The Death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri

http://i.imgur.com/pF0zhqK.png

http://i.imgur.com/gMBRINS.jpg

http://deadspin.com/america-is-not-for-black-people-1620169913

Sultan interviewed an 11-year-old boy about the rioting. "I don't know why they hate us so much," he said.

man, that is heartbreaking. i've had students express the same sentiment and never really known how to respond.

they don't even know why they hate you so much

yeah

don't know the details yet, but this just happened again

http://uptownmagazine.com/2014/08/ezell-ford-unarmed-black-man-killed-by-police-in-south-l-a/

http://jezebel.com/this-is-why-were-mad-about-the-shooting-of-mike-brown-1619522935

http://colorlines.com/archives/2014/08/10_social_media_shares_about_the_horrors_in_ferguson.html

http://instagram.com/p/rlipIeOuCY

Is this SOP for 'riot control'? Closing down airspace?

http://tfr.faa.gov/save_pages/detail_4_2599.html

http://i.imgur.com/rRwPK29.png

apparently the St Louis County PD asked the FAA to do that, claiming a police helicopter was shot at? this time report notes that it also makes it hard for news organizations to get aerial shots of what's actually happening: http://time.com/3105035/ferguson-faa-no-fly-zone/

Hah yeah, that just came to me - my thoughts were verging more sinister... still, that's pretty fucked up

http://i.imgur.com/lWcDJnO.jpg

NOTAM lifted: http://www.ibtimes.com/faa-lifts-ferguson-flight-ban-airspace-was-restricted-following-michael-brown-riots-1656698

The FAA bureaucracy is still trying to figure out how to deal with both government and privately-owned drones all interacting over this.

Can you explain why a black man is killed by the police every 28 hours in this country?

wau

https://mobile.twitter.com/PDPJ/status/499394946416529409/photo/1

ferguson pd's response: bring bigger guns

FUCK THAT.

it is sort of heartbreaking seeing grassroots petitions and protests demanding real legislative changes in how these cases are treated and knowing that nothing will ever change until everything, the entire philosophy on what "police" (and prison) is supposed to mean from the federal level on down, is completely abolished and replaced with one that isn't built on sadism and racism. all you can really do is call for the persecution -- or at least the firing -- of the guilty officers. anything beyond that is unattainable because this is how the system is built to function. chop off one leg and there's fifteen more all saying "you can still shoot black men whenever you get the urge"

michael brown and eric garner and marlene pinnock, i'm really upset by all this, share zachlyon's frustration with the difficulties of revamping law enforcement.

America why are you looking so much like fucking China or some shit right now, what the hell guys.

Cops give a damn about a ne-gro?/Pull the trigger, kill a n***a, he's a he-ro.

America why are you looking so much like fucking China or some shit right now, what the hell guys.

― the Bronski Review (Trayce), Wednesday, August 13, 2014 3:18 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

Police officers in China didn't even begin to carry firearms until a few months ago, let's get our facts straight here

they don't even know why they hate you so much

― j., Wednesday, August 13, 2014 2:55 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

they don't even know that they hate you so much. i never know how wilful this is

guy on NPR this morning (heard only a snippet in passing) said that the ferguson PD employs 52 people, 3 of whom are black. patrolling a 2/3 black community. also, there was apparently another shooting by a cop overnight, this time with the allegation that the victim - injured but not killed - had a gun.

America why are you looking so much like fucking China or some shit right now, what the hell guys.

America has always been like this.

Cleveland, OH, 1966. Plus ca change . . .

http://binaryapi.ap.org/ac11b76c8ce24735a7e5c3b38cef9217/512x.jpg

http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/america-is-not-for-black-people-1620169913

The worst part of outfitting our police officers as soldiers has been psychological. Give a man access to drones, tanks, and body armor, and he'll reasonably think that his job isn't simply to maintain peace, but to eradicate danger. Instead of protecting and serving, police are searching and destroying.

If officers are soldiers, it follows that the neighborhoods they patrol are battlefields. And if they're working battlefields, it follows that the population is the enemy. And because of correlations, rooted in historical injustice, between crime and income and income and race, the enemy population will consist largely of people of color, and especially of black men. Throughout the country, police officers are capturing, imprisoning, and killing black males at a ridiculous clip, waging a very literal war on people like Michael Brown.

http://www.businessinsider.com/police-militarization-ferguson-2014-8

"Why do these cops need MARPAT camo pants again," I asked on Twitter this morning. One of the most interesting responses came from a follower who says he served in the Army's 82nd Airborne Division: "We rolled lighter than that in an actual warzone."

https://twitter.com/AntonioFrench <-- deserves a medal for covering the events

There's an amazing picture of him tweeting while standing around a bunch of exploded tear gas canisters.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Buze9jFCIAAM-De.jpg

http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2014/08/unarmed_black_man_ezell_ford_shot_by_police_in_la.html

While the country is still reeling from the news and aftermath of the fatal shooting by police of unarmed Ferguson, Mo., teen Michael Brown, KTLA is reporting that a 25-year-old mentally challenged man, who his family says was complying with officers, was shot and killed while lying on the ground. He also was unarmed.

