.
On the shooting as a last resort thing, there was a fair bit of pointing out on Twitter that less shots were fired by police in the whole of the UK, last year, than Wilson fired in this one instance. And no-one was killed.
Yes, I saw that. The IPCC report is interesting too. 130 deaths related to contact with police - mostly suicides within two days of being arrested, and quite a few drunks and drug-related. Worth a read...
Independent Police Complaints Commission. Not International Panel on Climate Change.
I'm telling you people, again, that in my professional opinion the level of certainty being bandied around here is unwarranted.
So what? The issue at hand is not "in the heat of the moment, were Mike Brown's actions ambiguous enough that maybe you could kinda figure out a way that Darren Wilson coulda sorta been in danger a little bit." The issue is that, regardless of the state, the situation, the time of day, the size of the suspect*, etc. etc., if you're a black person, you're vastly more likely to end up dead in an encounter with police.
*Also, what's this "Mike Brown was a big guy" shit have to do with anything? Are police officers only not justified in shooting young black men to death if they're 5' 7" and 155#? Speaking as a fairly hulking person myself, my impression of the relative risk of dealing with various types of people is actually that you're much better off facing down a big guy because (a) Big guys don't get into as many fights, so are less experienced fighters, (b) Big guys don't get in the habit of being overly aggressive, because our size does the talking for us, and (c) Big guys know they're going to get most of the blame if any physical altercation occurs, which goes triple for black men.
Re: some earlier comments
Hypothesis 1: If, especially in unstable, high-crime areas, young men (of any race) are allowed to beat police with impunity, then society will break down.
Hypothesis 2: Your level of visceral fear of this happening will do much (everything?) to color your feelings as to whether the shooting of Michael Brown was justified.
170, 173: The officer doesn't appear to have any serious injury in the video that Piaget Crenshaw shot of him pacing back and forth next to the body after the killing. He's not touching his face nor is his moving like he is in pain in any way.
Also, Charles whatshisname of LGF linked on Twitter to side-by-side images -- showing that somebody deleted the words "University of Iowa" from the X-ray or CT scan that is circulating that is supposedly of the officer.
Seems very clear that the scan is an outright fake (or rather, attributed -- I'm sure it's somebody's real scan), and unclear where the officer suffered any injury.
Brown hit or shoved him trying to get away, and then Brown was magically fair game . . .
On that note I thought the essay about white privilege by Matt Zoller Seitz, the editor of rogerebert.com, was will written and the incident he describes was actually shocking to me.
White privilege sent me home to my kids.
White privilege is the reason I've never told this story publicly.
The incident in 195 seems made-up or exaggerated to me, which I guess means I underestimate racism? But why would the cop go out on a limb to help him concoct a story instead of just sending him home?
The officer doesn't appear to have any serious injury in the video that Piaget Crenshaw shot of him pacing back and forth next to the body after the killing. He's not touching his face nor is his moving like he is in pain in any way.
I've had a similar injury (minor fracture, zygomatic arch). I didn't even realise it had happened until about an hour later. I certainly didn't immediately start clutching it in agony.
192: You've been commenting in the threads so you might have noticed that a lot of the discussion has been about the specifics of this case rather than strictly about broader issues of race and policing.
197: That kind of takes it out of the category of "attacks sufficiently savage that the attacker may be shot with impunity" if it was the sort of injury you might not notice immediately, no?
re: 199
This seems to imply you have a category for "attacks against an armed officer such that he as long as he isn't hurt too badly, you're in the clear"?
This seems to imply you have a category for "attacks against an armed officer such that he as long as he isn't hurt too badly, you're in the clear"?
I believe we have an entire legal system designed for the redress of such issues.
If by "in the clear" you mean that I would call it murder if the cop shot you while you were running from him, yes, absolutely. An unarmed man punches or shoves a police officer and runs, I'd call the cop unjustified in shooting at him, and a murderer for killing him.
you're much better off facing down a big guy because (a) Big guys don't get into as many fights, so are less experienced fighters, (b) Big guys don't get in the habit of being overly aggressive, because our size does the talking for us, and (c) Big guys know they're going to get most of the blame if any physical altercation occurs, which goes triple for black men.
Given that he'd just got into his second physical altercation in three minutes, this might mean that Michael Brown wasn't your typical big guy.
Right. No problem arresting and prosecuting the guy with assaulting an officer, doesn't really justify on the spot immediate execution. Not super hard to figure out the right rule here.
200: Also, as a regular, you should know that I can see your IP address, and I really disapprove of people taking argumentative positions they're not willing to stand by with a consistent identity. Do that again and I'm editing your name back in.
That kind of takes it out of the category of "attacks sufficiently savage that the attacker may be shot with impunity" if it was the sort of injury you might not notice immediately, no?
Well, the argument about self-defence doesn't depend on the severity of the injury already inflicted. It doesn't depend on any injury having been already inflicted.
