To Serve And Protect

The racist element I feel exists in these cases is not the stereotypical KKK, "all white people are racist" line you would hear from Sharpton or some of those morons. I'm going to try to explain as succinctly as I can.

Growing up in the US, we are around other ethnicities all the time, but we categorize rather than seeing the individual. That IMO leads to acting off of stereotypes. Asians in the US do not have a stereotype of being dangerous or criminals, so they as a group are treated as such.

When a black person is killed so easily, I think it's because the police are just categorizing them as black, and black= dangerous. That assumption is stronger than the actual circumstances of the encounter and evaluating the individual.

This isn't a white thing either. Everyone does it, but killings like in Ferguson gets a lot more complicated because of the history of this country and the history of black/white relations, digging up old wounds etc...

 

Agree with everything you said, but I need clarification on the bold part. Are you saying blacks aren't as dangerous as the assumption made by the police? Or am I missing your point.

If that is your point, I agree with you, but I'm not a police officer in those high poverty / high crime areas. I'm sure many become burned out and I'm not just talking about white cops in black areas. I think any cop (of any race) could in any low income / high crime area.

 

What I mean is that black is the first and foremost of the evaluations made about the person.

An example I use to encounter a lot when I was younger: I can't tell you the number of times I've been wearing a 3 piece suit and still followed around a store the same as I would be if I was wearing a hoodie, as if I still look like a thief. They weren't evaluating anything about me other than categorizing me as black and blacks steal in their mind. The fact that thieves don't generally dress in 3 piece suits was of no consequence.

 

We don't know if he followed protocol. There was no court case.

So Wilson says his story of what happened, Brown can't give his side, but some witnesses are giving conflicting accounts of what happened. There needs to be a trial for all killings IMO. This isn't a small thing.

 

A preliminary trial is not the same as a criminal case and this one was shady at best. It's extremely extremely rare for a jury in an indictment case not to indict. I'm talking out of 162,000 federal criminal cases in 2010, the jury only chose not to indict 11 of them in federal cases for example. Getting an indictment to go to trial is damn near automatic. All the prosecutor has to do is want a full trial because they present all the evidence, both defensive and prosecutorial. But this prosecutor has a bunch of cops in his immediate family, his father was killed by a black person, and on top of all that, as it says in the article above, cops almost never go to trial. I know you're going through police training yourself right now, but come on, you think it's ok that cops almost never go to trial to investigate a killing?

And there's this. The assistant DA handed the jurors a statute that was deemed unconstitutional to use as the measure of whether to indict:

'http://player.theplatform.com/p/7wvmTC/MSNBCEmbeddedOffSite?guid=n_lw_Eremis_141126_397271'

Regarding police officers having to go through the hassle of going to court, how can you trivialize taking a life like that? What is more important than killing a person? What else is more deserving of a trial to make sure the killing was warranted? A regular person kills someone they might be locked up for life or put to death themselves as a result, but it's not worth a police officer even having to explain it in court?

 

I agree with Barns, in that we'd get a lot of questions answered if it went to trial.

Very rarely does a police on-duty shooting go to trial.

Militarized state. Just how the powers that be want it.

Shut up. Be happy. -- ice T. 25 years ago

 

It could. I believe this one was. Once Browns hand went for the gun, game over.

I'm just saying very few, including me, have read the grand jury report (couple thousand pages). So obviously, many have questions. I have a couple.

Why did he shoot when Brown ran, stopped, and came back charging? Why not taser him or use a Billy club?

Why was his body left in the street for 4 hours?

Maybe this has been answered, but I've never heard the answers.

It would come up in trial.

 

It's not that I just don't like the outcome as if it was fair, it's that the outcome was predicated on the prosecutors telling the jury to judge the case using a state law that were deemed unconstitutional in 1985. The law she sited allowed an officer to shoot a fleeing suspect in the back if they were fleeing. That hasn't been true at any point during the Assistant DA's tenure as Assistant DA. Are we supposed to believe this was a mistake? Was this the Assistant DA's first time trying a case?

The background of the prosecutor I gave earlier is just a suggestion as to why they might do something like this.

 

He wasn't shot in the back. The first autopsy, Holder's directed autopsy, and the families autopsy all concluded the same thing. Every shot entered the front of his body.

 

But it's cause for an indictment if he shot at Brown while he was running away, because that's against the law.

 

I agree. If he did that. A lot of people claim a lot of things (shot in the back, hands up, etc), but when the witnesses testified in front of Grand Jury, they didn't say that stuff. This is common. Talk up the story to the media, but when read rights and next to a judge, people change their stories.

 

The prosecutors giving the jury a law that was made unconstitutional in 85 removed the possibility that the jury would even consider it. Again, this wasn't a trial to see if Wilson deserved to be punished, all that had to be proven here is that there was enough questions to warrant an indictment, and there were.

 

I agree.

Do you think Mike Browns step-dad should be charged with inciting a mob? He instructed them to "burn it down" and then led them away to do just that.