Little is known…
…about the Michael Brown shooting, except that a young and unarmed black man is dead, shot by a policeman, and riots have been going on in response.
Was it a case of unjustified police violence, complicated by racism? Or of an officer understandably in fear for his life, defending himself? Why were the young men stopped in the first place? What happened next? Was there a scuffle instigated by one of the young men, in which he tried to get the officer’s gun? Or was that a fiction? What was Brown’s role in the whole thing?
The police tell one story, Brown’s surviving friends another. It’s not clear where the witnesses were, and what they were in a position to see (the shooting happened in broad daylight).
This is a case in which a videotape might have been a wonderful thing to have. In some jurisdictions, such recordings are routine. They could tend to prevent hotheaded responses on both sides, but there apparently was no tape of what happened in Ferguson. Meanwhile, the accusations fly and the incident will be exploited by the usual suspects.
I am surprised to see so little speculation about this incident on the part of the msm. Could it be they learned something after the Zimmerman fiasco?
I hope we are not returning to the 1960s when black riots were the order of the day and Alinsky strode to the forefront. But we might be. A black male is shot and the blacks in the hood (which is apparently what Ferguson, MO is) trash and loot some 15 stores in a passion of…… social justice. The national black scum float right in…Sharpton and the bl. lawyer that sued “on behalf of Trayvon”.
And we quail before these disgusting human forms with their disgusting conduct and deem them our equals?
This is going on; it’s a “thing.” So the MSM have to cover it. But I think they’re covering it reluctantly because race riots do not reflect well on the powers that be.
Gee, I wonder who that is?
P.S. Instapundit likes the idea of mandatory cams on all police, and I agree.
I thought it rather … interesting … that in the comments on this story that I have read in various places that there is not very much support for the police department in this matter. There’s practically none for the rioters, of course, and a lot of contempt for what Don Carlos is calling the ‘national black scum’ floating in to grab a few headlines. But the interesting thing is that police have lost support among those that I think previously would have been come out for them. These commenters seem to be withholding judgement. After so many instances of “SWATing” innocent or relatively innocent householders, officers clearly and obviously overreaching their authority, and abusing the general public … I suspect that law enforcement departments have alienated not just the black inner city community, but the relatively law-abiding, white working and middle-class communities as well. An interesting turn-about, I think.
Oh, yes, and I like the thought of mandatory cameras on all police officers as well. With an instant feed to a secure ‘cloud’ so there is none of this nonsense about the recorded media going mysteriously missing, or found to have been erased.
What a happy day for the lowlife in Ferguson. They get to loot and they get to be on TV and they get to race bait with Al Sharpton.
These people need to hold down jobs and know what it is like to work.
They think looting is an occupation. They are disgusting.
About an hour ago Michael Medved played Rev. Al’s statement mostly issued to the hot heads doing damage, etc. in the name of Michael’s death. I was stunned at the adult tone and Non-Sharpton nutzoidiness coming over the radio. A nice surprise that I won’t assume will last. But, still, quite a pleasant anomaly. Obama’s statement released from the hugbout HQ was tepid and scrawny by any comparison. Go F***ing Figure.
Well, Sharpton isn’t a dummy – he isn’t a genius, but I think he certainly possesses a generous degree of low cunning. Perhaps he senses that if the hot-heads really cut loose in non-black areas of St. Louis, it will not go well for the hotheads.
After how-many-summers of nasty black-on-white incidents and robbery-rape-murders, the Martin-Zimmerman affair, and that lengthy list of whites killed or badly injured in the “knock-out” game, perhaps he senses that the tide is on the verge of shifting. And not in a good way for him and his “peeps.”
I live outside Wash. DC and over the weekend several black people were shot and a little girl killed. Since it’s black on black crime it rates a paragraph in the metro section of the WAPO. This happens practically every weekend. Nothing to get excited about.
My best estimate is there may be a million law enforcement officers, Fed, state and local in the US and with that many folks with arrest powers carrying weapons some stupid things seem to occur on a regular basis. This case of Michael Brown being killed by an officer might make perfect sense or it might be a case of real bad judgement on the part of the officer. If the officer were being shoved into the police car then I would imagine that an emotional fight or flight reaction on the part of the officer took place and it appears he decided to fight.
If that was the case then it might not have been a good idea for two young men to be pushing and armed officer around especially if he did not know if they were armed or not. He was outnumbered and perhaps in fear of his life so I would take that into consideration.
Now if he did have his gun out to regain control of the situation and the young man put his hands in the air then I would question why the officer shot that man and not the other one since I have not read that both had their hands in the air.
The neighborhood reaction does cause a person to think that home defense with a decent firearm might be a good thing to persuade folks acting out their anger and frustration to do it elsewhere.
