Tag: Ferguson
Police confront a civilian in Ferguson, Missouri.
Truth is stranger than fiction; it is also most certainly harder to accept.
In a nearly hour-long interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Tuesday, a day after thousands of protesters took to the streets from coast to coast, expressing outrage that yet another white police officer got away with the murder of another unarmed black person, Wilson stuck to his story: “I just did my job. I did what I was paid to do. I followed my training…. That’s it.”
Sure, there are plenty of reasons to doubt his account. If he knew Michael Brown was a robbery suspect, why did he politely stop him and Dorian Johnson for jaywalking only to “have a conversation,” as he described to Stephanopoulos? If the West Florissant section of Ferguson is “really a great community,” why did he testify that it was a not very “well-liked community” and a hotbed of anti-police sentiment?
And yet, despite all the equivocations, the shooting death of the teenager on August 9th and Monday’s grand jury decision not to indict Wilson were entirely unsurprising. They are the predictable outcomes of a criminal justice system doing exactly what it was meant to do. For all the dissecting and debating of the veracity of Darren Wilson’s grand jury testimony this week, one thing seems crystal clear. He was in fact doing his job.
Indeed, by this standard, isn’t Darren Wilson actually a model police officer?
He certainly thinks so. When asked by Stephanopoulos if he could make “something good” come of this experience, he said he would “love to teach people” and give them “more insight in uses of force.” That he may have logged more time on first-person shooters—emptying clip after clip to take down demonic super-villains who “run through shots”—than actual police work is beside the point. Darren Wilson has the kind of experience that many Americans value.
Evidence abounds that the United States is the world’s most punitive nation. More people are behind bars and incarcerated at higher per capita rates here than anywhere in the world. African Americans are the nation’s prime suspects and prisoners. White police officers are our chosen protectors, enforcing the law in the name of public safety.
In a Pew research poll conducted shortly after Ferguson made national headlines this summer, researchers found that most Americans have a “fair amount of confidence in local police.” Eighty-five percent of respondents, white and black, gave a fair to excellent rating on police “protecting people from crime.” And on “using the right amount of force,” 66 percent of respondents gave a fair to excellent rating; white support stood at 73 percent and blacks at 42 percent. Though a clear racial divide exists, African Americans are only 13 percent of the population nationally. Everyone is therefore implicated in police performance writ large, if not by choice, certainly through political representatives.
Critics and protesters of police violence among African Americans and on the political left, as polling data suggests, see things differently. They are organizing against the routine killing of unarmed men and beating of helpless women on an unprecedented scale not seen since the anti-lynching movement of the last century. Even with such evidence in hand that black men are twenty-one times as likely to be killed by law enforcement than white men, as analyzed in a recent report by ProPublica, today’s movement like the one before it might fail to overcome deeply entrenched fears of black criminality without a massive shift in white public opinion and a new model for law enforcement.
Most whites do not realize they are reading from very old racial scripts. When Ida B. Wells, the world’s leading anti-lynching activist and black social worker of the early twentieth century, tried to explain to a wealthy suffragist in Chicago that anti-black violence in the nation must end, Mary Plummer replied: Blacks need to “drive the criminals out” of the community. “Have you forgotten that 10 percent of all the crimes that were committed in Chicago last year were by colored men [less than 3 percent of the population]?”
Like Mary Plummer, Darren Wilson is emphatic that the issue is not racism. Brown’s African-American neighborhood is “one of our high-crime areas for the city,” he said during the interview. “You can’t perform the duties of a police officer and have racism in you. I help people. That’s my job.” On that day, “the only emotion I ever felt was fear,” before my training took over. “We are taught to deal with the threat at hand.”
Implicit bias research tells us that most Americans are afraid of black people and subconsciously associate dangerous weapons and animals with them. They see things often that are not there. Stanford psychologists Rebecca Haley and Jennifer Eberhardt note in a study last month that the more people perceive blacks as criminals or prisoners, “the more people fear crime, which then increases their acceptance of punitive policies.”
The truth is that Wilson has no regrets. He wouldn’t do things differently. He’s looking forward to a new chapter in his professional journey as a teacher, trainer or a consultant. He’s our representative figure—a model policeman—acting on our collective fears.
Denver, 2014. Because a football team lost
LOOK AT THOSE GODDAMNED THU- oh, that was in Huntington Beach after a surf competition.
San Fransisco, 2012. Because a baseball team won.
