Running gun violence thread

[YankeeFan]

The officer involved has been accused of cold blooded murder, based on very little evidence.

Who's been slandered?

Well, there's the dead body and the eyewitnesses. Not my favorite type of evidence, but clearly enough to get us past "very little."

The dead body is evidence of a death. It's not evidence of murder -- not yet at least, maybe once we get in some ballistics.

You are the most vocal critic of eyewitness evidence. You recognize it for what it is. I know one witness was his buddy, who was with him in the convenience store. What else do we have so far, one other witness?

 

[YankeeFan]

Congratulations, YF. Like so many completely worthless contributors to political discourse in the past, you've proven that The Other Side Has Hypocrites.

Which would be fine, except when the "Other Side" is proclaiming to hold some moral high ground.

 

[Big Circus]

You might want to think all that through again LTL ... The officer's ignorance of Brown's earlier activities makes me more, not less, willing to believe that Brown instigated and/or escalated the incident that led to his shooting.

Completely disagree. The guy had just broken the law, and it had likely gone worse than he had hoped (having to engage clerk instead of just walking out with cigars). Then a cop rides up and makes a request that makes it pretty clear he's not trying to arrest him for the robbery ("Get on the sidewalk!" vs. "Stop and keep your hands where I can see them!"). You're trying to say that the natural response is to start a fight with the cop and go for his gun rather than do what he says and get off scot-free?

You're attributing a level of nuance to a situation that almost certainly didn't have it.

Fully acknowledging that your earlier "One exaggeration doesn't warrant another," it's certainly no bigger of a leap than "He stole cigars and pushed a clerk, therefore he would probably try to wrestle a gun away from a cop."

 

[RickStain]

You are the most vocal critic of eyewitness evidence. You recognize it for what it is. I know one witness was his buddy, who was with him in the convenience store. What else do we have so far, one other witness?

We have the pattern of behavior from the police department that signifies either almost unfathomable incompetence or an attempted cover-up.

Is it enough to get a conviction? Not even close. Probably not an indictment. But it's sure as heck enough to make the accusation, when all we have as evidence of his story is the fact that it's his story.

 

[RickStain]

Fully acknowledging that your earlier "One exaggeration doesn't warrant another," it's certainly no bigger of a leap than "He stole cigars and pushed a clerk, therefore he would probably try to wrestle a gun away from a cop."

Had I said that, it certainly wouldn't be. But I didn't, so you're out on your luck.

What I said was "it makes it slightly more plausible." Not "so he probably would."

It's one of those nuance things that most people are incapable of keeping up with.

 

[doctorquant]

You know it's possible -- and I don't mean "aliens!" possible -- that both Brown and the officer are equally to blame here.

 

[YankeeFan]

Gov. Nixon has declared a state of emergency for Ferguson and a midnight curfew.


That should work out well.

 

[RickStain]

You know it's possible -- and I don't mean "aliens!" possible -- that both Brown and the officer are equally to blame here.

Sure.

But when you accept a legal monopoly on lethal force, you get held to a higher standard.

Or at least in theory. In practice, you get held to no standard at all because your buddies will do everything they can to avoid an investigation then obfuscate when higher-ups start snooping around, all while you get to run away and hide until it blows over.

 

[doctorquant]

The point I'm making is that we seem to be grasping at nailing down that particular moment/act that led to this story unfolding the way it did. Perhaps that's a fool's errand. It seems entirely possible to me that there were multiple moments when this story could have gone another way, and each participant had control of at least a few of those.

 

[RickStain]

And the point I'm making is that, as a citizen of the United States of America, which of these should be more concerning to you

1) the possibility that a person may commit a crime and resist arrest

or

2) the possibility that a government official has the power possibly summarily execute a citizen with the investigation in the immediate aftermath either being unfathomably negligent or intentionally corrupt.

If police officers can't be held to higher standards, there's no point in having them. "he could have not been a criminal and it wouldn't have happened" is just-world bias popping up to blame the victim. If there is a victim, which we conveniently can't be sure of because, again, the whole cover-up thing.

 

[Inky_Wretch]

Community and media demand Police release all information they have.

They didn't release all the information they have. We've still not seen the incident report from the shooting.

 

[Songbird]

The point I'm making is that we seem to be grasping at nailing down that particular moment/act that led to this story unfolding the way it did. Perhaps that's a fool's errand. It seems entirely possible to me that there were multiple moments when this story could have gone another way, and each participant had control of at least a few of those.

If he doesn't steal the cigs, the store owner doesn't call cops, a cop doesn't roll up alongside him, shirt doesn't go down the way we've been told it went down, and he's alive today.

IF it's all connected.