No way they indict the cops, but they might indict racist asshole 911 caller for filing a false report.
There's a march and vigil for the grand jury next Monday. I think Selah and I will be there.
The cops are at fault though, as well, right?
If he wasn't doing anything threatening, why on earth not indict the cops? I mean, contingent on what the security footage shows, but they're really not allowed to shoot people other than when they're an immediate danger.
I mean, the racist asshole behaved despicably, and I hope his balls rot off, but there are supposed to be safeguards in place.
Man with what could be perceived as a real gun, doesn't comply with order to drop it (too bad he didn't hear/didn't know they were directed at him), 911 caller previously describing him as threatening. Cops can easily spin that as, "Oops, did the best we could with the available information." My money's on no indictment, much less conviction, for the cops.
I assume the security footage is sufficient to indict the cops.
DeWine has said that releasing the footage would be "playing with dynamite" and prevent any trial from being fair.
Not that I'm defending them- FFS, make sure a guy knows you're even talking to him before you shoot him for not complying. I'm just depressed about the state of the police state today.
Sorry, that's in the original post. But I added personal content, at least!
But it really depends on what's on the tape, right? If he was just standing there holding a BB gun pointed at the ground and the cops say "drop it!", his failure to drop it immediately, without more, can't possibly justify lethal force. The racist asshole says he swung it around so it was pointed at the cops; the family says he didn't. If the tape shows that he did, then I agree there won't be an indictment (though obviously not endorsing the shooting), but if not...
7 to 10. I think if the tape showed him swinging a gun around, it would have been played on TV so much that all of America would know how to find the Tide at that store.
I would really like to see something happen to the guy that called 9/11. I bet he's not even getting idle death threats or rape threats.
Hoping that 7, 11 are right. Surely the video is unambiguously bad or it would have been released.
I'd be surprised if racist asshole gets charged, don't know anything about this kind of thing but there's got to be some kind of materiality threshold and while the guy is obviously despicable it's not clear that his false details would be material in context (i.e., cops presumably would have come even if he accurately reported just a black guy with a gun rather than a black guy with a gun, "like, pointing it at people"). Of course I don't condone vigilante justice in any form, but I can't say I'd be terribly upset if somebody decided to wipe that shit-eating grin off his face.
15: Cops get qualified immunity, not absolute immunity, though it can often be tough to see any daylight between them.
And I should say that I can think of all sorts of plausible things the tape could show that would excuse the cop's mistake. I can just think all sorts of things it would show that wouldn't.
(Have I told the scary story from my high school? Idiots playing "Assassin" with pellet guns, all over the city. Particular idiot paints his plastic toy gun black to look scarier, and is one of those six foot bearded sixteen-year-olds. Cop stops him in a subway station, and asks about the gun. Idiot is showing gun to cop, when cop's partner walks around the corner and sees guy in trenchcoat apparently pointing gun at his partner, drops into crouch pointing gun and idiot and yelling "Freeze, drop the gun!" No one got shot, but that would clearly have been an understandable mistake if the cop had shot the idiot.)
I don't see what case they would have against WalMart.
My brother is a plaintiff's attorney. In a different state.
I have no idea if it's possible to charge the police, because AFAIK they have released any use-of-force guidelines, so we don't know whether they were followed or not.
The part that stinks to high heaven is the refusing to release the tapes, while allowing the caller to watch them. I don't see how this isn't a glaring example of "Prosecutor helping a witness get his story straight."
Yeah, the real civil case will be against the cops. If the family's account is accurate I don't see how the cops could get qualified immunity. Even if there's a claim against the 911 racist shitbag he's got to be judgment-proof so why bother? I would not be surprised to see a nuisance-value suit against Walmart (something like negligence for leaving unboxed guns around for people to play with, with the foreseeable risk of in turn getting gunned down?).
This case contrasts pretty strikingly with the one described here.
The part that stinks to high heaven is the refusing to release the tapes, while allowing the caller to watch them. I don't see how this isn't a glaring example of "Prosecutor helping a witness get his story straight."
