Police shooting of unarmed teen leads to protests and Riot

[nik-]

Of course you would

[TheJoeGreene]

Originally Posted by combustiblefuel

He was shot 30 plus feet away . He stopped threw his hands up which is a universal sign of surrender.

There was supposed to be a recording that shows that, but I've set to see anything other than the witness, who happened to be the guy who was at the convenience store that Brown robbed, who claimed that. This same witness went on every TV station he could to talk about the incident yet he left out the part about robbing a store and refused to give a statement to police about the situation.

If something substantial shows up that says that's what happened, then yes the cop was way out of line. If the police story is accurate, then the cop can easily articulate being in imminent physical danger which allows for the use of lethal wounding according to every policy handbook I've ever seen for law enforcement.

We have no idea what really happened. As of right now everyone's story should be questioned and held up to legitimate scrutiny. Since there are no dash cams in Ferguson, due to their force being woefully underfunded, I'm guessing there will be no video evidence at all and the cop will end up losing a wrongful death lawsuit and his badge.

[Oling_Roachinen]

Originally Posted by nik-

Oh I have no doubts he'll be found not guilty. If there's no shots in the back, then yeah, there's something off. But I'm going on the statements of two unrelated eye witnesses (on top of his friend) that he was first shot in the back.

Sorry, let's talk morally instead of lawfully. What type of evidence would be required before you change your stance? Is it plain and simply nothing? No matter what the FBI finds or the coroner report suggests you're going to believe that the officer murdered Michael Brown?

Even if the coroner's report disagrees with the statements of the eye witnesses?

[TheJoeGreene]

Originally Posted by combustiblefuel

The cops have admitted the distance he was shot at. They also have admitted he was running away.

Do you have a link for that? I read their entire release yesterday and didn't see that, but I was just skimming over it quickly so I may have missed it.

[nik-]

Originally Posted by Oling_Roachinen

Sorry, let's talk morally instead of lawfully. What type of evidence would be required before you change your stance? Is it plain and simply nothing? No matter what the FBI finds or the coroner report suggests you're going to believe that the officer murdered Michael Brown?

Even if the coroner's report disagrees with the statements of the eye witnesses?

No shots in the back would be a good first step.

[Ryan Coke]

Certainly some people who hate having their pre conceived biases challenged by actually looking to facts before making determinations here. And then to get so wound up at the person who is challenging those biases, and to try to minimize him in such a desperate way.

So far we have a criminal who had a run in with a cop. Either the cop killed him without just cause, or the criminal attacked the cop. The evidence one way or another is the only way to determine that.

One group in this thread is cheering for 'their' guy, while Roachinen is cheering for balanced reasoning and some critical thinking.

[jayswin]

Originally Posted by Ryan Coke

Certainly some people who hate having their pre conceived biases challenged by actually looking to facts before making determinations here. And then to get so wound up at the person who is challenging those biases, and to try to minimize him in such a desperate way.

So far we have a criminal who had a run in with a cop. Either the cop killed him without just cause, or the criminal attacked the cop. The evidence one way or another is the only way to determine that.

One group in this thread is cheering for 'their' guy, while Roachinen is cheering for balanced reasoning and some critical thinking.

Booo. I see what you're saying, but Oling Roachinin is one of those guys, only his guy is the cop.

Everyone's biased, it's natural. OR is biasing towards the cop, you can tell because he's building a narrative about the victim and speculating on what likely happened.

Nobody cares that he has a different opinion, our issue is that he's speculating about what the victim likely did to get himself killed and at the same time, calling those who are critical of the cop out for speculating and not waiting for the facts to come out.

Of course there's bias, but don't speculate on one side of the coin while telling those you disagree with not to speculate.

[Oling_Roachinen]

Originally Posted by flameswin

Booo. I see what you're saying, but Oling Roachinin is one of those guys, only his guy is the cop.

Everyone's biased, it's natural. OR is biasing towards the cop, you can tell because he's building a narrative about the victim and speculating on what likely happened.

Nobody cares that he has a different opinion, our issue is that he's speculating about what the victim likely did to get himself killed and at the same time, calling those who are critical of the cop out for speculating and not waiting for the facts to come out.

Of course there's bias, but don't speculate on one side of the coin while telling those you disagree with not to speculate.

I've also been abundantly clear that if the autopsy collaborates with the eye witness statements that the officer was in the wrong and should be convicted of murder. My bias isn't towards the police, I realize there is good and bad cops. At this point the officer could be either.

I do have a bias towards violent criminals, but I think that's far more than reasonable...

Regardless, you keep avoiding the question, what would it take for you to believe the officer wasn't a cold blooded murderer? Let's set a bar. If the eye witness reports are wrong about the shooting him in the back will that change your mind? If not, what will? I'm just curious.

