More news from Baltimore about what may have caused Freddie Gray’s death
The WaPo is reporting that a man who was being transported in the other side of the van that also was carrying Freddie Gray has told investigators he heard sounds that indicated Gray may have been trying to hurt himself while in custody:
…[The prisoner] told investigators that he could hear Gray “banging against the walls” of the vehicle and believed that he “was intentionally trying to injure himself,” according to a police document obtained by The Washington Post.
The prisoner, who is currently in jail, was separated from Gray by a metal partition and could not see him. His statement is contained in an application for a search warrant, which is sealed by the court. The Post was given the document under the condition that the prisoner not be named because the person who provided it feared for the inmate’s safety.
I wouldn’t doubt it.
Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts has…said officers repeatedly ignored Gray’s pleas for medical help and failed to secure him with a safety belt or harness in the back of the transport van…
Batts has said officers violated policy by failing to properly restrain Gray. But the president of the Baltimore police union noted that the policy mandating seat belts took effect April 3 and was e-mailed to officers as part of a package of five policy changes on April 9, three days before Gray was arrested.
Gene Ryan, the police union president, said many officers aren’t reading the new policies ”“ updated to meet new national standards ”“ because they think they’re the same rules they already know, with only cosmetic changes. The updates are supposed to be read out during pre-shift meetings.
I wonder if what really happened will ever become clear. I’m fairly certain, however, that a lot of people will disbelieve the police no matter what they say. Once a meme gets going and people get fired up, nothing can undo it.
Perhaps we need to not only have cameras on the police, but cameras inside the vans too. Cameras, cameras everywhere And even then, people would still argue about what the cameras show and what it means.
There’s something tremendously sad about this:
The Baltimore neighborhood that saw the worst of the violence was already filled with many burned-out buildings and vacant lots that had not been rebuilt since the 1968 riots that followed the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
That’s almost 50 years ago.
[NOTE: See also this.]
There was once The Renaissance, and The Age of Enlightenment, and the The Age of Reason. Now we have entered the Age of Idiocracy in a time of Universal Deceit, supported by all the Gimme Dats!, an Age where no facts can ever penetrate The Narrative.
Liberty depends upon trust. We can proceed in our lives without fearing others when we can trust those others. But trust requires that we share a basic culture, with basic values. The paradigm shift of the past fifty years to individual rights and multiculturalism has fractured our once-homogeneous culture, and with it, the trust that enabled liberty.
Cameras everywhere.
@Cap’n Rusty
In my opinion, more than about having shared values, it’s about respecting fair play, a deal that stays over different social groups, even in conflicts. Even in war. That’s one the most important conquests of civilization.
Tribal cultures, on the other side, use whatever the mean they think is needed to get their goals. No limits. From the point of view of a tribal moral, moral values don’t apply outside the tribe.
You have here a very interesting article from Victor Hanson’s page. It’s about Islam, but you can apply it to blacks in America without problem.
http://victorhanson.com/wordpress/?p=8296
Tribes never thrive because there’s no trust among tribes. And because of this lack of trust, they can never cooperate. Cooperation requires trust.
And you have a very good example of this with Obama. Think how Obama hasn’t respected any previous “status quo”, no matter how old and established it was. He just broke cooperation with Israel even though this cooperation survived different republican and democrat governments. He just went over Congress and Law. This is tribal morality: I don’t respect any previous deal, I don’t respect anything outside my own group and my own goals, I don’t care what gets broken.
When something breaks, it’s very difficult to fix.
I’m from a mediterranean country, and we have a bit of this tribal mentality. Not much, but enough to prevent thriving and flourishing. You see Greece, Italy, Spain… so you know where the road ends.
What Yann and Rusty said. Trust is a relatively fragile thing in a society – and once it has broken down in a society, it is very hard to regain.
I agree with Neo’s call for more cameras. What that means is that we need more transparency in government.
