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There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

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Mediocre white men think RFK Jr’s pathetic midlife crisis is inspirational. The bar is set so low for them, it’s subterranean.

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T R E 4 5 O N

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Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

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Rupert, come get your orange boy, you petrified old dinosaur turd.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

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You are here: Home / Civil Rights / Racial Justice / Post-racial America / We’re so Fucked

Reader Interactions

46Comments

  3. 3.

    Lit3Bolt

    He also whistled at a white woman, ingested multiple grams of PCP and flakka, hulked himself up to run through the bullets, and broke his own spine to get back at our hero-police.

    Odds are even whether he’ll come back from the grave as a 25th level lich for his unholy vengeance on the innocent white power structure.

  4. 4.

    Renie

    I know we will probably never find out but how could this have occurred. Mr. Gray appears to be dragging his legs when they first put him in the van so was he initially injured when arrested by the bike cops? He’s heard on video being in pain at this point. Can this severe of an injury be caused while being restrained and handcuffed?

    If he sustained a neck injury or back injury then, did the ‘rough ride’ they gave him in the – what was it a 30 minute ride to the station (that was 2 minutes away by car)? – exacerbate the initial injury to cause more severe injuries. Then at what point did they think leg irons were needed if he was already injured or was that done just to dick him around and make the ‘rough ride’ worse? It was reported he was unresponsive when they arrived at the station.

    I have the bad feeing we will never know what really happened.

  5. 5.

    srv

    A plague-infected dog spread the dangerous disease to four Colorado residents, according to a new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

    Health officials told ABC News that this the first report of a dog infecting a human with the plague in the U.S.

  7. 7.

    SiubhanDuinne

    I don’t even have the words to say how sad this makes me. Sad and despairing. And enraged.

    In the past few days I’ve seen AA parents say things like, they always teach their kids to be respectful and to make eye contact if they ever have an interaction with LE. Yet eye contact seems to have been what signed Mr. Gray’s death warrant, or at least contributed to it.

    Can’t win for losing.

  9. 9.

    Renie

    I have no idea at all what AA parents go through and won’t pretend I can understand it. I live in a lily white suburb and taught my own kids to just say ‘Yes officer” when they were teenagers. Many times the cops here would hassle the kids hanging around at night, so I told my two kids just be polite and don’t talk back. Annoyed me to hear the cops would go through the kids pockets or backpacks for no reason but I always told the kids, its your word against theirs and its not a fair world, cops’ word will always win. Hard to teach kids to respect authority when they treat kids like that. But again, I realize its 1000X worse for minority kids.

  11. 11.

    kc

    @Renie:

    If he sustained a neck injury or back injury then, did the ‘rough ride’ they gave him in the – what was it a 30 minute ride to the station (that was 2 minutes away by car)? – exacerbate the initial injury to cause more severe injuries

    That’s what I think happened.

  13. 13.

    Peale

    @rikyrah: so piecing this together, they never charged him. He died before they could figure that out, or it robably would be bad form to do so whe e was in a coma,

    I can’t remember which interview it was – either with the union guy (most likely) or the commissioner, they basically said that they didn’t need probable cause to pursue him. He was in a “high crime” designated area so basically they could approach him for being there. Didn’t help that he ran, but probably didn’t help that he looked at the police either. Didn’t help that he was there. But who knows – maybe he lived nearby and had plans for the evening that didn’t involve being questioned and arrested. Had they charged him, it would be for having a knife. Maybe they were extra insulted that with all of there loving care watching over the neighborhood, he still thought it was a good idea to have a knife.

    An enterprising reporter would probably would ask for a map of these “probable cause free” zones. One would think there would be clear lines, maybe even in red, drawn on a map where they are. Or is that secret, too.

  14. 14.

    catclub

    @srv: There was a recent report that rats got a bad rap for plague. It was gerbils
    or hamsters. This actually makes some sense, since rats were around all the time, but the gerbils had big boom and bust cycles.

  15. 15.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @catclub:

    It was gerbils or hamsters.

    I wasn’t aware that Europe had a large population of gerbils and hamsters in 1248.

  18. 18.

    beltane

    @Omnes Omnibus: From what I understand, the gerbils transmitted the plague through Central Asia to the Middle East at which point the rats took over in the transmission process.

  20. 20.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Renie: We will never find out what occurred because to do so would condemn the officers in question to lives in prison.

    This is something that cannot happen.

    The police in this country are destroying law and order by abusing their authority and stripping it of all legitimacy.

  21. 21.

    a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)

    @Renie:

    I have the bad feeing we will never know what really happened.

    What really happened is that BPD killed him. Period; the end. The details are mostly immaterial, in my view.

  24. 24.

    Xenos

    The whole thing, especially the bit about eye contact, reeks like an ex-post facto excuse. A lie close enough to the truth used to hide something worse.

    My hunch is that this does not even rise to the level of a racist beat-down that got out of hand. The eye-contact line, and then running away tells me Gray ran away because he knew these cops wanted to kill him, probably because he had skimmed off their money from a racket, or had run off with (confiscated) drugs he was supposed to sell for them, or something along those lines.

    This was a mob hit, basically. The whole situation is soaked in appalling racism, but the proximate issue was police criminality. Just a theory, but we will see.

  25. 25.

    Cliff in NH

    @Renie:

    Its easy to break your neck if you are tackled at speed from a moving bike onto concrete.

    I don’t like that they always say he was running when his bike is right there in the video, and it’s different from the bike cops bikes you see later in the vid, so it wasn’t the cops bike.

  26. 26.

    RepubAnon

    @Xenos: Indeed – he ran from the police because he had the wildly unreasonable fear of being chased down, beaten, and possibly killed. What an unlikely coincidence that his fears actually came true, despite the warm, friendly. humanitarian treatment he had while being tackled, wrestled to the ground, dragged in pain to a police van, and thrown inside to be given a “rough ride” to the police station.

