Ferguson St Louis - Michael Brown shot by police

Politics and religion
21

I don’t know much about this shooting because I wasn’t there. But it’s the first page of the thread, so I thought I’d throw this out there as a general discussion point.

The trick about analyzing questionable police shootings is that 9 times out of 10, they’re legally justifiable – for whatever that’s worth – at the instant the shot occurred. (This one might be the exception to the rule.) The victim’s family comes out later and says their innocent child only had a knife, or a bat, or a pen, or a cell phone at night, or was unarmed, so why couldn’t the police hold fire? But you can’t always make that leap between “bag of Skittles” and “dead kid.” There are dangerous things that can happen between those two factual points in time. For example, it’s well established that someone with a knife could be considered a deadly threat even when he’s 21 feet away. That’s two rooms of a house! There are justifiable little quirks in self-defense that you’d never think about.

Almost always, the problem with police shootings begins well before the shot is fired. A cop inserts himself somewhere he’s not needed or wanted (“dial 911 and die”) or they get the wrong apartment or they attempt an unnecessary assault instead of waiting someone out. In the Ferguson shooting, the cop just had to hassle the kids to get out of the road, and then just had to exit his vehicle when they did not comply. Maybe they bumped his car door back into him. That’s how deadly misunderstandings begin.

As a gun owner who has learned a few things about self-defense, I usually give them the benefit of the doubt when the shot is fired. But I’m extremely skeptical of everything they do before – and after, when the wall of silence goes up. Those are the parts that need to be changed.

The easiest answer long-term is more cameras: wearable cameras and witnesses with cell phones. Privacy advocates worry about government spying, but on balance I think cameras everywhere will protect citizens from government more than it will allow government to harm citizens. The old quote is “an armed society is a polite society.” Replace that with cell phones and you’re on the right track.

In the meantime, it’s good to put more pictures of paramilitary police forces in front of oblivious taxpayers, no matter what color they are.

22

@jelani9
This is not the hood. Area is full of single family homes with manicured lawns. If police can behave like this here…” #Ferguson

23

Fuck it. I’ve had a few beers and need to sleep, but let’s do the what happened thing.

Mike Brown and one of his friends were walking down the middle of a street on Saturday afternoon. Sidewalks are reasonably crowded with pedestrians, it’s a nice day out for St. Louis in August. Not many other cars on the street, near an apartment complex. Apartment complex here is not a code word for “public housing”. Apartment complex. No biggie.

Cop pulls up alongside. Tells them to get on the sidewalk. (“Get the fuck on the sidewalk” is what the witness reports.)

The two young men tell the cop they’re almost at their destination. They may not have been excessively polite in doing so.

Cop brings his car to a halt and throws it in reverse. He brings his driver’s side door even with Mike Brown. “What did you say?”

The cop starts to open his door. According to the witness, he flings the door open, but it hits Brown, who weighs about 300 pounds. The door bangs off him and back shut.

Officer interprets this as hostile threat and grabs at Brown. Witness says he first gets Brown by the neck, but that seems really unlikely. Brown is tall, cop is still in his car. The cop likely does get his arm and then a big hunk of Brown’s shirt. he draws him close and threatens him, pointing his gun at Brown. Witness sees Brown try to pull away, sees the gun go off. Brown is hit in the body somewhere.

At this point both young men run. Brown’s friend ducks between two cars to hide. He yells to Brown to keep running. Police officer exits vehicle. This part seems to not be in dispute: on a sidewalk and street with pedestrian traffic, the officer opens fire on Brown down the street. Brown is hit again and falls. He gets up putting his hands in the air. He yells that he’s unarmed. More shots. Brown goes down curled in a fetal position, and dies.

A nurse is one of the onlookers. She asks the cop if she can at least check on Brown. The police officer aims the gun at her and orders her away.

The shooting happens around 2:15 Saturday afternoon. By 2:40, St. Louis County police are notified by Ferguson’s police chief that he would like them to take over the investigation. In other words, after even a cursory look at what happened, the Ferguson Police Chief essentially said “Oh fuck, this is bad” and escalated the investigation. By 5:30 that same afternoon, the St. Louis County police investigators will notify the FBI and DOJ to request assistance handling the investigation. In other words, shortly after getting their own guys to the scene, they too say “Oh fuck, this is bad” and realize they’re going to need to bring in experts. It should also be pointed out that these escalations are NOT related to civil unrest yet. It’s still daylight. Crowds have gathered. It will be 6:30 before Brown’s body is allowed to be taken away…but the “Oh shit, we have a really bad thing here” escalations were based strictly off the shooting and what police discovered in talking to the officer and witnesses nearby in the immediate aftermath.

