Michael Brown shooting II

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Nihilianth said:
First, the whole "ESP" thing is totally irrelevant, and frankly, a bit obnoxious.
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When people continue to rely on information that was unknown at the time of the incident, then yes, it is a case of demanding that cops have some form of future telling ability. Not just in this thread, we see the same in other threads where the police are supposed to be able to detect and distinguish a replica weapon make to look all but identical to the real deal from the real thing or that they are supposed to be able to determine the age and inclination of a suspect just by looking at them. They want to introduce a heap of stuff that was learned after the shooting, and blame the cops for not knowing it before they fired. That is what is obnoxious.

He didn't have a taser. So you have said. Again, my question: "Why not?" and no, "because it was uncomfortable" is not an excuse for the officer not to have had a largely non-lethal police issue tool. (Non-lethal, so long as it isn't obnoxiously abused on an individual.)
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Of course it is, Officer Wilson had no reason to believe that he was going to need a Taser that day, just as he hadn't needed one the other however many hundred times he'd gone out on patrol. Yes he played the odds, the odds that he wasn't going to be attacked by a doped up and violent criminal, because that didn't happen on a regular basis. For him, the odds of being highly uncomfortable in the vehicle outweighed the odds of being attacked and needing it. Sadly that day he was wrong.

I will grant you that this particular case probably did not have anywhere near enough evidence against Wilson to obtain any sort of conviction.
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There is not even enough evidence to say that a crime was committed.


However, there is an even greater issue than this at hand:

Guns, fear, and racism. Fueled largely by Fox News and far-right conservative Tea-Partiers who do not want to even discuss the possibility of racism, poverty, and guns as problems in this country.

I'll give you a few statistics:

According to USA Today, there are upwards of 400 police killings each year in the United States. The exact figure is largely unknown.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/08/14/police-killings-data/14060357/

According to The Economist, British officers only fired their guns three times last year;
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2014/08/armed-police

According to RT.com, German police:

http://rt.com/usa/us-germany-85-shots-022/

We have a problem in this country. A serious problem. The people own guns because they are afraid of the mystical random home invasion. Cops are suspicious of the public, particularly black people. Blacks are scared of cops. And everyone MUST own a gun!

Trayvon Martin was a high-profile case. Michael Brown even more high-profile, on the order of Rodney King. Things are only going to continue to get worse, as we accept the excuse that cops should automatically reach for their guns. Maybe in this case with Michael Brown, it was at least not "criminal" what officer Wilson had done. But it sure as **** happened in front of a whole lot of witnesses in broad daylight. They left the body in the middle of the road for all the world to see with a river of blood coming out of it before they finally were able to cover it up. And later on, the police department disrespected the memorial the people on the community set up by running over it. Then they brought out full military gear in order to deal with the riots that happened afterwards. The site of tanks on the streets of an American city, and the statistics of police departments harboring military-grade weapons only further enraged people.

We have far too many people sitting in prison on trumped-up drug charges in the name of the so-called "War on Drugs." Blacks are targeted at a far greater rate than whites when it comes to drugs. Same with stopping people in their cars.

Personally, I have experience three separate racist incidents in three years while attending school in a city in PA. As a white guy with black friends in my car, on three separate occasions, I was pulled over for no apparent reason, other than the officers wanting to check the (black) passenger's IDs. I was the one driving all three times. And I was not speeding, and my car registration was up-to-day. It's nuts. No reason why I should have been pulled over, and even less of a reason why passengers have to have their IDs checked, but not the driver's.
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And off on a totally irrelevant rant. Even if 100% true, none of this has anything to do with the shooting itself and if there was a crime. You can't judge people guilty because of circumstances and things they haven't done.

