Look, I am not going to pretend that this is some kind of new development, but can anyone seriously say that black people don’t have every right to be terrified of letting their kids out of their sight? When their children can be murdered with absolute impunity by our law enforcement officers, that sends a message that cannot be understood by non-black people. It cannot be understood because it isn’t felt.
I suspect that even our president, our First Lady, and our Attorney General are terrified.
Why wouldn’t they be?
Protests spreading to NYC and Oakland…Fires in Ferguson.
Booman, when I tell you that my nephew actually looks a LOT like Mike Brown, so much so, that I can’t even really look at the pictures of him and NOT see my nephew, same coloring, same build, even same fat cheeks (I used to squeeze them when he was younger). My nephew is 16.
So yeah, excuse me if I’m not as willing as others to joke or be snarky about this whole mess or not emotional.
I am literally wondering what type of conversations my sister has had with him and hoping that they will be enough and feeling that it never will be.
I can’t imagine how this feels for you and your family.
Demonstrations downtown and in Capitol Hill in Seattle. Large, rowdy crowds, and the night is still young on the West Coast. None of this is good.
Tracking the announcement & aftermath in traditional & social media has underscored in a very, very visceral way that this country is experienced completely differently by white and non-white people, as well as by wealthy and poor.
What does “good” or “not good” mean anymore?
Don’t assume that the protests and fires are related.
Protests in Chicago as well. US 44 in St. Louis shut down by protesters. St. Louis County Police Department tried to raid Hands Up United without a warrant; they had to back off.
Video seems to indicate that police volley of flashbangs cause ignition of own police car. (per emptywheel) Need to examine video of that incident closely.
Freeway shut down in LA. Protests in Seattle.
Mayor Kasim Reed of Atlanta calls for federal investigation of due process in Missouri.
NYC Police Commissioner Bratton heckled this afternoon at NYU and splattered with fake blood this evening at protest. Not a happy camper.
NYC Police Commissioner Bratton heckled this afternoon at NYU and splattered with fake blood this evening at protest.
Bratton is a pig. It’s too bad they didn’t dump gallons of it on the racist SOB.
Don’t assume that the protests and fires are related.
A frequent tweet: I have never seen most of these people.
Like the bullet that “disappeared” after it was surgically removed from Maya Aaten-White’s head on Oct 13, the people who rioted and looted last night will not be found. They were not Protestors.
This is an old play book of law enforcement.
There was disciplined courage shown by Ferguson Protestors as they stood strong to protect as many businesses as possible.
Loud chants at the WH right now. “I say Jim Crow!” “We say hell no!” (Tweet with pic)
Good!
2 month deliberation, and you’re going to tell me they couldn’t think that a crime MAY have been committed?
As Bmaz(he blogs over at Emptywheel .. and is a defense laywer .. I believe .. or at least has done defense work in the past) said .. this was a total set up from the beginning. The DA’s father was a cop who was killed on duty. Two other family members are cops. The douche never charged a cop for murder once, out of at least 15 times. And no, it doesn’t take two months. Did you see that press conference tonight? That’s what a corrupt scumbag DA looks like.
In 30 years of criminal law, I do not think I have ever seen a more craven travesty & malignant contortion of justice.
And so transparently set up! No bullet in the hand, then two weeks later the magic bullet in the hand. He was stopped for a theft that wasn’t reported until after he was stopped? Precognition by the cop?
To be fair, the three eyewitnesses were friends of the victim, but the veracity of their testimony should have been evaluated by a trial jury, not the grand jury.
I never wanted to prejudge this case, but the obvious setups and changing story and most of all the EIGHT bullets, tell me this smells worse than anything I’ve ever heard of in Chicago.
Followup:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B3TDAXkCMAAFDCU.png
“According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. attorneys prosecuted 162,000 federal cases in 2010, the most recent year for which we have data. Grand juries declined to return an indictment in 11 of them.”
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/ferguson-michael-brown-indictment-darren-wilson/
McCullouh got the indictment he wanted.
McCullouh got the result he wanted.