The only fact that seems to be undisputed, is that he and an associate were walking in the street sometime after 1 AM but before 2 AM.
It also seems to be conceded that he was engaged in some kind of physical confrontation with the cop, and that it was the upshot of what appears to have been a reluctance to move from walking in the traffic lanes to walking on the side walk.
Why they objected or resisted moving onto the sidewalk in the first place, is not stated as far as I have seen.
I’m going to refrain from commenting further on this “walking in the street” business, as it may have had nothing at all to do with the street straddling and blocking maneuvers some of us may have encountered.
The cop may have initially thought he was looking out for their safety and that they were simply being careless. But once his authority was challenged it escalated from there …
Or not. Can’t really say at this point.
Sgt. Mom
There are multiple things going on with our police and I see no way to reach a broad verdict.
1) NYC cops are forced by diBlasio policy to abandon the “stop and frisk” which was associated with a serious violent crime decrease.
2) Police forces are increasingly militarized, with Armored Personnel Carriers given them by our esteemed Federal Government, lots of SWAT teams unleashed on lots of law-abiders. The Feds are driving this to a large extent, not citizens nor police depts, not in dinko places like Keene, NH, which has a “free” APC.
3) In my town, we have cops everywhere, city cops, sheriff’s deputies, city marshals. They are all well-paid and headed for great pensions after 20 years. Great work if you can get it.
4) And then we have Ferguson, MO.
Personally, I think a place like Ferguson should be a cop-free zone. That’s what they want, let them have it. No cops–> no stores–> nothing to loot.
The militarization I can do nothing about. Neither can I reduce the # of local cops; we apparently like them. My town also has a disproportionate percent of blacks as city employees and what are we to do about that? Nada. Maybe this keeps the blacks relatively happy, or at least not actively discontent.
DNW:
That’s PM, not AM. It was early afternoon when it happened.
That ABC report seems to more or less be in accord with the early police version.
Of course the Huffington Po is pushing another angle.
Just as an aside, it has become noticeable that the “social idea” of what is tolerable assault seems to have become broadened.
Now, it has probably never been recently permissible to “get yourself into” with a fight with another ostensibly willing party and then claim that it was ok to kill him in “self-defense” if things escalated to your detriment.
But what seems new to me, is the notion being currently peddled that one is for some reason morally obligated to continue to sustain a serious physical assault without resorting to lethal counter-force, if the final maiming one is (usually in retrospect) imagined as likely to undergo, might itself be less than fatal.
Somehow a bizarre idea of “proportionate response” has been incorporated into our law in the case of interpersonal batteries. And the once absolute principle that no one is permitted to lay hands on and batter an innocent stranger without opening themselves up to a potentially lethal response, has seemed to evaporate along with many other traditional boundaries.
There were people who were arguing, or at least asserting, that even if Zimmerman was completely and unjustifiably assaulted and battered, he had no justification for to responding with lethal force; and should have “taken his beating like a man”.
I don’t think you would have much trouble finding people who would argue the case that if you were jumped, knocked to the ground, and your ear practically torn from your head, that, if you somehow managed to pull a firearm while lying on your back, then you would be obligated to warn the person assaulting you, before shooting them.
What kind of people would find such a dog-like social arrangement congenial, is, frankly, mystifying to me.
neo-neocon Says:
August 13th, 2014 at 6:24 pm
DNW:
That’s PM, not AM. It was early afternoon when it happened.
Thanks.
I glanced at the early reports and figured I had better let the dust settle before forming any opinion of this particular event. And then I read your post and your link and posted a half-assed take.
Feel free to take it down if you like.
I would have been well advised to have followed my initial plan more carefully.
Noon to early afternoon. That’s a strange business.
DNW: It’s an understandable error. One would think it would have been more likely to have happened in the wee hours of the morning instead of the middle of the day.
Don Carlos,
Everyone should be suspicious of the paramilitary nature of police forces across the nation. I don’t see it in my area and we don’t have an over abundance of police personnel, but the national trend is disturbing. Too bad these forces can not be deloyed on the southern border.
Btw, I am not commenting on the situation in Missouri until far more information is available.
I do not know what happened in Ferguson. Accounts differ widely. It is too early to reconcile these early accounts with known facts.
As in the Trayon Martin incident it appears as though young Michael Brown came from a broken family.
I am sorry for loss of their son by the parents of Michael Brown. I understand how Brown’s mother, Lesley McSpadden, would call the shooting of her son murder, and said she hopes to see the police officer who shot him fired and that he should be put in jail. I reacted rather negatively to another public statement by the mother, Lesley McSpadden, which seemed in effect to be a call for the accused police officer to turn himself and his family over to a lynch mob.