No, but the argument about "So dangerous he can't be allowed to escape" does. The stories seem consistent that Wilson was shooting at Brown both while he was fleeing, and after he stopped. The shots while he was fleeing have to be justified with Brown having been so dangerous that he could be killed rather than being allowed to escape. The shots after he stopped have to be justified as conventional self-defense. Neither one seems terribly plausible to me.
True. However, do the shots fired while fleeing really need to be justified, since none of them seem to have actually hit anyone?
Yes, of course they do. Shooting at someone without justification is important misconduct even if you miss. There's a technical term for it... oh, right. Attempted murder. And if the cop was willing to shoot without justification when it wasn't at all possibly self-defense, I'm going to find any claim that "I was just defending myself from the unarmed man who I had been shooting at and who turned around and faced me," less credible.
Does anyone know much about the shooting of Kajieme Powell in St. Louis?
From the video I saw, it looked like he was disturbed but not an imminent threat, and there was no need for the police to draw their weapons as soon as they got out of the car.
It sounded like he was known to have mental health troubles, so bringing along someone with crisis de-escalation skills would have helped.
Which reminds me of the Lee Clegg case in NI a while back: a soldier was at a checkpoint in Northern Ireland that got rushed by some kids in a stolen car. The soldiers (one of whom was Clegg) fired nineteen rounds at the car. Clegg fired four. The first three, the court decided, were justifiable, as they were fired as the vehicle approached and were therefore self-defence (a vehicle's a lethal weapon, not even considering the risk of a proxy car bomb). The fourth, however, seemed to have been fired after the vehicle broke through the checkpoint and was speeding away - this was the one that killed the passenger, and since the car was no longer driving towards him, Clegg couldn't claim self-defence for this particular round and was convicted of murder.
(Overturned later after forensic re-examination showed the round had actually gone through the side of the car, not the rear; but that's beside the point).
For years, there was a big HANG LEE CLEGG graffito on Manningham Lane in Bradford, just after Lister Park.
On the shooting as a last resort thing, there was a fair bit of pointing out on Twitter that less shots were fired by police in the whole of the UK, last year, than Wilson fired in this one instance. And no-one was killed.
Good lord! I assume the fatality rate among police in the UK is 20% or more per year, if they can't fatally defend themselves preemptively.
209: Yes, the shots do need to be justified. The standard is generally threat of death or serious bodily injury to the officer or to others if apprehension is delayed, etc. "A jaywalker shoves the officer and runs" doesn't get us there. OTOH, "a robbery suspect smashes an officer in the face with sufficient force to make him fear he's about to be knocked unconscious and then runs" is, at least from a legal standard, getting into the realm of a justifiable shooting.
210: I was going to bring that up. Greg Mitchell has been covering it. Here is an Ezra Klein write-up in Vox. (I swear he had the video embedded earlier, but there still seems to be a link to--don't watch it do not want to see the shooting--the change in tone of the event is something else.) If anyone thinks that shows a justified shooting then there is a pretty massive gap between their view of the world and mine.
I do think that the fact that we are engaging in internet micro-litigation of individual incidents means the terrorists have won. 29 and 36 are right. Took a week and a little over 3 miles to get a second borderline (at best) case.
210: Yeah, I'm surprised it isn't getting more attention. I guess the initial reports were that he was attacking officers with a knife when he was shot, so everyone sort of mentally filed it away under "justified".
And on the subject of "unwarranted certaint[ies]" I will note that the release of the video* of the more recent shooting has forced a number of "adjustments" in the claims of the police. It is always thus*, whether you've shot down an Iranian airliner or a young black guy.
*And yes, the Dorian Johnson's are generally also objectively poor witnesses.
215: The latter case sounds as if it might be legally justified only if you have an extraordinarily loose standard of probability applied to justification for officer shootings. An unarmed robbery suspect (and getting back to the concrete case at hand, I don't believe the story that Wilson identified him as a suspect during the encounter. It's not impossible, but it's unverifiable and terribly convenient) who hits a police officer to get away from him and runs is doing something that is, depending on the circumstances, plausibly wrong. But it's not something that makes me think he's immediately about to hurt anyone else. And I question the judgment of anyone who disagrees with me on that.
216: The video shows him increasing his speed as he gets closer to the cops just before they shoot. I can't see the knife in the video but I'd sure as hell shoot someone coming at me with one and that close to me.
I was struck by the fact that the white witness felt totally comfortable approaching to about 10 feet to chide the police (and they ignored him) while the black witnesses felt the need to stay about 50 feet away. Probably a logical move on their part.
218: Anderson Cooper did have it on CNN, but there needs to be more.
222: Looks like they had plenty of time to bean-bag or net him if they had the gear and training. The whole thing looks to be suicide-by-cop.
221: The number of shots seemed like a lot to me--even if one was justified. And I'm not convinced. I also think that he needed some psychiatric help and that the police weren't prepared to deal with that.
That's disgusting, and the quote from the STL police chief was a flat-out lie. Powell "came at the officers, gripping and holding it high." He was wandering randomly at a very low speed, and the knife wasn't "high."
