Ferguson, MO: Unrest Continues

[Clockwork]

The IS(IS) guy was a Brit, I'm waiting for the right wing nuts to start screaming about 1772 again

Yup, that's pretty much what my sarcasm was aiming for, plus a laugh at cops and such.

[TTG4]

On another note, it seems that some protests over police brutality in LA have managed not to decend into battles with the police

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2014/08/18/375727/americans-in-la-protest-police-brutality/

Instead, the Chief and Deputy Chief of police have attended ommunity meetings to discuss the issues at play. So perhaps there's more hope for the US police system than our fairly negative outlook here would suggest!

Oops, I meant to reference 1776 earlier!

[comrade_general]

1776

[Gen_Glory]

Guess LA learned from the riots in '92

[Jubal]

And apparently in the modern USA, shooting unarmed people dead is okay. 

[TTG4]

For reference, here is the statement given https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuupBHUGbYo

Now from this I can kind of see why they acquitted the officer. I do still think the policy of shooting to kill is wrong, a taser could have disabled him without the need for killing him. But given the way US law enforcement officers are trained to act it seems that they didn't really have a choice except to acquit him.

[comrade_general]

Yeah it's not so cut and dry.

[Jubal]

I'm not saying what he did was necessarily illegal - I'm more suggesting that a legal system that permits this (and other police shootings of unarmed people as have happened across the US in the last few years) has very deep-seated flaws in it. The officer is ultimately a cog in the machine, it's the people at command level who have to bear most responsibility here. I think the specific case is less important than the frankly terrifying pattern - military-style police forces wearing combat gear patrolling neighbourhoods where they treat the inhabitants as potential insurgents. That's really, really not how you do effective policing - cutting crime has to come from within communities not just be imposed externally.

[comrade_general]

I think the specific case is less important than the frankly terrifying pattern

This.

[TTG4]

Interview with the officer who killed him. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CU2NPSxjho

[comrade_general]

Seems legit.

[comrade_general]

http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/ferguson-shooting-13-facts/2014/11/25/id/609483/

Even if some of it isn't true, he was hardly an innocent little unarmed boy.

[Jubal]

Yes, but the point is not that he was an angel, or different. It's that human lives portugaling matter. Stealing a pack of cigarillos doesn't carry the death penalty, and nor even does common assault. I mean, seriously, we in the west spend lots of time acting all het up about how in other countries there isn't a functional justice system, how they cut people's hands off for theft, whatever. How is the idea that cops have pretty much carte blanche to shoot suspects in a robbery any different?

If someone's a criminal, you try them. Maybe you put them in jail. YOU DO NOT SHOOT THEM MULTIPLE TIMES IN THE HEAD.

Also, that link takes all of the officer's later report as verbatim truth, which is questionable at best when multiple witness statements do not agree, and it's known from forensics that he didn't tell the truth about some elements of it. But even so - that's not the point. Even if this is totally legal, that's a terrifying indictment on the system as a whole. And I'm just going to add this; if a middle class white kid shoplifted then got shot in an altercation by police, we'd all be asking where he went wrong, discussing how tragic the whole thing was, etc etc. Look at some of the coverage of that guy who went nuts and shot a load of women, it was all pussyfooting around his mental health issues, and here we are with a black kid who got shot dead totally unjustly and somehow the right-wing part of the media are desperate to portray him as a thug whose life didn't matter. It's that attitude - both that the police shout be given total carte blanche in these cases and that some people's lives fundamentally matter less than others - that is frankly shameful and which permeates many layers of American media and society (not to say that Britain is anywhere near perfect on this, it's just less obvious here because our cops don't have guns and can't shoot to kill).

[comrade_general]

YOU DO NOT SHOOT THEM MULTIPLE TIMES IN THE HEAD.

In all the cases I've never heard anything like this happening.

[Jubal]

I was using hyperbole. But the facts remain that several people HAVE been shot and fatally wounded by police, that they have been predominantly non-white, and that this keeps happening. If police are going to use rapid responses when they feel threatened, they should be carrying tasers not firearms for that purpose.

The US police are literally getting away with accidentally murdering innocent people on a regular basis.  We're getting case after case of this. Losing one person like that would be a tragedy. Two would look like carelessness. The numbers that it's actually happened to look like a systematic failing across America to a) train police properly to not kill people, b) have a legal system that actually holds someone to account when someone gets killed, c) refuse to accept that the lives of poor black citizens are more than somehow "acceptable collateral damage".