We should be mindful, sometimes police do engage in criminal assaults such as:
College Park Beating Verdicts: 1 Of 2 Prince George’s County Police Officers Found Guilty”
By The Associated Press 10/19/12
In this incident the beating victim was a white college student and a grandson of a respected retired local judge. The victim in this incident did not fight with the police officer and struggle with him for his gun, however.
BTW: next year August 17, 2015 will be the centennial anniversary of a 31 year old Jewish-American factory superintendent, Leo Frank. Leo Frank was likely wrongly convicted of murdering a teenage factory worker, Mary Phagan. Frank was kidnapped from prison by a group of 25 armed men who called themselves “Knights of Mary Phagan”. Frank was driven 170 miles to Frey’s Gin, near Phagan’s home in Marietta, and lynched by a lynch mob as planned and led by prominent citizens in Marietta.
Former congressman and Populist Party vice presidential candidate “Tom” Watson of from Georgia, stoked the antisemitic hatred of Leo Frank that culminated in the lynching.
Monday a pair of black punks attacked a 72-year-old white man in Greenwich Village, NYC, putting him in the hospital, in a knockout game incident that was Not, of course, reported as such by the TV “news.” But it obviously was a racist attack: they didn’t say a word to the man — one came up from behind and punched him in the side of the head, while the other recorded it; they made no attempt to rob him.
Video at link: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/punk-slugs-senior-west-village-cops-article-1.1900570
The NY Daily News refers to the “knockout game in which people videotape themselves sucker-punching strangers,” instead of telling the truth: it’s a strictly blacks-attacking-whites phenomenon.
Imagine the reverse: would they conceal the racist nature of the attacks from their readers? yeah, rhetorical question.
DNW: “There were people who were arguing, or at least asserting, that even if Zimmerman was completely and unjustifiably assaulted and battered, he had no justification for to responding with lethal force; and should have “taken his beating like a man”.”
In forums elsewhere, I ran into variants of this with alarming frequency at the time of the Zimmerman trial. There actually are people who think that it’s perfectly reasonable, in fact normal and expected, behavior to assault someone because you think that they looked at you funny, or are following you or any of a number of other trivial reasons; and having initiated a physical assault, your victim has no right to defend himself with a weapon that he might happen to have.
I thought this was bizarre and tried to pull out a rational explanation of why initiating a physical assault is perfectly OK, but using a weapon to defend oneself from a physical assault started by someone else is wrong. The only two responses I could get were that one should “take their beating like a man” or that it’s not “fair” to use a weapon (particularly a gun) in a fight with an unarmed person.
I saw precisely the same thing and achieved precisely the same result. It was like arguing with a tape recording.
So yes, I have come to the conclusion that there are some very deep differences in human psychology having to do with “interpersonal boundaries”. Anyone who has read widely or deeply in philosophy or philosophical anthropology is intellectually prepped for this realization, even if it is not really felt at the time of the readings.
The left versus right (or classical liberal) is not just a matter of a just “return of value to the producer”.
There is a much more profound question relating to ways-of- being, and the concept of the self in operation.
I’m not sure why I should have to sometimes remind myself of this, because a great deal of the academic material I encountered in college, and which had been generated in the years and decades before my attendance, had been directed pricely at this point: toward revaluing American values from a scoffed at “unrealistic” and purportedly mythological frontier individualism, to interdependence, cooperation, mutualism, and the hyper-socialization of the ego.
I think you learn this stuff in college and then forget about it for 20-30 years. Until it rises up and bites you on the ass in real life, and you see that Bill Ayers is out here too, and now.
One of my closest friends is a retired policeman.
I have had the opportunity to see police work through his eyes. Everyday, when a cop goes on duty he never knows what might be coming at him. They are well-trained for the most part, but when things get physical they don’t want to end up dead or even injured. Their modus operandi when someone gets physical is to use overwhelming force and quickly. They don’t want to get hurt or killed. From talking with him it has become apparent to me that anyone who gets physical with a cop is going to be subdued quickly and with prejudice. Injuries and death occur frequently in these altercations. The lesson: Even if the cop is overbearing/wrong, do not get physical with him/her. It’s a good way to find yourself in the hospital or the morgue. Just cooperate and things will go much better.
People who have trouble dealing with authority figures are the ones who often get into it with the police over nothing except attitude. It’s stupid to bad mouth a cop, or even worse, assault the officer. The chances are very good that you will be injured or killed. Put yourself in the cop’s shoes and you will understand their motivation to come home at the end of their shift alive and uninjured.
If the revalued values I describe don’t initially seem to square with “taking a beating”, think as Neo might say, Robert “Beat Me baby” Fisk.
DNW – I don’t know if it’s quite that deep but I think the attitudes you are describing reflect certain biases that people don’t like to articulate plainly, for obvious reasons.
