Clams wrote:This thread should be put on hold for thanksgiving. Give it a rest until tomorrow, everyone.
I just saved a draft. Can we bat this one around in the meantime?
scotto wrote:Stones > Beatles
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Clams wrote:This thread should be put on hold for thanksgiving. Give it a rest until tomorrow, everyone.
scotto wrote:Stones > Beatles
John A Arkansawyer wrote:Clams wrote:This thread should be put on hold for thanksgiving. Give it a rest until tomorrow, everyone.
I just saved a draft. Can we bat this one around in the meantime?scotto wrote:Stones > Beatles
Penny Lane wrote:I agree that it would have helped the appearance (not necessarily the process or changed the outcome) had they brought in an outside prosecutor. Over time, it seems like the grand jury process has expanded past just submitting enough evidence to get an indictment. However, given the (mostly inconsistent) witness testimony the defense brought in, the prosecution probably felt it necessary to push as much evidence as they could the other way to save this man a trial.
John A Arkansawyer wrote:Penny Lane wrote:I agree that it would have helped the appearance (not necessarily the process or changed the outcome) had they brought in an outside prosecutor. Over time, it seems like the grand jury process has expanded past just submitting enough evidence to get an indictment. However, given the (mostly inconsistent) witness testimony the defense brought in, the prosecution probably felt it necessary to push as much evidence as they could the other way to save this man a trial.
It's nice to read a comment by someone who understands just what went on: The prosecutor rigged the process because he sided with the killer and not the victim.
To prevent this sort of rampant pigdickery, I have a Modest Proposal to make: Whenever anyone is killed violently, the killer should face a trial. No exceptions. And when the accused is a cop, then the prosecution should be contracted out. Let the local criminal defense firms bid on the chance to prosecute a killer cop. Fuck this "poor little policeman, with your gun and your club and your Kevlar vest and your radio backup, how frightened you are, bless your heart" horseshit. I want to see every cop who kills someone face the full fucking force of law as represented by a prosecutor who aches to see him roast in the electric chair. Let the Hand of Law get its own fingers broken a few times and see how that goes over.
John A Arkansawyer wrote:A cop isn't a soldier. A soldier's job is, ultimately, to kill people and destroy things in order to impose the will of that soldier's country. A cop's job is supposed to be to keep the peace. Protect and serve, right?
That's the theory. The sad fact is many police forces--and these small town governments around St. Louis and their armed forces sure qualify, if you ask me--are no better than shakedown squads who target poor people for arrest and prosecution in order to fund government without taxes. It's a brutal, thieving system designed to oppress those who most need the protection of the law in favor of those who can buy their own security. I believe in rule of law but that requires the law not be corrupt. When thugs control the law, it's just another club for the powerful to use on the weak. I say fuck that shit.
A cop who kills is not going to become a victim in a witch hunt. They'll still have their fellow cops, their union, and the prosecutors on their side, as well as the vast majority of the public. (Don't get me started on the cop fired for lying about other cops who is now the spokesman for St. Louis area cops.) B[b]ut when they tell bullshit stories--like the one Darren Wilson told about Michael Brown--I think they should face actual, you know, prosecutors, who have at least a minimal interest in justice, who aren't beholden to the storyteller's fellow cops for delivering a steady revenue stream to their desks and who might actually question them with some degree of skepticism. Like ordinary citizens.[/b]
Or not. We can have a special class of uber-citizens who can kill with impunity. Why not? It seems to be working out so far:
John A Arkansawyer wrote:Man, I'm sorry to tee off on you, but this is a subject on which I'm somewhat passionate. Give this a good read and tell me what you think: How municipalities in St. Louis County, Mo., profit from poverty
I don't think it's the cops. I don't think it's people who are bigoted. I think it's long-displaced chickens coming home to roost. The story of American migration in the first half of the twentieth century was black people coming north in search of the protection of the law; the story of the second half is white people moving as far away from them as practical and scorching the earth between. This is one of the many consequences: Law enforcement as fundraising. Good guys and bad guys and cops and klansmen and all that, yeah, I'm sure there are a few of each, but mostly its just poor schmucks stepping on their own dicks while fat rich fucks bet on who'll take the first fall. I got lotsa sympathy for them all.
But at some point, cops have to be held accountable. Don't care for this case? How about the black guy who'd picked up a pellet gun in that Ohio Wal-Mart, who the police shot down like a dog earlier this fall? No charges. That twelve-year-old kid shot over the weekend for having a pellet gun? I bet no charges. How about that seven-year-old girl in Detroit, killed during a no-knock raid, the one whose granny supposedly bumped a cop's gun and scared him half to death and who must really be the person at fault for hosing down a little girl till her torso looked like a soup tureen? No charges. The baby who had a flash-bang grenade thrown in her crib? Must I go on? No one is EVER held accountable.