While I am also loathe to jump to conclusions in shooting cases when a police officer uses lethal force, in this case it feels like all involved realize that they have an officer who may have done a whole lot of bad things.

24

Part of my work on my Master’s thesis was the militarization of law enforcement. Back then, it was Cold War-era funds and equipment being used to train law enforcement agencies in CQB and equip them like soldiers. Today, it is Iraq/Afghanistan funds, equipment, personnel, and tactics finding their way into civilian policing. It was a dangerous trend in the mid-90’s and even more dangerous today.

25

I think part of the problem here is we really don’t have good alternatives for who to call in when the police has lost the confidence of the community. I don’t know anything about Ferguson, but I agree that it sounds like the cops (with the exception of the officer who shot Michael Brown) did everything pretty much right. However, it also sounds like the cops in Ferguson had a pretty shaky relationship with the community to begin with, so, fearing civil unrest, they called in the county cops – who, like many county cops, don’t have a clue how to do community policing or defuse the situation and are instead used to kicking in the doors of meth houses. Their presence just serves to inflame the situation – and it’s a testament to the quality of the good people of Ferguson (IMHO) that the situation hasn’t gotten violent.

Now, all of that said, I’m really not sure what else the Ferguson cops could have done. Part of why they’re keeping mum, I assume, is because the FBI is investigating and building a case, and they don’t want to endanger that. Part of the reason is also that they don’t want to further inflame the situation. I don’t know St. Louis, but is there anyone else (besides the county cops) that they could have called to help support them? It sounds like the county police force has become pretty specialized at doing paramilitary/“hard” actions, which is useful when you’re taking down a meth house, and less useful when you’re trying to calm a volatile situation.

26

See, I was actually speaking straight to the investigation, and not the police supervision of the town.

The Ferguson Police didn’t ask for help with crowd control in Ferguson until late into the evening Saturday.

I’m talking about the investigation into what happened between Mike Brown and the police officer only. The point I’m making is this: the investigation of what happened got moved upstairs–twice–with incredible rapidity by those who presumably got preliminary reports directly from first arriving police. To have called in detectives and IA investigators from St. Louis County within the hour of the shooting is extraordinary. For those same investigators to have said “Oh shit” and called the FBI and DOJ to say “This investigation is going to be awful, we need help” within a few hours after that is also remarkable to me.

27

Two other witnesses with no ties to the deceased both corroborate the story his friend told:

http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/14/us/missouri-teen-shooting/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

The women’s accounts corroborate that of a previous witness, all three of whom said the officer fatally shot the unarmed teen.

Police have said the black 18-year-old died in a dangerous struggle after trying to grab the officer’s weapon. Not so, say the witnesses.

“It looked as if Michael was pushing off and the cop was trying to pull him in,” Tiffany Mitchell told CNN on Wednesday night.

Mitchell said she drove to Ferguson on Saturday to pick up an employee for work just in time to see Brown tussling at the window of a police vehicle.

She and the employee, Piaget Crenshaw, told CNN’s Don Lemon late Wednesday about Brown’s last moments.

Crenshaw, still in her building, watched the same events from her window. She later shot cell phone video of the aftermath, which CNN obtained from affiliate KMOV.

It looked like the two of them were arm wrestling, she said.

Neither woman, who gave their statements to St. Louis County police, say they saw Brown enter the vehicle.

Instead, a shot went off, then the teen broke free, and the officer got out of the vehicle in pursuit, the women said.

“I saw the police chase him … down the street and shoot him down,” Crenshaw said. Brown ran about 20 feet.

“Michael jerks his body, as if he’s been hit,” Mitchell said.

Then he faced the officer and put his hands in the air, but the officer kept firing, both women said. He sank to the pavement.

Cop shot him down while he was surrendering. They have 3 witnesses that contradict the account given by the policeman. Sounds like he should be arrested immediately and charged. What more evidence do they need?

28

Video evidence probably, and even that might not be enough sadly. This last month has been a strong reminder that to be Constitutional guarantee of ‘equal’ does not apply to all. This is just depressing. The police across the country have been given billions of dollars in military equipment over the last decade under the guise of ‘preventing terrorism’. When all those go unused against actual terrorism, is it any wonder that they’d see anything as an excuse to use them?

Police of Ferguson, shame on you. People of America Shame on us.

29

No matter what happened in the heat of the moment of the first shot, it’s pretty damning if he really chased him down and fired again. I assume the forensic evidence doesn’t contradict that.

He probably snapped or wasn’t thinking, and the department knows it.

