Ferguson

[GrubberRaven]

How is there no thread on this?

 

I don't like talking about things like this, but damnit, this is downright becoming a police state. Hell, even anonymous is involved...

[deeshopper]

Because, apparently, Robin Williams' suicide is more important.

 

My Facebook newsfeed is full of Robin Williams articles....nonstop. Nothing at all about what's happening in Missouri.

 

I guess I need new friends.

[papasmurfbell]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=GO1SKC6dK7o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75WkEZK_f6g

What that this police dept has done is inexcusable. That whole area should arm themselves. If their police want a war it should be given to them.

[oldcrow]

it's a damn shame

 

sick and tired of these fucking pigs and their brutality

 

time to tear the whole fucking thing down

 

 

 

this shit is nothing new and I have to hear how

Al Sharpton is involved blah blah blah he is stirring the shit up blah blah blah

 

god I need new friends too Dee

 

 

if it wasn't for Al there would be zero attention on these cases throughout the country

[papasmurfbell]

The people should send Al away.

 

http://www.salon.com/2014/08/12/in_defense_of_black_rage_michael_brown_police_and_the_american_dream/

In defense of black rage: Michael Brown, police and the American dream I don't support the looting in Ferguson, Missouri. But I'm also tired of "turning the other cheek" and forgiving

 

On Saturday a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager on his way to college this week. Brown was shot multiple times, though his hands were in the air. His uncovered body was left in the street for hours, as a crowd from his neighborhood gathered to stand vigil. Then they marched down to the police station. On Sunday evening, some folks in the crowd looted a couple of stores and threw bottles at the police. Monday morning was marked by peaceful protests.

The people of Ferguson are angry. Outraged. The officer’s story is dubious. Any black kid with sense knows it is futile to reach into an officer’s vehicle and take his gun. That story is only plausible to people who believe that black people are animals, that black men go looking for cops to pick fights with. Absurdity. Eyewitness accounts like these make far more sense.

It seems far easier to focus on the few looters who have reacted unproductively to this tragedy than to focus on the killing of Michael Brown. Perhaps looting seems like a thing we can control. I refuse. I refuse to condemn the folks engaged in these acts, because I respect black rage. I respect black people’s right to cry out, shout and be mad as hell that another one of our kids is dead at the hands of the police. Moreover I refuse the lie that the opportunism of a few in any way justifies or excuses the murderous opportunism undertaken by this as yet anonymous officer.

The police mantra is “to serve and to protect.” But with black folks, we know that’s not the mantra. The mantra for many, many officers when dealing with black people is apparently “kill or be killed.”

It is that deep irrational fear of young black men that continues to sit with me. Here’s the thing: I do not believe that most white people see black people and say, “I hate black people.” Racism is not that tangible, that explicit. I do not believe most white people hate most black people. I do not believe that most police officers seek to do harm or consciously hate black people. At least I hope they don’t.

I believe that racism exists in the inexplicable sense of fear, unsafety and gnawing anxiety that white people, be they officers with guns or just general folks moving about their lives, have when they encounter black people. I believe racism exists in that sense of mistrust, the extra precautions white people take when they encounter black people. I believe all these emotions have emerged from a lifetime of media consumption subtly communicating that black people are criminal, a lifetime of seeing most people in power look just like you, a lifetime of being the majority population. And I believe this subconscious sense of having lost control (of the universe) exists for white people, at a heightened level since the election of Barack Obama and the continued explosion of the non-white population.

The irony is that black people understand this heightened anxiety. We feel it, too. We study white people. We are taught this as a tool of survival. We know when there is unrest in the souls of white folks. We know that unrest, if not assuaged quickly, will lead to black death. Our suspicions, unlike those of white people, are proven right time and time again.

I speak to this deep psychology of race, not because I am trying to engage in pop psychology but because we live in a country that is so deeply emotionally dishonest about both race and racism. When will we be honest enough to acknowledge that the police have more power than the ordinary citizen? They are supposed to. And with more power comes more responsibility.

Why are police calling the people of Ferguson animals and yelling at them to “bring it”? Because those officers in their riot gear, with their tear gas and dogs, want a justification for slaughter. But inexplicably in that moment we turn our attention to the rioters, the people with less power, but justifiable anger, and say, “You are the problem.” No. A cop killing an unarmed teenager who had his hands in the air is the problem. Anger is a perfectly reasonable response. So is rage.

We are talking about justifiable outrage. Outrage over the unjust taking of the lives of people who look like us. How dare people preach and condescend to these people and tell them not to loot, not to riot? Yes, those are destructive forms of anger, but frankly I would rather these people take their anger out on property and products rather than on other people.

