The most interesting question is whether the shooting is justified. Only 39% of the homies need more information, the rest already "know" the truth. Meanwhile, 68% of the honkies need more information. Quite a disparity.
Captain, I agree that DB's comment was all of what you said. When this case first began, my first inclination was that this officer could have likely been charged while having his weapon un-holstered. If that turns out to be the case, the officer may have been well within his duties to fire his weapon, to unload it even. Many, after hearing the number of shots fired in to the Brown, (5) simply have made up their minds this was an excessive case of police brutality, racism, and a lot of other things which we simply cannot say. Perhaps if DB were to re-think his comment, then you and others could at least consider whether or not he is to remain on ignore. With all due respect, Capn, but to ignore even the worst of atrocities is still to ignore the truth. Just my .02
Many do not understand this, because they simply haven't been in, or can't seem to put themselves into the situation. The thought has probably gone across this person's mind a thousand times again: "What happens if someone tries to take my weapon?" Perhaps, he has had many long talks with his spouse or significant other, discussing the scenario. If you have the balls to patrol the street, and my hat goes off to any who do in the name of justice, then you are going to need a fully loaded weapon. The world is full of meth driven pcp poppin who knows what kind of assailants in practically every neighborhood in America. Some of you who are ignorant should watch this video.
Why would I care whether or not the people who populate this forum put me on Ignore? The fact of the matter is that, typically, nearly all those who post here jumped to a set of conclusions about events and those who participated in them that were driven entirely by their prejudices regarding white policemen and negroes. And they're still doing it. All we know about the situation that resulted in this teen's death is that he was shot 5 or 6 times (I've lost track by now) and left lying in the street. None of what's been posted here dozens of times would stand up under even the most feeble cross-examination. It's all the result of fevered imagination. There are a few people here who understand that, but only a few (Capt Obvious isn't one of them). It does seem clear that the cop was scared. Given his age and his physical condition (i.e., what he looks like in his photographs), he had every reason to be scared. Did that give him the right to gun down an unarmed teenager, even if that teen were on PCP? That's up to a jury -- and society -- to decide. But I place no value whatsoever on the rantings of a group of message boarders who come to the subject with a preset of prejudices which preclude them from reaching rational conclusions or even hypotheses. I don't have anyone on Ignore. That's childish. But it is typical of a certain kind of mind. This is not to say that there are plenty of people whose posts I don't read because there's no point in doing so: they're completely predictable. I know by now who thinks well and who doesn't. Why waste time on those who don't?
When I first brought up Graham, the response was that it was irrelevant, and yet here we are . . . WASHINGTON (AP) — The moment Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson shot an unarmed teenager, a 25-year-old Supreme Court case became the prism through which his actions will be legally judged. To most people, an 18-year-old unarmed man may not appear to pose a deadly threat. But a police officer's perspective is different. And that is how an officer should be judged after the fact, Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote in the 1989 opinion. The Supreme Court case, decided at a time when violence against police was on the rise, has shaped the national legal standards that govern when police officers are justified in using force. The key question about Wilson's killing on Aug. 9 is whether a reasonable officer with a similar background would have responded the same way. The sequence of events that led to the death of Michael Brown, a black man shot by a white officer, remains unclear. An autopsy paid for by Brown's family concluded that he was shot six times, twice in the head. The shooting has prompted multiple investigations and touched off days of rioting reflecting long-simmering racial tensions in a town of mostly black residents and a majority white police force. Attorney General Eric Holder said Thursday the episode had opened a national conversation about "the appropriate use of force and the need to ensure fair and equal treatment for everyone who comes into contact with the police." A grand jury is hearing evidence to determine whether Wilson, 28, who has policed the St. Louis suburbs for six years, should be charged in Brown's death. "Except in the most outrageous cases of police misconduct, juries tend to side with police officers and give them a lot of leeway," said Woody Connette, the attorney who represented the Charlotte, North Carolina, man behind the case, Dethorne Graham. On Nov. 12, 1984, Graham, 39, felt the onset of an insulin reaction, and asked a friend to drive him to buy orange juice that would increase his blood sugar, Connette said. According to the Supreme Court, Graham rushed into the store and grabbed the orange juice but saw the checkout line was too long, so he put the juice down and ran back to the car. Charlotte police officer M.S. Connor thought this was suspicious and followed him. When Connor stopped Graham's friend's car, Graham explained he was having a sugar reaction. But Connor didn't believe him. As Connor was following up with the store to see whether anything had happened, Graham left the car, ran around it twice, then sat down and passed out for a short time. Other police