Doesn’t the video show the clerk putting hands on Brown first? And if Brown had not, in fact, stolen anything, doesn’t that mean he was entirely within his rights to shove him away?
No, it’s probably reasonble fear that more dead black people who cause worse unrest.
Your surprise is probably irrelevant to the facts of the situation.
:smack:
You need to go on a cross country tour providing specialized BLD conflict training to not only our police forces but also our military because you have got it all figured out.
The store owner didn’t report the theft because he is terrified that he will be killed if word gets out that he did that. (Saw this in a linked article a few days ago but coudn’t find it just now.)
If Brown was charging toward Wilson, then the fact that he’s falling forward looks, from Wilson’s point of view, no different than if he’d been lowering his head for a running tackle. So if you share the assumption about the charging perp, then a shot to the head is not a callous act regardless of whether the attacker is collapsing. If you assume Brown was surrendering, kneeling and ducking his head, then the head shot does not seem justified.
That’s why it’s important to keep checking assumptions against the evidence.
This should read "No, it’s probably reasonble fear that more dead black people would cause worse unrest.
Well I saw that as a baseless speculation in this thread a few days ago. If you can’t find a quote from the store owner, it remains a baseless speculation.
The officer shoots until he feels the threat is neutralized. He certainly doesn’t fire, step back, evaluate, fire again, step back, evaluate, etc. That would be insanely dangerous to him under most circumstances.
The police also stated that he was treated at the hospital. So I believe in case there is a trial there will definitely be medical records.
Doesn’t specifically say that he didn’t actually call the police for that reason, but one follows from the other.
Let me take a guess here: you have never owned a gun, you never had any gun training, you have never served in the military, and your knowledge of gun usage is from the movies. Right?
There are armed people in every city, all the time, who really hate the cops.
But what you said was that if the police had taken the (by your lights) appropriate measures from the beginning, i.e. had shot at people who were shooting or throwing bombs at them, then the whole mess would have been avoided.
If you hadn’t been posting to this thread much more frequently than I had, I would think, based on that, that you didn’t even know generally what had happened in Ferguson. The police shot somebody. There are no riots that could have been avoided in the “beginning” that exist separately from that shooting. Do you think that after just a little passage of time it’s now fair or reasonable or – I don’t know, ingenuous – to say essentially that this whole thing could have been avoided if they’d just rounded them up and shot’em if they didn’t like it?
I understand that you don’t particularly connect the dots between the shooting and the riots the same way others might. But, I mean, to the extent you’re willing to concede that maybe at least some of the rioting is an expression of anger toward an institutionalized blind eye toward institutionalized abuses of a particular demographic… to the extent you’re willing to entertain it, if the thing they’re angry about was a real thing, wouldn’t an approach like yours, which writes off the fact that the police killed somebody and claims that the police haven’t been harsh enough “from the beginning” be exactly what that looked like? Like, at the same time that you’re asking the others to concede that the riots must not be about the shooting, because they’re still going on, aren’t you basically exhibiting exactly the attitude that those riots would be about?
The convenience store where the robbery took place was boarded up, but open for business on Friday. A store manager, who declined to give his name, said he fears for his life and pleaded with reporters not to suggest that he called police.
“It’s very dangerous,” he said. “They kill us if they think we are responsible. People don’t understand that.”
Is that a good enough quote?
Why would you think that comment refers to their decision on the day in question? The owner -after days of rioting- is asking the reporters not to make it seem like he called the police about the incident, a) because he didn’t and more importantly b) because he’s afraid that would make him a target of community hatred. That’s a reasonable fear on Friday, but it says nothing about how he felt on the day of the incident.
I adressed this, as you quoted. What I said was: “Doesn’t specifically say that he didn’t actually call the police for that reason, but one follows from the other.”
Meaning that if he was so terrified of being killed if word got out that he reported it, it’s quite likely that he would also refrain from calling them for that reason.
Unless your point is that this situation only arose in the aftermath of the killing - the guy’s language doesn’t suggest that, but perhaps his English is not good. But if that’s the case, then maybe he really did call the police and is denying it now for this reason. Or even if he didn’t, it’s possible that he didn’t call them because there was no reason to once someone else did anyway - the main point is that the reason he is distancing himself now from the suggestion that he called them is not because there was no robbery but because he’s afraid of the reaction.
More significant than that, the burden of proof is the other way here. Others are trying to prove from the fact that he didn’t call the police that there must therefore have been no robbery. If this guy is so terrified of having it be known that he called the police, then that’s a very plausible reason for him not to have called, and the no-robbery inference therefore falls away.
I think I see why you are confused. You are skipping a step. I’m saying the police, from the beginning, should have moved in and arrested anyone who’s rioting.
You must have missed that.
Yes, I acknowledge that doing this might result in some of the rioters shooting at the cops or throwing molotov cocktails or something else that results in them getting shot. I understand the hesitation by the police to getting in that situation. However, given that rioting has gone on for over a week with no end in sight I think it’s fair to say that holding back as much as the cops have been was a mistake.
Clear?
I don’t know why you think this. Of course the riots have resulted from Brown being shot. No one is disputing this.
How anyone could believe the owners claim that the clerk didn’t call the police is mind boggling to me. So what, the cops just rolled by a random gas station and randomly asked to see the surveillance tapes and then, coincidentally, the guy who was thugging in the surveillance video was also involved in a shooting a few minutes later?
I understand the guy is scared, I would be too. He called the cops,there’s no way to put that cat back in the bag, no matter how much he may want to claim otherwise now. He did nothing wrong.
No, it doesn’t follow from the other. It’s perfectly consistent that the store owner said that and no employee from his store called the police.
I think this store owner who was pushed by Michael Brown is probably used to unruly customers. Somebody obviously thought what happened deserved a 911 call though. I don’t think it’s off base to say that most store owners would call the police over this. This particular store owner probably gets harassed daily and is desensitized over this behavior.
I’m fairly sure it’s been reported that another customer phoned it into the police.