The Death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri

A Black Man is Killed in the U.S. Every 28 Hours by Police
Fri, 5/31/2013 - by Adam Hudson
This article originally appeared on AlterNet

Police officers, security guards, or self-appointed vigilantes extrajudicially killed at least 313 African-Americans in 2012, according to a recent study. This means a black person was killed by a security officer every 28 hours. The report notes that it's possible that the real number could be much higher.

The report, entitled "Operation Ghetto Storm," was conducted by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, an antiracist grassroots activist organization. The organization has chapters in Atlanta, Detroit, Fort Worth-Dallas, Jackson, New Orleans, New York City, Oakland, and Washington, D.C. It has a history of organizing campaigns against police brutality and state repression in black and brown communities.

http://www.occupy.com/article/black-man-killed-us-every-28-hours-police

ugh fuck this fucking country for real

re: ezell ford being mentally challenged but also just everything

last night:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bu7bdZfIEAAg5js.jpg

this is all so depressingly predictable/never-ending

wtf

http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2014/08/13/reporters-say-they-were-just-arrested-in-ferguson-missouri-for-not-leaving-mcdonalds-quickly-enough

and now tear gas

amazing to me that no higher authority has seen fit to rein in the cops if for only pr purposes

oh well, war on the streets, states' rights ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It doesn't seem like to me that the city government of Ferguson realizes that THE ENTIRE WORLD is watching and tracking their every move. Or maybe they do and just don't care.

i don't think higher authorities really give a shit unfortunately and never really have : /

The FBI has opened a civil rights investigation but yeah I don't know who is watching the watchers in this case

PaulSzoldra
SWAT using LRAD (loud deafening siren) in Ferguson

hang on, claire mccaskill has made calls to the dept. of justice, may discuss things tomorrow

Way to be on top of things, Claire.

You've had four fucking days.

have we heard of the governor of missouri?

Shit's getting real:

@RealAlexJones 2m
#Ferguson Police Attack Protestors With Tear Gas & Rubber Bullets! Infowars reporter Joe Biggs wounded LIVE: http://bit.ly/1kCmkgt

(They've pissed off Alex Jones! I haven't clicked that link yet.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=zApzDwjxfgs

This is insane

http://new.livestream.com/accounts/9035483/events/3271930

holy fuck

Media has been told to stop rolling and the St. Louis Police have issued a "final warning" to the crowd. What the hell

Protectin and serving (themselves that is)

This stream is a repeat, because what's going on now is what's in the youtube video linked above.

When police fuck up then lose control, what can they do to get back control without more fucking things up? It's the eternal police state paradox.

they could just go home

don't read the comments on that video fyi : [

man twitter is a fucking godsend right now. i havent been this disgusted in my country since katrina.

guys america is the best country its the BESSSSSSST

*burns passport*

this place is garbage

luckily you won't be needing that to get to missouri

So fucking frustrating

kinda feeling like germany in 1933 atm

Fucking crazy.

Rubber-bullet Tiannamen.

st louis twitter folks to follow:

https://twitter.com/BlackSpade
https://twitter.com/Vandalyzm
https://twitter.com/TefPoe
https://twitter.com/Nettaaaaaaaa
https://twitter.com/brownblaze

@brownblaze particularly is key imo

Antonio French got arrested

so proud of the people filming and recording the events, i doubt i would have the courage.

are they incredibly stupid or omnipotent... either way they are armed to the teeth and i am really fucking scared

Occupy got us used to footage of tear gas creeping through downtown streets and city parks, but I have to say its a new sight seeing it crawling down suburban roads and lawns

And was wondering when the LRAD would see another deployment.

Reading the story of those reporters who were beaten up and arrested for sitting in a McDonalds and then released without ANY police report / documentation being written up was horrifying, and it's not even close to the worst tidbit of this whole saga

They let us hang out for a couple of months before they came in with night sticks and tear gas. They don't seem interested in letting people in Ferguson stay the night.

xp

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/14/us/missouri-teenager-and-officer-scuffled-before-shooting-chief-says.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=LargeMediaHeadlineSum&module=photo-spot-region®ion=photo-spot&WT.nav=photo-spot&_r=0

The photo accompanying this article is so fucked

(not graphic, just the level of armament)

https://youtube.com/watch?v=xnSVtW49roE

jesus fucking christ @ that nyt picture

Oh it's such a fucking awful article, it's like Crash in print nonfiction form. I can't.

Wilson, who is from Texas, is the son of a woman who repeatedly broke the law. His mother, Tonya Dean, stole money, largely by writing hot checks. After completing high school, she married Wilson’s father, John, who had been her English teacher. They soon had two children to support—Darren and his younger sister, Kara—but Dean spent wildly. She left John Wilson for another man, Tyler Harris, who ran a Y.M.C.A. They had a child, Jared, and Darren and Kara lived with them. “Tonya had me in debt—almost twenty thousand dollars—that first year,” Harris told me. Dean, it seems, often repaid debts to one person by stealing money from someone else.

