America's Ferguson protests put police authority on trial

We know Micheal Brown is a bully from the store video. The cop tells him to move from walking down the street to the sidewalk, and Brown attacks the cop inside the cop car - ie the cop did nothing to cause Brown to fight him. To me it's very easy to believe that Brown charged the cop once they were facing each other outside the car. While I don't doubt there's racism in police departments and selective enforcement, I just don't see what this particular cop was supposed to have done differently.

A study found that blacks are much more likely to attack cops when stopped. While this may come from a sense of oppression, and being stopped just for being black, it's still a good way to get yourself arrested or killed.

Brown was not the right person to be made out as the poster child for civil rights. That said, what is going on in Ferguson didn't start with Brown's shooting. Also, it didn't help that the Fergidishu cops were so heavy handed with witnesses in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. Seizing cell phones so people couldn't post video was out of line and the facts of this form of abuse are indisputable now that a Federal court has ordered three separate law enforcement agencies in Fergidishu to cease with the illegal arrests and seizures of peaceful photographers and videographers.

Brwon was wrong and Wilson was right, but these cops are a$$holes and even a Federal judge thinks so.

The riots spring out of the fact that Ferguson is not an unusual case in the US. Poor blacks know they're getting fucked, and the cops are hired to keep the blacks in line.

Ferguson to the American left is pretty much identical as a political rallying point as what Benghazi was/is to the American right. The facts are essentially irrelevant. Indictments and eventual guilty verdicts, even when the evidence is abysmal, are what was demanded. The left is cooking up the concept that all police-related shootings are illegitimate and damn the actual truth of what happens in each separate incident.

Finally reading though some of the evidence presented to the grand jury, I had these takeaways

1) The prosecution knew they had zero chance at a conviction and rather than face public outrage for not bringing the case to trial, they let the grand jury make the decision for them.

2) Officer Wilson is a terrible cop and shouldn't wear the badge again. NEVER let a civilian that close to an open window of your cruiser, especially without backup.

It's been said that the Ferguson PD is also like too many other PD's in the US. Thanks to excessive cutting of law enforcement budgets by the states and municipalities the police are now reliant on issuing excessive numbers of fines for petty lawbreaking (like jaywalking) in order to generate revenue for the department. If they're already well disliked in the black neighbourhoods, then having them be even more draconian in those areas in order to generate money will make the locals hate them even more. And then incredibly minor confrontations, like the one between Wilson and Brown began as, can rapidly turn into another flashpoint event.

There's too much involved in all of this to have anything pinned down on one simple item of blame. From the reeking politics of both fringes, to economic reasons, to the incessant tension between blacks and whites, none of it is really repairable. The next incident that sets the same old cycle in motion all over again is just a matter of when, not if.

As much as the black community want to make this out as a white vs. black issue, it's not. Brown's race is irrelevant to the facts of the case.

"Poor blacks" aren't being 'fucked'....perhaps poor people are, in your world, but poor people aren't treated differently based on their skin colour.

Oh, they are. A good number of cops are lazy and think skin pigmentation is a replacement for probable cause or reasonable suspicion.

Oh, they are. A good number of cops are lazy and think skin pigmentation is a replacement for probable cause or reasonable suspicion.
Not only cops, wannabe cops and civilians too...


...re: Trayvon Martin.

Oh, they are. A good number of cops are lazy and think skin pigmentation is a replacement for probable cause or reasonable suspicion.
Not only cops, wannabe cops and civilians too...


...re: Trayvon Martin.
It's not exactly a recent development that a small fraction of Hispanic communities and a small fraction of Black communities don't get along.

or Blacks and Koreans

Nothing to do with being lazy.

It boils down to statistics and if we don't like the statistics, we should look to change them, not blame those that follow them.

Officer Wilson is a poorly trained cop with a remarkable record of competence in spite of his lack of training. This is pretty typical in small-town America where the LEO jobs are low pay and the guys who take the jobs can count on very little training past their initial certification.

Officer Wilson is a poorly trained cop with a remarkable record of competence in spite of his lack of training. This is pretty typical in small-town America where the LEO jobs are low pay and the guys who take the jobs can count on very little training past their initial certification.

In no way shape or form am I saying Officer Wilson was wrong to defend himself and I, like the Grand Jury think he did what he had to. Although, your hypothesis on cause may explain small town America's policing problems but what explains Canada's issues on the subject?

If you believe the press, we have highly trained, extremely well paid and supposedly competent police officers yet, we continually have incidents like Ferguson where killings by police officers are common place and the only difference is that in Canada our Police Officers don't seem to notice what colour their victim's skin is and nobody riots when a police officer is found not guilty.

We save that peccadillo for losing hockey teams.