To tell the truth, for a period of time, I didn’t even know the guy was black. The initial stuff I read seemed to avoid mentioning his race. If race was just inherently what made this a big deal, it would have been mentioned in every report.
What makes this a big deal is that a copy apparently shot and killed someone who was unarmed and not a threat. Then it became a bigger deal when the riots happened. Further actions threw fire on the flames.
You want to talk about racism, you need to compare similar events. What you are doing is like a black man saying that their boss is racist for firing him because they didn’t fire the white guy–when the white guy was a good worker and the black guy stole from the company.
What does everyone make of the video and transcript found here?
I have never heard of the site but it seems clearly conservative and therefore bias (got link from a CNN comment), however the video does seem to support both the transcript and at least the notion that the victim may have ran at the officer and that the victim was in the police SUV/truck.
Not looking to take sides here but I despise the rush to judgement and the rioting and looting going on just a few hundred miles from me. Seems to me, even in the best case scenario for the officer, that he panicked, was scared and probably had no business being an officer with a deadly weapon (a sentiment that probably applies to a lot of us, myself included).
Officer is guilty of something for sure, but I do not think he was a racist cop just looking to murder an 18 year old kid/man as many are stating in the community.
It’s much more complicated than just thuggish/racist cops. The protests are aimed at a very complex history – cops often seem just a little more likely to be nervous, draw his gun, and pull the trigger when the suspect is a young black male. Further, cops often seem much more motivated to protect their departments than in finding justice and keeping order – releasing the convenience store video, for example, only served to inflame opinion… the DOJ asked them not to release this.
In short, shootings like this seem like just a symptom of a much larger systemic problem – that black people are not treated equally by law enforcement and the justice system in much of America.
As for the convenience store robbery footage I am on the fence. It definitely paints the victim in a different light and is wholly irrelevant. However the other side of me cannot shake all the biased commentary from a few days ago calling the victim a “great kid” a “gentle giant that would hurt no one” plus the “he was going to start college the next Monday”.
The facts are he was not a great kid by most parents definition and him rushing the cop and robbing a convenience store mean he was not really a gentle giant.
Two wrongs (biased comments) do not make a right, but if I was the cop or his family I would want the world to know he was no choir boy.
Doesn’t justify the shooting - as a shooting - by a perhaps scared and/or overzealous cop, but it does frame the picture away from total racism that so many are want to do.
I haven’t been following the story closely enough to know anything about that (I’m not in the US). It doesn’t make any difference to my point: the initial reports were that a policeman had shot an unarmed guy with his back turned and his hands up. That has far deeper and more far-reaching implications than a civilian killing someone. That’s a sensible reason why it might get more coverage.
The same thing people always suggest in situations like this: a kind of make-believe equality that deliberately obscures why these cases get attention and why they’re significant. Any killing is terrible, but no, a case where a police officer kills an unarmed civilian - and is not named for days, isn’t charged, etc. - is not the same as a case where one person kills another and then the killer goes to prison. People do this every time the murder of a black person by a white person gets media attention, by the way. It’s pretty grotesque. If you’re that upset that the press is covering the death of a black guy in Ferguson, consider how biased the criminal justice system is against black people. I think it evens out, so that should set everybody’s mind at ease. :rolleyes:
Nothing has refuted that so far. Brown was shot six times, all while he was facing Wilson. There’s more information to be released, so we don’t know their relative positions. Frankly I’m not sure it matters which direction he was facing, since people will obviously interpret that as they see fit.
The autopsy performed by the victim’s family says six shots all from the front indicating he was not running away. That said, it is still 6 freaking shots, 4 to the arm and 2 to the head. Even if the first 4 were all arm shots and the officer had bad aim and the victim was rushing him, that is excessive.
That is and always had been throughout history, the problem with eyewitness reports. They are generally very biased at worst and less than accurate at best.
This scenario is kind of hard to picture. Wilson shoots Brown, apparently while Brown is near the police car, then Brown runs away, but without being shot again, he turns around and runs back at Wilson as Wilson continues to pump bullets into him? Who knows what information we’re missing, but this sounds incredibly weird.
Black men shooting white people. Plenty of news coverage.
It’s not the coverage, it’s the riots. Why are there riots? Because the perpetrator of the murder is still at large, implying that the indiscriminate killing of black people by white people is still socially acceptable. Same with Trayvon Martin. Remember, when that initially happened, it was a non-event. Black people kill white people, sure, but they don’t usually get away with it. (Press outrage at social injustice is also nothing new, lest someone try to attribute this to Clintonian liberals or something)
It may not be true in reality that white people can go around shooting black people, but the social fabric is made up of people who misinterpret reality. It’s a complex issue that would probably take a post doc in sociology to untangle, not to mention a residency in Ferguson.
Why is there coverage of riots? Because riots are FRICKING EXCITING. Looting, bombs, tear gas, troops, conflict! Nighttime! Arresting the press!
A better comparison would be the Egyptian revolution. Shit going down, and it’s happening live on television. Or watching NASCAR for crashes. We have a violent culture.
You mention evil. There’s really no pinpointing of evil in the Michael Brown or Trayvon Martin cases. There’s attempts, but there’s no clear Satanic winner. That’s confusing. How can bad things happen without evil? Someone must be evil, right? The fucking cops? The robbery suspect/victim? chargerrich has pointed out some of the nuances here. But if there’s no evil, how can this happen in a good society? What happened? This scares people. Confusion and fear lead to discussion, and argument, and debate. If true evil were involved, or true psychosis, there’d be nothing to say.