As I have been watching the Michael Brown/Darren Wilson case unfold, a few things have occurred to me.
1: Let’s just get this out of the way first: there were two distinct groups in the streets the other night. Group A comprised people with legitimate grievances about this case and its place in a much longer running history of injustice for minorities in the US. Group B was made up of punks and hooligans looking for any excuse to cause trouble. There’s no defending this element’s behavior in the wake of the announcement that no indictment for officer Darren Wilson was forthcoming. I mean, you done me wrong, so to show you how pissed off I am I’m going to burn down my own house? Not a lot of rocket surgeons in that crowd, huh? I never ate at Red’s Barbecue, but I bet it was good and I hate to think what the owners are going through right now sifting through the ashes and trying to figure out what to do next.
2: I want to consider some numbers. Ferguson is 70% black but 50 of the police department’s 53 officers are white. The city has argued that it has done all it can to recruit black officers. That may be true. But if you’re skeptical, I understand why.
3: More numbers: Ferguson is 70% black, right? But the grand jury was 75% white. Just saying.
4: How about this number: 0.0068%. What’s that?
In the more than 162,500 cases prosecuted by U.S. attorneys from 2009 to 2010, grand juries voted not to return an indictment in only 11, according to data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics — equivalent to one in 14,759 cases, or 0.0068 percent.
The article goes on to explain that this isn’t a perfect comparison. But even if it’s off by two freakin’ decimal places, that’s still an eyebrow-raiser, init?
5: How in the hell did this grand jury find itself in such rarefied statistical company? Good question. It isn’t clear that the prosecutor tried real hard.
Faced with the high burden of proof surrounding a contested police shooting, what’s clear is that McCulloch did not aggressively push for a prosecution. Rather, the lead prosecutor took a series of steps that are unusual in a grand jury proceeding and that likely influenced the jury’s final decision. Rather than building a case intended to prove Wilson’s criminal culpability before the jury, McCulloch presented all the evidence in the case. In effect, the lead prosecutor gave equal weight to the prosecution and the defense. That’s technically in keeping with the prosecutor’s responsibility to “disclose any credible evidence of actual innocence,” but highly unusual, since prosecutors usually only appear before grand jurys in cases where they are convinced of a party’s guilt.
Was the whole grand jury proceeding an elaborate dog and pony show staged by a man determined not to put the officer on trial? Good question.
6: But why would County Prosecutor Robert McCullough behave in such an unusual fashion? Well, there’s a history there. This isn’t the first time he has been perceived as acting to provide cover for the police in racially charged cases. And while we can’t say for sure that he was biased by his own personal history, it should be noted that his own father, a police officer, was killed in the line of duty when McCullough was 12. By a black man.
I’m not going to suggest for a second that I don’t understand how that might leave a scar on a man. Seriously. And I’m not going to argue that a boy who faced that kind of adversity couldn’t grow up to be a paragon of color-blind justice. But – and I cannot stress this enough – in a case like this it is not enough to act justly. It is also critical that one appear to be acting justly. For better or worse, there are times when perceptions are simply too overpowering, and in these cases officials whose motives are potentially suspect must recuse themselves, handing the reins to someone that the public can trust.
If McCullough didn’t realize this he was either stupid or pathologically naïve.
7: Hey, I know – let’s wait and announce this decision, which we know a highly agitated population has been planning for since the grand jury was seated, after dark. You know, because they’ll probably think it’s too late to go out, right?
Hey Hollywood, I have an idea for Dumb & Dumber 3. Have your people call my agent and let’s do lunch.
8: I wonder what President Obvious has to say? Obama didn’t tell us that water was wet or that the sun rises in the east, but he came damned close.
It’s still hard to say how this is all going to play out. I’m the sort of guy who can’t help hoping for the best, but I’ve learned to expect the worst.
Sam Smith is a writer and photographer living in Bend, Oregon. He’s the founder and publisher of Scholars & Rogues and by day works in the exciting world of marketing. Sam holds a PhD from the University of Colorado and loves craft beer, Chelsea FC and Scottish Terriers perhaps a bit more than is strictly healthy.
St Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch To Be Promoted
ST LOUIS, MISSOURI (CT&P) – Frank Ancona, president of the Missouri chapter of the Traditionalist Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, based in Park Hills, Missouri, has announced that St Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch will be promoted to the level of “Grand Imperial Anus” of the KKK at a gala pageant over the Christmas holidays.