It is ironic that that those who post here generally distrust our present government as much as do the people protesting in Baltimore. The difference is that the left which is responsible for many of the abuses which have destroyed trust have managed to deflect the anger of the citizens of Baltimore away from themselves onto their favorite scapegoat, conservatives.
Perhaps what the other prisoner heard was Gray convulsing – assuming there was another prisoner and that he heard anything – which would account for the sounds of Gray striking the walls of the vehicle.
Why not go with Occam’s Razor and the simplest answer? Gray was trying to hurt himself to set up a police brutality lawsuit. From what I’ve read from people in Bal’mer, the City is quite easy in paying lawsuit money.
Gray already had a lead paint settlement in his favor, to the tune of $180,000 over time. But Gray was in a hurry and cashed out through Peachtree for $18,000.
The neighborhood with the worst violence still has many burned out homes and empty lots from the riots in 1968? Wow, that says it all. A population that has no sense of ownership or responsibility and expects others to clean up their messes. That isn’t just sad, it is pathetic.
You realize that meme is idea in french and not anything special unless you think that saying something in another language is exotic… like leftists do… duh
i guess the left wants to be fute…
Nearly every city would be better off with more and better trained police, what could really improve life would be better citizens.
The left has been in charge of education in the US for a couple of generations now, look what it produces.
Those inclined to disbelieve the police will claim that Grey was pushed around by the cops inside the van, who to protect themselves, then lied that Grey tried to hurt himself. And of course there’s no way to either disprove or prove that claim.
Given the Left’s machinations, black’s refusal to look in the mirror, cops need to go where the crime is, i.e. the black community and cop’s occasional abuse of power… It’s spiraling out of control with the ‘knockout game’ and black ‘flash mob’ violence.
I see little reason to hope we can get past this state of affairs. I also expect we will start to see another, greater level of white flight from the cities with de facto segregation into white and black enclaves.
Of course Gray could have been convulsing, as he complained before of difficulty breathing, this could have pointed to onset of paralysis…
You are short of breath because the muscles that
control your lungs are losing their ability to function,
lower oxygen to the brain can trigger a seizure…
then a coma & possibly death if there is no medical
intervention & even medical treatment is no guarantee
as Gray died, after being in a coma the entire time in
the hospital.
Good points by Cap’n Rusty and Yann. Tribalism is what humans have been evolving from. It worked reasonably well for the hunter-gatherers, but humans can do so much more than live a life of subsistence when individual creativity is unleashed. The path we are on has never been easy and there have always been steps backward. In fact, there was a period known as the Dark Ages – a big step back.
I posted this on another blog:
Ah, the good old days. In 1968 I was just beginning my life as an airline pilot. Many times during the next four years I looked down on cities such as Baltimore and Los Angeles seeing vast swathes of buildings ablaze. And the layovers in Baltimore, D.C., New York and LA with sub-machine gun toting cops with dogs protecting the hotel lobbies. What fond memories. 🙁
Those passions cooled down some and life became more normal, but nothing really changed. The dysfunctions of black communities remained and even got worse with more bastardy, fewer family units, more drugs, and, with the prodding of the race hustlers, greater entitlement mentalities.
Police and National Guardsmen can help control the crowds, but only a concerted effort by blacks themselves will change their lot in life. Why do some succeed and others don’t? I know several fine black men. One of them lives across the street from me. He’s a good neighbor. He has the same values and intentions as me. He gives the lie to the claim that the deck is stacked against blacks. How to solve it is a dilemma, but it’s not going to be solved as long as we have race hustlers like Sharpton, Jackson, Obama, and Holder fanning the flames and telling blacks that the deck is stacked against them. My neighbor made his way into the middle class the old-fashioned way. He EARNED it. The opportunity is still there, but tribalism obscures the way for too many.
“He has the same values and intentions as me.” J.J.
