St Louis shooting: protesters clash with police at scene of teenager's death

You might be able to make an argument that when a law enforcement officer is being investigated by a grand jury, there should be some special safeguard to ensure that the DA isn't playing buddy buddy with the cops, however since plenty of police get indicted all the time (I know one personally), somehow the system still manages to indict, convict, and sentence bad cops. But the example we've been talking about is the Michael Brown situation. We've had all of the Grand Jury testimony and evidence released, and if you think Darren Wilson walked just because the system was rigged to protect him then you're delusional. An indictment of Wilson would have been just a political stunt. The more posts I read of you guys though, the more it seems likely that you are far more interested in political stunts than justice.

 

Obviously you left out the FBI Report that states Afro-Americans make up 13% of America's population and commit Fifty percent of overall crime including assault, rape, robbery, murder, arson and drug distribution.

 

I believe this is actually the case in some jurisdictions.

Statistically, this is exceedingly rare. That's why I posted a bunch of links saying so. You are making the same argument the last guy made - that since there ARE exceptions, therefore there is no such pattern.

Sigh. If the prosecutor had wanted to, he could EASILY have brought an indictment against Wilson. He probably would have lost the case, but he could EASILY have got an indictment. The reason he didn't is the same reason cops are rarely indicted by grand juries - the cops and the prosecutors are teammates, they do not undermine one another. I suppose you could argue (and I wouldn't entirely disagree) that ALL grand jury indictments are to some degree political stunts, since most district attorneys are elected, and their JOB is to bring indictments and get convictions, and if they don't, their political career is very short. And you could argue that an indictment in the Brown case might have been ALSO motivated by the political desire not to incite protests and riots. Nonetheless, the facts in the case were EASILY sufficient to justify an indictment. NOT a conviction.

 

And so, if you happen to LOOK like a lot of criminals, this means I can kill you and get away with it? Even if you did nothing wrong?

You're getting pretty desperate. Individuals are NOT automatically guilty by association.

 

I did say that, I repeated the statistics reported by the FBI. It's your racism that is making illogical assumptions. Desperation is your suit because of your warped ideas of justice. Just as a desperate Joshua Williams from Ferguson MO was caught lighting up a store in Berkley with a torch. Desperation is an illogical act, people that assassinate cops, rape, murder, burn down businesses because of thugs and known criminals show their true selves as the racists in question. Failed attempted assassination of Durham NC cop just some more of what you support. I don't!!

http://blogs.channel4.com/factcheck/factcheck-black-americans-commit-crime/19439

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/uc...-in-the-u.s.-2011/violent-crime/violent-crime

www.sodahead.com/united-states/blacks-50-times-more-likely-to...

 

Yawn. Grand juries rarely indict members of the legal establishment. This is a problem. If you wish to change the subject and run off in a cloud of insults, we understand.

 

No really, you didn't. They did though have as much color as your comments, rendering them funny in a grotesque way. "Chickens grow teeth."

Here's some gems from your authoritative links:

Why Grand Juries Don’t Indict Cops When They Kill?

Police are allowed to use lethal force under specific circumstances, when it’s reasonable to do so. Especially when it comes to black suspects, that means almost anytime.

This has something to do with the way police see things. Police are people, after all, subject to the same flaws and vices as the rest of us. America’s police departments tend to be whiter than the general population, and nearly half of whites believe “many” or “almost all” black men are violent. Whites overestimate the amount of crime, in particular violent crime, involving blacks. Whites are also more likely to ascribe supernatural physical abilities to black people, in particular the ability to resist physical pain, a stereotype that harkens back to slavery

Get right Flintc,

This tripe solves nothing and with gravity of what is at stake I would think an honest conversation is something you would demand?

Get control of the narrative, keep it based in civil discourse, in a language that the majority can understand and identify with; or those that have an agenda one that is anathema to the rights of man will control it and will drive us into the ground.

Cheers
Labour

 

We seem to have a perception problem. What you quote is based somewhat on opinion polls, somewhat on personal perception. The part you bolded as being not worthy of discussion, actually DOES come from opinion polls. And you demand that we not mention these perceptions in order to "get control of the narrative." Those perceptions and opinion poll results ARE the narrative, they lie at the core of the problem.

Why do you suppose people like Garner and Rice and Crawford and others were killed so quickly, while the white guy in Kalamazoo got a 40-minute talk-down, no arrests, and he got his gun back? Could this possibly have anything to do with police expectations being self-fulfilling?

