It probably says something about the left that they want to believe that Michael Brown didn’t do anything to be deserving of death. Did he, perhaps, punch the police office in the face, struggle to take his gun, and then, later, attempt to bum rush him, as a friend of the police officer alleges? I don’t know. I wasn’t there. Even most of the eyewitnesses were too far away or arrived too late to see exactly what went on around the car.
What disturbs me more than this seeming lack of open-mindedness on the left is the opposite bias on the right. They desperately want to believe that Michael Brown battered a police officer and then tried to attack an armed man with his bare hands. Why?
Why do they want to believe that this homicide was justified? Would that somehow relieve them of some burden? Do they feel responsible for the actions of this cop, Darren Wilson?
There’s something psychologically twisted about this instinct to defend people who kill young black men. And that’s what it is. It’s an instinct. Someone black dies, and their first instinct is to try to justify it. The first instinct should be to try to find the truth. That goes for both the left and the right.
But there is a distinction here. The left feels that regardless of the particulars in the Michael Brown case, there is a problem in this country with how law enforcement interacts with the black community. If it turns out that Brown was responsible for his own death, that would step on that message but the issue would still be 100% valid.
It seems that the right, in contrast, thinks that the real problem is black criminality. If Michael Brown turns out to by guiltless in his own demise, that wouldn’t reflect one way or the other on the issue of black criminality, but the right acts as if it would.
In summary, the left sees an opportunity in the death of Michael Brown to highlight national problems with how black communities are policed and the right sees an opportunity to highlight black criminality. Both sides have a political agenda, but one is a positive one and the other isn’t policy-based at all. It’s just an attempt to ramp up fear of blacks in order to win votes.
This perfectly illustrates the difference between progressives and conservatives.
This could only be written by a White person.
And I don’t say that positively.
When the stats are that 1 out of 3 Black men is involved with the Judicial System..
that means 2 out of 3 are not.
There is nothing, in the history of Black people and law enforcement
that gives this Police Officer the benefit of the doubt
from my Black perspective.
I have never had so much more than a parking ticket…
Yet, every male member of my Black family has been harassed by the Police at one time in their lives.
Period.
I come from a regular, middle-class Black family….
and yet, I will repeat…
EVERY MALE MEMBER OF MY BLACK FAMILY HAS BEEN HARASSED BY THE POLICE.
There is absolutely no reason why the police should get the benefit of the doubt.
NONE.
I don’t think anyone should get the benefit of the doubt.
That’s not at all what I am saying.
I’m saying that if you set the evidence aside, that the left has a preferred narrative to this story and they interpret the evidence in that light. And if you read the Twitchy article that I linked to, you see that the right looks at the same evidence and interprets in a totally different way. Both are biased in the sense that they are both predisposed to see what they want to see, but it’s hard to explain why the right wants to see what they the want to see. Why do they want the police officer to be innocent?
It’s easy to see why we want Michael Brown to be innocent, and we do. But our bias has a positive goal. We want needed change. What change is the right asking for?
The answer is none. They just want votes.
Boo, I completely disagree here. Conservatives are not looking to reinforce the narrative of black criminality because they want white votes, or want to suppress black ones. They’re looking to reinforce that narrative because they truly believe that all black men are criminals until proven otherwise. Up to and including, if you haven’t noticed, the President of the United States.
If the cop had also happened to be black, they wouldn’t give two shits about defending him. As is, the black residents of Ferguson – all of them – rioted and looted. It’s perfect.
Sure, there are politically pragmatic reasons to suppress the black vote, just as there were compelling economic reasons for Jim Crow (and antebellum slavery). But none of it would be possible without the preexisting racism. Conservatives defend people who shoot young black males (and it doesn’t need to be cops – c.f. George Zimmerman, a plenty dubious character even before he became a murderer) because young black males are by definition guilty. By. Definition. In almost every case, political calculation has nothing to do with it.
I think Michelle Malkin is a little more sophisticated than that, Geov.
You may be describing the conservative id fairly well, but not the motives of the people who feed that id.
The law enforcement community for the most part controls the facts at evidence. Do you not get that?
Example, WaPo now has a leak from the county medical examiner’s office that says the Mike Brown had marijuana in his blood.
Do you understand what that evidence really means if its true. It means that Brown was less likely to be an aggressive individual when confronted with police force.