Powell was clearly high or disturbed or both. There were two officers covering him with drawn guns and more were on the way. I guess they thought this was a "stand your ground" situation. Police are not allowed to back away from someone with a knife, I suppose.
221: it seems like a perfect example of how a Taser or something would have come in very handy. I mean, by the time of the shooting I don't think they had a choice - he was 6-8 feet away judging by the video, no more than the width of the pavement, and moving towards them rapidly holding a knife shouting "Shoot me now!"; I think the time for negotiation was past and if they'd tried to use batons they would very possibly have been injured or killed, knives are tricky things - but if they'd got out of the car with Tasers drawn rather than pistols, they'd still have been safe and the guy would be alive and in custody right now.
I don't believe the story that Wilson identified him as a suspect during the encounter.
I might, depending on the details, be inclined to be critical of an officer who didn't notice such a thing. SOP on those radio broadcasts is to do some kind of beep or tone that indicates a priority transmission and then it goes out over every available channel, overriding any other traffic. It's basically impossible to not hear it if your radio is turned on. I was a field training officer prior to going up to detectives and if one of my new guys had failed to notice a recently broadcast robbery suspect was standing right in front of him we'd have been doing some remedial training on listening to the radio and paying attention to detail.
re: 202
For me, it would entirely depend on the circumstances. Sometimes a fistfight is just a fistfight, and you can be reasonably certain it's not going to escalate and you're not in real danger. But what if you're not sure just how much the fight is going to escalate, or what's going to happen next?
You seem to feel that officers have a duty to withhold force and use only the minimal amount necessary in a given time. That's not an unreasonable position to take, but I disagree with it.
I believe "minimal force necessary" can be at times impossible to judge. And I believe that people have a responsibility to not assault police officers. And if you do assault a police officer, and more if, as alleged here, you reach for his gun, then the situation can escalate, even to the point of death, and it is your fault.
re: 205 I am not a regular.
Depending on what details come out about the wording of what came over the radio, I might change my mind. But as far as I know, there wasn't a description -- Wilson's saying that seeing a pack of a popular brand of cigarillos was enough to make him think Brown was a suspect. Which seems really convenient for someone he's already started harassing for no good reason.
229.last: You're posting from Bostoniangirl's IP address. Bostoniangirl -- if that's not you, could you ask your friend to pick an identity and stick with it? S/he's making you look bad.
Situations don't escalate; police officers have agency.
And 230's me -- my name didn't fill in.
Knowing he was a suspect still only gets you to "strong arm robbery suspect" -- there was no indication that he was armed and dangerous. I still think the only way you get in the zone of justifiable shooting is (a) Brown really did to for and try to use the gun on the officer, and didn't stop running orp try to surrender, and/or (b) Brown clearly and threateningly charged the officer after being told to stop. That (a) alone might get you there under current law is pretty weird, but it does seem to be the law. Just a hard punch alone shouldn't get you there, I don't think. Since (b) seems implausible given witness accounts I still assume that Wilson's defense is going mostly with (a).
But Stormcrow is totally right that Internet microlitigating of this thing is already a loss.
227: Exactly so. If the situation could have been quickly and safely contained somehow there wouldn't have been any need for shooting. I'm not going to fault anyone for not wanting a stab wound. The immediate tactical problem was there were only two reasonable choices available, yelling or shooting.
229: In this situation, we're talking about a man who was running away. The fight wasn't escalating further in the absence of gunfire.
231: That's not me, and nobody else is using a computer in my apartment. I don't think anyone else in this building reads unfogged, so I don't know how it came from my IP address.
235: Fleeing seems underrated. Back up out of reach, get back in the car, get back out when he backs off, repeat ad infinitum or until he gets tired.
229 -- good thing you're not a regular, because you're an idiot. I'm as pro-cop as anyone here, but there's an obvious difference between the use of deadly force in self-defense and the use of deadly force in shooting a fleeing suspect, which is what is at issue here. Just because someone hits you doesn't give you the right to execute them later after the fact.
"The troll is posting from inside the house"?
227 and 235 do answer my 216.last.
The second shooting is heartbreaking. The guy is clearly trying to get the cops to shoot him. He looks over his shoulder, sees that he's in line with bystanders behind him, and either out of concern for them, or because the cops are less likely to shoot in that case, he moves to approach the cops from a different angle.
It seems like a case where the fact that legally and procedurally the cops did everything right is precisely the problem.
227 and 235 do answer my 216.last.
You're posting from Bostoniangirl's IP address
No, s/he's not.
I kind of like that a drooling half-wit moron is out there hijacking commenters' identities. It's a great excuse. "That wasn't me, that was the drooling half wit moron!"
Would have been pretty funny if you'd edited the name in. You just can't trust the justice system in this country.
Someone let me know when we see the knife. You know, the one that was in an overhand grip 2-3 feet away from the police.