However, if your idea of civil discourse is to hand-wave this all away, then there is nothing to discuss.

 

I did follow them and certainly not the first time I have seen and read them and once again find them quite lacking and a distortion of the facts.

For instance the US attorney's received 188,000 cases of which 84,000 were for immigration offenses. That's half the number. You don't hold grand juries for immigration violations.

So the statement that the US Attornies prosecuted 166,000 cases and grand juries only issued a no bill in 11 cases is non sequitur, it has no meaning. When you know how many cases were presented to a grand jury then you might have some point to make although I have no idea what it would be.

 

And the number you cited was for FEDERAL grand juries and no you can't indict a ham samich you have to have evidence to get an indictment but try this how many of these police who kill someone in the line of duty but do not get indicted for a crime are later successful prosecuted in a civil court for a wrongful death? How many a year?

Pure conjecture on your part. You have NO evidence to support that statement.

Prosecutors don't operate in a vacuum, and they face elections and they face states attorney generals and then federal DOJ officials. Then the face judges. Bring to trial a case that has no chance of successful prosecution will get a pre-trial dismissal. Had the Brown/Wilson case gone to trial I have no reason to believe otherwise the the judge would have tossed it for lack of evidence and the overwhelming evidence it was a justified shooting. That should have happened in the Zimmerman shooting. I have no reason to believe the same would have happened in the Garner death while resisting arrest.

The fact is we don't subject citizens to malicious prosecutions or prosecutions to satisfy the desires for revenge by families or the community. Prosecutors don't bring cases to grand juries unless they believe they actually have a crime to prosecute and that at trial they can win the case. They don't waste the time of the grand jurors or the tax payers money pursuing cases where there was obviously not a crime.

 

Yes, if the prosecutor wanted to, he probably could have ignored all of the evidence and selectively presented a case to the Grand Jury to get an indictment. I just don't understand why you want to rig the game to get an indictment for a case that, once the full body of evidence is presented at trial, would have resulted in a not guilty verdict. What exactly, are you trying to accomplish? Do you really think that, despite of all of the evidence, that Wilson is a murderer, and if you could get him before the right kind of jury, he would get convicted? I mean, I don't get it. Why do you want to indict someone that you don't even seem to think is guilty? I mean, this strikes me as crazy. Maybe you can explain it better than you have, but it's not like the Garner situation in which a pretty good case that the police officer should have been indicted (with the caveat that we don't have access to the evidence presented to the GJ). I just don't know why you want Wilson indicted for a crime that you have not even argued that he committed.

 

It's very hard to present the argument that there is a general pattern, when the response is always that THIS case is different in detail from THAT case. If every tree is different, then how can there be any forest, right?

From what I saw, I think Wilson did nothing illegal, and the Ferguson grand jury returned the corect decision. I also think that the prosecutor inundated the jury with mountains of details as a way of evading an indictment.

Now at this point, the discussion branches off into two directions, and it's hard to follow both branches at once.

Branch 1: Did Wilson exercise less than the judgment of Solomon in his handling of the case? What triggered the whole thing? I forget, I think it was jaywalking. Jaywalking doesn't escalate into a life and death battle without the willing cooperation of both combatants. Yes, we can "freeze time" anywhere during that battle, and say "after THIS time, Wilson's hand was forced, and his action was justified." In hindsight, was there any way Wilson could have avoided getting to that point? Sure, hindsight is great stuff. We might ask if perhaps another member of the Ferguson police force would have handled it the same way? Going further back, we might note that the Ferguson police force was nearly all white, and Ferguson itself is nearly all black. Maybe the process of configuring the police department in the first place was asking for trouble eventually. One certainly wonders if a black cop would have managed the situation the same way Wilson did.

Branch 2: There is an overall pattern of giving cops free hands. The Garner case was illustrative in that Garner was unarmed, nonagressive, and nonthreatening. AND the whole thing was on video. AND the prosecutor couldn't get an indictment? Seriously? And the Rice case, where the cop was a washout from a previous police job, and regarded as an immature loose cannon. He gave a child less than 2 seconds before gunning him down. No indictment? Seriously? And there was the Crawford case, where the cops raced into WalMart and opened fire before Crawford even knew they were there. No indictment? And that guy (I forget his name) who was gunned down in a dark stairwell because the cops knew the guy they were after was dangerous, and they panicked. No indictment?

