Miss me with this.
The reason for being angry about Zimmerman not being arrested are many:
Let's do this.
1: He was clearly hostile towards Martin, because Martin was "walking around, looking about", or in other words, walking down the street like an ordinary pedestrian.
He certainly doesn't sound like a man who is "hostile" toward anyone in the recorded call. He sounds like someone who is annoyed, frustrated perhaps - with the hoodlums who've been trickling into the neighborhood lately. He sounds pretty confident that he's discerned something about Martin based on how he is carrying himself, moving through the environment, etc.
People have always acted like there's only one version of "walking through a neighborhood" and that it is 100% innocuous, period. This just isn't the case. Ask any seasoned cop or even just someone who lives in a bad area, and they'll tell you that you can often spot the troublemakers a mile away. When people adopt a criminal lifestyle they start reflecting that sometimes in how they behave, even down to how they move through an environment. They're looking around to make sure they aren't being watched, they're noticing things most of us wouldn't (things that look like opportunities) etc. I have no doubt at all that you've noticed suspiciousness in a person who wasn't really doing anything objectively wrong.
Since neither you nor I were there watching Martin when Zimmerman made that call, we aren't in a position to know whether Zimmerman was reasonable in deciding Martin looked suspicious. We do know that the (black) neighborhood watch coordinator from the Sanford PD testified on the stand that calling NEN based on Martin's described behavior was appropriate, and was exactly the sort of thing they encourage people to call about. We also know from information that came out about Martin later, that Zimmerman was pretty much right on the nose about Martin.
2: He was clearly following Martin, while spewing curses and complaining that "they always get away".
I don't know if I'd call it "spewing" but he did curse a couple of times, true. I think again this was just indicative of frustration. Frustration plus trying to establish a comradery with the police dispatcher (the kind of comradery people build by complaining about the same sort of things together) and maybe trying to firm up his own courage a bit, as he walked into a dark area this person had recently been.
And I agree he was "following" Martin briefly, but the evidence (timeline, witnesses, physical object locations, etc.) backed him up on his claim that this had only been at a distance, briefly, with no running, and only to try to reestablish a visual from a distance, NOT to try to have any direct contact with Martin.
99% of the outrage people felt about the following thing is because they wrongly assumed Zimmerman initiated the direct confrontation when all indications are he didn't and couldn't have. There really isn't anything left to be outraged about when you learn the truth which is that he had no intention of direct contact with Martin, and Martin was the one who decided that would take place.
3: He left the safety of his vehicle to pursue Martin on foot.
He did leave the safety of his vehicle and I'm sure he wishes he hadn't. I guess he underestimated the level of Martin's criminality and the threat he posed. He learned the very, very hard way. I think we can better understand this decision in the context of the time though, by realizing that he didn't think there was any danger. He appears to have been completely convinced Martin would continue running, and that by the time he reached the "T" intersection Martin would be seen in the distance at best.
"Pursue" is possibly accurate, but it's one of those loaded words. Does it imply merely going in the same direction and wanting to keep an eye on someone? Or does it imply more, like direct confrontation being a goal?
4: Martin was obviously attempting to avoid him, as both he and Rachel Jeantel state.
Martin was obviously trying to avoid him at one point. Obviously the opposite later. Did this have something to do with Zimmerman no longer being on a lit street, in a big metal truck, with a phone up to his ear? Did it have something to do with an already high level of anger at having an eye kept on him getting even higher (to the level of violence) when he saw this guy had gotten out and come around the corner on foot? Was it this anger combined with the impulsive inability to pass up an opportunity to act out his frustrations with a whole string of recent events in his life where he was getting busted? Did Zimmerman become the embodiment of cops, parents, teachers, and anyone who'd been getting in the way of his delinquency? Did Zimmerman obliviously make himself the "last straw"? Possible, but just my speculation.
Based on all my observations of this case I'm completely convinced Martin was never scared of Zimmerman. I think he may have been briefly concerned about cops showing up, but I think his primary emotion was anger.
5: He was found around a corner from where his vehicle was, even though this makes no sense according to his own version(s) of events.