officers arrived, and Graham was rolled over and handcuffed. The officers lifted Graham from behind and placed him face down on the car. When Graham asked the officers to check his pocket for something he carried that identified him as a diabetic, one of the officers told him to "shut up" and shoved his face against the hood of the car. Then four officers grabbed Graham and threw him head-first into the police car. Once police confirmed no crime had been committed inside the convenience store, they dropped Graham off at his home and left him lying in the yard, Connette said. Graham ended up with a broken foot, cuts on his wrists, a bruised forehead and an injured shoulder. Graham, who died in 2000, lost his lawsuit against the city of Charlotte and five police officers in a jury trial and appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, which set out the standards still used today. After the Supreme Court decision vacating an appeals court ruling against Graham, he had a new trial, in which the police actions were judged on new standards. Graham lost again. The Graham decision found that an officer's use of force should be considered on the facts of each case. Officers are to weigh the seriousness of the crime, whether the suspect poses a threat to the safety of police or others and whether the suspect is trying to resist arrest. "The 'reasonableness' of a particular use of force must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight," Rehnquist wrote. In Graham's case, his behavior as he was experiencing low blood sugar looked similar to that of a belligerent drunk. Since then, police officers across the U.S. have been trained to use force in that context. States and police departments have their own policies, but the standards set in the Graham case are always the minimum. Some law enforcement agencies, like the Los Angeles Police Department, even reference Graham v. Connor in their manuals. The jury that acquitted four Los Angeles police officers in the beating of Rodney King in 1991 was instructed to consider the Graham standards — the officers' "reasonable perceptions" — as they deliberated. Officers are to be judged by those standards even if things look different to people who weren't involved. "What a police officer, what she perceives at the moment of application of force, may seem very different in the hard light of the following Monday morning," said Ken Wallentine, a recently retired police chief and former law professor in Utah. "And there's the rub." ___ Associated Press writers Alan Scher Zagier in St. Louis and Nancy Benac and researcher Monika Mathur in Washington contributed to this report.
Prosecuting Officer Wilson Won't Bring Justice to Ferguson Candace McCoy Michael Brown’s family and community deserve more than the slim chance of his killer going to jail. Another Midwestern town, torn by a police shooting, has the answer. No parent should outlive a child. Michael Brown’s parents received this most shocking of news and in their grief are demanding to know the circumstances of their son’s death and who is responsible for it. In the long run, their son’s death may spark meaningful and lasting change in police practices, but criminal prosecution of the officer who killed Brown will not do that, cannot compensate the family, and will not change Ferguson, Missouri. The legal system from which the Browns are demanding answers may tell them the circumstances of their son’s death—and they hired their own coroner to ensure the independence of the county’s autopsy findings—but prosecuting Officer Wilson will not produce the justice that they and the Ferguson community demand and deserve. Other legal options are more likely to achieve police accountability. The physical evidence is but one indicator of the circumstances of Michael Brown’s death. In the days to come, we will surely hear more about witnesses’ accounts of the altercation that led to the shooting, forensic tests of clothing and the officer’s car, and medical reports about the officer’s injuries. All these facts are important because a jury might be asked to consider them in answering a crucial question: did Wilson reasonably believe he was acting in self-defense when he shot Brown? Even if the prosecutor indicts Wilson, it will be hard to convict him. But dry evidentiary standards are not likely to be the concern of a community grieving over what they believe was the murder of an innocent man. For very good reasons, a conviction is unlikely either in state or federal criminal court. As any television viewer knows, American justice requires that all elements of charges be proven beyond a reasonable doubt in order to convict a person of a crime. Suppose Missouri prosecutors charge Wilson with the crime of reckless manslaughter. Given the facts as we know them at this moment, would you be willing to say beyond a reasonable doubt that they add up to the conclusion that Wilson drew his gun with reckless disregard for consequences, and not because he had a justifiable reason to do so? Perhaps, but actually it is not for you to say—unless you are on the jury. In the past, juries in such cases usually have been unable to decide unanimously, beyond a reasonable doubt, whether an officer reasonably believed his or her life to be in danger and thus was shooting in self-defense. So they rarely convict. Getting a unanimous jury verdict required to convict is unlikely in most such cases because the facts usually point to conflicting interpretations of the officer’s state of mind. There is no room for ambiguity in deciding guilt. The same standard of “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that is required to convict a street criminal—a convenience store thief, for example— must apply also to an accused police officer. To do otherwise would be to permit the government to punish people without carefully proving they are actually guilty. Furthermore, prosecuting