No, I don’t support looting. But I question a society that always sees the product of the provocation and never the provocation itself. I question a society that values property over black life. But I know that our particular system of law was conceived on the founding premise that black lives are white property. “Possession,” the old adage goes, “is nine-tenths of the law.”

But we are the dispossessed. We cannot count on the law to protect us. We cannot count on police not to shoot us down in cold blood. We cannot count on politics to be a productive outlet for our rage. We cannot count on prayer to soothe our raging, ragged souls.

This is what I mean when I say that we live in a society that is deeply emotionally dishonest about racism. We hear a story each and every week now about how some overzealous officer has killed another black man, or punched or beaten or choked a black woman. This week we heard two stories – Mike Brown in Missouri and John Crawford in Ohio. These are not isolatedincidents. How many cops in how many cities have to murder how many black men — assault how many black women — before we recognize that this shit is not isolated? It is systemic from the top to the bottom.

Every week we are having what my friend Dr. Regina Bradley called #anotherhashtagmemorial.Every week. We are weak. We are tired. Of being punching bags and shooting targets for the police. We are tired of well-meaning white citizens and respectable black ones foreclosing all outlets for rage. We are tired of these people telling us what isn’t the answer.

The answer isn’t looting, no. The answer isn’t rioting, no. But the answer also isn’t preaching to black people about “black-on-black” crime without full acknowledgment that most crime is intraracial. The answer is not having a higher standard for the people than for the police. The answer is not demanding that black people get mad about and solve the problem of crime in Chicago before we get mad about the slaughter of a teen boy just outside St. Louis.

We can be, and have been, and are mad about both. Violence is the effect, not the cause of the concentrated poverty that locks that many poor people up together with no conceivable way out and no productive way to channel their rage at having an existence that is adjacent to the American dream. This kind of social mendacity about the way that racism traumatizes black people individually and collectively is a festering sore, an undiagnosed cancer, a raging infection threatening to overtake every organ in our body politic.

We are tired of these people preaching a one-sided gospel of peace. “Turn the other cheek” now means “here are our collective asses to kiss.” We are tired of forgiving people because they most assuredly do know what they do.

Mike Brown is dead. He is dead for no reason. He is dead because a police officer saw a 6-foot-4, 300-plus-pound black kid, and miscalculated the level of threat. To be black in this country is to be subject to routine forms of miscalculated risk each and every day. Black people have every right to be angry as hell about being mistaken for predators when really we are prey. The idea that we would show no rage as we accrete body upon body – Eric Garner, John Crawford, Mike Brown (and those are just our summer season casualties) — is the height of delusion. It betrays a stunning lack of empathy, a stunning refusal of people to grant the fact of black humanity, and in granting our humanity, granting us the right to the full range of emotions that come with being human. Rage must be expressed. If not it will tear you up from the inside out or make you tear other people up. Usually the targets are those in closest proximity. The disproportionate amount of heart disease, cancers, hypertension, obesity, violence and other maladies that plague black people is as much a product of internalized, unrecognized, unaddressed rage as it is anything else.

Nothing makes white people more uncomfortable than black anger. But nothing is more threatening to black people on a systemic level than white anger. It won’t show up in mass killings. It will show up in overpolicing, mass incarceration, the gutting of the social safety net, and the occasional dead black kid. Of late, though, these killings have been far more than occasional. We should sit up and pay attention to where this trail of black bodies leads us. They are a compass pointing us to a raging fire just beneath the surface of our national consciousness. We feel it. We hear it. Our nostrils flare with the smell of it.

James Baldwin called it “the fire next time.” A fire shut up in our bones. A sentient knowledge, a kind of black epistemology, honed for just such a time as this. And with this knowledge, a clarity that says if “we live by the sword, we will die by it.”

Then, black rage emerges prophetic from across the decades in the words of Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay who penned these words 95 years ago in response to the Red Summer of 1919.

If we must die, let it not be like hogs

Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,

While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs

Making their mock at our accursèd lot.

If we must die, O let us nobly die,

So that our precious blood may not be shed

In vain; then even the monsters we defy

Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!

O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!

Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,

And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!

What though before us lies the open grave?

Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,

Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

 

I offer no answers. I offer only grief and rage and hope.

[Spen]

Actung baby. Welcome to the corporately run police state.

 

To a degree I excuse the Facebook and Twitter users ignoring Ferguson. I wonder if some people even know. The media largely ignoring it, especially at first, it is inexcusable.

 

And also, while it may not be a good excuse, I use Twitter and Facebook to goof off, not to depress myself.

[GrubberRaven]

I heard of it through, Al Sharpton getting involved.

 

I blew it off becuase, Al Sharpton got invovled.

 

True story. Can't stand the guy.