White Supremacy wins another battle.
McCullouh christened the copKKK.
What side are you on? should be the watchword for People of
Conscience as we walk though our community lives. The hope and endurance of the Ferguson Movement must shine in every town and countryside of America. It is that elemental to our American society.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B3TDAXkCMAAFDCU.png
The cable media are all hyped up about the violence, fires, and looting–which to this point are minimal.
In 1968, when Martin Luther King was assassinated, entire neighborhoods were torched in DC, Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, and other cities. The vacant lots from those buildings are still there in a lot of those cities. That was serious.
But Don Lemon getting a dose of tear gas and FoxNews having their camera trashed are the things that the media will fixate on.
If it bleeds – it leads. Faux et al are making a lot of money off this.
So where is the Wimp-general, Eric Holder?
Let’s add our voices: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B3TDAXkCMAAFDCU.png
Obligatory disclaimer: I am Black, so is my adult son and daughter. Last year there were, according to an article I read, about 100 shootings by police of black males. There are over 38,000,000 blacks in the U.S which probably equates to 18,000,000 males. The odds of a black male being shot and killed by a policeman is effectively, 0%.
I’m so angry right now but the truth is, this is a tiny problem and it’s sucking the air out of the room. It also makes people feel angry and hopeless far out of proportion to the actual threat. the constant drumbeat of scary news has really negative effects on people.
Google “how many black males” as I just did and almost every hit relates to incarceration. The war on drugs is a war on black people and is, I think, largely to blame for the militarization and shoot first mentality of most police forces. These are the burning issues we need to address. Police killings like stranger abductions are horrific but also, really, really rare and yet they are all over the TV and make us feel personally threatened, causing us to feel endangered and stressed.
I don’t want to go all conspiracy-theory but sometimes I think this is a feature, not a bug. People who feel scared and in danger are less likely to be productive and empowered and more likely to tune out. They are less likely to vote because they don’t feel they have to ability to shape their future.
You say you are a black person. So what? Sure try telling your bullshit to Mike brown’s parents, or those of the 12 yr old kid, Lamin Rice,gunned down by police this past weekend for playing with a BB gun in a playground, or to Jordan Davis’ family, Or Trayvon Martin’s parents. Your “O%” became 100% for each and every one of those parent.
The number is still extremely high compared to other western countries.
But the point is not just that number. It’s the icy peak of a huge mountain of institutionalized oppression.
So despite the insufficiency of evidence even for an indictment or for Holder to move ahead with a civil rights prosecution you just know in your heart this was a police murder because the victim was black and the cop was white?
Uh huh.
Racist, much?
Who says the evidence was insufficient? The prosecutor who put his fist on the scale.
It is clear from the response of the DOJ to torture, banking fraud, this case, and the military policing abuses in Ferguson that the DOJ is not interested in evidence, only in politics.
The kid was unarmed. Ordinary citizens have captured crazed armed mass murderers without killing them.
The cop had probable cause for jaywalking and suspicion of robbery or shoplifting. Neither of those are capital crimes. He would have let a white guy go on those and come back to his house with a warrant.
The typical process for exonerating cops is to bring an indictment and argue justification in trial. There was sufficient evidence to bring an indictment, except the prosecutor took the unusual step of allowing the officer to make his defense to the grand jury, effectively moving one side of the trial process into the grand jury process and incompletely doing the other.
Yes, McCulloch’s prosecution was racist much because a black guy killed his cop dad back when he was a kid. And the rest of his family are in law enforcement. And he insisted on prosecuting this case himself instead of recusing himself because of his personal feelings.
This reverse racism denial is despicable. Because the evidence is there.
Fuck off bigot.
Giuliani was right. They should be more afraid of the black passers by on the other side of the street.
Giuliani is a sociologically inexperienced, big mouth, white power broker with no care for American citizens who won’t applaud him.
May Holder’s DOJ investigation come down on the Ferguson PD like rolling thunder, followed by a civil suit that wins back justice.