But the 911 call was recorded, and there's plenty of documented evidence of his initial claims. I can't imagine this getting to a courtroom in any sense without him knowing full well the gaps between his original story and the footage.
Ie, so the sooner he starts taking blame and recanting, the better for not letting someone get a "JOHN CRAWFORD SMOKED POT!" story going.
21.2: I agree, although in slight mitigation it seems like the family of the victim has gotten to see the tape too. So at least it's not *only* the caller who got to see it, though it's also high time somebody bribes the security guard at the store to get a copy to TMZ or wherever.
In addition to 23, there was a case several months back in Tennessee where a guy was harassing families with a gun at a little league game, and the sheriff's deputy not only declined to shoot him dead, but would not even arrest him, as he was within his 2nd amendment rights.
You can't file a class action suit against police departments for having systematically different statistical outcomes for interacting with black people and white people, can you.
28: IANAL, and IANACRL, but there can be DOJ investigations for disparate impact, I believe.
21: And to clarify, I understand that of course prosecutors go over testimony with witnesses all the time. I just mean that letting him see the tape, weeks or months in front of the public, is giving him a GIANT head start in getting his side of the story voiced and in print in the court of public opinion while the family is still stuck saying "The tape says something different! Really, it does! You would agree if you saw it!"
28: Sure you can. The NY stop-and-frisk case is a prominent recent example.
Oh! That's great. They should file a bunch more, nationwide.
17: Close to what happened in Birmingham decades ago. Local TV station was doing a crime reenactment, didn't provide security around the scene, and a citizen nearly blew away the guy playing the criminal. Wasn't me, but it easily could have been.
29.2: As I understand it, prosecutors usually don't go over testimony with people who are likely to be defense witnesses.
re: 32
Not quite the same situation, but a friend of mine, who supplemented his student income by selling certain smokable but illegal substances, once came home from college with his pockets full of merchandise, to find his entire street full of SWAT type cops, drug dogs, etc.
He quickly did a U-turn, stashed the stuff, and came back. To find out that they were filming an episode of Taggart.
34: Stuff happens. Years ago some guy wanted to find out if his dog would allow people to aid him if he was in trouble so he faked a heart attack. Dog growled at a good sam, got shot, and as I remember the article, the bullet also nicked the idiot on the ground.
I'm kinda surprised there aren't more such disasters related to those practical joke "reality" shows.
Two thoughts: those open carry assholes taking their guns shopping didn't run into folks calling 911, and Walmarts often sell guns. I feel like I would have assumed, "Oh, maybe he's buying that."
(Are BB guns still allowed to be black? Why is that?)
I'm pretty sure they're required to have fluorescent orange parts on at least the tip of the barrel. I assume that's the case here, if not then there definitely is a case for a lawsuit against the toy manufacturer.
The open carry phenomenon really does make the gap enraging. It's hard to wrap my brain around the simultaneous movements: on the left "Don't shoot unarmed black men!" and on the right "Don't make Clive Bundy pay taxes or we'll kill officers!" and "Wah, Target says we can't strut around with our semi-automatic weapons because the soccer moms are prissily stepping on our rights!"
I would really like to see something happen to the guy that called 9/11.
Giuliani?
38: It's pretty obviously a "heightening the contradictions" strategy. Smaller government is more likely to be seen as a solution when not-shitty government is deliberately blocked.
38: Or, to put it another way, the contrast between self-defense/justified shooting claims that you can't ever say it's unreasonable to kill someone if they're either armed or have done anything perceptibly violent, because there's no way of telling what's going to happen next, and situations where people deal calmly and successfully with armed, violent people without killing them.
38: The most parsimonious explanation is white supremacy. America's just a really racist country.
I like the open carry movement, for basically the same reasons that the NRA really, really wants them to go away.
