The Tamir Rice non-indictment is leaving me speechless.
Maybe you should say something.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
the effort to stop the police/prosecutors/judicial/penal systems from killing and incarcerating young black men – this BLM movement that has started and is picking up steam…this is a major threat to the white power structure in our society. whitey ain’t gonna like it when people try to change the system, or even monitor the scope of the problem. I expect no change in the system in the short term and major police infiltration efforts against the brother & sisters trying to effect change. like the last round of civil rights legislation, it’s going to take a while. hence the need for the long game mentality – Obama gets it.
Have you seen Making a Murderer? Or read this http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2015/12/whats-matter-with-kansas-now.html or this https:/www.balloon-juice.com/2015/12/29/more-maddening-police-misconduct ?
Those are just things I read this morning. Obviously, OBVIOUSLY, blacks in general and black men and boy in particular, have it even worse, but the rot is so much deeper. Even racist whites should support BLM, just to try to protect themselves from an out of control system.
I would welcome any signs which show racist whites, or just white people in general, have anything at all to fear from law enforcement or the court system. The evidence is pretty strong that white people can walk around in public all day with real and loaded guns, and the most the can expect to have to deal with is a friendly chat with their local cop. Just to make sure he or she is not some mass shooter. Well, that’s not always the case, though. The system will even protect a mass shooter’s right to be publicly armed ,even as he’s on the way out the door to kill people.
I guess that’s why I included those links. They are signs. Here’s another: http://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6051043/how-many-people-killed-police-statistics-homicide-official-blac
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I’m looking at the chart titled “Killed by Police During Arrest, by Circumstances.” While nobody knows exactly how many Americans are killed by cops every year, everything I’ve read suggests that more white Americans than black Americans are killed. However, blacks are only 13% of the population, and something like 40% of the victims, so blacks are hugely more likely to be targeted.
Still, in terms of raw numbers, it’s clear that many whites do, in fact, have a great deal to fear from law enforcement and the court system.
Thanks for the links. I didn’t click on those prior to posting. Some pretty crazy shit!
true that. it goes beyond a seriously widespread abuse of power type problem to bordering on a police-state like don’t-step-out-of-line, show-me-your-papers type of problem. it is not a good situation. my cops here in suburban west denver have been nothing but professional whenever I have had to interact with them (kudos to the good ones), but that’s as a college edu white male homeowner type and not remotely in tha hood. it’s scaring me to think about how endemic violence is in our society and I am glad that there are others who not just acknowledge this issue but are doing something about the problem of police violence. for a while there I thought it was just me.
Yes, there are the stats that show that whites, including old people and children (with nothing in their hands and no threats being made) are getting gunned down by cops, as well. That story that Digby highlighted about the KS couple – former CIA analysts no less – being totally harassed by the cops bc they bought some garden supplies and had wet tea leaves in their garbage can should be sobering for everyone.
Black murder by cop is at a higher number proportionate to the percentage of blacks in our society, but cops are killing whites, as well.
That’s why it’s dumb or worse for whites to ignore these issues and/or diss BLM. They think, somehow, that the cops only go after the “bad” guys. The usual tropes of “if you don’t do anything wrong, then you won’t be targeted” are bullshit.
Go buy some frickin’ garden supplies in Kansas and see how that works out for you. And don’t count on corrupt judges to actually, you know, rule according to the law, even if you are white.
The system is very corrupted. If you’re super rich, you are mostly protected, but good luck to the rest of us, no matter what our skin tone is. But yes, still is worse for minorities.
Are they corrupt? Or are they ruling ‘correctly’ by hewing to corrupt laws? So much of this seems to come down to ‘they’ legally get to decide whom to prosecute (and persecute). If they decide to prosecute you, you’re fucked. So if you’re brown, you’re fucked. If they’ve got a PR stunt, you’re fucked. If they messed up, you’re fucked. If you’re brown and they messed up, you’re dead. And they can -still-, perfectly legally, decide if they want to bring charges or not … and can completely sway a Grand Jury. I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t know if that’s legal corruption or just moral rot.
Yeah, it’s a fine line, for sure. And I’m sure the KS couple (former CIA) were most likely smart enough to figure out some angles, plus possibly hire a good attorney… and still they got screwed over.
Was the judge corrupt or just staying within the letter of the law? It’s very very very fine line. And sometimes, yes, difficult to prove that what the judge ruled wasn’t within the letter of the law.
I work in the legal system, but I’m not an attorney. Judges don’t have a lot of leeway, but there IS leeway. That judge in KS could have probably ruled differently but went with findings that supported the cops. Was it corruption? Good old boys network? Outright egregious? I think maybe the couple is appealing but unsure.