Ancona, who made headlines recently by threatening “lethal force” against Ferguson protestors, told Chris Hayes of MSNBC that the group was “proud beyond words” of McCulloch’s handling of the grand jury in the Darren Wilson case.
Wilson, who gunned down unarmed black teenager Michael Brown on a street corner in Ferguson earlier this year, was not charged with a damn thing for his reckless actions.
“We need more guys like Bob in local and state government,” said Ancona. “He really knows how to treat these mongrels that pollute our country with their thuggish music and filthy black skin. I’m proud to call him a member of our group and I think that he will handle the added responsibility of being a giant anus like real pro.”
Ancona also mentioned that Darren Wilson, a longtime member of the organization, will be receiving the James Earl Ray Award for Proficiency in the Use of Firearms, even though it took around a dozen rounds to “bring down that giant nigger.”
Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson and the entire overwhelmingly white police force are also slated to be honored at the banquet.
“We wanted to honor Chief Jackson and his boys for the brutal way in which they dealt with the protests after the ‘turkey shoot,’” said Ancona.
“This whole episode shows what a town and county can accomplish when a white police chief, a white police force, a white prosecutor, and a white governor can get together to protect a white police officer when he murders an unarmed black teenager in broad daylight. It really reinforces the great pride I have in this wonderful country in which we live.”
There we had Barack Obama, the first black 
President of the United States, finally admitting on one side of the television that structural racism is real. There we finally had him saying that when it comes to police terrorizing black folks, “communities of color aren’t just making these problems up”. But, in nearly the same breath on Monday night after the grand-jury decision in Ferguson, as the people were taking to the streets in cities across the nation, the president also said he doesn’t believe unequal enforcement of the law is “the norm. I don’t think that’s true for the majority of communities or the vast majority of law enforcement officials.”
It wasn’t just surreal, then, to witness Obama’s anti-Trayvon Martin moment at the very same time a split-screen on the other side of the TV showed police launching smoke bombs at protesters in Ferguson. It was heartbreaking. Because if that was reality rising up through the gap on Monday night, the reality is that legal discrimination is the norm – and our law enforcement officials refuse to acknowledge reality.
This is the gap in our collective split-screen: The Ferguson cops arrest black citizens three times more often than they do white people, but USA Today recently reported that “1,581 other police departments across the USA arrest black people at rates even more skewed than in Ferguson.” That’s right: the police department that won’t even see officer Darren Wilson stand trial – a cop, mind you, who complained that Michael Brown “looked like a demon” after he’d shot the unarmed black teenager – engages in less racial profiling than 1,581 other American police departments.
So it was nothing short of a gut punch to see our African American president on the wrong side of the gap between the fantasy of what the law does and the reality that people live. Obama, in that moment, gave credence to the fiction that if citizens just faithfully adhere to being “a nation built on the rule of law”, the result will be justice. Perhaps he will finally go to Ferguson tomorrow, but today, we are a nation looking upon a pile of ashes, death and broken dreams.
‘The most significant challenge encountered in this investigation has been the 24-hour news cycle,’ Bob McCulloch said – which … really?
And here we also had the overzealous, smarmy prosecutor Bob McCulloch telling us on primetime TV that the law allowed Wilson to shoot a kid in the head – and that there would be zero consequences. Obama and McCulloch both occupied this same gap between law and justice, but at least the president acknowledged there is a gap. McCulloch didn’t see the gap at all.
The prosecutor spoke in a bland manner about making sure things like this don’t happen again, without seeming to think he could actually do anything to deter them from happening again. He certainly didn’t display any feelings of agency as a prosecutor, and he didn’t seem to care that he’d maximized the possibility of police violence by holding his conference after nightfall. And, while deeply concerned about the potential for looting in Ferguson on one side and the “insatiable appetite” of the media and social media that was apparently the “most significant challenge” to the investigation on the other, McCulloch showed no interest in how the legal, economic looting of Ferguson and the irrational, unabated militarization of its local police force are undoubtedly responsible for countless charged interactions between police and citizens.
black lives matter fire
The people who understand this gap were and are the protesters – many very young – who have been on the streets nightly (and overwhelmingly without violence) for more than 100 nights since Michael Brown was killed. Monday night was just one night in what is a movement that cannot be contained, no matter what the (white) talking heads of the split-screen say. Today, while Ferguson and a nation full of organized protest cope with the smoldering embers, Darren Wilson goes on living his life as a newlywed groom, free to shop his story to networks without a trace of apology. Today, Michael Brown remains dead, but at least the protesters understand the gap between justice and the law, between reality and our political insanity. They know not to simply listen to words from a black president in Washington or a white prosecutor down the street. They know to take to the streets, because it’s not enough to shout in the margins anymore.