[combustiblefuel]

Originally Posted by Oling_Roachinen

I've also been abundantly clear that if the autopsy collaborates with the eye witness statements that the officer was in the wrong and should be convicted of murder. My bias isn't towards the police, I realize there is good and bad cops. At this point the officer could be either.

I do have a bias towards violent criminals, but I think that's far more than reasonable...

Regardless, you keep avoiding the question, what would it take for you to believe the officer wasn't a cold blooded murderer? Let's set a bar. If the eye witness reports are wrong about the shooting him in the back will that change your mind? If not, what will? I'm just curious.

Releasing the photos of the officers alledged injures that occurred to his face that he had to be hospitalized for.

That wouldn't make me more on either side but it could help.

[WhiteTiger]

[Oling_Roachinen]

Originally Posted by combustiblefuel

Releasing the photos of the officers alledged injures that occurred to his face that he had to be hospitalized for.

That wouldn't make me more on either side but it could help.

Thanks, but curious why? Everyone seems to suggest there was a struggle. There was ample opportunity to get hit in the face for the officer even if Dorian Johnson's recount of the event is correct and Michael Brown was simply murdered.

Likewise, the officer didn't seem to suggest it was because of the physical attack 'damage' but rather he was afraid of Michael Brown going for the gun. So I don't really know what the hospital photos would show one way or another.

[Tinordi]

Why is it such a high standard to just expect cops not to kill people? Period?

From Mark Steyn:

http://www.steynonline.com/6524/cigars-but-not-close

American police have grown too comfortable with the routine use of lethal force. To reprise a few statistics I cited three months ago:

So the biggest government in the free world chooses not to keep statistics on how many people get shot by law enforcement. So be it. It does keep figures on "justifiable homicide", which it defines as "the killing of a felon by a law enforcement official in the line of duty". When is a police homicide not "justifiable"? Ah, well. At any rate, for 2012, the corpse count was 410.

By comparison, for the years 2012 and 2013 in England and Wales:

'No fatal police shootings.'

In the Netherlands:

'The average for the last 35 years is three dead and 15 injured...'

In Germany, a nation of 80 million people, police in 2011 fatally shot six persons. In Denmark, police shot 11 people in 11 years, and this was felt to be so disturbing that the National Police Commissioner held an inquiry into why his cops had gotten so trigger-happy. In Australia, 41 people were shot by police in eight years, and the then Justice Minister Amanda Vanstone (whose friend thinks I'm "eminently shaggable", but I digress) thought that that was too high. In Iceland, police have fatally shot just one suspect. That's one guy in the entire history of the country. He was killed by police last December.

So comparisons between the kill rates from American police and those of other developed nations aren't worth bothering with. Indeed, the "justifiable homicides" of US cops are more like the total murder count for other advanced societies:

In Oz, the total number of murders per year is about 270, so a nation of 23 million would have to increase by 50 per cent to commit as many homicides as American law enforcement. In Canada, whose urban police departments have absorbed certain American practices, a dozen or so people get shot dead by cops each year, which is again somewhat short of the US rate. Indeed, that 2012 "justifiable homicide" figure of 410 compares to a total Canadian homicide count for 2011 of 598. In other words, in America 120,000 or so full-time law enforcement officers rack up the same number of homicides as about 24 million Canadians.

That strikes me as on the high side.

In Ferguson, both parties agree that the first shot was fired from inside the car. The rest were fired by the officer when he'd got out of the car, with Chief Jackson conceding there could have been ten bullets fired. For purposes of comparison:

In 2011 the German police fired 85 bullets. That's all of them. The entire police force. The whole country. Eighty-five bullets in one year. That's seven bullets per month. One bullet for every million German citizens.

So the Ferguson PD used as many bullets on Michael Brown as the Polizei used on ten million Germans. But, by American standards, that's relatively restrained. The same year as those German figures - 2011 - the Miami PD blew through the Polizei's annual bullet allowance on just one traffic incident:

Police killed Raymond Herisse, 22, of Boynton Beach in a barrage of gunfire after they said he refused an order to pull over while speeding down a crowded Collins Avenue in his Hyundai...

Twelve officers – from Miami Beach and Hialeah – unleashed more than 100 rounds at Herisse, police said. The hail of bullets also struck and wounded three bystanders.

By comparison, those 85 German bullets per annum were aimed somewhat more precisely:

85 Patronen verfeuerten Polizeibeamte in Deutschland im Jahr 2011 bundesweit auf der Jagd nach Verbrechern, 49 davon waren Warnschüsse. 36-mal gaben die Polizisten gezielte Schüsse ab. Dabei wurden 15 Personen verletzt und sechs getötet, wie aus einer Statistik der Deutschen Hochschule der Polizei im westfälischen Münster hervorgeht.