At some point, when you are used for ignoble ends, the ignobility rubs off on you. God knows it's hard to find the line. I look for it every day and fear I passed it so long ago I can only dream of finding it again. But at some point, those who serve power have to face up to the consequences of their choices, too. Accountability isn't just for the little people.
Iowan wrote:2. The autopsy seemed to confirm a lot of what Darren Wilson said. It wasn't a bullshit story.
oilpiers wrote:I read some articles by Ezra Klein...He has taken the grand jury testimony of Officer Wilson, and contrasts and compares it with the testimony of Dorian Johnson, the other person involved in this incident. The one who did not get shot. There are consistencies, and tremendous divergence of perceptions of what happened over what was only a few minutes. Since there is limited forensic evidence, much of what we know is from eyewitness testimony, which is actually the least reliable type of evidence. Ironically it carries the most legal weight. No one in this scenario comes out looking great. There is no definitive conclusion made, but by the headline, you can tell Ezra does not have a lot of faith in Wilson's account. He gives some rational justification for his headline...
http://www.vox.com/2014/11/25/7281165/d ... in/7041840
http://www.vox.com/2014/11/25/7287443/d ... nson-story
Iowan wrote:3. If you can't see how antithetical this is to the entire concept of what justice is supposed to mean in this country, I can't help you.
Iowan wrote:John A Arkansawyer wrote:Man, I'm sorry to tee off on you, but this is a subject on which I'm somewhat passionate. Give this a good read and tell me what you think: How municipalities in St. Louis County, Mo., profit from poverty
I'm not in a position to sit down and read that link, right now, but if it's about civil forfeiture, then you and I are on the same side. That's legalized robbery, and thankfully it's really only ever used in instances where someone is actually convicted and the property involved was actually a crucial part of said crime in my neck of the woods. It definitely gets abused around the country.
Cole Younger wrote:Now, with the fear of those who are armed and in a position of authority violating that trust and becoming thugs with a license to kill, is it a little easier to understand why some of us feel the way we do about the Second Amendmant?
Cole Younger wrote:Now, with the fear of those who are armed and in a position of authority violating that trust and becoming thugs with a license to kill, is it a little easier to understand why some of us feel the way we do about the Second Amendmant?
Zip City wrote:Cole Younger wrote: drawing a gun against a cop in any situation is an instant death sentence
Wolf wrote:Zip City wrote:Cole Younger wrote: drawing a gun against a cop in any situation is an instant death sentence
as it should be
Zip City wrote:Cole Younger wrote:Now, with the fear of those who are armed and in a position of authority violating that trust and becoming thugs with a license to kill, is it a little easier to understand why some of us feel the way we do about the Second Amendmant?
Sort of? I mean, I guess I understand the impulse to protect yourself, but drawing a gun against a cop in any situation is an instant death sentence
Iowan wrote:Cole Younger wrote:Now, with the fear of those who are armed and in a position of authority violating that trust and becoming thugs with a license to kill, is it a little easier to understand why some of us feel the way we do about the Second Amendmant?
Not really. The Second Amendment isn't going to stop a government (or it's agents) truly bent on taking down it's people.
Iowan wrote:FWIW, I'm not anti-gun. I just think the Second Amendment just doesn't carry the same level of importance, protection, or necessity as it did when it was written. As long as it's part of the Constitution, it deserves to be protected, and I'm not in favor of repealing it as guns are a cat which left it's bag in the rear-view more years ago in this country. Making guns limited or illegal will create more problems than it solves.
Iowan wrote:I'd even be against it for all homicides for the same reasons.
Daniel Politi wrote:And the medical examiner did not take photographs—because his camera’s battery was dead—nor measurements at the scene of the crime—because what had happened was “self-explanatory.”
Iowan wrote:The thing about these people bailing on court because they can't pay is that they set up the very instance that gets them behind bars. You can only be fined for standard traffic offenses in Iowa; not jailed. The only way you get jailed is through warrants.
lotusamerica wrote:Arkansawyer, that's some crazy shit there in some of your posts. Having worked in and around the drug war and seeing a variety of injustices, though, I can see where the passion comes from.