Maybe you can make a good case that in the Ferguson case, Wilson did nothing illegal. Maybe no policeman did anything illegal in any of these cases. Fatally bad judgment never seems to be illegal, in the eyes of the prosecutor who selects and manages the grand juries. But like Caesar's wife, grand juries need to avoid the appearance of whitewashes. Maybe bringing in someone from the outside, who does not need to retain close working ties with the local police, would be an improvement.

And there might even be a third branch, given some other comments here. If blacks are WAY overrepresented in every instance of violent crime (and they probably are), the police might well anticipate violence and act accordingly. They'd probably be fools not to, but this sort of anticipation tends to be self-fulfilling. And here again, if the composition of the police force mirrors the composition of the community, perhaps stereotypes wouldn't control behavior as much. I don't know.

 

It doesnt seem so, in this case....

 

That's a good point. We have two different conversations going on here simultaneously. In one of them, responsible people are unhappy with a grand jury system that is nearly always unable to bring an indictment against a member of that selfsame system. Their focus is on forging a system that dispenses justice a little more evenly.

But the other conversation focuses instead on the more angry, violent, uneducated black looters, rioters, and criminals. The subtext of this second conversation is, basically, that blacks are violent, dangerous, not law-abiding people who generate unjustified riots to loot free stuff and shoot whitey.

The first conversation sees police work as inherently dangerous, policemen as normal humans who get nervous, frightened, and confused. Yet most of the time, the police do good professional competent work. The goal is incremental improvement, weeding out the bad apples, encouraging better communication and understanding between police and the communities they serve, trying to eliminate the armed-camp, them-against-us mentality, etc.

The second conversation sees police as unable to do the job they're supposed to do, if they are to be hobbled by the requirement to make all nicey with criminals, who are often armed and who have no respect for the police anyway. The police are the good guys in the war against the thugs.

And one problem seems to me to be that some sources present ONLY one of these conversations, and completely ignore the other. Two echo chambers, each attracting those who want to hear everyone else agreeing with them.

 

That is a false statement. The FBI reports states that blacks commit 28% of the overall crime and whites account for almost 68% of overall crime.

 

I do disagree that it requires two people to escalate a situation from basically, "Hey get out of the street" to a deadly shooting. From all the aggregate evidence,Brown was the instigator, behaving in a way that sounds totally crazy to me. However if I had a life time of cop hate driven into me I might have a much shorter fuse than what would generally be called for. So far, I've not heard any Monday morning quarterbacking that would have diffused the situation once Brown decided to reach into the police car and go for the officer's gun.

As far as the demography of the Ferguson PD goes, the change in the community happened within the course of a few years. So unless you intend to fire the department and start from scratch, there is going to basically a generational delay in the PD matching the community. If that's even possible. That was my initial thought in August; Black communities need Black police officers. If distrust of white police is so engrained, what could be simpler than giving them a police force that looks like the community? Ultimately I realized that it's virtually impossible to do that, since the pool of young black people qualified to be police officers is much tinier then the actual need for them. At least that's the case in my neck of the woods.

Both the Rice and Garner case are ones that, looking from the outside, should have resulted in some sort of indictment (with the Rice case being a bit iffy depending on police policy). But whether Blacks are overly represented in being shot by cops (relative to their crime rates that is) I don't know. I've seen that people have posted statistics saying they are not, but I don't have my finger on those numbers, so I'll just say I don't know for now.

 

I agree that once it reached that point, the die was cast. I suspect (apparently you do too) that Brown was in the street purely to antagonize the cops. He was trying to get a rise out of them. Whether Brown would have reached into the car and tried to take a gun from a black cop, who can ever know?

But you make a good point about a lifetime of cop-hate. There's all too much of that going around. As has been reported from all sides of the political spectrum, many if not most of the citizens of Ferguson regarded the police as enemies, at best a hazard to be avoided, certainly not there for anyone else's benefit. I suspect many of the (all white) police force regarded the citizens of Ferguson as "the enemy" as well. Maybe in this context, Brown's actions weren't so much crazy as the whole environment was crazy.

I regard this as all part of the same problem. I certainly disagree that the demographics of entire large communities necessarily change faster than the demographics of a small organization. But something would have to be in place to reassign police as communities change.

I wonder about the "pool of young black people qualified to be police officers." Around here, with the wars winding down, a whole LOT of ex-military young blacks are being dumped into the community. Surely this is true in Missouri. A kid I've known since he was 10 (he's now twenty eight) has been trying to get a job with the police. His father was a career cop here. But the police force needs more black cops. It's not affirmative action really, it's a desire to have the force match the community.