1) Cops exist to protect whites and harrass minorities therefore a white person (or ‘white hispanic’) should wait for police intervention in any situation while a minority is automatically justified in questioning police authority.
2) There are places whites just shouldn’t go and if something bad happens to them they are substantially at fault, even if they are lawful residents of the area and the other person involved isn’t. This is sometimes inoperative if the victim is female though #1 can overcome even that (i.e. the Central Park wilding from the 1980s and other incidents)
JJ-
I have trouble buying your thesis. Most cops do not face danger every day; yes, the risk of danger, but danger itself? Most cops are not foot-patrolling the ‘hoods.
I know a couple of retired local city cops. Retired. Never pulled their guns on duty.
DNW – I noticed this subtle occurrence in our culture more than 7 years ago. As the mother of 2 Caucasian sons, I worried when they were out that some affront could escalate into something that could get serious and then we wouldn’t be able to depend on the system to ascribe formerly reasonable assessment. One example: one son came home angry and upset that the girls in their group were being harassed by “gang-like” individuals at a theatre while the movie was going on. In times past, men defended and protected women. That natural response arose in our son. From that time and there were many others, I worried that an incident like that which occurred outside Dodger Stadium could ensue–either one of our sons being harmed, or in escalation response to being harassed, seriously (or fatally–as both are strong and black belts as well) injure a provoker. Not an easy time to be a real man, especially a white man.
Don Carlos, you have a low opinion of policeman. Based on what?
My friend worked in Yakima WA. It was then, and still is, ground zero for narcotics smuggling and dealing in the state of WA. Admittedly he didn’t face violence everyday. But the possibility was ever present. He was a beat cop for several years. Yes, they needed beat cops. Yakima is about 50% Mexican. A lot of them are/were hostile to police because – machismo, I guess. Or they don’t like authorities screwing up their drug deals and other illegal activities.
I have had experience with little Caesar type cops. Is it worth getting a night stick upside the head by defying their boorish behavior? Take their badge number and report them to city hall or the ACLU. You want to assault them (put hands on them)? Be ready to get hurt, maybe killed.
Not all cops are bad. Just like the rest of humanity, some will overuse their authority. Some have a low threshold of fear. On the whole though, I think they do a hard, thankless job. Without a police force, anarchy would reign. Even with police, anarchy is in charge in Missouri now.
Ferguson, MO is a pretty appalling place. 67% black, with 15,000 residents of voting age, but a total vote of only 1500 in the last local election, and mother-only households 32%.
The population has not increased, but 25 years ago Ferguson was 75% white.
It is all Whitey’s fault.
Here’s a video that might give some hope for race relations.
The anti-Sharpton: (HT Vanderleun)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5f0mVn0HH6U&feature=player_embedded
We don’t have to draw and hard and fast conclusions at this moment, but let’s just meditate for a moment on the meaning and implications of a very few instances from the constellation of the slogans and axioms taken for granted by the serious leftist/progressive. Propositions, axioms and slogans, that is, which we all encountered in college or other schools.
And let’s grant that those who are asserting these propositions really believe them; or at least really “FEEL” them as part of their own moral sensibility apparatus.
“Property is theft”
“The essence of man is found in his mode of production”
“The unified self is an illusion”
“Freewill is an illusion”
“Moral agency is an illusion”
“There is no ‘human nature’ ”
“Reason is (and by implication should be accepted as) the servant of appetite, not its master”
“Man’s motives are unknown to himself”
And then of course there are all the cultural and moral relativist and ultimately values nihilist stances that go along with the kind of material we see above.
If people really believe and feel this stuff, if they orient their moral compass along these lines, then it is clear that what we have known as law in the past, cannot be sustained if we continue to inhabit a political space that requires a “shared fate” (Rawls), with activist “progressives”.
For various reasons having to do with long experience attempting to engage leftists on these very topics, I believe, that they really believe this stuff …
Sgt. Mom… Re-Sharpton. Yep, and my very guarded optimism yesterday didn’t last a full day. Rev. Tawana is tossing swill upon the flames now. Hey, AL, how’bout the horrendous stats for Black on Black deaths??
J.J.
I have re-read my earlier posts, and do not see how you legitimately conclude I have a low opinion of cops.
Some of my best friends are retired cops; I shoot with them, not at them, verbally or otherwise!
If it is such a thankless and dangerous line of work, as you assert, why do we not have a major cop shortage?
In the main (and I exclude Ferguson, MO; East L.A.; and south Chicago here) cops are respected and obeyed, pretty much as they would be if they were surgeons.
Don Carlos, sorry, I misread your comment challenging my assertion about the dangers of police work as having a low opinion of police. Jumping to conclusions is one of the main forms of exercise I get these days. 🙂