Yes, the main thing is not to get sucked into the gaping maw of the criminal injustice system, which includes the courts. You can so easily be screwed over and have it be considered strictly legal.
Again, that’s why the yayhoos are dumb to not support BLM… they don’t get it until they’re busted, too.
Can’t tell from your comments so far, but it would be good to know? Any confrontation even, where they let you go?
Did you feel good about it afterwards? Did you feel that they were overstepping their bounds? Even in light of the prospect of you maybe being a terrorist (or otherwise absent appropriate valor?).
Wasn’t that cop that arrested you (at least) one too many cops? What did you do wrong?
Were you glad the cop was there to arrest or kill you?
Looks to me as if cops have too much freaking spare time on their hands. Hanging out and monitoring garden center purchases in KS? Stuff for growing plants and not bomb making materials.
This is an example of the extraordinary privilege to be incompetent granted to police:
Just as the Cleveland cop was “under no obligation to know” that a kid held a toy gun before instantly shooting him.
The KS case also highlights that judges provide practically no oversight in the issuance of warrants.
…you want to elect an old, Jewish, DFH, socialist as President. Not that it wouldn’t be hell, but at least with Sanders at the helm for four years, you’d have someone at the head of state giving them hell back. Not just long term, but a year from now.
. . . to effect change”
(Assuming you’re using “brother and sisters” in the vernacular sense of African-Americans — by all means correct if that’s wrong): one approach, taken straight from the 60s civil rights activism playbook, is to ensure those brothers and sisters are not left to agitate alone, but to join them in solidarity. Decent whites need to make sure it’s perceived that, if not AS outraged as blacks (cuz, duh! — how could we possibly be so? we’re not the victims of this!), we’re still outraged nonetheless.
Not to toot my own horn here (since I see my efforts as pathetically inadequate to the justification and need), but I’ve attended a candle-light vigil in front of the Cathedral of Saint Helena in support of #BlackLivesMatter following one of these police shootings/killings of an unarmed black man/boy. (I think it was Michael Brown. But how fucked-up-symptomatic is it that it gets hard to be sure as these extra-judicial summary executions by police keep stacking up?
Seemed a tiny contribution here in 99% lily-white Helena, MT. There was one black woman with several mixed-race children there. If whites/hispanics in large numbers don’t stand shoulder-to-shoulder with those “brothers and sisters” in our outrage and demands for changes in police policy and practice that supposedly (per compromised DA McGintry) made Tamir’s execution non-criminal . . . nothing changes.
“.. perfect storm of human error ..”
Universal police slogan: “to protect and to serve”
"No Comment" (Photo: PBS)
Multi-institutional racist rot in action. If this killing of a 12-year-old was legal, then the law is an ass.
In his extremely defensive press statement, I heard the prosecutor stress the height of the 12-year-old, as if that had jack shit to do with the biggest problem with the cop’s action: driving up SUDDENLY within a couple of feet of the kid and creating an instant confrontation. There was no tactical need to do that; in fact, that tactic would have placed the officers in jeopardy if the child had a real gun.
I know the purpose of the prosecutor mentioning the height of the 12-year-old who was executed by the state. We all know why the prosecutor mentioned it, don’t we? It certainly betrays his psychology, a psychology which helped drive his misuse of the grand jury process.
I agree with what Ta-Nehisi Coates has written and said about the misuse of law enforcement officers to kill, maim and incarcerate minorities at obscene scale- this is what white people collectively want. Until enough white people change their minds about that, or until white people lose their control of government institutions, cops will keep on doing these things.
Yeah, from the video the way it was approached by police seems counterproductive.
Are you always this given to understatement?
It keeps the spelling errors down.
Bluntly? Centerfielddj is right, the law in this case is ass. We have decades of legislative and case law giving police more and more leeway. Enforcing existing law and public protest cannot alone solve the issue. We need new laws circumscribing police power and a judciary that wont short circut those laws.
You know, we all insist on fewer cops.
My cops are nice, actually. But I live in the most liberal (pro-Sanders by the way) district in the Midwest. Lucky me. So I speak from experience; the fewer cops, the more cops of high quality, the less likely innocent children will die.
Pretty sure that’s what you’re saying, or meant to say. We just need a lot fewer cops.
My 12-year-old son is 5’10.5″. A relative gave him a BB gun for Christmas. Since he’s white, we will tape the tip, store it safely, and occasionally take it to grandpa’s ranch to practice. Under NO circumstances will he be allowed to take it outside of our home in the city. If we were black, that thing never would have been allowed anywhere near my home. It’s not fair. It’s not just. It’s horrific and makes me nauseous.
