The Death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri

clearly though jeff roorda hasn't learned a damn thing from all of this

good
grief

tbf it is his job to say shit like that

“I worry that he’ll still be a casualty of history,” Mr. Roorda [Jeff Roorda, a spokesman for the St. Louis Police Officers Association] said in an interview on Thursday. “Fifty years from now, he’ll still be the white police officer who shot an unarmed black teen. - NYT

that was a bizarre quote, because yes, that is literally true. he will always be a white police officer who shot and killed an unarmed black teen.

right?

I join Jeff Roorda in wishing for a greater awareness of the many white police officers that shoot unarmed black teens, to diffuse the focus on Darren Wilson.

A friend has also pointed out that the behaviour described by the DoJ report is pretty similar to that of an occupying army who don't want to create too much hassle for the installed government while still pillaging as much as possible.

occupying army or a gang, basically

http://theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/03/The-Gangsters-Of-Ferguson/386893/

http://www.theonion.com/articles/justice-department-calls-on-ferguson-to-align-leve,38155/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=SocialMarketing&utm_campaign=LinkPreview:1:Default

WASHINGTON—Describing its policing practices as totally out of step with the nation as a whole, the U.S. Department of Justice called on Ferguson, MO to take immediate action to align its level of institutional racism with the rest of the country, sources said Thursday. “Our findings suggest that Ferguson requires profound changes to its criminal justice system to bring its routine violations of African-American civil rights in line with acceptable amounts present in police precincts across America,” said Attorney General Eric Holder, adding that a top-to-bottom overhaul could be required to square the Ferguson Police Department’s use of illegal searches and unlawful arrests with the remainder of the U.S. “Ferguson simply cannot continue living in a past in which its reliance on intimidation and excessive force flies in the face of reasonable levels of brutality elsewhere in the country.” Holder went on to say that without reform, residents of Ferguson could never hope to treat their police with the same level of mistrust as everyone else.

2 cops shot and carried away by ambulance to the hospital during a protest outside the PD HQ. Some people on twitter are saying the shots came from a house on a hill down the street (and Buzzfeed was saying that too until their rolling article took that bit out). btw, don't read what's under the #ferguson hashtag on twitter right now unless you're in the mood to get angry as fuck at racist a-holes.

this is one of the worst things that could happen

yup :/

I can think of worse things (cops firing into the crowd in response, for ex.)

based on my gut, i think it was an inside job

I doubt it, one of those cops was shot in the face

Yeah come on spazzmatazz

it could happen. the stakes are high, and the FPD is dumb and crazy. i don't know. the situation remains surreal & horrifying, unmatched by anything in my lifetime except 9/11. is the plan just a war of attrition until the spirit of ferguson is COMPLETELY obliterated?

I think it could have been some rogue person trying to stir up anger against the protesters. I don't think the FPD would shoot one of their own in the face

Is it really that unfathomable that someone would want to shoot at a cop in Ferguson? I mean no need to go into Lorax territory.

Unacceptable in any regard...violence/shootings never acceptable. But yea this is going to walk back a lot of the goodwill and undermine the gains the ground movement made. Avoiding hashtags (ie #bluelivesmatter ugh)

it could happen. the stakes are high, and the FPD is dumb and crazy. i don't know. the situation remains surreal & horrifying, unmatched by anything in my lifetime except 9/11. is the plan just a war of attrition until the spirit of ferguson is COMPLETELY obliterated?

― flappy bird (spazzmatazz), Thursday, March 12, 2015 8:06 PM (14 minutes ago)

come on man

i always thought the strength of ferguson as an organizing event was its very mundanity - that it was not a unique situation throughout the country, not something particularly "surreal" unless you hadn't been paying attention at all

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