245: You're right and I'm wrong. I don't know what I did the first time I hit search, but I swear it came up with a bunch of Bostoniangirl's comments.
Bostoniangirl-- I'm really sorry. I just get so annoyed with anonymous trolls, and this one was particularly annoying. I wonder what I did there.
But of course the menace to the public was palpable and immediate.
249: We saw what you did there...
(I would have rechecked before I edited in a name, honest!)
Or shouting "ban me" while brandishing an analogy.
But as far as I know, there wasn't a description
Under the assumption that what, the police call taker couldn't be bothered to ask what the suspect looked like? That the caller, who was standing in the store and watched the assault couldn't recall a single thing about Brown, who is a wee bit outside the average in size?
A few minutes earlier they had trolled Crooked Timber.
I smell my own butt!
CT was so used to trolls they didn't even call the moderators though. Let's burn down their place now.
255: No -- because the police story, as I've seen it, is that Wilson did _not_ initially stop Brown and Johnson because they fit the description of robbery suspects, but because they were jaywalking, and that what tipped Wilson off was the cigarillos. If he had the description -- huge black guy with a much smaller black guy with dreads and a goatee, or any recognizable version of that -- then that order of events is really strange.
249.last: I am really feeling like a jerk here. I can't think of what I did. (Oh, somehow clicked on the wrong IP address -- I can't see what else it could have been. But still.) Anyway, sorry again. I should go back to my usual practice of not looking at the IP addresses.
248: No overhand mad movie slasher grip. The video is too fuzzy for me to see the knife clearly but it looks like he's holding something low. This looks to be a very different situation from Brown's regardless of the Chief's bullshit.
Really, animal control officers generally have more options available to them than yelling or shooting when dealing with dogs, cats, and bears, the police should have some too.
This shooting sponsored by the Taser corporation.
Their stock is up 25% since the Brown shooting.
262 - they apparently also sell police body cameras.
254 reminds me that I saw this book in a bookstore the other day and concluded that Douglas Hofstadter is preemptively banned from this blog.
actual investigations and official autopsies
Again I ask, what distinction are you making between official and unofficial autopsies?
The problem with that knife shooting isn't that there's never options, it's the time. Look how relaxed everyone is a the beginning of that vid. He's clearly not been waving the knife around yet. 16 seconds between the police vehicle door opening and the first shot going off. Options take time.
And if a guy is aggressively advancing on me with a knife and willing to ignore my gun then fuck no I'm not turning around and hoping he's not willing to run after me and stab me in the back. I'm likewise not going to lock myself in my car and hope that determined crazy knife man who is untroubled by looking down the barrel of a handgun will now be flummoxed by the pane of glass separating us and will not, say, try to smash it with a rock and stab me.
264: From the blurb:
The answer to all these questions, of course, is analogy-making--the meat and potatoes, the heart and soul, the fuel and fire, the gist and the crux, the lifeblood and the wellsprings of thought.
I think ogged should invite him over for a debate.
Again I ask, what distinction are you making between official and unofficial autopsies?
The one released by the family is a freelance one without access to Brown's clothes or any of the other hospital records, tests, etc. There's two being done by govt. agencies. The usual local govt. one and a second being done by the feds.
170: The story seems to have originated from here.
So, "Jim Hoft heard from the prosecuting attorney's office, and the Ferguson police department that...." ends up faced off against actual video of the police officer wandering around calmly, and the fact that he didn't get first aid at the scene or go to the hospital, and the fact that Hoft doctored the X-rays to make them look like they might be of Wilson, and the fact that somehow the Ferguson PD didn't think to tell anyone it was this bad before this point (maybe because of their integrity), and so on. It's not massively implausible that he had one, and if so maybe it was caused by being hit by Brown (though probably not by punching him since he didn't have the sort of damage on his knuckles that would usually show up). But there's better reason to suspect it might just be a made up story, or an exaggeration of relatively minor damage caused by knocking his face against the car door.
I'm not sure we'd have all that much to argue about. Analogies might be crucial to the way we think, but are still a horrible way to have a discussion.
The piece linked in 195, by the way, is very good. I was thinking about a post, but I think we might have Ferguson fatigue. This is also eye-opening. Such blatant (legal) corruption.
Isn't Hoft officially the Doug Feith of blogdom (i.e. the stupidest fucking man in the world?)
If I'm mistaking him for another rightwinger who holds that title I'll blame LB for the confusion.
though probably not by punching him since he didn't have the sort of damage on his knuckles that would usually show up
I had a guy who'd been huffing jump out of his car and come at me with a full on haymaker. It took a minute or two for my backup to get there. The guy ended up having a couple fractures in his zygomatic arch and I think a bit of a concussion? I had a bit of soreness in my right hand and knee from hitting him but I didn't have visible swelling or bruising.
The piece linked in 271.2 is really great and important. That kind of low-level bullshit and fine collecting that can really toxify police-community relations, even without "militarization" or excessive force or whatever.