30

CBC radio here in Toronto had an interesting segment this morning on the state of police in the US. First they talked about the equipment itself, how even small town police forces are getting armored vehicles and sniper rifles and assault rifles. One stat that blew my mind is that there are something like 140 SWAT raids in the US per day, and only 5-6% of those are for ‘active danger’ situations where members of the public are conceivably in danger (the reason SWAT was invented). But the interesting part is that there is a serious identifiable psychological impact on police officers when they are given access to new deadly weapons and equipment. Part if it is that it’s only human to start imagining use-case scenarios, enjoy using and practicing the equipment. And then it’s a short mental leap to us-vs-them and a world full of bad guys and then something happens that you MIGHT need the APC and then all of a sudden you’re using it for traffic control.

In Canada our lower gun ownership was said to be a factor limiting police need for equipment escalation, but we are following the lead. G20 and Vancouver Olympics involved unidentifiable officers heavily armed and willing use of sound canons etc.

31

Sounds like a straight up execution to me. Man should be locked away for life.

32

It’s hard to say exactly what happened, but the one thing that was clear in multiple reports was that he was killed about 35 feet away from the car that he was supposedly shoving the officer into/against/whatever.

33

In the movie The Dark Knight Rises, Christopher Nolan attempts to imagine what it might look like if a dangerous terrorist with a warhead confronted the military. That’s the top picture.

The bottom picture is actual police response to a peaceful, daylight protest involving 100 persons in Ferguson on Wednesday.

34

“Clay” here is US Rep Clay, who represents the district:

@dwallbank
Clay: “The gov. just called me and he’s on his way to St. Louis now to announce he’s taking St. Louis County police out of the situation”

35

It sounds like he shot him with his normal service weapon. I don’t think militarization has anything to do with the actual shooting. It just sounds like an asshole with a gun and a badge.

36

I suspect the hair-trigger bogeyman mentality and the eternal vigilance paranoia has bled into regular street cops too.

But yes, the paramilitary stuff is mostly SWAT teams and unnecessary displays of force after the fact.

37

Well yes, the militarization is not a direct cause of the original tragedy. It IS a direct cause of the resulting escalation though, an escalation almost exclusively done by the police.

38

Cops have been shooting unarmed black men for a long, long time in this country. “RESPECT MY AUTHORTAH” and all that. Again, the militarization shit is all the stuff that happened after.

My bet is that it was your typical douchebag of a cop riding a power trip. It was probably hot and humid as hell, which only makes triggers shorter.

39

Sorry, I should have been clearer – I completely agree with you regarding the investigation and taking it “upstairs” with rapidity.

My follow up was more along the lines of “I honestly don’t know what Ferguson PD could and should have done differently once they were in this hugely fucked situation.” That’s not to excuse what happened AT ALL, but from an otherwise totally ignorant external perspective, I think they actually did a decent job of recognizing that they were screwed and, rather than covering it up, immediately taking things to a higher level.

40

CNN just posted an interesting discussion of police militarization and inappropriate force. I’ve always said it’s an outgrowth of the war on drugs, and ACLU agrees:

To some, the events in Ferguson highlight a growing danger.

“Police militarization has been among the most consequential and unnoticed developments of our time,” The Huffington Post’s Washington Bureau Chief Ryan Grim said in a statement decrying the arrest of one of the site’s reporters.

Just weeks ago, the American Civil Liberties Union issued an extensive report on the issue. “American policing has become unnecessarily and dangerously militarized, in large part through federal programs that have armed state and local law enforcement agencies with the weapons and tactics of war, with almost no public discussion or oversight,” the report said.

The weapons are meant to help in the “failed War on Drugs,” the report said. “Instead, the use of hyper-aggressive tools and tactics results in tragedy for civilians and police officers, escalates the risk of needless violence, destroys property, and undermines individual liberties.”

“Militarization of policing encourages officers to adopt a ‘warrior’ mentality and think of the people they are supposed to serve as enemies,” the report added.

Some in the military community say the problem is that police are getting the equipment without the same training and rules.

“To call this militarization doesn’t characterize the military very well,” says Josh Weinberg, an Army veteran who focuses on security issues for the Truman Project. “We always were trained in escalation of force.”

The police apparently “had their weapons up and pointed at protesters who are obviously unarmed,” he said. In the military, he learned that “your force posture matches the threat. You only raise your weapon if one is raised at you.”

With a pointed weapon, Weinberg says, “You could make a mistake, maybe get startled, put your finger on the trigger and shoot somebody who doesn’t deserve to be shot.”

And threatening people unnecessarily can increase the tensions and danger, exacerbating the situation, he says. “A crowd kind of has a mind of its own that develops over time, depending on what threat they perceive.”

Weinberg isn’t alone. “As someone who studies policing in conflict, what’s going on Ferguson isn’t just immoral and probably unconstitutional, it’s ineffective,” Army veteran Jason Fritz wrote on Twitter. He’s now senior editor of War on the Rocks, which analyzes national security issues.