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The people on the streets know that the status quo cannot stand if justice is to be achieved. Amidst the flames and the teargas, the people on the streets are right – they are somehow even more right than the rule of law, at least when such laws won’t even let Darren Wilson face a trial for shooting an unarmed teen, whether Mike Brown had his hands up or not.
Future protests have another gap to expand: when McCulloch blames social media, and Obama dismisses news coverage of “negative reaction[s]” simply making “for good TV”, there is a root injustice there. The flames of Monday night’s unrest were manufactured, but not by media. They were stoked for hours, by McCulloch, who riled up the crowds needlessly until night fell; they were fueled for days, by Missouri governor Jay Nixon, who whipped up hysteria with his pre-emptive “state of emergency” and his calling-in of the National Guard. The flames were fanned for hundreds of years, by the white supremacy and structural racism that have wreaked economic, physical, psychological and spiritual violence upon black Americans for centuries.
It wasn’t the media that caused this history, despite Obama’s claim that to deny “progress I think is to deny America’s capacity for change”. Watching television and Twitter on Monday night – and today, and tomorrow, and 100 more days after that – reveals that media, especially social media, reflects the reality of the racial violence of these United States more than any politician in a box ever can anymore. Meanwhile, US laws haven’t just failed to catch up with what media sees: They have created the violent nightmare we are living.
Death in custody , Andrew Bolt’s Social Welfare. Police 0 Aborigines dead 1 jailed 7
After a Missouri grand jury declined to indict police officer Darren Wilson for the killing of Michael Brown, prosecuting attorney Bob McCulloch said that the decision was based upon physical and scientific evidence, not “public outcry or political expediency”.
This call for objectivity does little in a situation where autopsies show Wilson had shot Brown at least six times, twice in the head. McCulloch seemed to compromise his own objectivity by blaming social and news media for beating up a story, rather than acknowledging that when a young person is shot by law enforcement, people expect a level of accountability.
Watching the events in Ferguson unfold raises similar questions about Australia’s own legal system. The parallel is immediately drawn with the failure to secure a conviction in the case of 36-year-old Cameron Mulrunji Doomadgee, who died in a Palm Island lockup over 10 years ago.
Mulrunji was picked up for singing “Who let the dogs out” at a police officer, Chris Hurley, who drove past him in the street. He was charged with public nuisance. He had been in police custody for only an hour when he died. An autopsy revealed four broken ribs, which had ruptured his liver and spleen.
Hurley was indicted for assault and manslaughter but acquitted in 2007. He is the only person ever charged over a death in custody of an Aboriginal person in Australia.
Emotions overflowed after Doomadgee’s death in custody. A riot broke out on Palm Island. It was, like in Ferguson, as much a protest against a single act of injustice as against a system that seemed riddled with it. No police officer was ever successfully prosecuted for Doomadgee’s death, but several Aboriginal men, including Palm Island spokesperson Lex Wotton, were successfully prosecuted for the ensuing riots and received a seven year prison sentence.
Would it have been realistic to expect this outcome on Palm Island? The Ferguson grand jury’s decision certainly seems to have been anticipated on social media, reflecting the persistence of deep cynicism about the criminal justice system.
Anyone who has lived in the US – or even visited – will notice that poverty is racialised. 15.1% of Americans live in poverty; of that 28.4% were black and 26.6% were Hispanic. The events in Ferguson are perhaps a way of highlighting that the election of Barack Obama has done little or nothing to change the US’s deeply ingrained cultures of exclusion, marginalisation and stereotyping.
Obama’s response to the eruption of a new wave of violence, and the broader disappointment and anger about the grand jury decision, showed his own understanding of the perceptions of bias in the legal system. His call to respect the rule of law was accompanied by pleas for calm and constructive protest; then-Queensland premier Peter Beattie struck a similar tone after Hurley was acquitted, urging Queenslanders “to accept the decision of the court without question,
Obama also admitted that there were legitimate grounds for mistrust of the police, including that white police officers are seen to get away with killing young black men, while young black men seem to have no problem getting locked up. According to US Department of Justice figures from 2009, African Americans make up 40% of the US male prison population.