Even giving them the benefit of the doubt on the shooting (as though there were any) and on their stupid tactics, once they shot the kid and saw that he was just a kid, they then proceeded to do NOTHING TO HELP HIM.
They even handcuffed his distraught sister and threw her in the back of the police car.
And still did NOTHING TO HELP THE BOY.
Just let him lie there.
That alone is enough to prosecute.
That’s why I think this will eventually go to the feds. It seems like it might be a fairly good case, as much as these can possibly be with the strong bias for the police – video evidence that contradicts recordings of the cops early claims; assault of the sister; failure to provide aid (and the FBI agent’s aid in place of those police). The FBI agent alone should provide good testimony.
For my own sanity and peace of mind, I have had to step away from commenting on this except in limited spaces…
It’s too much and hits much harder than the rest.
Juxtaposing Tamir Rice vs the “Afluenza” then case…where thst bastard actually killed 4 people and it just makes me sad and angry.
Your sadness is maybe more or less than mine, but we’re in this together. Your sanity is over-rated.
Black child gunned down by a cowboy who it turns out has no business with a gun and a badge and no one will be held accountable. Same BS different day.
Black and Brown people have been saying something about this. It’s time for White America particularly the “Progressives” to step their game up. But I don’t maintain high expectations in that regard.
If you don’t, no one will.
Said online. Still true.
The definition of white supremacy is killing a kid with a toy within two seconds and claiming he was a man with a gun.
You do understand the oath of omerta the Cleveland PD chief took, don’t you?
O-fuckin-o-hi-o. We know.
It’s horrible. I speak out about it, fwiw. Some people listen to me and agree but feel as powerless as I do. I can tell some just want me to STFU. They don’t want to have bother their “beautiful (white) minds” with the horror and the injustice of it. After all, even people who do not watch Fox, et al, still pick up on the prevailing memes/themes/weltanschauung and kinda sorta buy into it, even thought they’d deny it vigorously.
We’ve been carefully taught to believe “he had it coming!” I assume that’s world view that the Grand Jury operated from (or something similar).
There’s always been huge inequalities in the US Justice system, and poor minorities have always suffered the worst.
Support your local BLM group for starters and keep speaking out against this radical injustice.
What’s the problem
White cop drives white cop up to HUGE black child
White cop scarrrrreeeed kills huge black child
hope no sarc needed
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It’s days like this that make me feel like we’ve already lost The Republic and are instead living in The Prince.
The minute we started saying that mere fear and suspicion without ever even being questioned after the fact, let alone having to be right, were enough to do pretty much anything, from arrest to killing to murder, was the three minutes after the fascists had already won one of their most important battles.
It may be best to avoid giving into that feeling. Data collection and reporting have been so poor over the decades that we don’t actually know if the current situation is worse, better, or the same as in the past. The Guardian is at least capturing the data beginning with this year and Harvard School of Public Health: Call for police killings, police deaths to be reported as notifiable weekly public health data. Expect police to fight back on this as strenuously as physicians, hospitals, and Pharma has always fought back on national healthcare. But it’s a long-overdue demand and even if in the short-run we have to rely on crowd sourcing data, that’s more than we’ve had in the past.
Perhaps, but you could also say we lost the Republic when slavery was not only permitted but rewarded in the Constitution. I sometimes think we’re still working out the bad karma of the 3/5 clause.
If you want to look at it in terms of the long moral arc of the universe bending toward justice, the first four score and seven years of our Republic bore that taint. And it perverted the whole course of affairs, because of course it became necessary to justify slaveholding in a land dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. You don’t have to do that if you’re the Romans–I defeated you, and you’re lucky to be my slave. Otherwise I would have crucified you.
So then along comes that fucker John C. Calhoun and proclaims the doctrine that slavery is a positive good! Because Negroes are inferior! That’s part of the perversity of the Constitution’s original take on slavery, it gave rise to the doctrine of white supremacy. And the reasoning behind this persisted as official doctrine for a full hundred years after the peculiar institution had been abolished.
That takes us to the civil rights era, and the fact that it’s only within the past half century or so that we’ve even been pretending to be truly egalitarian on any large scale. So you could recognize that we have most definitely made some genuine progress considering where we started from, even as you lament the fact that global warming is going to destroy us before we’ve had time to complete the process.
I think your comment contains some very thoughtful statements and a broad view of history.
