Michael Brown Case

[SpecialEdition]

I think when a big ass man tries to beat up an officer in his car, then tries to steal his gun, after having robbed a store, and then charges the officer from whom he tried to steal a gun and would likely have KILLED him with... What can you do? How do you diffuse that?

 

[sassafras]

I think when a big ass man tries to beat up an officer in his car, then tries to steal his gun, after having robbed a store, and then charges the officer from whom he tried to steal a gun and would likely have KILLED him with... What can you do? How do you diffuse that?

Shoot for the legs. Stop him from charging. Or stop shooting when he doubles over.

Or, if the officers actions are considered justifiable, maybe we ought to revisit how the justice system looks at self defence in general. As it stands, it's rather incongruent.

 

[sassafras]

I think this is again dividing the country. If no one believes there can be a real and factual investigation isnt it this that is really the problem?

Had this been a white person, would the nation be talking about it? Lets take look back at OJ Simpson. Did people riot even knowi g that clearly he had committed murder? Had a black police officer shot Brown would we be talking about this?

Federally mandated video camera's on all police officers. Lets end this.

This.

 

[SpecialEdition]

Shoot for the legs. Stop him from charging. Or stop shooting when he doubles over.

Or, if the officers actions are considered justifiable, maybe we ought to revisit how the justice system looks at self defence in general. As it stands, it's rather incongruent.

I agree that that is an ideal way to handle the situation but I don't think that is how the police are trained to deal. They are meant to stop a target... And I mean STOP them permanently.

I don't know what the solution is here outside of all police being required to wear cameras. I think that's what people need to be fighting for above and beyond all else. It becomes a lot easier to place appropriate blame and charges.

 

[SpecialEdition]

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/2nbuxe/ferguson_decision_megathread/cmcimra

Another "as a black male" post and this is sort of off topic, but I'm so tired of our community getting up in arms for guys who are criminals but not vocal at all when someone from our community actually does something with their life. Lets be real, Mike Brown and his friend both had questionable pasts even though the media fed us this "gentle giant" narrative.

This will sound bitter, but I've seen it in my own family. One of my cousins was released from prison recently and there was a HUGE welcome home party with not only my family but the entire neighborhood. My cousin even got a chick pregnant the first month he was out of prison, haha. On the other hand when I received my Masters degree from one of the better universities in the country, I didn't get a single call, text, Facebook message/post or any sort of acknowledgement. In all honesty, that did hurt a little and whenever I open my mouth about anything suddenly I'm not black enough or just an Uncle Tom, when in reality I care more about the systemic issues than most people.
I guess my point is it seems like the black community is so quick to defend bad actions/criminals that so many of the good people and accomplishments aren't celebrated fairly and images like from Ferguson just perpetuate the stereotypes that those of us actually trying to create a positive image have to deal with everyday, especially when you're often times the only one in your field.

What do you guys think about posts like this? I have been following a thread on reddit about the riots and this case. A lot of black people are coming forward with stories like this. Do you think that there is a deeper issue going on than racism and profiling with the police? Do you think that there is a deeper issue within the community that doesn't lend itself to the success of black people?

I often have found myself feeling angry towards people who cry about racism when they perpetuate certain stereotypes. I feel angry about any kind of victim mentality. In truth, I believe that tools and resources are available for people to succeed. I do think that in some cases it is very difficult and people will fall through the cracks, but so many people have risen up and become successful even after enduring some serious fucking hardship.

I think it's awful when people are wrongfully gunned down and there seems to be no repercussions, but I think that this rioting actually speaks to a much larger issue here. Looting and tearing down your own community, stealing, causing more violence and grief, burning down local businesses and just trashing your own home just seems so... fucking retarded. Yes someone got shot and killed but come on. You can't support your fellow neighbours when you are ruining everything that they worked hard for. It's not easy being a business owner of any sort. You are taking other people's lives out from under them!

I suppose this is where many would come up with the "they have insurance" excuse. But that IS no excuse! You are using someone's DEATH as an excuse to wreak havoc on your own home! That is the lowest of the low! This is not acting in the name of a person, this is acting in your own low self interest!

I can't even focus on the case anymore because the details have been released and this case is closed. I can't see past the injustice of the entire scenario. This isn't about Michael Brown. I don't think it ever was.

 

[muir]

People need to fight to have the police de-militarised

Part of this is changing the aggressive war-zone culture being created within the police force where the police are trained to have a soldiers mindset of being at war against the civilians of the country as if the police are an occupying military force in a hostile land



Whats better...beign agressive with petty criminals and shooting them down like rabid dogs or letting them escape and then tracking them down through police work?

