I do not recognized the Ferguson I am in currently.
— Wesley Lowery (@WesleyLowery) August 14, 2014
Wesley Lowery’s Twitter is worth a look tonight. Looks like some reasonable police are finally on the ground in Ferguson.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 9 Comments
This post is in: Post-racial America
I do not recognized the Ferguson I am in currently.
— Wesley Lowery (@WesleyLowery) August 14, 2014
Wesley Lowery’s Twitter is worth a look tonight. Looks like some reasonable police are finally on the ground in Ferguson.
This post is in: Post-racial America, Shitty Cops
Here is the Police Chief of Ferguson going on Hannity and doing his best Orval Faubus imitation, blaming the mess in Ferguson on “outside agitators.”
Now that we've met the #Ferguson #Police Dept, does anyone believe the officer politely asked Michael & his friend to move to the sidewalk?
— cheerio grrrl (@cheeriogrrrl) August 14, 2014
This post is in: Post-racial America, Shitty Cops
This post is in: Post-racial America, Shitty Cops, Meth Laboratories of Democracy, Outrage
Good grief. It’s almost as if they want this whole to town to blow up:
In another day of demonstrations, protesters chanting “Don’t shoot!” marched in front of the St. Louis County prosecutor’s office on Tuesday, demanding the arrest of a police officer who shot and killed an unarmed black teenager.
The Ferguson Police Department, which had previously said it would release the name of the officer, said Tuesday that it had decided against doing so out of concern for the safety of the officer, who was put on administrative leave. The department said threats had been made against the city’s police on social media.
“The value of releasing the name is far outweighed by the risk of harm to the officer and his family,” the Ferguson police chief, Thomas Jackson, said.
Look, if someone does hurt the cop, at least we can be assured the local police will do a thorough investigation and not leave his body to roast on the pavement for four hours in the afternoon sun like they did for Michael Brown. Besides, shouldn’t you have something to fear when you shoot an unarmed teen eight times, most in the back as he fled unarmed? I have no sympathy for this man whatsoever. Release his damned name. Now.
Despite the bullshit claims (on the few occasions the national media actually covered the story), most of the protests in Ferguson have been peaceful. Lemme rephrase that. Most of the protesters have been peaceful. The police have been up to their usual bullshit, cordoning off the protesters so it was basically shooting fish in a barrel and firing tear gas, rubber bullets and these at protestors:
On a street in Ferguson: big wooden pellets matching protesters' descriptions of what they were shot with last night pic.twitter.com/e7cDWOMey8
— Jon Swaine (@jonswaine) August 12, 2014
Steve Walsh, 26, who says he was shot in the neck with a "wooden pellet" by police in Ferguson tonight pic.twitter.com/weMaHrglxR
— Jon Swaine (@jonswaine) August 12, 2014
From same street: remains of "Triple Chaser" CS gas canister, "60 cal stinger" rubber bullet magazine; rubber bullets pic.twitter.com/ImgZNfwyzN
— Jon Swaine (@jonswaine) August 12, 2014
Not sure about you all, but I think while gagging on tear gas, being shot in the head with a large hunk of wood might be more than “less than lethal.” Oh, bonus fact- the cops corralled everyone protesting, and then while shooting at them, screamed at them to disperse and go home. Which, of course, they couldn’t do, because they were corralled by the cops and not allowed to break police lines to leave. Speaking of tear gas, here are Ferguson’s finest shooting teargas into a guy’s lawn because he would not disperse… from his own yard:
NWA had it right. I guess when these neanderthals get their toys, they want to use them, and use them they did. Can the feds just take over the entire Ferguson police department?
Another good question- does this look like a smart composition for the government and police force:
Ferguson’s police chief and mayor are white. Of the six City Council members, one is black. The local school board has six white members and one Latino. Of the 53 commissioned officers on the police force, three are black, said Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson.
Blacks in Ferguson are twice as likely to be stopped by police as whites, according to an annual report on racial profiling by the Missouri attorney general. Last year, 93% of arrests following car stops in Ferguson were of blacks. Ninety-two percent of searches and 80% of car stops involved blacks, the report said.
Lots more here at Vox.
This post is in: Post-racial America, Shitty Cops
This MSNBC interview with an eyewitness to the Michael Brown shooting (which, unless you have twitter, you probably haven’t heard about because every major network has simply refused to cover the story in any detail whatsoever) is absolutely chilling:
The police say the officer shot Brown after the teen shoved the officer and tried to wrestle the officer’s gun from him. But a number of witnesses, including Johnson, refute those claims. And in the wake of the shooting, the Ferguson Police Department has asked the St. Louis County police to step in and take over the investigation.
