Running gun violence thread

Why are we supposed to give police some sort of deference here?

Police reminds me of the military, and not just because they dress the same now. It's because I'm supposed to grant the actions of a force significantly consisting of uneducated asshole fuck-ups from high school blind acceptance.

 

Read that the store did not even report a robbery; so what relevance do the photos have now? Plain and simple character assassination.

 

Against a 6-4, 300-pounder that's charging you? Self defense.

 

Yes. If indeed he needed to use deadly force to defend himself. But "adrenaline" doesn't get him off the hook if it wasn't a situation that required self-defense.

 

Today's NBC News report by reporter Sarah Dallof was disgraceful. Completely fails to mention that the autopsy report shows all shots coming from the front. Then segues to Brown family attorney saying that the autopsy verifies witness accounts. Witness accounts said he was shot in the back running away. The autopsy shows those were lies.

 

I wouldn't necessarily say "lies." Fog of war, you know?

But, yes. Poor reporting.

 

The Tony Stewart videotape features someone saying Stewart ran over Kevin Ward.

So is Stewart guilty or was the witness lying?

I thought the witness on MSNBC was pretty compelling (not so much his friend Johnson). But she did say he got shot in the back, which didn't happen. It's possible Brown was running with his back to Wilson, she heard a shot, Brown turned around, and she put two and two together and got five. That's how eyewitness accounts can work. (She also said the cop was shooting so wildly that one bullet went into a neighbor's house, where police dug it out.)

 

Almost all DNA exonerations were initially convictions resulting from eyewitness testimony.

My guess is that most of the eyewitnesses were not "lying." In fact, there are studies that show that eyewitness accuracy does not necessarily improve with confidence level.

 

Cite your claim.

 

From the American Psychological Association, 2006:

http://www.apa.org/monitor/apr06/eyewitness.aspx

Mistaken or flawed identification has assumed a newfound prominence in recent years: It's been cited as a factor in nearly 78 percent of the nation's first 130 convictions later overturned by DNA testing, according to the New York-based Innocence Project, which works to free the wrongly convicted. As a result, a number of researchers are turning their attention to helping police departments and juries better understand the circumstances under which eyewitnesses observe crimes and later identify a suspect.

More from Stanford, 1999, on the flaws of witness testimony:

http://agora.stanford.edu/sjls/Issue%20One/fisher&tversky.htm

The Supreme Court in early 2012 recognized that eyewitness testimony can be unreliable, but affirmed that judges and juries (in cases not involving police misconduct) are enough to determine whether it is, in an 8-1 ruling.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/11/us-usa-court-eyewitness-idUSTRE80A1CH20120111

 

Thanks, Bob. I wasn't disputing the claim.

 

The level of witness unreliability doesn't mean the witnesses who have spoken publicly regarding Ferguson are lying, or that they're wrong. Hey, if you forgot where you left your keys, are you going to remember every detail of what happened in a highly charged situation? The perverse result of the police trying to bury (no pun intended) what happened and who did it is that the story has gotten far more out of control as others filled the vacuum.