lotusamerica wrote:Police need to become much more sensitive to issues around different and minority cultures. I don't think it's so innocent that a community that' s 2/3 black has a police force that's 9/10 white. Officer Wilson was afraid, he says. But of what precisely? Was he really only afraid of the particular man in front of him in the moment, who may have swiped some swishers and put on an attitude (or maybe worse) or was he also afraid of the mythological powerful primitive black man that white people have been subtly, implicitly been taught to fear since way before any of us came on the scene? I have no way of knowing, he seems like a kind of nice, kind of culturally ignorant, blue collar white guy to me. I don't ascribe evil intent to him, and if I understand correctly, in several years of service this is the first time he's used a weapon, which surely argues against him being one of the power mongers who are out there on police forces everywhere, at least here and there. I've worked for some years on the fringes of efforts to help police officers learn how to understand minority cultures and learn to de-escalate volatile situations in ways that don't make them weak, and this, more than toppling power, seems like the way to go to me. It's working with PO's, it's working in prisons, and the place to try to get it to work next is in these kinds of unpredictable idiosyncratic street situations. Allow the officer to have as much control as possible while also thinking "how can I de-escalate" before thinking "am I authorized to kill him?"
Penny and Iowan, what specifically leads you to believe that the Brown guy assaulted the officer other than the officer's story, contradicted by the witness story that it was the officer who assaulted the dead guy and that guy was defending himself?
Well, yes, in part. But if you read further into that story and get to the guy trying to run the auto repair shop, or the woman stopped leaving the court where she'd just paid her fine for no license to be cited again for having no license, you see how hard it is to climb out of the hole. It's one more weight on people who already have enough weight on them.
Iowan wrote:John, I know full well the weight of this and how this system works. I was a prosecutor for 2.5 years, and hated many aspects of the job (mostly the excessive punishments and waste of money from the war on drugs and low test OWIs that resulted from minor traffic violations that only occur in the wee hours of the morning), and saw this cycle of poverty and how traffic tickets lead to a loss of license which lead to difficulties in finding work, and would try and work with people to come up with solutions that put the ball in their court in terms of having time to pay fines, or holding off on no-license prosecutions in order to get their license back in order. At least 75% of the time, the people involved didn't follow through and kept breaking the law and racking up more fines and more violations.
I guess what I'm getting at is that in most cases I've seen, this cycle, while unfortunate, is self-inflicted. The government didn't make them speed. The government didn't make them blow off court. The government didn't make them not pay their fines. I just don't see a solid logical reason for amnesty. All it would provide is short term relief, as the people who get themselves into these cycles will more often than not view it as a "get out of jail free card" and start the cycle anew.
Iowan wrote:Ok... I started reading that article.
When people don't show up for court appearances, they get notices which tell them that if they keep failing to show up they will be arrested. What did they think would happen when they just keep blowing it off. This woman at the start of the story buried her problems, didn't confront them, and they snowballed. And I'm supposed to take this is an example of injustice? They offer payment plans.
I'm a pretty liberal guy who recognizes that there is systemic injustice in this country, but how am I supposed to be excessively sympathetic for people who break the law, get cited for it, and then blow it off because they can't afford the advertised consequence of their own choices?
Those municipalities would all prefer that the people cited just pay their damn fines without causing all the backlog in the justice system that arises when people don't show up for court, and don't pay their fines, and fight losing battles against laws they clearly broke. Traffic offense are far more "black and white" than most indictable crimes.
If officers start ignoring traffic crime, as is so often suggested, then we're basically creating martial law on the road, which tangibly increases dangers to many people. If we stop requiring people to pay fines, show up for court, etc, then we're basically removing all rules from the highway. No accountability means the system falls apart and if people don't have to pay fines, show up for court, then they don't have any incentive to drive within the boundaries of the law.
tinnitus photography wrote:Iowan wrote:Ok... I started reading that article.
When people don't show up for court appearances, they get notices which tell them that if they keep failing to show up they will be arrested. What did they think would happen when they just keep blowing it off. This woman at the start of the story buried her problems, didn't confront them, and they snowballed. And I'm supposed to take this is an example of injustice? They offer payment plans.
I'm a pretty liberal guy who recognizes that there is systemic injustice in this country, but how am I supposed to be excessively sympathetic for people who break the law, get cited for it, and then blow it off because they can't afford the advertised consequence of their own choices?
Those municipalities would all prefer that the people cited just pay their damn fines without causing all the backlog in the justice system that arises when people don't show up for court, and don't pay their fines, and fight losing battles against laws they clearly broke. Traffic offense are far more "black and white" than most indictable crimes.
If officers start ignoring traffic crime, as is so often suggested, then we're basically creating martial law on the road, which tangibly increases dangers to many people. If we stop requiring people to pay fines, show up for court, etc, then we're basically removing all rules from the highway. No accountability means the system falls apart and if people don't have to pay fines, show up for court, then they don't have any incentive to drive within the boundaries of the law.
@ "traffic crime"
that article had nothing to do w/ public safety.