 

Now that it's a few days removed, and I heard Anonymous got involved. I started reading and it's friggen sad. Sad for the the young man. Sad for the community.

 

The cop's name was released by Anonymous...

[papasmurfbell]

http://www.kmov.com/special-coverage-001/Another-witness-to-Michael-Brown-Jr-shooting-speaks-to-News-4-271139501.html

 

It is the police industrial complex. These local PD's are making some companies very rich. In Albuquerque the DOJ made it so cops could not bring their own weapons on duty so the city is buying 350 AR-15's at a cost of $350,000. This is a PD that is basically murdering its citizens a a whim. They have 24 kills in 2 yrs and a great many are not legit.

[papasmurfbell]

I heard of it through, Al Sharpton getting involved.

 

I blew it off becuase, Al Sharpton got invovled.

 

True story. Can't stand the guy.

 

Now that it's a few days removed, and I heard Anonymous got involved. I started reading and it's friggen sad. Sad for the the young man. Sad for the community.

 

The cop's name was released by Anonymous...

If they aren't careful Anonymous will release the names and address of every officer and their home address on the net. With that you wait for them to come home and have 15 dudes against 1. You turn police tactics back on them.

[dc.]

Funny Dee... My Facebook feed was one day on Williams but is exploding on Ferguson. But I do have a bunch of friends in alternative media.

 

New details make at least part of the shooting seem justified - though the extra bullets after raising his arms... Absurd.

 

But the story of the police state is the bigger one and scarier. Even journalist from the post and huff post got arrested with no explanation for covering the event.

[GrubberRaven]

Wait, what part was justified?

[papasmurfbell]

Click the link to KMOV I had from 11:05. It is an eye witness and she saw them scuffling in the window of the cruiser. Then she basically said the cop executed the kid.

[ForceEight]

I think the justifiable part was the confrontation. The unjustifiable part is everything that happened after.

 

I also disagree about the police state mentality. Everything that is happening these days is not new. There is not an oncoming police brutality like never seen before. How it is today is how it has always been, but the emergence of the cell phone camera, constant news reporting, and places like YouTube "educating" us half-assedly on our rights versus officers. I don't think that things have gotten worse; I just think both sides are coming to a better understanding about how often it happens and why it happens, without answers as to stopping it effectively.

[GrubberRaven]

What if he grabbed the kid and pulled him in?

[dc.]

Fair question, Grubber. I only meant that there has been this statement of "shoot with his hands up," but little discussion of how things got to a guns out situation and there is some indication that Brown may have instigated some of that. Not proven but at least the knowledge of an altercation is being confirmed by witnesses, whereas so many previously didn't acknowledge that part happened.

[dc.]

I think the justifiable part was the confrontation. The unjustifiable part is everything that happened after.

 

I also disagree about the police state mentality. Everything that is happening these days is not new. There is not an oncoming police brutality like never seen before. How it is today is how it has always been, but the emergence of the cell phone camera, constant news reporting, and places like YouTube "educating" us half-assedly on our rights versus officers. I don't think that things have gotten worse; I just think both sides are coming to a better understanding about how often it happens and why it happens, without answers as to stopping it effectively.

I would only add, Force, that until the last fifteen years local police generally did not have access to what are literally war-grade assault weaponry. The growth of that industry has dramatically emboldened and increased the frequency of these tactics - got to use the new toys.

 

But certainly some level of police state mentality has always existed.

 

I have never understood those who believe the govt was right to rend certain public protests like those on the mall in Vietnam or even some occupy movements. What good is a right to protest if the govt can dictate when and where to minimize the publicity and keep it out of sight

[papasmurfbell]

I think the justifiable part was the confrontation. The unjustifiable part is everything that happened after.

 

I also disagree about the police state mentality. Everything that is happening these days is not new. There is not an oncoming police brutality like never seen before. How it is today is how it has always been, but the emergence of the cell phone camera, constant news reporting, and places like YouTube "educating" us half-assedly on our rights versus officers. I don't think that things have gotten worse; I just think both sides are coming to a better understanding about how often it happens and why it happens, without answers as to stopping it effectively.

 

I would only add, Force, that until the last fifteen years local police generally did not have access to what are literally war-grade assault weaponry. The growth of that industry has dramatically emboldened and increased the frequency of these tactics - got to use the new toys.

 

But certainly some level of police state mentality has always existed.

 

I have never understood those who believe the govt was right to rend certain public protests like those on the mall in Vietnam or even some occupy movements. What God is a right to protest if the govt can dictate when and where to minimize the publicity and keep it out of sight

I was going to mention the militarization as well. But I would also add that local PD's have been getting military training. they have been trained how the army and marines deal with indigenous people they deal with. We are not Iraqis and we have no business being treated like them in a war zone. Also I saw a sheriff in a news report say he needed his MRAB because of all the big weapons and how dangerous it is for police. Statistically 2013 was the safest yr to be a cop in about 60 yrs. He aslo said they needed protection from the returning military vets.