These patterns are replicated in Australia. Between 2000 and 2013, the adult Indigenous imprisonment rate increased by 57%, while the non-Indigenous rate did not show significant change. The rate of juvenile detention sits at about 24 times that of non-Indigenous youth. Indigenous people make up just 3% of the Australian population.
There are dozens of instances where Aboriginal people are killed in custody. The 1987 Royal Commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody investigated 99 of them. Since then, 340 Indigenous people have died in custody.
Some of these have been high profile. In 2008, respected Elder Mr Ward died in the back of a paddy wagon, after being driven 400km across the WA desert. He had been arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol.
More recently, 22-year-old woman Ms Dhu died in police custody in the South Hedland police station while she was being held in police custody to “pay down” around $1,000 in unpaid fines.
These deaths accumulate to cause a similar level of distrust with a legal system, particularly in the way it administers justice. Other than the unsuccessful prosecution of Chris Hurley, not a single charge has been laid, not a single person held to account. To return to McCulloch, is the long-term failure of African Americans and Indigenous Australians by their legal systems not also an “objective” reality?
While there is much talk about why violence occurs in this context, it also raises the more profound and long-reaching question: what will we do to fix a system where cynicism is rife and racial bias seems to abound? How do we change a conversation when there is suspicion that the system is stacked against the marginalised, and the powerful are defensive about being critiqued.
If there is a shining answer to this problem, it’s the Aboriginal community of Redfern. Riots erupted there in 2004 when TJ Hickey, a 17-year old Aboriginal man, was killed. After police chased him in their car while he was riding his bike, he was impaled on a fence. Hickey’s death sparked an emotional response from a community that had long been targeted by the police. Violence broke out and was eventually beaten back by police with fire hoses; law enforcement were castigated by the Sydney Morning Herald for their poor preparation.
Perhaps nothing was unusual about the situation in Redfern. What was unusual was the longer-term response. Police command changed and the new officer in charge, Commander Luke Freudenstein, built a relationship with the local community. A range of programs to build self-esteem in young people, particularly young men, were a success. As a result of this grassroots effort, the community transformed and far fewer young Indigenous men were arbitrarily picked up by the police, to end up in the lockup.
The lesson isn’t that good can come from civil unrest, so much as that change really is possible, if we address the issues that lead to outbursts of emotion and violence.
As the events in Ferguson unfold, it’s clear that their community is a microcosm of the deep-seated issues in the US. Ferguson is perhaps also a sign of what happens anywhere that key institutions, like the criminal justice system, are unreflective about their own entrenched biases – biases that colour outcomes when justice is what we need most.
By Ben Tanosborn
TOKYO (CT&P) – The Associated Press is reporting that approximately one hour after the announcement that Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson would not be indicted for the shooting death of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown, a furious Godzilla waded ashore from Tokyo Bay and began to destroy the city.
Witnesses reported that Godzilla used his patented heat ray along with his massive feet to create a swathe of destruction five miles wide and around fifteen miles long in and around the city.
Japanese authorities used every weapon at their disposal including white cops in riot gear in an attempt to stop the gargantuan reptile but nothing seemed to have any effect on the creature. U.S. troops stationed in and around the home island joined in the battle but Godzilla seemed unaffected by even the most modern weapons.
“Most of Tokyo now lies in ruins,” said a tearful Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. “Godzilla showed no mercy this time. He just walked out of the sea and tore our city all to hell! He even destroyed Ray’s Sushi and Comfort Woman Bar in Shinjuk. Now I have no idea where I’ll go to relieve the stress that builds up from this fucking job. First Fukushima and now this. Can’t those idiot Americans get their act together? I mean Jesus!”
After a full night of unbridled destruction, Godzilla returned to Tokyo bay where he held a brief press conference before returning to the depths.
“The situation in Ferguson reflects the entrenched white male power structure in the United States,” said Godzilla. “It appears that Missouri has made no progress since the days of Jim Crow. I fully expect this kind of thing from that dystopian hellscape they call Florida, but Missouri? I thought those folks were better than that. I guess it’s open season on unarmed black kids in America.”
When asked why he destroyed a Japanese city instead of heading up the Mississippi River to St. Louis, Godzilla replied that it was just force of habit.
This is the 47th time Godzilla has destroyed the Japanese capital.
olddogthoughts 
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