As to comparing the UK and US with shootings, that is plain dumb. For a start, UK cops don't carry guns for the most part, and you know what else, most UK criminals don't either. It's a totally different dynamic. In the US the police travel to an incident with the knowledge that one or more of the actors may very likely be armed with a gun. In the UK they don't. In the US, it's not beyond the pale to have the driver of a stopped car pull out an AK-47 and shoot up the cop car, this doesn't ever happen in the UK. This year in the UK three officers died while on duty, one from a heart attack, and two from vehicle accidents. In the US, 43 officers died because they were shot, another 2 died by from being assaulted, and 3 were hit deliberately with vehicles, and that doesn't include the 7 dogs that were shot or stabbed. As you can see, the dynamics are way different.
 
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Kaosium said:
On asphalt casings can skitter or roll (but generally in a tiny circle due to the shape of the casing)
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Small nitpick, the .40 S&W case is tapered less than .001" and are rimless so they can roll and not go in circles.
 
Kaosium said:
Darren Wilson goes through his options and why he didn't choose them in his post-shooting interview (p. 6-9). The one he didn't mention that I wondered why he didn't consider was simply putting the vehicle in gear and hitting the accelerator. That would have solved his immediate problem without having to bring out the gun, which just made his situation worse and from his own account almost got him shot.


Once he was out of the vehicle, the problem with a guy the size of a typical NFL Offensive lineman attacking is that if you have a gun and don't use it then in short order it could be his gun. He's still that big and strong and odds are you're not only without your gun you're beaten and quite possibly about to draw your final breath...
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His shifting hand was a bit busy at the time.
 
No gangsta
Less Crime !

No gangsta
Less Crime !

No gangsta
Less Crime !

No gangsta
Less Crime !

No gangsta
Less Crime !
 
Ziggurat said:
I don't know how any parent can ever be "comfortable" with the death of their child, regardless of the circumstances. So that's really not in any way relevant to whether or not Wilson was justified in shooting Brown. It's an appeal to emotion, and Wildcat is right that it really has no place in this discussion. There's a reason we don't let crime victims decide on the punishment for criminals, and it's got nothing to do with not caring about those victims.
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I'm sorry you and wildcat did not understand the point of my exercise. I did not ask him to decide guilt or innocence base on emotions--what I asked, if you read carefully, is to clear yourself of biases and then ask yourself if the process was fair. Perhaps it was a mistake on my part to tell him to put himself in Brown's parents shoes--I did that simply to try to drive home the point that his personal biases were clouding his perception. What I am asking is if this was a fair process. If you really knew the dynamics of the police and community here, it is hard for me to understand how you could think that things proceeded fairly here.
 
stanfr said:
I'm sorry you and wildcat did not understand the point of my exercise. I did not ask him to decide guilt or innocence base on emotions--what I asked, if you read carefully, is to clear yourself of biases and then ask yourself if the process was fair. Perhaps it was a mistake on my part to tell him to put himself in Brown's parents shoes--I did that simply to try to drive home the point that his personal biases were clouding his perception. What I am asking is if this was a fair process. If you really knew the dynamics of the police and community here, it is hard for me to understand how you could think that things proceeded fairly here.
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Surely "fair" means that the evidence was impartially examined, and a determination without bias towards either party, and that was supported by the evidence, was reached. What "fair" doesn't mean is give the parents and mob what they want because they're upset.
 
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stanfr said:
I'm sorry you and wildcat did not understand the point of my exercise. I did not ask him to decide guilt or innocence base on emotions--what I asked, if you read carefully, is to clear yourself of biases and then ask yourself if the process was fair.
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For the most part, yes. I've seen complaints about some of the specifics (such as not photographing Wilson's hands before washing them off), but I can't see how any of that would have changed the outcome.

Perhaps it was a mistake on my part to tell him to put himself in Brown's parents shoes--I did that simply to try to drive home the point that his personal biases were clouding his perception.
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That was a mistake, because you basically asked him to substitute his alleged biases for even stronger biases. If your point was to try to rise above biases, that's really not the way to do it.

What I am asking is if this was a fair process. If you really knew the dynamics of the police and community here, it is hard for me to understand how you could think that things proceeded fairly here.
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That sounds a lot like you want me to accept your biases.
 