. . . Good values, Wilson insisted, needed to be learned at home. He spoke of a black single mother, in Ferguson, who was physically disabled and blind. She had several teen-age children, who “ran wild,” shooting guns, dealing drugs, and breaking into cars.

Fuck this dude forever and ever, I hope everyone he's related to including his fucking baby die in a fire.

shut the fuck up, both of you

I hope everyone he's related to including his fucking baby die in a fire.

just to be clear, that's not what I was trying to say at all, almost the opposite -- I don't think what happened here is really about what's inside Officer Wilson's head, or rather what's inside Officer Wilson's head is a piece of a much larger system. His comments don't seem to offer much insight into anything imo, and I almost question presenting them in this equal time sort of format, although admittedly I just skimmed the article and maybe I'm being too harsh on it. I mean, this is a long passage of uneditorialized text, and the views expressed therein are not very well-thought-through, and pretty predictable. So why?

“I am really simple in the way that I look at life,” Wilson said. “What happened to my great-grandfather is not happening to me. I can’t base my actions off what happened to him.” Wilson said that police officers didn’t have the luxury of dwelling on the past. “We can’t fix in thirty minutes what happened thirty years ago,” he said. “We have to fix what’s happening now. That’s my job as a police officer. I’m not going to delve into people’s life-long history and figure out why they’re feeling a certain way, in a certain moment.” He added, “I’m not a psychologist.”

Wilson said that, despite what he’d said about experiencing “culture shock,” race hadn’t affected the way he did police work: “I never looked at it like ‘I’m the only white guy here.’ I just looked at it as ‘This isn’t where I grew up.’ ” He said, “When a cop shows up, it’s, like, ‘The cops are here!’ There’s no ‘Oh, shit, the white cops are here!’ ” He added, “If you live in a high-crime area, with a lot of poverty, there’s going to be a large police presence. You’re going to piss people off. If police show up, it’s because it’s something bad, and whoever’s involved can’t figure out the problem for themselves.”

He continued, “Everyone is so quick to jump on race. It’s not a race issue.” There were two opposing views about policing, he said: “There are people who feel that police have too much power, and they don’t like it. There are people who feel police don’t have enough power, and they don’t like it.”

'we have to fix what's happening now'

'this isn't where i grew up'

It's not like the writer is uncritical:

In his telling, there was no reaching the blind woman’s kids: “They ran all over the mom. They didn’t respect her, so why would they respect me?” He added, “They’re so wrapped up in a different culture than—what I’m trying to say is, the right culture, the better one to pick from.”

This sounded like racial code language. I pressed him: what did he mean by “a different culture”? Wilson struggled to respond. He said that he meant “pre-gang culture, where you are just running in the streets—not worried about working in the morning, just worried about your immediate gratification.” He added, “It is the same younger culture that is everywhere in the inner cities.”

There were two opposing views about policing, he said

He's not a psychologist, he's a mind reader, but he can only read two minds at a time.

I mean, this is a long passage of uneditorialized text, and the views expressed therein are not very well-thought-through, and pretty predictable. So why?

The article critiques that passage throughout its entire length, both through the facts of the case and the interviews with other people involved, which you'd pick up on if you read it.

fair enough, I'm in a foul and impatient mood right now, will give it a chance later

The most telling portion is how the defense from Wilson's former mentor crumbles when he tries to assert that the situation would have gone down the same way if HE'D been involved when the article has already gone to great pains to show that the mentor:

- was gay and felt some empathy to the ostracization of the black community he was policing as a result;
- did a lot of community outreach in his capacity as a policeman, changing the dynamic with which he interacted with the members of that community;
- was in a situation where people were shooting at him and had the wherewithal to remove himself from a potentially dangerous chase scenario and circle back to see if his partner, who had been hit by a bullet, needed help

There are some good points in that article, where the writer presses against inconsistencies in the worldview of the cop. Darren Wilson uses all the coded language of a racist asshole, and he has no awareness about his own hypocrisies. Like, Wilson has never read the justice report on racism in Ferguson, because he doesn't want to dwell on the past, but he has no problem discussing everything else about his own past, and the problems he saw while on patrol. Just, racism, that's not to be dwelled on, because that is the past.

And yeah, that passage is really really strong as well, x-post.

Another police shooting tonight, police firing smoke/tear gas at protesters, this is useful:

https://twitter.com/mattdpearce/lists/ferguson

this is awful.

i should know this by now, but where would be the best place to look for updates on this, where the stories don't consist entirely of things asserted by the police?

washington post has been doing some good reporting all year

deray, netta, cornell west arrested

http://gawker.com/state-of-emergency-declared-in-ferguson-as-protestors-a-1723175123

The place to look for news about all this btw is twitter.

Really good essay by Darryl Pickney:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/08/18/black-lives-and-the-police/

really wish this stuff had come out a couple years ago

http://www.theroot.com/everything-you-think-you-know-about-the-death-of-mike-b-1793261221