I have been told that commending your soul to Jesus is appropriate in such circumstances. Good as any, I suppose…
In Ferguson, there WAS sufficient time for Brown to clearly indicate he had surrendered. Even if you don’t believe he put his hands up, both the cops AND the witness accounts say he ran 30+ feet away, then stopped and turned around. That was enough time.
Yet it IS the law that you can’t execute someone who’s no longer a threat just because you’re pissed that they went after your gun. Maybe YOU decided “to hell with law or morality”, but the rest of society can’t do that. Not if it cares about justice.
Just want to remind that we don’t know that Brown went for Wilson’s gun. We only have Wilson’s statement to corroborate that.
Running away then turning round isn’t surrendering, necessarily. Someone who has previously attacked you, and fractured your eyesocket, starting to come back to you could quite reasonably be considered an imminent threat.
Not that that has anything to do with your actual question, which was about what the aggressor should do to save his life, not what the victim of his attack is or isn’t allowed to do.
Are you asking what counts as a surrender in law, and would mean that, legally, the right to self defence on the part of the victim has ended? And remember that, unless proved otherwise, the cop should be considered the victim here.
No, but we know he was close enough to fracture his eyesocket.
Also unconfirmed as far as I’m aware. We have one unnamed source.
While I don’t find it unlikely, with so many facts being contested, I’m inclined to wait for further corroboration.
I agree but it seems plausible that Brown attacked Wilson first. Even if Wilson didn’t know Brown was a robbery suspect initially, certainly Brown himself, knew he was. And if you’re crazy enough to jump a cop, you’d HAVE to go for the gun. Otherwise, what are you trying to accomplish?
Painfully simplistic. Well, of course not! But it is impossible to go forward with a public protest without attracting the attention of assholes. How would you do that?
Had the same sorts of problems back in the day. Schedule an anti-war demonstration, and the nuts come out. Shit disturbers, the kind of people who thrive on ugly. There was one particular cadre of self-described Maoists that I would cheerfully have experimented upon, Lecter and Dexter style.
And you would hear the same chorus: well, this civil protest is all very well, perhaps, but doesn’t justify this sort of behavior yadda blah yadda blah… As if we were rooting for them, tickled half to death to have them show up! Who we needed to show up was your Aunt Esther, and the choral group from the Methodist Church! We needed those Maoist morons like a jalapeño enema! Would have preferred, actually.
So what would you have them do? Give up? There is serious change afoot, possibilities. Would they be there without the strife and stress? Likely, but slowly, in my own view.
But I’m not a black father living in Ferguson, who has to tell his son how carefully he must behave. I am not in a position to scold his choices.
What if there was a scuffle at/in Wilson’s car and Wilson drew the gun himself and fired either purposefully or accidentally?
I find that equally as likely as Brown trying to snatch Wilson’s weapon.
Additionally, we don’t know Brown attacked the cop. Again, witnesses have Wilson attacking Brown.
I thought we treated everyone as innocent until proven guilty.
The victim is clearly Brown. He’s the dead one. Killed by Wilson and that is not in dispute. That makes him the victim.
The whole point of my question was, would someone elect to charge into a loaded gun. I wouldn’t. I doubt you would. I don’t think Brown did. You made the point that someone wouldn’t have sufficient time to surrender after losing a wrestling match for a gun. My only point was that in Ferguson, there was CLEARLY enough time.
The other StL shooting, on video:
clear suicide by cop.
According to Charles Johnson (he of Little Green Footballs), their spiritual descendants are stirring the shit in Ferguson: Revolutionary Communist Party Inciting Violence
Yes, that’s what I’m doing. Treating someone who claims to be the victim of a serious assault as that, not as a criminal.
Nope, not if he started the fight, or resisted the officer.
Only if the officer elected not to shoot him as soon as he regained control of the gun. Which, if he did, was a mistake both because he put his own safety at risk, and because he opened up this ludicrous line of questioning.
It’s interesting how much this thread is paralleling the various Zimmerman threads, not least the dismissing of the harm done to the head and face of the victim, the distortion of the time and distance involved, the expectation that someone who has been punched in the head and was possibly under attack should be capable of careful reflection on the best course of action (an expectation that has been completely discounted in American law), and the false idea that an unarmed person, despite being much larger, couldn’t possibly be a real threat.
But yeah, if it turns out that Brown was lying prostrate on the ground, but was somehow shot repeatedly in the front, I’ll accept that he surrendered. Otherwise, I doubt he did anything that would meet that standard. Holding your hands up whilst moving back towards someone emphatically does not meet that standard.
Well, what started the scuffle? We can see in the robbery video that Brown was clearly feeling aggressive that day. If Wilson had gotten out of his car, I could buy that he might’ve started it. But NO WAY would he have started a scuffle with a guy Brown’s size from inside his car.
What? As in, “da fuq”?
I can’t tell from that video if he had a knife, but if so, that was clearly self defence.
Anyone talking about the length of time people have to decide need to watch this video. He moves away and towards the cops pretty damn fast, and they have to decide pretty much instantly what to do.
Some observations, the police were reasonably polite when asking people to move back, and there was nothing said about people recording it.
The dead one is ALWAYS the victim. The question is whether or not the circumstance of his/her death was justified. But that’s semantics. Have it your way if it makes you feel good.
Or if the officer couldn’t shoot him because he took off before the officer could retain control of his gun in order to fire.
Unarmed, standing 30 feet away, when you have your gun pointed at him, Brown is NOT a threat.
Brown didn’t move back towards the Wilson. It makes ZERO sense that one would first run from a gun, then run towards it. If anything, Brown would’ve continued running away. Not come back to Wilson.
I agree. I read an article where they were making hay out of the police report saying that the assailant was only 4 feet away when he was further, but that guy was definitely in, or very close to, striking distance.
There is also the county PD who also have a well documented history of racism: a lieutenant was fired after telling officers to arrest more black people, the city and the county PD rely on tickets and court fees for funding and blacks have been shown to have been targeted disproportionately despite stops of whites yielding more arrests. What you insist on calling a few bad apples is systematic harassment of black citizens. You seem to think that the blacks are just misinformed about what they experience in their own community which is pretty fucking condescending and telling.