Officer Wilson would amount to scapegoating. Unless Wilson intended to kill Brown because he was black, holding this officer personally responsible for the racially disparate impact of contemporary American policing will only compound the injustice so evident in this tragic shooting. Frustrated Ferguson residents, perhaps knowing that a local court is unlikely to convict Wilson of manslaughter, have demanded that the federal prosecutor bring charges instead. Surely they have called for federal prosecution because they perceive that federal officials are not tied to local Missouri politics and will not be influenced by parochial loyalties. Many also probably believe that only a federal criminal prosecution will signal the gravity of this case and others like it where white police kill black men. The federal legal system has a role to play here, but it is not with prosecution. Criminal justice is quintessentially a local matter; policing, judging, and operating local jails are municipal endeavors. (There are approximately 18,000 state and local police departments in the United States.) Officials appointed in Washington have no jurisdiction to prosecute someone for homicide in Missouri. However, they can prosecute Wilson for violation of Brown’s civil rights protected by the federal Constitution. The same standard of “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” would be applied to determine whether Wilson intended to kill Brown because he was black. Again, conviction on this charge is unlikely unless clear damning facts emerge. Time and vigorous investigation will tell. Nevertheless, the federal court that sits in St. Louis will surely be the forum for a civil lawsuit, as opposed to a criminal prosecution. The Brown family will sue for monetary compensation as hundreds do every year in federal courthouses across the nation. The Browns will claim that their son’s death was the result of unconstitutional “custom, policy, or practice” by the Ferguson Police Department in permitting racial discrimination to flourish in its official activity. This lawsuit will be decided under a lower and more easily met standard of proof: “preponderance of the evidence.” Such a lawsuit will point the finger where it belongs—not at an individual officer, but at the department that employed him and the city government that staffs that department. Even more broadly and appropriately, it would shine a spotlight on a political system that creates neighborhoods like those of Ferguson where black residents lack any meaningful political participation locally, creating animosity between whites and blacks. There is a chance that deep soul-searching among these different populations after the civil disturbances of the past week will prompt them to search for common ground in reforming their police department and government. Such a process has been undertaken before in another city that experienced a riot after the shooting of an unarmed black man. In 2001, a police officer in Cincinnati, Ohio pursued and shot Timothy Thomas, who was suspected only of ignoring a warrant due to 12 unpaid traffic tickets and two suspected minor misdemeanors. At the time, about a dozen lawsuits concerning deaths at the hands of local police were pending in the local federal court. Residents of Over-the-Rhine, Cincinnati’s poorest neighborhood, responded with four days of civil disturbance—called a “riot” in the media but a “rebellion” in Over-the-Rhine. When calm came to Cincinnati, residents from all neighborhoods and all levels of its society set out to understand the roots of that civil disturbance and reform their police department fundamentally. They did this within the structure of the lawsuits then pending in federal court and with the support of a federal Department of Justice consent decree. (Such “constitutional tort” lawsuits from the families of persons killed by Ferguson police have been filed in federal court there; also, Attorney General Eric Holder is considering whether to seek a consent decree for top-to-bottom overhaul of the police department.) In Cincinnati, political activists from minority neighborhoods, representatives of religious communities, the police union, and city officials signed a “collaborative agreement” to work together to change their police department. Today, 13 years later, there have been no police shootings of young men in which the facts proved unjustified use of force. This and other excellent results are attributable to several changes in the political structure of policing. They included a new police advisory board composed of residents from many neighborhoods with the power to help choose the police chief and to contribute and discuss ongoing issues as they arise. A citizen complaint board was instituted. Training and supervision protocols within the department were changed to comply with “best practices” standards set out in the consent decree with the Justice Department. New procedures for investigating officer-involved shootings were set in place, and they included 24-hour turnaround for initial investigation and transparency of ongoing reporting. Probably most important, all of the parties agreed that policing would be conducted as neighborhood “problem solving” planned with participation of local residents, in sharp contrast to “crime-fighting” strategies imposed from police headquarters. Building these police-neighborhood collaborations is very painful, and their results are not easily sustainable. But this approach offers a far more promising outcome for achieving social justice than criminal prosecution does. Prosecution is a very poor tool for getting to the bottom of why the Ferguson tragedy happened, and it will do little to foster deep and lasting reform of the police department. For that, political mobilization and hardheaded negotiation over future directions, whether collaborative or not, is the conversation that must begin in Ferguson.