If he went to the top of the corner to take a look, and then blindly stumbled in the direction he'd already been facing to react to Martin confronting him, upon being hit, then it makes sense. He really wasn't that far down south, and if he sustained an unexpected blow to the nose which made it difficult to see, and triggered a panic, it isn't completely unbelievable that he would just start trying to flee his assailant without giving any thought to the optimum direction. Strange things happen in physical altercations. They move very quickly, and when people are afraid and dazed they do odd things.
The trail of items does seem to back him up in showing movement from north to south. More importantly, multiple ear witnesses attested that the attack and screaming began at the "T" and then rapidly moved south. That's exactly what Zimmerman describes, and exactly what would need to have happened to make his final location make sense.
6: Rather than arrest him, the police chief make several false and inflammatory statements, including that Zimmerman "Never mentioned Martin's race" even though he did, and that Martin "must regret what he did", despite there being no evidence that Martin actually did anything wrong, except for the word of the guy who chased him, and who was obviously lying.
What people said was that Zimmerman didn't volunteer Martin's race, which is true. He mentioned it in response to the dispatcher directly asking what Martin's race was in order to get a description. He did later revisit it in what sounded like a confirmatory statement of "and he's a black male" - to erase the earlier uncertainty of "he
looks black." - Interestingly, the fact that he felt he had to remove this uncertainty later would seem to undermine the racial profiling narrative somewhat, because it indicates he didn't even know Martin was black during the all important period of time he was deciding he looked suspicious.
There's plenty of evidence Martin did something wrong, because it's wrong to do what the injury photos showed no matter what. If you want to claim those injuries were inflicted in self-defense, you can believe that if you'd like but recall that Zimmerman was the one screaming, not Martin, and Martin had no injuries... and Martin got shot in a way which seemed to indicate obliviousness to the presence of the gun, and he left no trace of himself on said gun... so it doesn't appear there was a struggle for the weapon.
As for Zimmerman lying? Most of that meme seems to just be people deciding early on he was evil, therefore he's lying, etc. I've never seen real compelling evidence for him lying in that early portion of things. He was exceptionally candid with investigators, and he passed two voice stress tests. So, while I have always felt he might have embellished or outright lied about things like "you're gonna die tonight" and Martin going for his gun, I could be wrong about those being lies and even if they are, it seems (based on the evidence and other considerations) that he was largely truthful, to the best of his recollection, about most of it.
7:All of the above was known (apart from Rachel Jeantel's testimony) when the protests against the Sanford PD's behavior began in earnest.
The protests, much like in Ferguson and many, many other examples - are based primarily on racial solidarity and emotion.
Criminals get shot from time to time by cops and by their victims. This is unsurprising and not anything that needs outrage or correction.
8: Juror B37 was excellent at recreating outrage, with her thoughtless dismissal of testimony and evidence, her false claim that there were "riots in Sanford" over the case, and her clear bias towards "George" over "the boy of color", to use her words.
Not everyone is as precise with language as we might like. I don't think it's that outrageous to call angry protests "riots" and Ferguson is another good example of how the line can blur. I don't think it's particularly damning that she confused that issue. She wasn't super bright, and clearly hadn't paid the kind of attention to this beforehand that you or I did.
The "of color" thing (as incredibly silly as it is) is embraced widely by the very sorts of people who hate her for using it. Hypocrisy, and indicative of a willingness to do anything to maintain senseless outrage.
She cried during that interview about what happened to Trayvon. She clearly had great sympathy for both parties. She was an emotional person without a very high IQ. She fulfilled her oath.
Now, when Christopher Lane was shot by two black kids and one white kid, black people weren't upset, by and large. We weren't calling him a thug because he had a picture of himself with his baseball cap backwards. Instead, the vast majority of us nodded our heads and said "put them in jail." So the claim that this was about skin color for us, and Martin supporters of other skin colors, is laughable.
So you think black people should receive accolades for not supporting three black kids (the one kid wasn't white, just very high white admixture - which in America is not considered white. In some pictures of him it's much more clear that he is a "boy of color") who outright murdered a completely innocent person jogging down the street?
You think that's an equivalent situation to a criminal being shot while brutally attacking someone?
