Ferguson

From the response of most Whites, I bet we're going to be seeing this a lot.

Now that I'm not completely down on my back depressed, I'll write about current depressing events.



Many (white) people seem to have a misconception regarding complaints about the police by black people. Whites seem to think that blacks protest whenever any black person is killed in police custody, and the poor police are afraid of apprehending black criminals because of it.

This is not even close to true. If Blacks did that, the major protests would never stop, and Al Sharpton would be dead of exhaustion by now.

Deaths of black people in police custody literally happen more than once every other day. According to the DOJ, there were 1,529 Blacks killed by police, which comes out to a mean average of about 217 a year nationwide. The Malcom X Grassroots Movement places the number deaths of black people by police, security guards, and self-appointed vigiantes at 313. Police departments, however, don't take or keep systematic statistics on the ethnicity of those killed by police. I wonder why.


(Now to be fair, more Whites die in police custody, but not nearly at three times the rate Blacks are killed, which is what it would have to be given the higher population of Whites, to be called a comparable rate.)

To actually anger people and create protests, a killing by police has to look blatantly and obviously wrong. It has to look like flagrant murder. But not even that is enough. To get protested, a police department has to also send the message that the cop will never be held responsible, much less ever face charges. There has to be a flouting of police procedure, a dehumanizing disregard for the rights of the deceased, and a depraved neglect for his or her life.

The Ferguson police displayed all three, starting with Darren Wilson's original encounter with Michael Brown. Despite what the Police Chief Thomas Jackson hinted at, Wilson wasn't arresting Michael Brown for robbery. Jackson later admitted that Wilson didn't even know Brown was a suspect. The encounter was for jaywalking.

This fits with the original story. What's more, if Wilson were arresting Jackson for robbery, he would have called and waited for backup first. Either that or Wilson didn't follow boilerplate police protocol. It's hard to believe Wilson neglected this, since that part of protocol is followed for the protection of the officers.

So, it's likely that Wilson was telling Brown and his friend to use the sidewalk instead of the street. If that's the story, IMHO, any officer who can take a Class D Misdemeanor/Ordinance Violation and turn it into a fatal incident shouldn't be on any police force. Yet, I look at Chief Thomas Jackson and all of his lies and transparent efforts to sidetrack the investigation and realize he had to have started somewhere.

Why was it necessary to shoot Brown six times when witnesses say he had disengaged with Wilson and was holding up his hands? There appears to be a violation of procedure at the very beginning that's hard to explain away.

What officers did afterward assured this would become a national incident. They never took Brown's pulse; they never called an ambulance; they wouldn't allow a medical professional to help him; they didn't inform the chain of command that Wilson had shot and killed Brown (Captain Jackson and the mayor learned about it from the news); they let Brown's body lie in the street for hours; they collected cellphones and erased cellphone data from witnesses. Meanwhile, they allowed Officer Wilson leave the scene of the crime with the car, and finally, loaded Michael Brown the back of an SUV, not an ambulance. All point to a cover up, not an investigation. All of their actions since have pointed away from investigation and toward a gigantic cover up.

If a white person were shot like this, and the "investigation" was handled the same way, people would not only protest but the Chief Jackson would be in the unemployment line.  

For people who come to defense of the Ferguson police before checking what we know they did, good luck. All the signs showed the police had no intention of investigating this shooting. And letting Brown lie in the street for hours after death was depraved enough to convince anybody this had to be protested.

I guess defenders of the police could join the Klan in Ferguson. At least everyone knows why they're defending the police.   

(I was anxious to get this up but have other things to finish by tomorrow night. I'll add the links later, sorry.)