I do disagree with you though. The very sad fact is that we did have the Republic then. That our sins as a country were not just that we had slavery and legalized it in our founding document, but that we try to white wash the fact that having slavery as a legalized part of our founding document is exactly the way a Republic is supposed to work. That you can be a democracy or a republic and still legalize slavery if you have enough votes.
The Republic in one of those cruel moral ironies can survive instituting slavery and Jim Crow, so long as the proper rules are followed, but it can’t survive becoming a police state because there is another word that describes a republic that becomes a police state. I believe it then turns into a dictatorship or an oligarchy at that point depending on who exactly is left in charge of the police state.
I’m always reminded anytime the topic of the qualities of a democracy or republic comes up to remember a Churchill quote: “Democracy is the worst form of government; except for all the rest.” Democracies and republics can do horrible things and yet still be democracies and republics as long as those horrible things are done be the will of the people. And that is why it’s a horrible form of government.
Calhoun’s speech was in 1837. Somewhat late in the gradual abolition of slavery in various states and the growth of the abolitionist movement.
Would any of us have done any better had we lived and been in a position of authority in the 18th Century? Today we don’t seem to be any quicker in doing the right thing or resist thwarting the right thing — 1996 DOMA — and it wasn’t the people or Congress that overturned DOMA but the SCOTUS. 118 DEM Reps voted yea and only 65 DEMs voted nay. Not any better in Senate — 32 DEM yeas. One of whom is the current DEM VP. Fourteen measly DEM votes opposed to discrimination in 1996. And we have the audacity to act as if we’re more enlightened as a people than “we” were over two hundred years earlier.
1787 – US Congress – Northwest Ordinance – outlawing any new slavery in the Northwest Territories.
1788 – US Constitution ratified.
The framers of the Constitution that opposed slavery likely accepted the compromises with the expectation that “the people” would evolve quickly enough on the issue and outlaw it within a generation, concurrent with the ban on importing slaves. Should/could they have been able to fathom that that ban would worsen conditions for many slaves? How could something that was already horrendous become worse?
Really?
Come out, come out, whoever you are, Beahmont.
It is a sad but simple truth in the USA. To the rich, powerful and all of the justice system they ALL believe that Black lives do not matter!
I’ll say it again. Too many cops.
Their number makes us bad. We’re not, so why so many cops?
A lot of these deaths hurt, but I know why Jordan, Trayvon and Tamir hurt me so much…..
YOU CAN LITERALLY SEE THAT THEY WERE STILL BABIES!!
They had not grown out of their Baby Faces.
You take a picture of them when they were 1 or 2, side by side with a picture of when they were MURDERED…and it’s only older…
They hadn’t grown out of it.
Which is why the evilness of them trying to perpetrate that that MURDERER thought he was `OLDER’ than what he was..
PHUCK THAT WAS A LIE.
A DAMN LIE!!
Their Baby Faces are right there.
I think it was digby I saw quote Chris Hayes pointing out that OH is an open-carry state, so what violation could Tamir’s police executioner have considered him to be committing?
If it was being too young to possess open-carry rights, then there goes that defense about how big and old he looked to the cops right out the window!
Man, would I savor the irony of either a Fed prosecution or civil suit over violation of Tamir’s 2nd Amendment rights, grounded in OH’s open-carry law!
. . . yet another abuse of prosecutorial discretion via hideously commonplace, transparent manipulation of the grand jury process to achieve a foregone, police-shielding outcome.
The pain that is evident in virtually every comment is proof that the spotlight shining on these situations are helping make them become stories with a national focus going forward.
The focus however is still “Us Vs.Them”.
We Americans are a pretty thick headed lot, especially the ones who think that the statement that the “Black Lives Matter” in your face activists and loony toons keyboard activists are the same folks that want Christmas banned and a Mosque on every corner.
I surmise it’s going to get creepier and more deadly before it gets better.
All it will take is the next grand jury INDICTING a white cop with the aforementioned thick headed bunch executing members of that grand jury and the cops will have more power than they ever did.
We’re not a healthy country.
And we need an enema.
I learned a new term the other day: “Officer-Created Jeopardy”. Just like the so called “21 Foot Rule” which has zero data to back it up, this is a example of just how militarized our law enforcement has become.
There is something seriously wrong with law enforcement when they have a “shoot first – ask questions later” mentality. If a cop is so chicken-shit risk averse that he or she is jumping at cars back-firing, like combat veterans are known to do, maybe they shouldn’t be cops in the first place?
Meanwhile, an unsavory sector of the population is thinking, Custer fashion: “one less dead indian – YAY!”