That's to say, of those 85 bullets, 49 were warning shots. America no longer does "the warning shot". But whatever happened to "the shot"? With the 36 non-warning bullets fired by German police that year, they killed six people and wounded fifteen. That's a bullet-and-three-quarters per target. Whether shooting to kill or to disable, they're trying to do it with a single shot. American policing takes a third of Germany's annual bullet allowance just to off a dog:

In July, three officers fired 26 shots at a pit bull that had bitten a chunk out of an officer's leg in a Bronx apartment building. And there have been other episodes: in 1995, in the Bronx, officers fired 125 bullets during a bodega robbery, with one officer firing 45 rounds.

Just what happened on Saturday is still being investigated. Police experts, however, suggested in interviews yesterday that contagious shooting played a role in a fatal police shooting in Queens Saturday morning. According to the police account, five officers fired 50 shots at a bridegroom who, leaving his bachelor party at a strip club, twice drove his car into a minivan carrying plainclothes police officers investigating the club.

The bridegroom, Sean Bell, who was to be married hours later, was killed, and two of his friends were wounded, one critically.

Three months ago I asked this question:

Are American civilians so different from Europeans or Aussies or Kiwis or Canadians that they have to be policed as if they're cornered rebels in an ongoing civil war?

A startling number of American readers wrote to say, with remarkable insouciance, that the US could not afford the luxury of First World policing. Large tracts of America had too many illegal immigrants, drug gangs, racial grievances, etc. Maybe. But the problem is that, increasingly, this is the only style of law enforcement America's police culture teaches - not only for the teeming favelas, but for the leafy suburbs and the rural backwaters and the college-town keg party, too.

Which is to say that one day, unless something changes, we will all be policed like Ferguson.

[WhiteTiger]

Originally Posted by Tinordi

Why is it such a high standard to just expect cops not to kill people? Period?

From Mark Steyn:

http://www.steynonline.com/6524/cigars-but-not-close

Because your columnist is nitpicking numbers? Here's looking at a few others.

The US population in 2013? 317 million
Total number of homicides in 2013? 12742
Officers killed in the line of duty (non accidental)? 105

Americans love their guns. And they love to shoot them. With the sheer amount of guns in the States (I think I recall reading somewhere that there are enough guns in the States for everyone to have 3...) they are going to be used irresponsibly by poorly trained people who have no interest in authority or the greater good of the community. The saying "live by the sword, die by the sword" could apply here, with guns for them. It's an arms race basically, and if the officers can't or won't shoot back...more of them will end up dead.

[Acey]

As the riots go on, it's staggering to think that ~240 people have died in the US due to gun violence in the week since then. Pretty safe to say they've got a gun problem.

[Devils'Advocate]

Looks like the curfew went over well:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/michael...rfew-1.2738861

[transplant99]

Originally Posted by Devils'Advocate

Looks like the curfew went over well:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/michael...rfew-1.2738861

On Saturday, some residents said it appeared the violent acts were being committed by people who came from other suburbs or states.

Sounds oddly familiar....Surrey anyone?

[PIMking]

Originally Posted by Itse

Did some rough calculations out of curiosity more than anything.

The US police shoot and kill something like 50+ times more people per year than their Finnish counterparts, relative to population. (It's a really rough estimation. Lot of variation in numbers from the US, and a really low number of incidents in Finland, only 2 since 2000.)

Then again, US police officers are also killed something like 20+ times as often.

Bang bang.

Of course the US is a big country, so the variance is huge.

(For those who wonder, Finland is a top 5 country in firearms per capita.)

We also have a huge drug problem, gang problem, open boarder to the south, and a very deep racial divide here that Finland doesn't have. I know LEOS but I don't trust them.

[PIMking]

Originally Posted by Acey

As the riots go on, it's staggering to think that ~240 people have died in the US due to gun violence in the week since then. Pretty safe to say they've got a gun problem.

It's an idiot problem. My question is why the black community doesn't riot or march in Chicago? Many killed there everyday with strict gun laws and mostly black on black crime.

I don't understand it really.

[Boblobla]

Originally Posted by PIMking

It's an idiot problem. My question is why the black community doesn't riot or march in Chicago? Many killed there everyday with strict gun laws and mostly black on black crime.

I don't understand it really.

AL Sharpton doesn't have time to arrange rallies for black on black crime.

[Arya Stark]

Originally Posted by PIMking

It's an idiot problem. My question is why the black community doesn't riot or march in Chicago? Many killed there everyday with strict gun laws and mostly black on black crime.

I don't understand it really.

Al Sharpton is a civil rights leader why on earth would black on black crime be a civil rights issue? He's about curbing racism not stopping violence in America.

Why aren't you organizing rallies in Chicago against black on black crime? Probably the same reason he isn't.