But the leak’s sole purpose is to continue to smear the character of the victim by raising doubts.
The only one who benefits by raising false doubts in this case is Darren Wilson and every future murdering racist cop in the US.
All of this fretting over bias is exactly like the he said-she said fretting the commercial media engage in when they are fuzzing the issues.
But look where the commercial media are on Ferguson. Last night they jumped with both feet, locally and nationally, into defense of the St. Louis County Police force that was conducting an aggressive planned military operation of occupation against the community of Ferguson.
False reports. cutting off street lights and using night goggles, sucker punch flash bangs and lit fires at their end of the street, calling the tear gas thrown back at them “molotov cocktails”, clearing the streets unexpectedly before curfew, firing tear gas knowing that there were elderly, disabled, and kids in the crowd, continuing to fire tear gas repeatedly for two effing hours, threatening journalists who were recording what they were doing.
All of that is on the Twitter feed and livestream documentation. And journalist witnesses at the site.
It is no wonder that Amnesty Internation is sending in observers from Amnesty New Zealand to internationalize the witnesses.
If you want a counter-narrative, a few nitwits from Bob Avakian’s Revolutionary Communist Party have been sabotaging the community conversations about what to do and creating the narrative of “outside agitators”. They are obnoxious parasites, but the timing of their arrival and their persistence in muddying the issues makes one think they are run by the Chicago Police Department. Their actions certainly enable police narratives and right-wing media validation even if they are just misguided neo-Maoist ideologues.
The right-wing doesn’t accidentally fall into biased narratives. Those narratives are carefully drafted. That’s why it’s taken several days after the events a week ago for the right wing to get the Wurlitzer up and running.
Trayvon Martin, Oscar Grant, Mike Brown, Ezell Ford, John Crawford,,,,those names are lost in the infowar fog intentionally being created by right-wing media. Academic reflection does not readjust that balance. The situation is beyond academic arguments.
The civil rights movement claimed a victory when white people woke up in great numbers and said, “This isn’t right.” When business executives told Southern Chambers of Commerce that they were not relocating in areas that had “racial strife”. That’s not likely to happen now because white people are neither as affluent nor optimistic nor generous as they were in the early 1960s. Nor are business CEOs.
Seeing the facts as they are will not bring about a resolution to this crisis. Because conflict over the fact is a part of the tactics of the domination that is going on. Welcome to postmodern politics, BooMan. The Enlightenment is pretty much dead.
that’s all true, Tarheel. But you don’t come here to read my biased efforts to establish what “the facts” are.
This piece isn’t about the left being biased. All people are biased. But biased for what?
Was Zimmerman on the top or the bottom when he fired the fatal shot that killed Trayvon Martin.
I wanted him to be on top because that would make the case clear-cut and justice more likely. The facts ultimately leaned the other way. And that helped Zimmerman win a not guilty verdict.
We all have biases. I’m willing to cop to my own, are you?
In this case, I think the evidence shows a wrongful shooting, period.
That doesn’t mean that the autopsy neatly lines up with the eyewitness testimony. It can be shoved in that box, but it isn’t conclusive. But my point isn’t about that. It’s about the difference in motives for bias. One side wants to use the energy from this to change society for the better, and the other side wants to heighten racial fears and insecurities.
You got a problem with that thesis?
I have a problem with the idea that that’s the most salient information for discussion in the current circumstances. That’s all. Maybe it was salient Saturday a week ago, but it ceased being salient sometime prior to the moment that Wesley Lowery was arrested by the St. Louis County Police Department on Wednesday evening.
The salient matter for discussion now is how far does the coordination for this closure of ranks by law enforcement go? Is the Department of Homeland Security coordinating the “bad cop” aspects while the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division puts on the “good cop” face? Or does that kabuki stop in Gov. Jay Nixon’s office?
What is obvious is the way that Nixon has been sandbagging the black officials involved – Obama, Holder, Johnson. And how the St. Louis County officials and Ferguson police have been sandbagging Nixon. The first dynamic is internal to the Democratic Party and should be of some concern to Democrats. The second shows the extent to which the culture war has infected our institutions.
That to me is far more important than the observation that we all, unreflectively, have biases or that we all if pushed far enough might become violent or suicidal.