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.)

imo it is the reaction/response that was/is surreal, the degree of state repression and media silencing was higher than anything I've seen since the 1999 Seattle protests. not defending the rest of that quote though.

The whole reason the Dillon Taylor shooting was more a back page story vs Trayvon/Michael Brown was because of the massive groundswell that emerged in both cases for the very reason Mordy mentions. Two states far apart, different circumstances, but organizers who refused to let the story die. The mood in Ferguson isn't surreal to anybody but the folks being targeted by the protests and that's kind of the point.

craziness.

the deployment of tanks and insane military gear and the media blackout were what was so surreal to me fwiw. and yes, it was probably a citizen. only way this (military occupation) will let up for even a second is if the whole department is fired

I think the dunderheaded (to put it kindly) response of local police forces to the protests was 90% of the reason why ferguson became a major media event.

in some way that part of the narrative has been lost -- a lot of people had been talking about the militarization of police forces, but now the "movement" seems to be about the obviously related but not precisely identical issue of police abuse/killing of young black men.

i shouldn't say "lost" -- maybe just marginalized a bit.

and i don't think we have to imagine some kind of 'false flag' operation here... there are tons of people angry with the ferguson police, and some of those people are bound to be hotheads/idiots. and we live in a society with a ton of firearms. it's not unimaginable that this would happen. aside from the cops who got shot--and as stupid as the ferguson PD was/is, noone deserves to be shot and we have no idea what these particular cops were like anyhow--the worst part of this is that it will amplify the backlash a thousand fold.

well, I don't have much to say about this, but it happened.

http://jacquelinevalencia.com/2015/03/15/thoughts-on-kenneth-goldsmith-and-michael-brown/

I don't even know what to say about that

Goldsmith does not belittle his material as a poet. As Dj Kenny G, he engaged the topic on the air on WFMU the day after the Grand Jury refused to indict using sick humor, but it remains fairly clear what side he is on, especially at the end of the show: http://wfmu.org/flashplayer.php?version=2&show=58274&archive=118775

kenneth goldsmith is terrible

kenneth goldsmith is not terrible.

his poetry career is... a con.

i didn't really look into this specific work. my suspicion is that goldsmith is engaging with the idea that the michael brown incident has become a kind of shared myth that people interpret according to their preconceptions. the autopsy report is already a part of this larger text we all are contributing to every day. or maybe the autopsy report, by grounding brown's identity back in his body, his actual body, not the interpolated body the police officer saw -- "the threat" -- is supposed to explode the idea of brown as symbol and restore his individuality.

Maybe his position as a privileged white artist makes this distasteful. I don't think it's merely provocative though

he's terrible

he's a joke

Sez the joke.

i'm not sure if this has turned into a full-blown internet controversy yet, but it's going to be agonizing if it does because of the few things that unites people across the world is the hatred of conceptual art. it's impossible to comment on his performance without at least implicitly making a statement about his work in general. can't WAIT to hear what people think about it!

http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/missouri-lt-governor-more-racism-in-the-justice-department-t#.frMWVpGMr

The lieutenant governor of Missouri says “there is more racism in the Justice Department” than in the St. Louis area, pointing the finger at President Obama and the Justice Department who, he says, often incited “the mob” in the wake of the shooting of Michael Brown back in August of 2014.

challops?

tangential but not:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/the-problem-we-all-live-with

actually made the trouble to listen to that. good story.
those wailing parents at the integration meetings made me sick. yes i'll judge the fuck outta them

the particular way the reporter hooked the story into the Michael Brown story was one of my favorite things about the piece -- incredibly effective

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/10/the-cop

Is there any good reason for me to read that?

I don't know, there are cartoons interspersed

Like, fuck what he has to say, and I don't mean that just in a light "this guy is an asshole" way but in the sense that it's very unlikely reading the words of this ignorant motherfucker is going to do anything to illuminate structural racism for me better and I don't really have room in my heart for his pity party right now.

the article is a lot wider than just the cop's story, but yeah it's not the ten millionth political piece either, but it adds a lot of detail I hadn't heard before

Why does this profoundly stupid man deserve to have paragraph after paragraph of his inane ramblings see print in a national publication? It's like reading a terrible facebook comment thread.

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