It's basically a bunch of people who are somewhere in between dangerous and pathetic walking around in public shouting "We are not sensible traditionalists upholding a rural lifestyle and concerned about constitutional rights! We are a bunch of dangerous lunatics!" And that's been true of the core NRA/Gun Rights people for a good long while at this point, but it's something that hasn't been obvious enough for low information people to assume they aren't just principled traditionalists or something. It's sort of like the Westboro Baptist Church forcing other Christian churches to either come out in favor of gay rights or stay quiet and have people assume they're just politer versions of them.
I don't know that there's much difference between open carriers and the NRA. The NRA doesn't exactly represent people who say "I'd like to keep my gun, but I also recognize that the levels of shooting deaths in this country are problematic. Maybe we should close the gun show loopholes and create a registry."
45: But I don't think people who don't follow politics are aware of how crazy the NRA's membership has become over the last few decades. I agree with 44 that the open carry nonsense is helping to drive this fact home to people.
The worrisome thing about the open carry folks is that it looks like they are determined to keep pushing until someone gets shot.
Plenty of people have been shot already.
Didn't some prominent politician (Bush senior maybe) resign his NRA membership many years ago because they'd gotten too batshit and the NRA response was, Suck it RINO libtard, we don't want you anyway.
Ah yes it was 1995 in response to the jack booted thugs remark. Which is now pretty much the Republican Party platform as far as the EPA, BLM, IRS, etc.
45 - Oh certainly, but the organization itself has enough sociopaths pragmatists working for it that they at least know how well a bunch of creeps carrying semi automatic rifles into the neighborhood Starbucks is going to look. I'm sure plenty of the people running the NRA are loons, but I think most of them are far enough outside of the bubble to realize that a lot of people aren't.
I'd say that the Open Carry people aren't going to push until someone gets shot (that has probably already happened), they're going to push until a whole bunch of people get shot, in one incident. At that point they'll either come across as dangerous lunatics (if those people aren't Open Carry lunatics), or pathetic clowns (if someone ends up going ahead with the "throw a couple firecrackers into the middle of the group" plan). Either way it won't look great.
52: With all due respect, if Newtown didn't do anything to change public thinking or policies, then I doubt very much that any one incident can.
The opening quote in the OP is unbearably sad. As far as changing laws, there's the tried and true method of large groups of black men openly carrying weapons.
I read somewhere recently that what changed all the open carry laws back in the 60s was that the Black Panthers started open carrying. Something like that could easily happen again.
"[L]ooks like"? Those guys wouldn't drag around 8+ lbs. of rifle &c. if they didn't fantasize about shooting people.
On a slightly less cerebrum-free level, increasingly often when I follow a link to Gunlovers-for-Gunlovers or whatnot, I see that they are stressing the "natural right[s]" of self-defense and, by not-very-articulated implication, concealed/open carry of firearms. I had thought that "natural rights" rhetoric had faded from public discourse decades ago. I should like to know whether to blame Scalia or talk radio.
It just doesn't end. I don't know if there are an unusual number of incidents now or they're just getting more coverage because of Ferguson (leaning towards the latter), but it's really heartbreaking. A black man is shot by police in Utah because he has a sword and supposedly charged the police, but was shot in the back. (People are hypothesizing on Twitter that he was cosplaying). Less horrific but still bad, in LA police arrest a black actress for kissing her husband in public because they decided she was a prostitute.
Newtown is weird, because I personally don't find it a very compelling reason to change gun laws. I mean, statistically it's super rare, and trying to get guns away from Adam Lanza is possibly a futile cat and mouse game. Whereas arguments about domestic violence and street violence and kids getting killed because parents keep loaded weapons around are much more persuasive to me. Not that I need persuading. Or that my reasoning is universal.
55 pwned, but I waited a while before realizing it.
I think its pretty clear that vast stretches of the judicial system have tacitly agreed that open carry and stand your ground laws only apply to white people. This was, after all, how the NRA intended the laws when it wrote them.