Checking our biases won’t necessarily make for more effective political action in this situation. Of course, running with later demonstrably false statements won’t either.
What we seem to know is that Brown and Johnson were in the Ferguson Market and Liquors around noon on the day he was killed. That they were goofing around in some way with the merchandise by the cash register, that the cashier (owner?) tried to block Brown from leaving and got forcibly pushed aside. Some customer (if the police report is to be believed) called 911, the police recorded it (either at the time or later) as a second-degree armed robbery and started looking for suspects.
Independently of that, Wilson patrolling on a side street sees Brown and Johnson walking up the middle of the street (not an uncommon behavior BTW). From here it gets fuzzy. It is not known whether Wilson heard a radio message about the supposed robbery. It is not known what transpired between Wilson and Brown. It is not know how accurate witness memories have been. But Brown wound up being shot at least six times on the right side from about waist high to bullets that hit his head. And ballistics experts will argue this for the next week without conclusion. And he died in the street.
We also know that the body lay in the street for hours.
Beyond that there are a trickle of eyewitnesses claiming several things, all coming out later with information that makes the situation that much more confusing.
But Michael Brown is dead. John Crawford died before him, and there has been no update on that case. Ezell Ford died after him and there has been no update on that case.
It is the process and the response that is of social import here because these events will keep happening until there is the political will to put a stop to it. And as intellectually honest as it is, evidentiary pedantry saps that political will just as so many other things have and continue to sap the political will to change.
you have your own agenda and strategy for achieving it.
What I do, I do for my own purposes. Not to sap anyone’s will.
What I am examining here is the rationale or psychology behind the right’s way of interpreting the same evidence that you and I see. For the purposes of clarifying my point, I am acknowledging our own bias in looking at the evidence. I am not saying this to argue that we are wrong. I am saying it because I am not interested here in the right’s bias, but in the reasons for their bias.
If you can shed light on how the psychology of the right wing so enthralls them that they read the same data 180-degrees from reality, there are lots of families with FoxNews watching folks who would be grateful for your giving them an intervention strategy. Not to mention a slew of folks being trolled on the internet.
For my money, the story they tell about their reasons for bias is accurate. They believe in traditional values more than they do in evidence. They want to defend what they think is slipping away: family values (i.e. suppression of sexual freedom and preservation of patriarchy), racial caste, individual agency, affordable government, arbitrary bureaucracy, ability to raise free range kids, good educational systems, economic prosperity, moral symbolic leadership). A lot of those things are the same things that we want to defend and expand. On others of those, we disagree. What the right-wing media and politicians have done is create a framework of total cultural/political war. And in war, propaganda is king.
So how to we defeat that absolutist frame? To me, it’s not a matter of human psychology but the fact that one political movement is pulling out all the stops to force everything into a propaganda framework.
An interesting question from your perspective of looking at this is why no one from the right side of the spectrum can make concessions to inconvenient truths except as feints to push their agenda. That is not a cognitive issue, it is a tactical one. Approaching it as a universal cognitive issue misses the point, just like the arguments that the universality of aggression makes war inevitable. Wars happen because sociological institutions find them useful for their purposes and the people within those institutions are so conformed to the institutions that they comply. Informal organization like political and sports affiliations in US society function a long-term institutional commitments with increasingly centralized messaging effects. Social media has actually had the effect of amplifying that centralization even as independent blogs have fragmented it.
Ultimately, right wingers are authoritarians.
Authoritarians don’t blindly follow any authority. They follow authority that they agree with.
Here you have a white police force and a poor black community being kept by that police force.
Of course right wingers who agree with white people controlling those people are going to side with a white cop who murdered a black kid.
What the right-wing media and politicians have done is create a framework of total cultural/political war. And in war, propaganda is king.
So how to we defeat that absolutist frame? To me, it’s not a matter of human psychology but the fact that one political movement is pulling out all the stops to force everything into a propaganda framework…
…That is not a cognitive issue, it is a tactical one.
This doesn’t get pointed out often or explicitly enough. The hard-right culture warriors believe they are literally under seige. They correctly perceive that their way of life is in many respects coming to an end, but they misinterpret the cause as a coordinated and deliberate act of hostility from the Left, when in fact it’s just a matter of societal evolution.
