Running gun violence thread

True. I thought the witness who was on MSNBC was very compelling (as opposed to maybe the buddy of "Big Mike").

But I really cannot fathom an explanation that benefits the officer as to why the final shot was 35 feet away from the car.

 

Is 35 feet that far? 12 yards. Friend of the cop in an interview on the radio today said that the story she was told by the cop (on Sunday night before all of this blew up) that Big Mike started to charge him. Figure 6.0 40-yard dash divided by around three. He could close that distance in about two seconds.

 

in flip flops ? no way big Mike was turning a 6.0

 

Maybe 7.0. My point is that 35 feet sounds like quite a distance until you turn it into yards.

 

Follow up from WaPo:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/08/15/ferguson-police-chief-encounter-between-officer-and-michael-brown-did-not-relate-to-robbery/

And this is why some of us are rolling our eyes at why the robbery is getting it brought up, because the chief is pretty much saying the officer didn't contact Brown with regards to the robbery.

 

Which still doesn't make any sense to me.

The question is whether Brown attacked the officer violently enough to warrant the use of lethal force. The robbery is evidence that Brown is not above attacking people violently and in fact had done so minutes before the incident.

Why would the reason the officer stopped him change that?

 

Did the Ferguson PD just release the robbery incident report and not the shooting's incident report?

 

We just need this guy to get on the case.

 

Chief's latest version is that upon stopping Brown, the officer saw the cigars in his hand and realized they might be from the robbery. I believe this is after he told other outlets that the officer wouldn't have known about the robbery.

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/ferguson-officer-stopped-michael-brown-for-walking-in-street-but/article_52c40b84-ad90-5f9a-973c-70d628d0be04.html

You know, any one of these would be a believable story. But not when the official story changes every hour.

 

And again, it also means that if he just committed a robbery, whether the cop knew it or not, there's a reason he might resist the officer or even react violently when the cop stopped him and said, "Hey, what are you doing?" (or whatever the cop said).

 

I'd be interested to know how Ferguson dispatches police to calls and such.

A city that size would typically be split into, maybe, two districts and cops on patrol in one district wouldn't respond to a call in another district.

But given that Ferguson is part of a much larger metro area without clear city limits, patrolmen might have zones with overlap into other towns for mutual aid. It would also explain why Ferguson with its population of 21,000 would have such a larger police department.

The larger police presence for the protests clearly indicates the other towns come together.

Anyway, the robbery call might not have been in the guy's patrol area but he would have been aware of it since it would have been broadcast on the police radio.

That would explain some of the chief's fumbling around as well.

It would also be nice to see if the patrol cars and other emergency vehicles have GPS trackers that would be overlayed on city maps to indicate where they are at any given time. It would present a much clearer picture on what the other officers in Ferguson and the metro were doing at the time of the call and up until the shooting.

 

You are correct. Changing the story can be problematic.