The black population is the majority in Ferguson. They should change things at the ballot box. If you can organize a protest, you can organize an election.
 
jhunter1163 said:
This is from another thread, but it bears repeating here. This poster is a police officer and knows of what he speaks.
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If this lad had simply raised his hands as directed......He'd be alive now.
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LOL--what a stupid remark. One of the few things the witnesses agreed on is that he had his hands raised.
 
PhantomWolf said:
Surely "fair" means that the evidence was impatiently examined, and a determination without bias towards either party, and that was supported by the evidence, was reached. What "fair" doesn't mean is give the parents and mob what they want because they're upset.
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Agreed. Many of us who have familiarity with the process saw this as a blatantly biased presentation towards Wilson.
 
Wolrab said:
His shifting hand was a bit busy at the time.
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It was his left hand that was blocking and his right hand that he used to draw the gun. It's hindsight, of course, but I just wondered why he didn't start driving and then draw the gun.
 
Ziggurat said:
For the most part, yes. I've seen complaints about some of the specifics......

That sounds a lot like you want me to accept your biases.
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No, im asking you to take a look at the history of Grand Juries, what their function is, what the standards are, and how they should conducted. Free of your personal bias as to how this case should have been resolved. If you had a solid understanding of those points, I would hope you would understand some of the problems we see with how this was handled.
 
PhantomWolf said:
Of course it is, Officer Wilson had no reason to believe that he was going to need a Taser that day, just as he hadn't needed one the other however many hundred times he'd gone out on patrol. Yes he played the odds, the odds that he wasn't going to be attacked by a doped up and violent criminal, because that didn't happen on a regular basis. For him, the odds of being highly uncomfortable in the vehicle outweighed the odds of being attacked and needing it. Sadly that day he was wrong.
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And we don't even know that he was wrong. We don't know that if he had a Taser, he would have used it. We don't know that if he had a Taser and used it, the outcome would have been any better. It's all just supposition.
 
stanfr said:
sorry, I don't see anything that contradicts my statement, you'll have to be more specific.
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Didn't read good. All entry wounds from front. Brown skin, blood DNA found inside Wilson's car. Two shell casings near cop car door. Gun powder residue in Brown's hand. Entry wound in thumb. Some witnesses say Brown charged Wilson.
Read again.
 
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stanfr said:
Agreed. Many of us who have familiarity with the process saw this as a blatantly biased presentation towards Wilson.
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But it's only biased towards Wilson because the evidence is biased towards Wilson. The evidence against him simply doesn't stack up.

Seriously, if I was in Wilson's shoes and got you as my public Defender, I'd be asking for another Lawyer. Any good defence lawyer would have gotten this kicked BEFORE it got to the GJ. The Prosecution knew that they didn't have a case, but they had the GJ purely as theatre to try and appease the mob. Going to trial would have been nothing more, and when Wilson had been found not guilty at considerable expense to everyone involved, the exact same thing would have occurred.

The Mob doesn't care about the evidence, they just wanted Wilson, an innocent man, strung up and the fact that the legal system went out of it's way to appease them is what is the most unfair thing of all.
 
stanfr said:
No, im asking you to take a look at the history of Grand Juries, what their function is, what the standards are, and how they should conducted. Free of your personal bias as to how this case should have been resolved. If you had a solid understanding of those points, I would hope you would understand some of the problems we see with how this was handled.
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Now it appears that you simply don't like my answer. But couching that disagreement as an insistence that I "free" myself from my "personal biases" is basically a way of claiming that there is only one conclusion that one can reach if one has no bias. But you don't get to claim that authority. Present facts, evidence, and logic. Don't just accuse me of being biased.

As for the history of grand juries, well, that history is full of indictments that should never have been handed down. The old saying about prosecutors being able to indict a ham sandwich has an element of truth to it. The fact that the prosecutor here did not take such an approach is not a sign of unfairness, it's a sign that he didn't abuse his position in pursuit of a politically popular outcome. Wilson would never have been convicted at trial, and the proceedings made that plain. There is no reason a grand jury should indict under those conditions, and the fact that many prosecutors manipulate the grand jury into handing down an indictment anyways is not a precedent worth following.
 
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