This explains not just the biases they willingly embrace–as Tarheel points out, this is conscious propaganda at the top level, and among the less sophisticated ranks consciously ignored cognitive dissonance when not recognized as deliberate misinformation–it also explains why they so readily excuse or justify the violent behavior and repeated outrages from the authorities and “concerned citizens:” this is war, and in war all acts, even the most shocking and brutal, are acceptable when committed in the defense of one’s alliance. Propaganda is yet another weapon in that war.
This to me is why you see the left so conspicuously lacking the unity that the right is so good at achieving: we don’t–or we don’t yet–view this cultural conflict as a war in terms beyond metaphorical. We tend to view it as a struggle between factual vs non-factual in the effort to chart the best course for the future, and that those in fiercest opposition to the plain evidence are just dumb, but somehow mean well.
Those of us who come at this from a more partisan mentality–shrill, even–see that the right not only is not dealing in good faith, but are lethally dangerous in a very literal sense, and not just to us on the left, but to humanity as a whole. We’ve taken this view since well before Barack Obama ascended to the presidency, and have been confounded and astonished as he demonstrated again and again his apparent inability to grasp the true deadly nature of this ever-hotter war.
The response from mainstream white society, as captured recently by Julia Ioffe at the New Republic, shows a dogged insistence to misinterpret every scrap of information that comes their way. It’s beyond disheartening. A vast portion of our population appears to be living inside a bubble of denial, and I don’t see how the inevitable pop can occur without a lot of innocent blood being spilled in the process.
Amen
Amen
a thousand times Amen.
Left wingers are naturally less authoritarian than right wingers.
Right wingers are inherently authoritarian.
Here, the authority is a white cop.
Of course the right is going to defend the cop and the natural, traditional authority.
The left is going to see brutality in a member of the established hierarchy seemingly killing an unarmed member of a class of people typically left out of the dominant culture.
Except when they have to surrender to law enforcement authority. Then they strap on their guns against government “tyranny”. Case in point. Bundy ranch militias and Open-carry ammosexuals all over the country. These are the same people who don’t think African Americans should also be able to exercise 2nd Amendment rights. Glaring hypocrisy.
The difference is WHO the authority is.
Fed’r’l Gub’mint encroaching on a white man?
Not the correct authority. Instead they’ll look to the local police force.
City police putting down a black kid who had the temerity to be black?
Correct authority. White cop. Black kid.
It’s not any more complicated or hypocritical than that.
It’s not just submission to ANY authority. It’s submission to the agreed upon authority.
Conservatism is about hierarchy. Freedom, to a conservative, is the freedom to hurt the guy below you on the totem pole. It is not the freedom to mouth off to the guy above you. If you did mouth off to the guy above you, and he hurt you for it, then he would simply be exercising his god-given conservative freedoms.
Cops are below white landowners on the totem pole, and above black teenagers. Everything else follows from this.
Except when they have to surrender to law enforcement authority. Then they strap on their guns against government “tyranny”. Case in point. Bundy ranch militias and Open-carry ammosexuals all over the country. These are the same people who don’t think African Americans should also be able to exercise 2nd Amendment rights. Glaring hypocrisy.
Agreed.
Agreeing to rikyrah & Geov Parrish
Question, is this standard procedure?
Fuck no.
Unless their standard is to let citizens report their own shooting incidents.
Didn’t allow a nurse to try to resuscitate, didn’t call an ambulance. Left him in the street for five hours.
None of that is standard.
Bodies are often left for hours in a war zone. Wilson and his fellow cops knew Ferguson was a war zone, a war zone where they were the daily victors.
Another wrinkle. According to the lawyer for the proprietor of the Ferguson Market and Liquors, no store employee called in to report the theft of cigarillos. As best the owner can determine based on the police report, it was a customer of the store who called in the report.
That raises the question of whether the Ferguson PD phonied up the report after finding cigarillos on Brown. The 9/11 records have not been made available.
There is a lot of law enforcement stench here.
Did he, perhaps, punch the police office in the face, struggle to take his gun, and then, later, attempt to bum rush him, as a friend of the police officer alleges?
No, the autopsy does NOT support that scenario. It’s likely he was on his hands and knees when the fatal shot was fired.
Looks like the popo’s shit-storm is working.
I agree that the autopsy report doesn’t support it. It doesn’t preclude it, either.