If you are referring to the riots and the protests, then yes, I would agree that it has all been the result of fevered imagination. Millions created a scenario that it was foul play on part of the officer, and dozens, if not hundreds or even thousands have flown in to from all over the country to add to that fevered imagination, and the chaos. The number of shots fired, simply shouldn't be used to determine excessive force, or racism. If 5-6 bullets is how many it takes to stop a perp in their tracks from an all out assault or charge, then so be it. Who are we to judge? As you have pointed out, there is no video to provide the definitive proof that is needed to make that determination. Testimony may give us a clue as to what happened, but little more. To say the officer only suffered a "boo boo"- well that is just as imaginative as anyone else's claims, and it's hardly a good reason for putting someone on ignore. But, I'm wondering, Could it be something else entirely which has created such an abundance of itchy ignore fingers? It's just a shot in the dark, but perhaps the civil war lesson I gave in one of your recent threads, in which Fhl threatened to put me on ignore, could be construed as the reason for which you have been so quickly exiled from many of their narrow and closed minds. http://www.elitetrader.com/et/index...ite-americaas-hiv.285603/page-16#post-4014157 Of course some might quickly say, "Ahh, but Hoofy- that's just a product of your egocentricity. No one cares what you had to say about the civil war, because republicans don't even teach their kids about it much these days." But, if I am only being egocentric, then why am I talking about the actions of Fhl in the first place? And, it's a very good question for anyone reading to ask- Why, in fact, did Fhl threaten to ignore me? Was it because I made an idiotic comment reducing the severity of a grave situation? It's doubtful that I did, and if so, I would indeed offer my sincerest of apologies. I'm afraid the reason that Fhl and millions of others are hovering their ignore buttons is because they are just not yet willing to accept that much of what they've been taught about their history and their race has been a product of deceit, spoon fed to them by their own party, whom they loyally serve. The lesson I gave them may have just been too much for their brainwashed minds to handle in such a short time, and this may be the reason for the "ignore" button flare up. I know, "That's a ridiculous notion" I can hear some of you thinking right now. But consider the following: Certainly many who have co-aligned to ignore DB's insight, have made numerous comments, the Captain included, which could just as easily be considered to minimize situations that were just as grave as the shooting of Brown. They have made countless comments which would dwarf the idiocy of DB's recent comment. So, why is there so much intent to convince others that DB is to be ignored? There is an old saying which says, "if you're gonna be dumb, you better be tough", and so I imagine many of the republicans on this board to be some very tough sons of bitches, but I am beginning to understand that even the toughest of individuals have a threshold for pain for which they can no longer bear. If this is the case, and I have caused more pain than can be tolerated, It should be my obligation to quietly step aside for the time being while the healing commences. I'll tell you why I choose to ignore the "ignore" button- Because even Leap-up has said something worthwhile at least once. I can't remember at the moment what it was, and I'm sure it was a long time ago, but whatever it was, It was worth it to me to be there listening. It undoubtedly helped me to understand a concept which had alluded me my entire life- right up till the very moment it came out of his fly trap. And so now, here I am, patiently waiting, sifting through what,at times, would seem to be an endless blast of turd wind; hoping to once again breath just the tiniest breath of that fresh air which can restore my diminishing faith in humanity; invigorating once again the heart, mind, and soul to their former state; which is that of purpose, intrigue and compassion.