If large numbers of black people started carrying openly, it would not change the law. The black people would simply be charged under some other law. Disrupting the peace, or something. Or perhaps the white people who are allowed to open carry, would just shoot the black people and get away with it.
The police might only have limited immunity according to the law, but in practice they have unlimited immunity. I'm not seeing a judicial solution, or really any kind of solution, to this problem.
58: I agree that the fact that Lanza was so weird enabled people to rationalize away Newton as tragic but an anomaly.
The open carry people are the self styled "responsible" gun owners, so the revelation that they are pathetic loons might make an impression on people.
I was thinking more about during one of their open carry events - parallel to the firecracker possibility.
Newtown just told everyone that weird loners with mental health problems were dangerous - the gun nut part was there but never quite ended up being an important part of the story that got told, because we already had a set story template ready to go.
62: But did it do anything to improve mental health care, or even reduce access that the mentally ill have to guns?
After Newtown, Connecticut passed some new gun control laws.
And Texas and a bunch of other states passed laws allowing teachers to carry guns on campuses. (Apparently many already did, pre-Newtown.) But there seems to be new momentum behind actually carrying the guns since then. Texas started some program to secretly train K-12 teachers to be on-campus marshalls. AWESOME.
Oh, I don't think their movement is going to result in any real changes to policy directly, or even at all.* But the less respectable being a gun nut becomes, especially among the low information majority, the better.
*With the "black people joining in" caveat here.
This is my Ed.D.
This is my gun.
One is for fighting.
The other for fun.
Let me try that again, more Texas-style.
This is my Ed.D.
This is my gun.
One is for shooting.
The other for procreation.
The other is for use only after marriage.
Imagine my disappointment upon second read, finding out that there's not to be a thread about Joan Crawford.
You can always send a guest post in!
The wire hangers go in the Adrian Peterson thread.
Mildred Pierce is about the dangers of having a gun in the home.
OK, finally getting back to add the additional links I wanted to add.
Study shows both police and non-police respondents over-estimate the ages of black kids accused of felonies. By FOUR AND A HALF YEARS. So a 13.5 year-old kid is perceived as 18.
Asked to identify the age of a young boy that committed a felony, participants in a study routinely overestimated the age of black children far more than they did white kids. Worse: Cops did it, too.
Ron Davis [the father of Jordan Davis, a teenager killed by a vigilante for playing loud music] is aiming to shame the United States before the United Nations for what he says are murders committed with impunity against young black men....
At the 85th meeting of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in Geneva, Switzerland on Wednesday and Thursday, [Ron] Davis hopes to pressure Washington to bolster efforts to stop the phenomenon of what he and the United States Human Rights Network (USHRN), the NGO backing him, call "the criminalization of race" in America.
The U.S. will be forced at the meeting to answer questions from Davis and the international community in what the American Civil Liberties Union told the press Wednesday was a singular opportunity to hold Washington accountable.
If large numbers of black people started carrying openly
54-55 already set this up, but it was worth a trip to the photo archive.
The Huey P. Newton Gun Club is already testing the waters.
A black man is shot by police in Utah because he has a sword and supposedly charged the police, but was shot in the back. (People are hypothesizing on Twitter that he was cosplaying).
I'm going to throw it out there that maybe there's mental illness involved. Seriously, this is the mom's reason as to why he was out there with a sword.
"I believe that maybe my son thought, 'Maybe I'll try to get a job at Panda, maybe this sword will impress them,'"
77: that study doesn't seem to have done the important experiment of asking people to guess the ages of black and white kids from photos alone, without telling them they're felons. Could just be that people tend to overestimate the ages of black kids generally.
I think there's plenty of data showing that 83.last is true, especially for boys, but I don't actually know where to find it.
I am surprised that there doesn't seem to be any promotion of the Walmart pilgrimage on the O\hi\o Sta/te campus. Beavercreek is only an hour away.
84: not to mention that it's open to two interpretations. If you show someone a 13-year-old black kid and say "this kid committed a felony, how old do you think he is" and they say "18", aren't they in fact saying "no way that a 13-year-old black kid could be out there committing felonies, he'd be innocent and totally non criminal at that age. He must be 18 and just youthful looking"?