Look at what the folks at Twitchy think the autopsy supports and doesn’t support.
You can make the facts line up with your bias if you try hard enough.
Based on the autopsy report alone, it isn’t possible to be certain what happened, but there are other facts including multiple eyewitness accounts and the curious actions of the police after the shooting occurred. When the totality of the available evidence is weighed objectively, it at least seems certain that Brown was shot and killed at a distance while facing the officer, and quite possibly with his hands raised. What happened in and around the car is not known.
The pathologist in the family’s press conference said there were no marks of a struggle on Brown’s body.
Like I said above, who does fuzzing the evidence to create reasonable doubt benefit? And who controls the evidence?
There are significant process issues here.
yes, there are.
But, again, you are showing your bias.
The boy that was with Brown said that the police officer grabbed Brown around the throat and tried to pull him into the car. That’s hard to do to a 6’4″ 292 lbs. man. Why aren’t there any bruises on his neck?
The evidence from the autopsy can be used to bolster or undermine both sides. If you want to undermine the testimony of the eyewitnesses, you can focus on one part and the exclusion of others.
And, remember, the officer will have good attorneys. So, any way that reasonable doubt can be raised is a potential problem when this goes to trial, assuming that it does.
Even the autopsies themselves could be a problem, since the St. Louis coroner said multiple shots to the chest, not the arm.
Also, it doesn’t matter who called 911 about a robbery as long as someone did. And it can’t possibly have any role in the shooting unless the dispatch went out at the exact moment of the confrontation, which should be easy to establish.
The key to my position is that Mike Brown will not go on trial. If Darren Wilson ever goes on trial, he will only be sent to prison if there is proof that the entire jury can accept “beyond a reasonable doubt”. The incentives are on the side of the police to create that reasonable doubt.
It doesn’t matter what the right or the left believe about, that’s where justice will or will not occur.
And I doubt justice will occur in St. Louis County.
Protests over the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer continue.
It’s not about one incident of a police shooting of Michael Brown, it has become a national discussion about equality, being treated fairly by authorities and THE WORLD IS WATCHING once again.
○ Missouri governor sends National Guard to Ferguson
○ Iraq A Mess, Now National Guard Send to Ferguson
Sorry to be OT so soon, but I freakin’ called it right here at BJ the other night. I said, the County was waiting to release the autopsy and tox report so they could find something to exploit, especially since the actual shooting would be suspect. I was told naw, tox reports can take a month,…
And guess wha –>
https://twitter.com/CapehartJ/status/501409934337011714
question: are the cigars he got at the convenience store the kind typically used to make blunts or are they not suitable for that purpose?
I assumed he was getting them to smoke weed, but I am not an expert on blunts.
I believe that is true, but we all know the story will be that he had traces of weed in his system at the time of “confrontation”
And as ya know
Me and every friend I had at the time had marijuana in our system at 18. Didn’t mean I was necessarily high. Probably meant I was less inclined to have any kind of altercation with someone.
If it is a box of cigars at a convenience store, then yes, they are typically used to roll blunts.
That said, it’s cannabis.
Someone who smokes once or twice a day will have metabolites in their system for week(s).
Like cannabis is going to make someone more agitated and more likely to fight a police officer.
Find PCP/Coke/Meth, and it is at least reasonable to think that perhaps drugs played a role in the events.
Cannabis? Hilariously fucking stupid.
Ooooh! The killer weed that drives black men into Reefer Madness. Maybe they should do a tox screen on LA and see if 90+% don’t have traces of Mary Jane in their blood.
Is that the official county report, whose data can be audited by pathologists, or is that the leak reported in the Washington Post?
As far as I know, it was a private autopsy.
the John Crawford incident in Ohio the most outrageous of all of these cases, and of course it is drawing none of the heat or light of the Brown case in greater St. Louis.
See, e.g., here. There’s basically no reporting since this article, but the story is the same — Attorney General and police are not releasing any details. Wal-Mart is also not releasing the surveillance footage.
Crawford certainly committed no crime, he was barely older than Brown, he was shopping at the store and is gunned down! The story coming out now is of course that the police were lying when they said that the reports over 911 indicated a man in the store was waving the gun at kids. Can we name even one case when a department classified a homicide as non-justifiable and then charged the officer with homicide???