The number of detectives (the police who solve crimes) is DOWN; less actual police work is being done and instead the police are being used as a way to aggressively dominate the public like the soldiers of the sheriff of nottingham (the banksters)

Most police i see are busting commuters for going a little over the speed limit; thats right they are targetting tax paying members of the public instead of the bankers at the top who are looting our economy

 

[SpecialEdition]

People need to fight to have the police de-militarised

Part of this is changing the aggressive war-zone culture being created within the police force where the police are trained to have a soldeirs mindset of being at war against the civilians of the country as if the police are an occupying military force in a hostile land

View attachment 22542

It doens't seem like burning a city to the ground would do much to de-militarize the place. It just seems like more of an incentive to bring in heavier force.

 

[sassafras]

I agree that that is an ideal way to handle the situation but I don't think that is how the police are trained to deal. They are meant to stop a target... And I mean STOP them permanently.

This is the problem. Police are trained like military responding to other trained militants rather than civilians and the law will always favour them. I'm not sure why people do not find this frightening.

The riots, unfortunately, are only going to exacerbate the issue.

I don't know what the solution is here outside of all police being required to wear cameras. I think that's what people need to be fighting for above and beyond all else. It becomes a lot easier to place appropriate blame and charges.

I think this would be the best solution.

 

[muir]

It doens't seem like burning a city to the ground would do much to de-militarize the place. It just seems like more of an incentive to bring in heavier force.

Oh yes! You are spot on with that analysis i think

I think they DO want to come down heavier on the public and if there aren't reasons to justify that they will orchestrate them

This is all about control

The crazy part is that many of the public don't realise the dynamic in society so they will side with the authorities against another section of the public because they don't realise they are next

The powers that be are very good at driving wedges between sections of the public too for example they will use the KKK to try and seperate white and black communities so that both can be controlled from above

People need to wake up and develop some solidarity because united we stand, divided we fall

 

[SpecialEdition]

People need to fight to have the police de-militarised

Part of this is changing the aggressive war-zone culture being created within the police force where the police are trained to have a soldiers mindset of being at war against the civilians of the country as if the police are an occupying military force in a hostile land

View attachment 22542

Whats better...beign agressive with petty criminals and shooting them down like rabid dogs or letting them escape and then tracking them down through police work?

The number of detectives (the police who solve crimes) is DOWN; less actual police work is being done and instead the police are being used as a way to aggressively dominate the public like the soldiers of the sheriff of nottingham (the banksters)

Most police i see are busting commuters for going a little over the speed limit; thats right they are targetting tax paying members of the public instead of the bankers at the top who are looting our economy

I think it's easy to look at the situation from behind our computer screens and say "Well, this because of that, and this as a cause of that and everything else," and not actually do anything.

You and I are never going to end up down in Ferguson facing police militarization like this. It's likely we aren't going to be gunned down in the street.

So what do you tell people in these communities? How do you communicate the wider issue and get them to act in a way that would actually be to their benefit instead of their detriment? What do you do to teach these people what their resources are, what their options are, and how things could be? OR do you just type about it on the internet?

This is the problem I have with this kind of thing. How do you actually REACH people who need the knowledge most? Because the way I see it, they are digging themselves into a deeper and deeper grave that I'm never going to step foot into.

I think even with everything going on, people have to unite together to make a better situation. That doesn't mean to just nod your head and comply, but people need to come together and produce a productive result that will benefit their community. Someone has to lead as an example and show people they can achieve something without tearing their own house down.

It just doesn't make sense to yell about bankers and the people at the top when you have people who are getting bulldozed at the bottom and a lot of this bulldozing is their OWN FAULT.

 

[muir]

This is the problem. Police are trained like military responding to other trained militants rather than civilians and the law will always favour them. I'm not sure why people do not find this frightening.

Absolutely......the NDAA was the government making a declaration of war aginst the US public; they passed that act to make US soil the battleground

If anyone still holds onto the illusion that that is not the case they won't hold it for much longer

The riots, unfortunately, are only going to exacerbate the issue.

Yes that will play into the hands of the authorities

What people need to realsie about the controllers is that VIOLENCE is what they do...its their forte

They are all about violence...they're experts at it

The people need to be smarter than that and use our strengths (cooperation, creativity and egalitarianism) instead of trying to play the authorities at their own game

 

[muir]

I think it's easy to look at the situation from behind our computer screens and say "Well, this because of that, and this as a cause of that and everything else," and not actually do anything.

You and I are never going to end up down in Ferguson facing police militarization like this. It's likely we aren't going to be gunned down in the street.

I'm not sure i agree with that lol

As far as i see it we are ALL on the front line of this conflict

This war is not just being fought with bullets and neither have any wars been fought just with bullets; if you take the second world war for example there were plots to print money in the oppositions country in order to create crippling hyper-inflation

Whats being called 'austerity' is really a weapon against the people. The keeping of interests rates low is destroying peoples savings whilst benefitting the speculators (the top 1%) so money and financial instruments are used as a weapon of war and often are; the aim is to destroy the middle class (there is no middle class in fuedalism and it was the rise of the middle 'merchant' class which ended fuedalism)

So we are all being affected by this war and even student demonstrators made up of children and young students were charged by mounted police in the UK recently so things are clearly escalating; they are talking about arming all UK police and they have bought water cannons to shoot demonstrators with

So what do you tell people in these communities?