The problem in both the Rice and Crawford cases was communication. In the Rice case, the dispatcher didn't bother to tell the cops on the spot that they were dealing with a child armed with a toy, even though the dispatcher knew it. In the Crawford case, the cops were listening real-time to a caller describing an emergency situation that in fact didn't exist at all. The caller was making it up.

(And as a footnote, I remember a case in Evanston Ill. when I lived near there, where the cops wrote down the wrong address for a drug bust. The cops smashed down the doors of an elderly couple, ransacked their house, the old man died of a heart attack, all their property was ruined. The lady sued, and the court ruled that the cops had done nothing wrong, they'd acted properly on their best information, so the surviving old lady never got a penny. Something is WRONG with this system.)

Beyond this, I think you might be asking the wrong question. I would actually expect the statistics to show that blacks are shot by cops out of proportion to their numbers, but NOT out of proportion to the need to shoot them. Most of those shot are armed criminals in the act of committing crimes. The black community is without question a dangerous place for a white cop - and he knows it. But I suspect that few such cases go to grand juries. Cops don't want to, but nonetheless sometimes they DO have to shoot people in the line of duty. Most police forces I'm familiar with suspend ANY cop who shoots anyone (fatally or not) pending an investigation. And frequently enough, the decision is that the cop did nothing wrong, but COULD have managed the situation so as not to need any shooting, and they get reassigned to administrative duties where the need to stay calm and collected under extreme stress is less urgent.

So we're looking at a subset of cases, where the shooting(or choking) victim is (usually) unarmed, not committing any particular crime (jaywalking and selling individual cigarettes are borderline crimes at best), not doing anything actually threatening. Where taking things just a bit more slowly until the situation is understood would generally result in a warning at best. The white guy with the gun in downtown Kalamazoo, screaming curses at the cop, drew a 40-minute talk-down and no arrest. He got his gun back the next day. Maybe his being white wasn't relevant, but THOSE cops dealt with the situation on the ground, not the worst-case situation in their fears and imaginations. It can be done. Good cops do it. Bad cops who can't do it, should at least be indicted.

Oh, and thank you for sounding reasonable and not chanting slogans.

 

I hear you, not off base in the limits of the conversation you outline.

It's more a melange though, even within your constraints.

The only real issue I have Flintc, and I have seen you modulate your position as you read more and more about the legal structural issues, bravo to that!, is that you are still opening with a restrictive statement: responsible people are unhappy with a ......

It suggests that, in your mind, any other position is irresponsible and indefensible. It's an opening premise that is off putting to the reader, me anyway.

I enjoy your posts, thanks. At least someone is giving the issue real thought.

Cheers
Labour

 

Well it is affirmative action in the sense that many departments would much prefer hiring Black or some other minority than the typical white ex high school jock. They got millions of them. But like I said, in some communities, they've tried everything.

Area police agencies struggle to achieve diversity in the ranks

Ferguson probably had a hard time hiring Black officers because if you're qualified to be a cop, a bigger department will be able to throw a lot more money your way. That's why a police department like the NYPD can have a pretty diverse workforce, but a middling size community will struggle since everyone is competing for the same scarce resource.

I need some slogans to chant.

 

Maybe you're right. I hate to see violence, riots, looting, robberies, and nasty criminal behavior. I regard such things as irresponsible and indefensible, as you say. But I also see a "dig in your heels" position that the blacks are ALWAYS at fault in one way or another, and even if they aren't in THIS case, they are enough of the time so that screwing up THIS case is dandy. And the poor police, heroes that they are, daily place themselves in harm's way, to be used as target practice by the black=thug community, and thank God for grand juries with enough sense never to indict any of them. And THAT irritates me. Sometimes cops are at fault.

So proximately speaking, I'm back to recommending that grand juries be selected and run by outsiders who aren't members of the local law enforcement machinery. People generally do a terrible job of blaming themselves, especially when they are to blame!

But the real conversation should be taking place in a different venue. WHY is the black community so prone to violence and criminal behavior? WHY is this so much less the case in, say, Native American or Hispanic or Asian communities (though statistically, Native Americans are much more often shot per capita than blacks by the police.) Maybe some of the problem is economics, since the other ethnic communities tend not to be so poor. And WHY has one ethnic wave after another (some European, but some Asian, some Mexican, etc.) blended into the American experience broadly within 2 generations - learned the language, gotten the educations, had real economic success - while the blacks seem mired in an anti-white, anti-authority, anti-education, linguistic separation? Hispanics and Asians are visibly different, and their offspring even many generations later are also visibly different. It can't be sheer appearance.