273: Yeah, and those kinds of examples are why I put those qualifiers in there. Typically though I'd think that hitting someone hard enough in the face to cause broken bones would also cause some kind of damage to their hand, or at least for someone with no known history of punching people or training in how to do it without hurting yourself. But certainly not always. And more importantly there are other ways that injury could have happened if it did. (I'd wager the guy with the fractures wasn't wandering around calmly afterwards too, but then again I also doubt Wilson had been huffing before hand.)
268: Toxicology reports and examination of clothing are not part of an autopsy, and "freelance" is a meaningless distinction. Michael Baden, who conducted the autopsy for hire, used to be the chief ME for NYC; his credentials are at least as good as the St. Louis county ME and the federal MEs.
After my mother retired from her state job (chief ME for VT), she worked as a consultant, sometimes taking a locum tenens (in which case her autopsies would be official by definition) and sometimes working for hire like Baden has. Regardless of who was paying, the autopsy procedure was the same.
The piece linked in 195, by the way, is very good.
It is very good and I feel kind of bad for the guy because he's feeling like shit over something there's a pretty good chance he's misinterpreting. That scene he describes feels all too familiar.
That guy he punched, drunk to the point of slurring his word and picking fights with everyone walking past? Probably does that on a regular basis and is known to the police in that area. I know a number of them myself. Sometimes those guys reap the natural consequences of being a drunk asshole and get punched. Drunken McFighty is probably not going to remember the fight and he sure as shit has no interest or inclination is going to court. So the cops get the regular citizen having a bad day back home to his family and keep him out of court and give the other guy his 500th trip to the drunk tank so he'll be out of everyone's hair for the night and not die of exposure. Problem solved, on to the next call.
Michael Baden, who conducted the autopsy for hire, used to be the chief ME for NYC; his credentials are at least as good as the St. Louis county ME and the federal MEs.
Sure. But he specifically brought up things like where the bullets were recovered in the body and Brown's clothing in his interview so I'm assuming he think they might be of relevance. I would also think the info coming out of Baden's would be at the discretion of the family whereas the govt. ones would be subject to full disclosure in a FOIA type request. But you probably know more about it than I do. I've been on a lot of calls involving a body but all that followup with the ME is done by homicide detectives.
277 is a nice example of why we want to maintain police discretion to let people go (as is, in a contrary direction, the failure to do so in 271.2). Can you tell I'm trying to redirect the conversation from the microlitigating?
So the cops get the regular citizen
This feels like epic point-missing. What are the chances the cops think that your average PoC qualifies as a "regular citizen"?
280 last -- actually pretty damn high, at least in most police forces. Most working cops even in big cities are well aware that most people of color are working stiffs and not criminals.
"even" there s/b "especially."
One of the benefits of litigation miniaturization to the microscale is that you can do more of them at once. We're now litigating, what, five different cases here instead of the original one- efficiency!
Fuck you SP, I get paid by the hour and can't double bill.
To pick up Josh's point, I think that's kind of why people reacted strongly to your calling Brown a sleazeball. The guy in 195 punched someone -- at the least, an asshole thing to do -- but he's a regular citizen, and the cops know this by looking at his general demeanor. Brown shoved someone and stole some cigarillos -- admittedly, also an asshole thing to do, but the rest of his public record seems to put him in the 'regular citizen' category. It's upsetting seeing that kind of judgment call used to sort people into ones who get respectful consideration and ones who don't.
Drunken McFighty
The first time I read your comment I thought this was describing the author, rather than the person that he ended up fighting, and was confused.
I think he's right to feel shitty about it -- even if the cops were being reasonable by his own description he was still taking out his general anger at life by getting into a fight with someone who hadn't done much to provoke it.
Has there been any kind of forensic evidence about Wilson's firing while Brown was fleeing, or is it just the witness reports to the media? I can't imagine any version of Wilson firing while Brown is fleeing that isn't gross misconduct, and probably attempted murder, whether or not Brown subsequently "charged." On the other hand, I find it somewhat more persuasive than not that Brown charged. The shot in the truck - it was a truck btw for people imagining different chevy chase type scenarios of people being hit by the door and the gun going off during Wilson's attempt to get out - tends to make the story about a struggle for the gun plausible to me, which tends to make Brown's willingness to take on an armed cop plausible to me, which, with Brown's having just immediately successfully practiced a turn-around-and-charge move at the liquor store, tends to make the charging story plausible. But if Wilson fired more bullets than hit Brown, that goes some way toward corroborating Piaget Crenshaw's account of Wilson running after Brown firing.
281: Too bad about those few bad apples, then.
Most working cops even in big cities are well aware that most people of color are working stiffs and not criminals.
What? No way. I just assume I'm working a side of town that is populated almost entirely with criminals. There's one every time I turn around? It's fucking exhausting.
285 -- this one, I think people have been pretty unfair to GSwift. Pushing a dude hard to steal cigars from a store gets you to "regular citizen" only on a pretty broad definition of "regular citizen" that also includes "violent asshole entitled teenagers." Most people, and even most teenagers, don't do stuff like that.