Where the fuck are the US Attorneys in Ohio and Missouri???
Atty. General Mike DeWine is busy running a corruption racket. Gov. Kasich is staying quiet for the GOP convention and the nomination for Pres. or VP. They know their base constituency.
Sure as hell DOJ should be here.
ACLU and NAACP, somebody needs to get on the State and also on the Feds to look into this. Make noise, there is a major election in November.
Ohio ain’t California, but it ain’t Missouri, either. Change, in the progressive direction, is possible.
And I am so sick of just sitting around, I’m happy to help agitate (even from greater DC). But we need locals to work with and through.
What does “agitate” look like.
Polite conversations with elected officials get shunted aside and conversations shut down so they can gladhand the next constituent. Phone calls get no results. Letters are delayed and sometimes lost in security procedures. And all of the communications seems to move from elected officials to constituents and none in the other direction. Citizen lobbying on a mass basis is shut down by building security.
Protests are ignored until they get large enough and noisy enough and persistent enough. And then they are shut down with tear gas.
People are awake and agitated. They are at a loss for what exactly they can do will be effective in bringing about changes that actually address the situation.
Well, that’s not entirely true because the media saturation of false information is so intense and well-funded.
What are your ideas of what “agitation” looks like?
I’ll take a try at answering your question, Boo.
The right reflexively discounts any argument that American society is not superior, exceptional, and is innocent of any need for change.
It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about the treatment of native people in the past or the treatment of black people today, the right will argue that complaints are unfounded and change is unneeded. This tendency has many roots–opposition to the civil rights movement, equal opportunities for women, rights for GLBT folks, health care for poor people, rights of workers, etc. All of these movements, in the view of the right, amount to a disruption of the natural societal order, the order where (mostly white) people with money have power and all the rest of us don’t argue with them.
In fact, all of these movements represent a dilution of the political power. The right can’t bear that because they want exactly the opposite–consolidation of power in the hands of the already powerful and privileged.
To that end, ANY complaint about unfair treatment of any group in our society is suspect among the right and will be discounted, rationalized, explained away, or waved off, because accepting the validity of any complaint lends credence to the argument that not everyone gets a fair shake.
Ludlow Massacre. Not black. Not male. Two dozen women and children were killed. UMWA strikes and armed resistance after that. More people including women and children were killed. National Guard called in to disarm miners and mine guards and militias. Miners didn’t achieve the goal to unionize those mines.
The bias in this country remains in favor of the ownership class and those hired to serve them.
Capitalists and the police forces who defend their property rights is just a euphemism for the Lords and their Knights of the feudal era.
About the threat that provoked the no-congregating and keep moving rule.
Yesterday someone set up a table registering Ferguson citizens to vote.
The only change will come with a sweep of the City Council and the Mayor’s Office, and then have the Police force completely re-organized and the Chief fired and/or indicted.
So of course they would break up a voter registration booth.
I shouldn’t be surprised anymore. I always am.
Yeah, elections have consequences….but something else needs to change right now. How about the protesters wrap themselves in the flag. You know that flag the Vets gave them when grandpa died or that cousin who died in Iraq. There needs to be a flag in every car, home, apartment window…so when the army comes they know its Americans they are pointing their weapons at. It has go to be clear that the people of Ferguson are not the enemy.
Hey, that might be possible. I have 144 flags, size one foot, right now to donate to the cause. I’ll tweet Antonio French.
That is actually a great idea.
“It probably says something about the left that they want to believe that Michael Brown didn’t do anything to be deserving of death.”
Even giving Wilson all the benefit of the doubt (which there is no reason to do at this point) he still used lethal force on an unarmed suspect. Michael Brown did nothing to deserve death even in the police’s own scenario.
That’s just basic morality.
Why?
My tribe, right or wrong. White cop, dead black kid.
Next.
What disturbs me more than this seeming lack of open-mindedness on the left is the opposite bias on the right. They desperately want to believe that Michael Brown battered a police officer and then tried to attack an armed man with his bare hands. Why?
Who?
Not NRO, not Mark Steyn – both have come out against the cops on this, against police militarization, and in Steyn’s case even against cops carrying guns routinely, anywhere in America.
Steyn thinks the cops are full of crap and scorns the whole “Brown was a robber” thing.
Straw wingnut?