And on the ground, this shows up in the cops vs. blacks tensions and frustrations grand juries are ill-equipped to deal with. Fixing any grand jury bugs isn't going to address the underlying problem either - these aren't really the problem.

 

At the end of the day, the police officer that breaks the law is still a citizen. We agree?

At the end of the day, it's the state bringing charges against a citizen. We agree?

How do you reconcile a different set of probable cause definitions, a different due process for any citizen?

At the end of the day, ...... what have you done?

We are all equal before the law or we are not.

Your thoughts? I'm thinking mechanics here, process. How do you protect the citizen that happens to be a police officer?

Cheers
Labour

 

You're thinking group justice, social justice; I'm thinking Blackthorn.

I'm thinking of the police, politicians, "the state" as one entity as you are. My thought is to limit them and their known excess. Limit the size and scope. Limit government.

That's the only way to limit the interactions you decry, limit the power of the state. Limit the interactions.

You will never stop abuse of power, you can only limit total power.

Where are you on this? Occam's razor. Simple, just limit the size of government. I'm in good company on this......

Cheers
Labour

 

This is like saying the boss who fires you is "still an employeee". We agree?

The state brings charges based on a protocol. If there are serious problems with the protocol, then those problems need to be examined.

Good question. When the police, or the DA, or the military "investigates" itself, very rarely does it find itself to be at fault. Isn't that amazing?

You completely evaded this problem. Should built-in vested interests working against justice be rubber-stamped, or should they be recognized and neutralized?

The mechanics, the process, is that the person who is responsible for selecting the grand jury, and informing them, and selecting potential charges (if any), CANNOT bring charges against a member of his team without losing his ability to perform his job.

You SEEM to be implying (I'm not sure) that indictments against police officers are ALWAYS bad because such indictments fail to protect the police officer. And if no police officer ever does anything wrong, there shouldn't be any indictments. But THEREFORE, should we conclude that the extreme rarity of indictments against police officers reflects the astoundingly world-record-holding infallibility of the police?

Heck, turn it around. Assume that grand juries are always run by black community activists, who select other activists to be on the jury. And let's say that they almost never return any indictments against blacks. Would you be suspicious, or would you shrug and say "due process in action"? Be honest.

 

Victim? Not hardly, that 'gentile giant' loser was the agressor, not a victim. The store clerk is a victim. The police officer is the victim as he no longer has a career. The agressor is dead because he forced the police officer (who was injured and scared for his life) to shoot him. This all ended the way it should have (except for the police officer being denied a career) in the blinded eyes of justice all the facts were weighed and found that there was not enough evidence to bring to trial an innocent man.

 

We can't communicate. Consider the nature of the grand jury:
1) The prosecutor picks the members of the jury
2) The prosecutor picks the evidence to be presented
3) The defense is denied any representation, by law
4) The prosecutor can present rumors, hearsay, or anything else he wants.
5) If the police force a confession that the defendent recants, the prosecutor need not tell the grand jury EITHER that it was forced or that it was recanted

Now, here we have a shining example of "due process of law" carefully and deliberately set up to give the prosecutor every possible advantage in bringing an indictment. And sure enough, prosecutors fail to bring indictments extremely rarely - EXCEPT when the accused is a member of the power structure.

What you are pointing out is exactly what you'd expect. The officer got to testify. Nobody represting Brown was allowed in the door. And sure enough, the facts in the case that "ended the way it should have" were under the prosecutor's discretion and control at all times.

There have been many studies of actual juries. The prosecution presents its case, the jury says "yep, he's guilty." The defense presents their case, the jury says "oops, he's not guilty." The prosecution cross-examines, and the jury says "we guess he was guilty after all". Finally, the defense cross-examines, and the jury says "apparently he is not guilty after all." This is exactly why the defense ALWAYS gets to speak last at trial.

And in the case of a grand jury, the defense doesn't get to speak at all. And grand jurors decide whatever the prosecutor chooses to present. Now, I think Brown was asking for trouble. He was standing in the street just to be woofin' the white cops, and he escalated it beyond the point of no return. But we simply do not know what might have been presented to an actual jury, with an actual lawyer for Brown doing actual interviews with witnesses, etc. We also don't know who might have been on an actual jury, where BOTH sides get to select the jurors, rather than only one. Is it any astounding coincidence that from an almost all black community, an almost all white grand jury was selected?

So there are some issues here. You may now return to your foregone conclusions.