Box clever

So in my country recently we had a referendum to try and gain independence which we narrowly lost because the vote was rigged and lots of fraud has been exposed since with sacks of 'yes' votes being found in bins!

So in response people flooded into the membership of the nationalist party which is now filling westminster with politicians. We are now in a position to aggressively push for reforms that were promised as a sop before the vote and these new devolved powers will allow a de facto country to develop and from there full independance will be a short step

This is being achieved through coordinated effort....so the people in fergusson need to use this event to bind them closer as a community; they need to organise and take radical steps to imporve their situation...strength in numbers

How do you communicate the wider issue and get them to act in a way that would actually be to their benefit instead of their detriment? What do you do to teach these people what their resources are, what their options are, and how things could be? OR do you just type about it on the internet?

The internet is exactly how these things are acheived; many recent protests and activism is being coordinated online which requires people typing things online

This is the problem I have with this kind of thing. How do you actually REACH people who need the knowledge most? Because the way I see it, they are digging themselves into a deeper and deeper grave that I'm never going to step foot into.

Basically their view is that they have been totally forgotten by society; they feel they have no stake in society and no say in the decision making process. In effect they have been frozen out and hemmed into crack filled ghettos (supplied by the CIA) to die

They have to organise and develop a political voice and that needs solidarity

These riots are pure frustration but they need to try and channel that energy in a constructive way

We had riots in the UK recently after the police gunned down a black man; the law then came down really hard on the rioters to make an example with people being sent to prison for 6 months for looting a bottle of water from a shop etc

I think even with everything going on, people have to unite together to make a better situation. That doesn't mean to just nod your head and comply, but people need to come together and produce a productive result that will benefit their community. Someone has to lead as an example and show people they can achieve something without tearing their own house down.

Yes their morale is very low at the moment...they're feeling desperate and like they have nothing to lose (which they don't)

It just doesn't make sense to yell about bankers and the people at the top when you have people who are getting bulldozed at the bottom and a lot of this bulldozing is their OWN FAULT.

No its not their fault....they have been frozen out of the democratic system by the top 1% and they have had their wealth looted by thre top 1%

Most of them were born into poverty with few opportunites, few role models, poor education and surrounded by desperation

But look...your country is ready to ignite...it's like a tinder box and its not just black people.....everyone is angry and they're right to be angry because there is outright and documented criminality going on at the top of their society

Here's good old gerald celente for a wider perspective (firts vid was uploaded in 2008):

[video=youtube;46MEqEgdLTg]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46MEqEgdLTg[/video]

[video=youtube;sVZIWZoCy7I]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVZIWZoCy7I[/video]

 

[muir]

I predicted riots in the US years ago on this forum but i said they'd be 'food riots'; that particular threat was averted by the powers that be through the creation of the food stamp system in the US and the food bank system in the UK but the riots are coming anyway due to a variety of combined pressures

 

[Stu]

I think this is again dividing the country. If no one believes there can be a real and factual investigation isnt it this that is really the problem?

This, is undeniably the real issue. There is a decided lack of faith, lack of trust by non-white Americans in the legal system.

When you look at American society as a whole you see a deliberate marginalization of especially Blacks and Latinos from the earliest interactions with preschool and kindergarten to the job market and any interaction with law enforcement. It is easy for us to judge the outrage that Black America feels when an unarmed Black man falls dead in a hail of bullets from a white policeman as being a misplaced outrage. That the outrage should be directed at the entire society and not one cop making decisions on one tour.

I don't think it is "again" dividing the country as much as it is showing us how divided the country really is.

The answer takes courage. Courage to look at our own interactions and beliefs in a profoundly different way.

Look at how we talk about things, how we think about them, what unnerves us and why.

And we all must look very closely at how we discipline kids at school. What message are we sending, what message is being received.

 

[dogman6126]

Shoot for the legs. Stop him from charging. Or stop shooting when he doubles over.

Or, if the officers actions are considered justifiable, maybe we ought to revisit how the justice system looks at self defence in general. As it stands, it's rather incongruent.