[dc.]

There are some good pieces out there on how many small town forces now have legitimate tanks and armored vehicles - mostly gifted to them by the DOD when taken out of service or simply unused. Scary.

 

Also a number of reports that verify that SWAT style teams are not only growing in size and arms but in frequency as well. They didn't used to busy down your door with a SWAT team and flash bangs because they thought you had a few dime bags... But there are plenty of studies showing increasing use for these purposes. And it's pretty clearly because if we're going to spend the money on the special outfits, equipment and extra man power, we better use it.

[Spen]

I'm not sure who he is but someone named Brandon Friedman tweeted pictures and said the officers in Ferguson are better equipped and armored than he was during the Iraq invasion.

[papasmurfbell]

There are some good pieces out there on how many small town forces now have legitimate tanks and armored vehicles - mostly gifted to them by the DOD when taken out of service or simply unused. Scary.

 

Also a number of reports that verify that SWAT style teams are not only growing in size and arms but in frequency as well. They didn't used to busy down your door with a SWAT team and flash bangs because they thought you had a few dime bags... But there are plenty of studies showing increasing use for these purposes. And it's pretty clearly because if we're going to spend the money on the special outfits, equipment and extra man power, we better use it.

Ding ding ding.

 

Does anyone know the history of the modern SWAT team? If not enjoy this beauty. In 1985 in philthy a black seperatist group was held up in some houses. They held off the police executing an arrest warrant. There was shooting back and forth. They decided to drop a bomb on the houses. After they did the houses went up in flames. The people started running out and teh cops started firing on them. 6 adults and 5 kind were killed.

Daryl Gates thought so highly of what happened that he decided to form the SWAT team to deal with baricade situation.

 

I'm not sure who he is but someone named Brandon Friedman tweeted pictures and said the officers in Ferguson are better equipped and armored than he was during the Iraq invasion.

If you remember in Iraq they didn't have body armor and the hummers were getting destroyed like made from RPG's. They started welding on outer wiring so the RPG's would fail then the IED's were killing them left and right and they had to build the MRABs.

[dc.]

It's a cliche but so true... When all you have is a hammer...

 

I love the scene in "13Days" about the Cuban Missile Crisis where the joint chiefs are advising JFK on his options. The army wants to invade, the air force wants to bomb ... They all agree that you have to act because the issue is clearly one big nail!

[papasmurfbell]

If the police have nothing to hide why are they attacking the press and arresting them?

[papasmurfbell]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/14/rand-paul-ferguson_n_5678900.html

Rand Paul Calls For Demilitarization Of Police After Ferguson Shooting

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) added his voice to the chorus of politicians condemning police conduct in Ferguson, Missouri, following Saturday's fatal shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown.

In an op-ed on Time.com, the libertarian-minded senator attributed the "militarization of law enforcement" to an "expansion of government power," making the tie-in to his advocacy for smaller government.

Paul also wrote that it is "impossible for African-Americans not to feel like their government is particularly targeting them," turning to how "racial disparities" distort the criminal justice system:

Anyone who thinks that race does not still, even if inadvertently, skew the application of criminal justice in this country is just not paying close enough attention. Our prisons are full of black and brown men and women who are serving inappropriately long and harsh sentences for non-violent mistakes in their youth. The militarization of our law enforcement is due to an unprecedented expansion of government power in this realm. It is one thing for federal officials to work in conjunction with local authorities to reduce or solve crime. It is quite another for them to subsidize it.

The senator, who is considered a likely contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, hasn't been coy about his attempts to appeal to a broader cross-section of voters by backing a voting rights bill and by criticizing federal drug policiesthat disproportionately affect minorities.

Read the rest of Paul's editorial here.

Rand is going after the black vote hard.

[Robjr83]

I'm sure in the not so distant future cops will have to wear some sort of body camera. i think they already do in parts of CA. Its the social media ear, municipalities cant put a lid on things the way they use to. I tend to be sympathetic to police, I have a cousin that retired from Bal City. The shit she had to put up with was amazing.

[dc.]

I'm sure in the not so distant future cops will have to wear some sort of body camera. i think they already do in parts of CA. Its the social media ear, municipalities cant put a lid on things the way they use to. I tend to be sympathetic to police, I have a cousin that retired from Bal City. The shit she had to put up with was amazing.

Definitely true. And you're right it's being tested in several districts. In most they have also found ways to make them battery saving in having an "auto activate" feature related to police movement or radio usage.