    All in all, it was very inconsiderate of him to suffer fatal injuries – perhaps he should apologize to those kind police officers. Oh, wait…

    (/snark) if you hadn’t guessed.

  27. 27.

    Cliff in NH

    probably because he had skimmed off their money from a racket, or had run off with (confiscated) drugs he was supposed to sell for them, or something along those lines.

    Blaming the victim for crimes there is no evidence of. Not one bit.

    Not cool dude.

  28. 28.

    Peale

    @Xenos: I’ll read that novel. Thoughts like that did cross my mind a little bit-the idea that he wasn’t fleeing “the police”, but instead had some reason to flee from that particular group of police. Perhaps that particular group of police was known particularly for nasty arrests…or something else (cue ominous music). I mean come on, there was a case in Baltimore just the other year where a whole bunch of jail guards were found to be members of a gang. Not a stretch at all to think that members of the police weren’t what they seem.

    But it’s just fun speculation. The death appears to be what it looked like at first. It’s a good novel though.

  29. 29.

    Citizen Alan

    Police say Gray had been picked up for making eye contact with officers and then running away.

    When I saw that, all I could think of was a fucking “Squidbillies” episode in which Early Cuyler assaulted and nearly killed a member of the Atlanta Braves during a baseball because “he cut his eyes at me!” And the prosecutor and judge agreed that that was a valid defense to aggravated assault charges in 21st Century Georgia.

  30. 30.

    xenos

    I certainly am not looking for an excuse to blame the victim here. It could well be that he had enough reason to fear these particular police that he ran away and was chased and one thing led to another. But why did the police go after him? What was their motivation?

    It may be suspicious if someone sees a Cop and runs away. But there was not a warrant out for him (Correct me if I am wrong, please). This was not a crime scene where this started. Maybe these cops are just dogs that see something run away and will automatically chase it down and kill it. That theory gives the co po s too much credit, and reduces Gray to a prey animal.

    It looks like Gray knew those cops were looking for him, and knew they wanted to fuck him up.

    Why? my suspicion is that racism is the context but not the cause here. These cops were acting like mobsters.

  31. 31.

    fuckwit

    What’s happened to this country where we have “probable cause free zones”? Is that like “free speech zones” we had during Bush and Cheney speeches 10 years ago?

    Hey, buddy, move over there, the Constitution doesn’t apply in this zone, didn’t you read the sign?

    What the hell happened? Drug war? Just continued racism? Economic inequality? Destruction of the social safety net? What are the causes, and what are the solutions?

  32. 32.

    Zinsky

    Being Negro was Freddie Gray’s most serious offense, and the one that led directly to his demise.

  33. 33.

    Sherparick

    @Omnes Omnibus: It was 1347-48, to be exact. Take all these 700 year speculations with a grain of salt. The only thing I know for sure is that there was a flea involved as the vector carrying the bacteria from one species (rat, gerbil?, hamster?, mouse?, dog?) to another mammal, humans, it could be a wide variety of sources. One account for the plague going from epidemic to endemic is that the the flea favored the “Black Rat” and became less contagious when the “black rat” was replaced by the Norwegian Rat as the most common pest in western Europe.

  35. 35.

    Jado

    @rikyrah:

    He made eye contact with an officer.

    What other charge do these militant adrenaline junkies need to instigate an incident?

    Actually, this sentence from the newspaper is probably the best reporting I’ve seen about this whole thing – there was no speculating about Freddie Gray’s previous diabolic plan to break his own neck and blame it on the police. It’s refreshing to see a simple reporting of facts without BS pandering or tap-dancing.

    Now maybe if they take the next step and write Cole’s sentence, we might scratch and claw our way back to a functional news media

  36. 36.

    FL

    I think the standard for stops is “reasonable suspicion,” not probable cause. The SCOTUS case ruling that running from police in a high crime area constitutes grounds for reasonable suspicion is Illinois v. Wardlow. The argument is that Gray’s fleeing was grounds for a stop, then a weapons search turned up a knife. PS I am not a lawyer.

  37. 37.

    SFAW

    @srv:

    What David Simon said, this is an occupation.

    No doubt Greg Abbott and Rand Paul will be all over that in 3 … 2 … 1 ….

  38. 38.

    boatboy_srq

    @rikyrah: Self-preservation. Apparently in Baltimore that’s a capital offense.

    Remind me again how “all men are created equal” and all that…

  41. 41.

    Lavocat

    @SiubhanDuinne: This whole sad affair actually reminds me of the mantra I ALWAYS hear from my cop friends: “Better to be judged by 12 than carried by 6.”

    At some point, civilians are going to start feeling the same way and a shitload more cops are going to get their asses killed over this nonsense. Because GUNS!

  42. 42.

    Lavocat

    @catclub: Your mother was a hamster and your father smelled of elderberries!

    Sorry. You walked right into that one.

  44. 44.

    Cluttered Mind

    @Lit3Bolt: He’d have to be a spellcaster to be a lich, and he’d have to have prepared the ritual far in advance. If he were to rise from the dead to seek revenge against the system that wronged him, he’d come back as a revenant.

    Why have I wasted my life?

  45. 45.

    J R in WV

    @xenos:

    More like gang members. They all knew the other guys would have their backs no matter what happened to Mr Gray, and so they did their standard violent bust of the suspect.

    The unfortunate fact that this time it was so violent a bust that the “suspect” was mortally injured didn’t matter, all 6 of those cops were going to provide a story that didn’t include them killing Freddy. And they ALL KNEW that all of them would be covering for each other, just like all the other times they committed assault while making an arrest.

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