While its a nice thought to say shoot for the legs because that will stop him and won't kill him, I'm afraid that's simply not true. Firstly because a leg shot is incredibly hard to make because of the erratic motion and size of the target. You'd have to push out 10 rounds and you might get two or three hits. But here's the kicker. Even if you did shoot someone in the leg, that very will might not stop them. Any number of things can make a person get shot and not notice it. I'm sure you've seen in the movies about people like an officer gets shot in the leg or ankle and doesn't notice till later. Well that's exactly true. Adrenaline, alcohol, weed, heroine, pain killers and the like can make a person into either a deranged or low sensory input that they don't notice getting shot. It really does happen. Have you heard about bath salts? That person got shot like 8 times in the chest before they finally went down. As an officer, you often encounter people on drugs or alcohol, and you don't usually know if they are under some kind of influence or if they are just crazy till after the fact. So if a person charges you, you literally cannot stop them simply with a shot to the legs. If you do that, they could have minutes still of pummeling you before they might notice. Imagine that with Brown now. If the officer had shot him in the leg, and then if he had continued and reached the officer, what might have happened then?
In general, imagine for yourself. You don't know if a person has drugs in them or not, and you have them charging you with your gun raised. You have enough time to fire a string of shots before they reach you. Are you gonna aim for the legs, or are you gonna aim for what you know can and will stop them? It's not like they are training officers to be occupying military like muir is saying. They do this because its the only logical way to protect officers. To do otherwise is not only ineffective, but also dangerous for the officers and those they are trying to protect
We only hear about these extreme cases because of the media, but do you know how many times an officer simply arrests people without shooting at them?
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/ard0309st.pdf
This shows that about 5000 people have died after or from being arrested from 2003-2009. Of course this is a low end number. Now lets look at this source:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-many-americans-the-police-kill-each-year/
This statistics estimates the highest possible (but highly unlikely to be all) police related deaths to be at <18,000 for the 2003-2009 time span.
From this we can conclude that the number of police related deaths in this time span is between 5000-18,000. Let's meet in the middle and say 11,500. Now, the first statistic also describes that the FBI estimates a total of 97,900,000 arrests were made during the same time span. That means that about 1 in 8500 arrests has some kind of death involved. This means suicides, murders, toxic exposure (like alcohol before the actual arrest, then later dying), natural causes (perhaps a heart attack).
The first statistic doesn't include unjustifiable homicides by police, but does include cases where the police didn't actually kill the person like a suicide by the person or natural causes of death, etc.. The second statistic includes the unjustifiable homicides and everything else the first did, but also includes murders not necessarily related to police such as murder in federal jurisdictions (not police related).
Therefore, we can conclude that those two numbers are the extremes, and because they both include suicides during arrest or intoxication related deaths, I find that one should lean more towards the lower end of the spectrum, but still guessing in the middle. Really we can't know where the number is. However, we can see that murder by police officer is NOT COMMON like the media would have you believe. Now look at this statistic:
http://www.nleomf.org/facts/officer-fatalities-data/year.html
As you can see, in the same 2003-2009 time span, about 1100 officers were killed. We don't really hear about that statistic in the media. I think it's important though. That's a lot of good men and women dying because of sleazy criminals who only make life worse for the rest of us. I think those officers have a right to protect themselves, and the idea of shooting for the legs is not effective at all and could get far more officers killed.

 

[dogman6126]

This is the problem. Police are trained like military responding to other trained militants rather than civilians and the law will always favour them. I'm not sure why people do not find this frightening.

The riots, unfortunately, are only going to exacerbate the issue.



I think this would be the best solution.

Police training is nothing like military training. I guarantee you that. Talk to a military officer and a police officer, and ask them each how their training went.

Edit: and I agree that police cameras are an ideal solution. I think it would show the public that police "brutalization" is actually mostly the media's doing.

 

[cvp12gh5]

Michael Brown's stepfather is a fucking idiot. He knew exactly what would happen when he yelled out those words, "BURN THIS BITCH DOWN" repeatedly to a crowd of angry protestors.

Yeah. Go right ahead and burn your own town down, Fucktard. That will show them cops. Loot, burn, vandalize, steal all throughout your neighborhood. Put the fear of God in them.

Wait. The only people that were scared were the residents that live there and support your cause. Congratulations. You have accomplished nothing and made it worse for you and your community.
Jackass.

 

[muir]

VICE looks at the militarisation of the police

[video=youtube;uTWy8tjTiTw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTWy8tjTiTw[/video]

 

[muir]

Police training

[video=youtube;V9QEg4VXliE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9QEg4VXliE[/video]

 

[Lark]

Shoot for the legs. Stop him from charging. Or stop shooting when he doubles over.

Or, if the officers actions are considered justifiable, maybe we ought to revisit how the justice system looks at self defence in general. As it stands, it's rather incongruent.

Could you do that do you think? I mean really, talking about real world violence here, could you be so precise with a firearm in a life or death situation in which you're liable to panic and experience traumatic stress?

Maybe you're being facetious or engaging in rhetorical questioning, I dont know because I've not read everything in the thread.

I just read stuff like this and think that its video game logic or something based upon an action movie or something like that, not realistic at all or in the least.