All it takes is a culture to embrace education, acceptance of individual responsibility, a strong work ethic, acceptance of familial obligations and embracing delayed gratification.
Individual exceptions aside, those five virtues have resulted in both European and Asian socioeconomic success in America.
A culture that embraces those virtues will also embrace the rule of law and our constitutional precepts.
Artfldgr:
There’s nothing exotic about the word “meme” anymore. It has become part of the English vernacular in recent years. It means more than simply “idea” and is often used as shorthand for “internet meme.” The definition of that is “an activity, concept, catchphrase or piece of media which spreads, often as mimicry, from person to person via the Internet.” In this case I didn’t just mean an internet meme, I meant “an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.”
By the way, the origin doesn’t seem to be French at all, although French has a word spelled the same way but that seems to mean something different (see this). This is a description of the origins of the English word “meme”:
To me, that seems to be stretching an analogy. At any rate, the word comes from the Greek: “The word meme is a shortening (modeled on gene) of mimeme (from Ancient Greek μίμημα pronounced [méËmÉ›Ëma] mÄ«mÄ“ma, “imitated thing”, from μιμεῖσθαι mimeisthai, “to imitate”, from μῖμος mimos, “mime”).” As such, I would guess it might have similar roots to the French word I discussed above. But the English word does not come from the French one.
I recall when the Cuban refugees moved into Florida in large numbers and leap frogged the black population who had been there for decades. Now our open borders means that the unskilled and manual labor that had been the province of black males is being taken by Hispanics. More talented blacks can move out of the hood leaving a fished out pond behind. That is what the police have to deal with.
How does Occam’s Razor assist in determining what Gray was doing in making the noise – if there was any – supposedly heard by the arrestee in the other side of the van? The simplest theory which explains all the facts. It seems a big far-fetched to believe that Gray is planning on a big score from the city in a lawsuit and therefore is going to bang himself up in the van. Seems to be more of a reach than that the cops injured him in the arrest and that he was having some involuntary spasms. In the absence of more information, Occam doesn’t help, because we don’t have enough facts to define the explanations to choose among, more narrowly than “Cops injured him” and “He injured himself”.
“Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts has…said officers repeatedly ignored Gray’s pleas for medical help”
What he says about his own officers. He is a black in an institutional black city run entirely by blacks ( a few token whities) for blacks. Oh, forget the “for”. It is run for the blacks who have gamed their way to power.
Molly NH and Ike remind me of the people who never doubted Michael Brown of Ferguson was just a gentle giant. Even after the testimonies before the grand jury became known.
Molly NH and Ike remind me of the people who never doubted Michael Brown of Ferguson was just a gentle giant. Even after the testimonies before the grand jury became known.
That’s a rather stupid prejudice.
If the Leftist alliance begins a war in Libya to arm terrorists, were you one of those people who said patriots couldn’t be against that war because it reminded them of those myrmidons in Bush’s OIF?
The Leftist alliance and their black ops bash in the teeth of Republicans, not merely because the leadership is stupid and or corrupt. But the denizens and Mortal Normals on the bottom are about on the same par, minus the expensive education.
And as for “who” those people are, they will unfold their introduction soon enough.
@ aterpillar Sorry, You are so wrong LOL, I never defended Mike Brown, in fact I was disgusted at his blatant thievery of the
convenience store owner. And I believed Darell Wilson, as I did geo Zimmerman.
I simply do not condone that a man arrested & helpless deserves to be BEATEN to death essentially, can you tell me why you are ok with that?
It appears that you and I will have to disagree about this, aterpillar, until we have more facts to work with in deciding what happened to Gray.
You do need to get your “reminder” equipment fixed, though, as I’ve never posted here about Michael Brown. If you cannot meet their arguments, don’t reveal that inability by trying to throw smelly stuff at people with whom you disagree. That tactic wins no discussion and reveals your weakness(es) in argument, discussion and debate.
Pingback:Friday Photos: UnBaltimore Edition