America the Land that never was but must be…
A prosecuter can indict anyone for anything. They have almost total control over the Grand Jury. If no indictment was returned, it was because the prosecuto didn’t want it. It would be political death for this prosecutor to be forced to prosecute Wilson in St Louis.
You can indict a ham sandwich
I sat on a grand jury in 2012. I can only think of a couple of cases we heard over the three month period where indictments were not returned. And those were cases where the prosecutor indicated a high level of ambivalence about the case. And these were usually relatively minor drug cases where he felt that it would essentially be a waste of resources and the judge would likely be irritated that the case was even brought to trial.
Obviously, we did not hear anything remotely as important or high profile as this case. But my takeaway from this experience is that the prosecutor could pretty much get any indictment or non-indictment that he wanted. The reality was, he called the shots in that room, and I cannot imagine the grand jury rebuffing him on something that he really wanted.
Typically, the fact that a Grand Jury is convened means that the Prosecutor wants to take it to trial…otherwise, there wouldn’t be a Grand Jury.
Of course, when bigots murder an unarmed kid, they know they at least have to go to a Grand Jury…but as you say, the prosecutor either wants to go to trial or the prosecutor doesn’t.
Basically, there are two ways that “justice” can be circumvented. A prosecutor who doesn’t want to take a case to trial when he/she should, and jury nullification.
When you realize that the powers that be control whether a trial begins or not, you realize just how temperamental “justice” can be.
The only instances that come to mind that we didn’t indict for were drug cases where the main evidence was only residue in some paraphernalia, and it was right at the required level to be illegal. The prosecutor indicated that judges hated cases like that; and more often than not, if there were no other incriminating circumstances, then they preferred to not prosecute for residue. It was usually reduced to a misdemeanor for something like possession of drug related instruments and moved to municipal court.
Hard cases make bad law. Learned that early on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_cases_make_bad_law
Interesting. Never had heard that before.
An often ignored office is likely to get a large protest vote come the next election. It might even be silent and not allow McCulloch to whip up his people.
went to sleep with the images of Mike Brown’s parents on my mind.
White people simply do not understand the fundamental lack of trust in law enforcement that exists within the Black community. And, they don’t understand why that undermines this country as a whole.
I’m not talking about Pookey and Ray-Ray having no trust.
I’m talking about my and the overwhelming swaths of Black America that gets up, goes to work everyday, and loves their family. The people like me, who have never had nothing more than a parking ticket in terms of ‘ infractions’.
I do not trust law enforcement.
If on a jury, I would never give them the benefit of the doubt.
I wouldn’t trust a word that comes out of their mouths.
Period.
I have three degrees and I have no more trust in law enforcement than Pookey.
If you don’t understand what that means…
oh well.
“White people simply do not understand the fundamental lack of trust in law enforcement that exists within the Black community.” I do, but only because I work every day with blue collar black men and women. And I know enough about the old days when Irish cops would roust Italian kids.
What I don’t understand is why black men and women don’t trust black cops.
Sometimes the House Slaves are worse than the Master.
Law enforcement is not an honorable professional. It is the Iron Maiden of white supremacy in America.
Whiteness will not protect anyone from anyone from the evils of white supremacy.
Beware. Ohio proves 911 calls are fatal.
This outlines many of the reflexive rationalizations that I have heard in my middle class white-man’s world.
And why don’t we know this? For the same reasons our history textbooks so warmly recount that imaginary first Thanksgiving. Because it shows a side of us that we don’t want to know exists, or ever existed.
Things are peaceful in Boston so far, and likely to remain so — not because people here aren’t angry; they are. But city and state officials, including the police, have been talking respectfully with — not at, with — the black community for months about Ferguson; and Boston has come a helluva long way since the busing chaos in the late 1970s. No, it’s not perfect, never will be, given the cussedness of human nature, but I’m pretty sure the protests here won’t boil over into violence. Heck, it wouldn’t surprise me to see Boston’s current mayor (Irish descent) marching at the head of any demonstration.
That said, this has all played out in such a drearily predictable way that I despair for this country.