Now, there is definitely class/race/situational unfairness at play here -- I think I've mentioned my psychotic college friend who, inter alia, brained a taxi driver with a beer bottle when drunk and then ran, in order to avoid paying a $40 fare, and who suffered no legal consequence for it. Really bad! That's unfair, but just because some dudes get away with this kind of thing doesn't mean its the kind of thing that cops shouldn't be worried about or should blow off as just the activity of some regular dudes having fun -- people who do stuff like that are legitimately "sleazeballs" for purposes of police trying to maintain order. Even if that kind of activity most definitely and obviously doesn't warrant summary execution.
289: It sure is a mystery how minorities have such a different view of the police than white folk do.
Oh, Jesus Christ Josh. Do you know any actual minorities who live in tough neighborhoods? Particularly, in, say, San Francisco or Oakland? I suspect that most of them have a slightly more nuanced understanding of policing than you appear to.
Corroborating 271 -- via Kevin Drum http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/08/ferguson-and-the-debtors-prison.html
292: It's possible I'm not articulating as nuanced a view of things as I actually hold. Not that you'd know anything about that.
Most people, and even most teenagers, don't do stuff like that.
This. Most people don't steal and most of the ones who do don't fight. And they're usually kind of furtive about it and feel kind of shitty when they get caught, whether it's a teenager snagging makeup her mother can't/won't buy her or even the junkies who aren't particularly proud about their drug habit leading them to start pocketing stuff at Wal Mart. The casual brazen theft with immediate physical escalation is way outside the norm.
On the other hand, I find it somewhat more persuasive than not that Brown charged. The shot in the truck - it was a truck btw for people imagining different chevy chase type scenarios of people being hit by the door and the gun going off during Wilson's attempt to get out
Boy, a struggle for the gun while the officer is in the car and Brown isn't seems a lot more Chevy-Chase slapstick than the alternative scenarios. I mean, the witness reports make it sound as if Wilson got out of the vehicle only as Brown was breaking away and running. So to be struggling for Wilson's gun, Brown would have had to be reaching in through the window or something. Not impossible, but very strange.
And your theory that Brown ran away, and then unprompted by any change in the situation -- Wilson wasn't firing at him -- turned around and charged Wilson also sounds odd. If he wanted to attack Wilson, why run away? He wanted a running start?
290: Right. But also, most people don't do what Seitz did:
I knew the second he did it that he didn't actually mean to touch me, that he was probably just jabbing at me for emphasis and misjudged the distance between us, because it wasn't a hard impact and the contact seemed to surprise him, too. But I hit him in the face anyway. He stumbled backward, turned around in an attempt to regain his balance, tripped and fell face down on the sidewalk. I jumped on his back and put my forearm around his neck and locked it, to keep him from getting up again. It was a chokehold.
That's a story -- punching someone for touching you and then jumping on top of him and putting him in a chokehold -- that's compatible with being a "regular citizen" having a bad day, who should go home until he feels better. And that doesn't seem all that unreasonable to me: the guy was a regular citizen, and was having a bad day.
But it's as bad as anything Brown did in the convenience store. Worse, really. So if that guy gets "regular citizen" based sympathy, I wish it were available for Brown as well.
The casual brazen theft with immediate physical escalation is way outside the norm.
I think we'll never know for sure, but that video really doesn't look like a straight robbery. Something weird happened there. Brown is standing at the counter with his hands casually clasped behind his back. Have you ever seen someone nervous/aggressive in that pose? Then it all goes to hell. So it looks more to me like a "fuck you, I'm taking these" rather than a planned robbery.
295: Yeah, but see as a couple people (like...me!) have pointed out that's not really a fair representation of the video, which starts with Brown trying to buy the cigars, getting into an argument, and only then storming off with them and shoving the store owner out of the way when he (store owner) gets in front of him (Brown) and tries to stop him from leaving.
It's hard to look at the video and take seriously the idea that this was some kind of premeditated brazen theft as a result, unless he was very skilled and devious about it.
Eh, I haven't even read the Seitz story, so I guess I shouldn't comment, but it strikes me that "getting into fight with corner drunk who wanders around starting into fights" and "forceful robbing of stores" are different situations that warrant different levels of police involvement. For starters, the latter is more likely to be repeated and more likely to cause danger to the completely innocent.
300 to 297. I don't have a strong take on the convenience store video, I'd say premeditation isn't really obvious either way.
But he specifically brought up things like where the bullets were recovered in the body and Brown's clothing in his interview
Where the bullets were found would definitely be part of the autopsy results. I don't know what Baden had to say about the clothing, but I'd be surprised if he even saw it, since I assume that it would be in the custody of the PD shortly after the body was removed from the scene. As far as I can tell, Baden released the full autopsy report, and I don't know if the county and federal ones will be released. In some jurisdictions they're considered medical records not subject to FOIA disclosure.