Do the same with the white 13-year-old kid and they say "yeah, he's probably 13 years old, white kids are vicious little monsters pretty much from 8 upwards".
Leaving aside history and everything anybody living here and paying attention would notice, it's open to two interpretations. Otherwise, not so much.
86: Yeah, it's more that a group of black boys walking down the street get scary to (white) passersby at 9-11, whereas for white boys it's not until 14-16.
87, 88: agreed, but that experiment is completely the wrong way to test that. The problem isn't that we overestimate the age of black kids we know to be felons; it's that we overestimate the feloniousness of black kids whose ages we know. If anything, 88 should imply that we underestimate the age of black kids who we're told are criminals, because we think black kids get scary earlier.
It's just not a very well designed experiment. The black person who designed it can't have been more than 13 or so.
a group of black boys walking down the street get scary to (white) passersby at 9-11
A group of Muslim boys walking down the street get scary to (white) passersby on 9-11.
I'm not disagreeing with anything you say!
a group of black boys walking down the street get scary to (white) passersby at 9-11
You mean when there are nine of them? I must be misunderstanding, because I think the answer to that question is closer to three. Four if it's someone used to living in the city.
I'm sure perception of age (even absent the other cues in this experiment) is culturally contingent, but it's also the case the age judgments are based in part on judgments of facial health, so there could easily be a poverty confound as well: poor people tend to be less healthy, and thus tend to look older.
You could probably find a pretty big effect if you asked people to guess the age of a set of felons who committed drug-related offenses vs. a race and (actual) age matched set of felons who committed non-drug-related offenses.
Which isn't to say that I don't think there's a pure race effect of age judgment; I imagine there is. I almost have the data to show it empirically, but not quite.
92; No, it was the age at which black boys transition from cute to scary. It seems to happen before 10 generally.
It seems to happen before 10 generally.
I'll be suicidally depressed now.
But also, you think really? An eleven year old kid is a skinny/pudgy (depending) little harmless thing. I'm thinking of Newt's classmates, and even at thirteen, they mostly couldn't scare a waffle. (Admittedly, there's one 6'2" black kid in his class who I don't know particularly, but I did notice last spring as someone whose parents are probably terrified to let him out on the street in case he ever does anything that some idiot could interpret as threatening. But the rest of them are still pretty childish-looking.)
96, the original comment was about a GROUP of boys.
Eh, I guess. I'll go back to suicidal depression now.
96: I read it within the last month and got sort of sniffly and didn't want to think about it anymore, but I don't think I'm remembering particularly wrong, though I agree with you about actually knowing kids within the demographic. It's not necessarily that people expect them to be violent or armed at all times or anything, but the heightened scrutiny in stores jumps and that sort of thing.
There are people whose main job duty is to convince older, white suburbanites that the "knockout game" is real and a bigger threat to their existence than anything but Obamacare.
Though doing a quick google, everything I see now is either anecdotal or linked to this article, so maybe people shouldn't be so depressed! I still will be, though, I think.
96: I think I mentioned here a while back that a couple of black kids roughly that age thought I was reacting as though I thought they threatening when I squeezed past them on the sidewalk, which really only made sense if that was a common reaction from the neighborhood gentrifiers. Ah yes, here it is. Suicidally depressing indeed.
but the heightened scrutiny in stores jumps and that sort of thing.
Oh, if you're talking about anticipating shoplifting/vandalism/antisocial mischief rather than straightforward fear, I remain depressed but no longer incredulous.
I wonder if school uniforms help or hurt -- like, do the kids I know get treated better because they're running in packs with identical pale blue polo shirts with little school logos on them?
It's depressing reading this and knowing that I'm one of those white people that is scared of groups of young black kids -- just because of something that happened to me almost 30 years ago. I guess it doesn't matter much -- I don't carry a gun.