Also, I apologize for starting a comment with "Eh." That, "Meh," "Pro tip:," "Ummm," and "Uhhhh" should all be banned comment-starters.
303: Meh, it's really not that big a deal.
With the usual caveat about not having access to the actual police report, what was reported doesn't seem all that ambiguous.
She told police she saw Brown tell the store employee that he and his companion wanted several boxes of cigars from behind the counter. "As [redacted employee name] was placing the boxes on the counter, Brown grabbed a box of Swisher Sweet cigars and handed them to [Dorian] Johnson who was standing behind Brown,"...The witness said that the store employee then told Brown he had to pay first, and then Brown reached over the counter to grab more packs of cigars and turned to leave the store.
That's now how most people do their shopping, and it's a really common technique for teens to steal beer and stuff. "Dum dee dum, just grabbing a 30 pack..., maybe some jerky...(clerk gets distracted, goes to spray some fresh WD40 on the hot dogs)..out the door, bitches!"
I don't know what I did the first time I hit search, but I swear it came up with a bunch of Bostoniangirl's comments.
If BG comments using a cellphone, anyone in the Boston area commenting from a cellphone on the same carrier can end up with the same IP. A certain persistent troll often had IP addresses that had been used by many different NYC-area commenters.
At the risk of microlitigating yet another incident, nothing in 306 is inconsistent with Brown handing stuff to Johnson to hold, getting pissed when the clerk says "You have to pay for those" and grabbing more and storming out. Like I say, I have no idea what happened, but I hesitate to use the robbery as evidence of Brown's tendency toward aggression.
Can you tell I'm trying to redirect the conversation from the microlitigating?
Please do.
with the same IP
It wasn't. LB has no excuse.
Ogged, worst coblogger, or worst coblogger ever?
306: Yeah, but again as we see on the video there are a few things that happen in between those events too. And ones that look like someone (entirely calm at the start) getting into an argument, throwing things on the ground, arguing some more, picking a handful of them up off the ground and storming off in a huff.
Given what the shopkeeper says about who called the police, I wish we could see descriptions of what other witnesses (like the shopkeeper or clerk) on the police report rather than just the one. I can't tell if it's just a huge redaction (why?) or a strange formatting error but it's kind of weird looking. I mean, the officer writes that he was assigned the case, then there's a third of a page of blank space, and then we see the witness account, and nothing from the other people who were there.
Boy, a struggle for the gun while the officer is in the car and Brown isn't seems a lot more Chevy-Chase slapstick than the alternative scenarios.
I'm not sure I can imagine any non bizarre version of the shot in the truck. Some of the language of the witness reports has them both "in the truck" though, whatever that means exactly, before Brown flees. I think obviously Wilson has to draw the gun in order to lose control of it, and he obviously did lose control of it, whatever else happened there, and that looks bad for him. Still, I just can't make any kind of sense of the scenario where Wilson is simultaneously drawing his gun and trying to pull Brown through the window or whatever.
And your theory that Brown ran away, and then unprompted by any change in the situation -- Wilson wasn't firing at him -- turned around and charged Wilson also sounds odd.
In your phrasing it does sound silly, but turning back around on a persistent challenger is an actual thing, and, indeed, Brown had just triumphantly done that very thing, obviously in way way lower stakes way, at the liquor store.
313: None of the eyewitness reports that we have access to says they were both in the truck. The Ferguson police chief said that that's what happened, but the witness reports that we have either start from the point where Brown was running away or say that Brown was outside the car with the policeman grappling with him through the window. The police chief is probably reporting what he heard from Wilson, though his story has changed a few times which muddles things up a bit.
While we are parsing Brown's actions for clues of inherent violent criminality that would justify how he was shot down on the street, is it OK to also review the actions of a police department that once charged someone with bleeding on their clothes and then denied that there was any blood at all, or excused 21 shots and 2 deaths by falsely saying that a car was driving towards the them? Or are the police specially protected by some magical epistemological force field?
(not exactly directed at commenters in general)
310: Ogged is right -- when I went back and searched on the jerk's comments again, B-girl's comments did not come up. I just clicked on the wrong thing somehow with no excuse.
Of course 315 is right too. If there's one thing we really do have enough information to know now, it's that the Ferguson PD and St Louis County criminal justice system really are deeply f'd up, regardless of the details of what happened with Brown.
314: None of the eyewitness reports that we have access to says they were both in the truck.
You're right, I guess that language was from the "bystander conversation" video.
that Brown was outside the car with the policeman grappling with him through the window
My impression is that there's general agreement on "in the truck" in the sense of standing outside but partially in through the window and the conflict is that whether that's Wilson pulling him into the truck vs Brown leaning in to assault Wilson.
How often do young white men who've stolen 4 packages of cigarillos get shot? Not very fucking often, right? Case closed, it was racism.
is it OK to also review the actions of a police department that once charged someone with bleeding on their clothes and then denied that there was any blood at all, or excused 21 shots and 2 deaths by falsely saying that a car was driving towards the them?
Of course, which is what the feds are doing.
Registering the kids for school and rain keeps shitting on my flyfishing plans. I should go read a book or something.
We had a case here some years back which I think is instructive: Old white guy, convicted murderer, served his time, got his civil rights restored. Got into some kind of weird dispute with a neighbor or something, cops show up, old guy FIRES AT THE COPS with his (legally owned) assault rifle. Did they call in the National Guard, or bomb his subdivision from a police helicopter? No, they talked him down and got him cuffed and in the squad car without incident. Meanwhile, as a young black man, pick up an air rifle in Wal-Mart and they shoot you down in 5 seconds flat.
319: Obviously, I've got some preconceptions going here. But one of those stories sounds a lot more natural than the other to me.
As I recall the original police story was that the struggle actually occurred inside the vehicle and that after the gunshot went off Brown got out of it and started running. But I think that part has gotten downplayed/left out in more recent statements, leaving it more ambiguous about whether Brown was actually inside the car or not.
The justification for the shooting has evolved from "he went for the cop's gun" to "he was wanted for robbery" to "he viciously crushed the cop's face" in a way that is not at all consistent with the possibility that the Ferguson PD is a bunch of corrupt, racist fuckheads.
bomb his subdivision from a police helicopter
The whole subdivision is just wrong but lobbing a brick of C4 down his chimney would be awesome and a great first step in making the job feel more like the movies.
You'd miss the mountains if you moved to Philly, gswift.
I could agree to only do it to white people. It's no reparations but I think it'd at least generate some goodwill.
287-But if Wilson fired more bullets than hit Brown, that goes some way toward corroborating Piaget Crenshaw's account of Wilson running after Brown firing.
In the NYT article, the police confirmed that Brown was running away when Wilson started shooting, although didn't hit him or anyone else.
As Officer Wilson got out of his car, the men were running away. The officer fired his weapon but did not hit anyone, according to law enforcement officials.
Now, I'm sure once this admission doesn't look good for them any more they'll walk it back, but to me that suggests Brown turned around to surrender, not charge- the self defense argument kind of falls apart if you think the normal response to being shot at, when you are unarmed, is turn around and attack. It only works if you say shots weren't fired until Brown turns around to charge, at which point Wilson is justified to shoot.
330: Well for normal people sure, but you have to understand that Brown was a large black man all hopped up on the angerweed. So really it makes total sense that he would suddenly do that for no reason, especially after suddenly deciding to attack a policeman and steal his gun for no reason.
"searched on the jerk's comments again"
Yes, I leave a couple politely-worded comments expressing what are explicitly my opinions, I don't even attempt any normative statements, and am insulted like I'm back in a gradeschool playground, and ergo, I am of course a jerk. Whoowhee! Your point has been made, though it's not the point you intended. Don't bother replaying: I am quite sure you're capable of twisting logic to justify yourself to yourself, and I won't be checking replies in any case. Just keep telling yourself I was a "troll" and not at all a person genuinely interested in dialogue.
Later, moron! I personally couldn't be less interested in dialogue with you.
I was saying Boo-urns!
The whole subdivision is just wrong but lobbing a brick of C4 down his chimney would be awesome and a great first step in making the job feel more like the movies.
Dude. Not that I can't entirely understand this sentiment, but it is sure relevant to my priors in this context.
333. Wait. Where are you going? I was going to make espresso.
So anyway. I've mentioned a couple of times here -- most recently upthread in 126 -- that the funding for any number of small- and medium-sized towns apparently comes from traffic stops and court fees.
There's a good piece from Alex Tabarrok (at Marginal Revolution, not normally on my reading list) on this, emphasizing the catch-22s and debtor's prison aspects of this. I saw that Drum noted it also.
There surely needs to be some reform in this realm. Probably the Arch City Defenders have something to say about that, but I haven't gotten that far.
330: As Officer Wilson got out of his car, the men were running away. The officer fired his weapon but did not hit anyone, according to law enforcement officials.
Yeah, I think that would be a devastating admission, if that's what it is. It's not totally clear to me - from the minimal description and the way what seems like it would be a pretty crucial fact is buried in the article like that and hasn't been developed since wednesday - that the cops weren't just talking about the shot fired in the truck there. I don't particularly agree that Wilson's firing on Brown while Brown runs away makes Brown less likely to charge - in fact, if the situation is that you might get shot in the back anyway, why not go for it? But, more to the point, and even if there is some kind of technicalism that says cops can shoot to prevent flight in scenarios of vaguely this pattern, if Wilson is chasing and firing on Brown, he's at the very least creating a situation where Brown's charging looks more like defending his own life than anything else, and, to my mind, whether or not Brown actually charged, it's all Wilson's fault.
concluded that Douglas Hofstadter is preemptively banned from this blog
By "preemptively" I assume you mean seven years ago.
the Arch City Defenders
I swear, that name sounds like it came out of a comic book.
A picture dead black kid is worth a thousand words $250,000