***About 20 minutes before the shooting, Johnson said he saw Brown walking down the street and decided to catch up with him. The two walked and talked. That’s when Johnson says they saw the police car rolling up to them.
The officer demanded that the two “get the f—k on the sidewalk,” Johnson says. “His exact words were get the f—k on the sidewalk.”
After telling the officer that they were almost at their destination, Johnson’s house, the two continued walking. But as they did, Johnson says the officer slammed his brakes and threw his truck in reverse, nearly hitting them.
Now, in line with the officer’s driver’s side door, they could see the officer’s face. They heard him say something to the effect of, “what’d you say?” At the same time, Johnson says the officer attempted to thrust his door open but the door slammed into Brown and bounced closed. Johnson says the officer, with his left hand, grabbed Brown by the neck.
“I could see the muscles in his forearm,” Johnson said. “Mike was trying to get away from being choked.”
“They’re not wrestling so much as his arm went from his throat to now clenched on his shirt,” Johnson explained of the scene between Brown and the officer. “It’s like tug of war. He’s trying to pull him in. He’s pulling away, that’s when I heard, ‘I’m gonna shoot you.’”
At that moment, Johnson says he fixed his gaze on the officer to see if he was pulling a stun gun or a real gun. That’s when he saw the muzzle of the officer’s gun.
“I seen the barrel of the gun pointed at my friend,” he said. “He had it pointed at him and said ‘I’ll shoot,’ one more time.”
A second later Johnson said he heard the first shot go off.
“I seen the fire come out of the barrell,” he said. “I could see so vividly what was going on because I was so close.”
Johnson says he was within arm’s reach of both Brown and the officer. He looked over at Brown and saw blood pooling through his shirt on the right side of the body.
“The whole time [the officer] was holding my friend until the gun went off,” Johnson noted.
Brown and Johnson took off running together. There were three cars lined up along the side of the street. Johnson says he ducked behind the first car, whose two passengers were screaming. Crouching down a bit, he watched Brown run past.
“Keep running, bro!,” he said Brown yelled. Then Brown yelled it a second time. Those would be the last words Johnson’s friend, “Big Mike,” would ever say to him.
Brown made it past the third car. Then, “blam!” the officer took his second shot, striking Brown in the back. At that point, Johnson says Brown stopped, turned with his hands up and said “I don’t have a gun, stop shooting!”
By that point, Johnson says the officer and Brown were face-to-face. The officer then fired several more shots. Johnson described watching Brown go from standing with his hands up to crumbling to the ground and curling into a fetal position.
His story is easy to corroborate- forensics will be able to determine how close he was when he wa shot, whether he was shot in the back, what the fatal killing shot was and what the angle of the shot would be for it to have happened, etc. If this eyewitness account is accurate, this was premeditated murder, one would think, as the officer stated before hand that he was going to shoot him. IANAL, but that seems like intent premeditation to me.
BTW- would forensics be able to determine whether or not his arms were up when he was shot if he was shot in the torso? Wouldn’t the bullet penetrate the muscles differently if his arms were in the air or by his side?
And why will they not release the cops name? WTF kind of shady sit is that?
by $8 blue check mistermix| 33 Comments
This post is in: Post-racial America, Clown Shoes
New frontiers in social networking:
SketchFactor, the brainchild of co-founders Allison McGuire and Daniel Herrington, is a Manhattan-based navigation app that crowdsources user experiences along with publicly available data to rate the relative “sketchiness” of certain areas in major cities. The app will launch on iTunes on Friday, capping off a big week for the startup, which was named as a finalist in NYC BigApps, a city-sponsored competition that promotes technologies designed to improve quality of life issues in New York City and government transparency.
According to Ms. McGuire, a Los Angeles native who lives in the West Village, the impetus behind SketchFactor was her experience as a young woman navigating the streets of Washington, D.C., where she worked at a nonprofit.
“How can we take large amounts of data and crowdsource opinions on certain areas?” she wondered to herself. “I brought that idea to a Lean Startup event in D.C., it got a huge reception and suddenly I was on my way.”
When challenged with the obvious observation that people’s subjective impressions of whether a neighborhood is “sketchy” is probably going to just enable racists, the founders replied that they only wanted people to report “incidents, not feelings”. Problem solved.
There have been attempts to use police data to determine what’s going on in a neighborhood (most notably Chicagocrime.org, which morphed into Every Block and was then shut down after NBC acquired it). That would be an app I’d be willing to buy, but it would take work, and it’s not “social”, so a couple of 20-something douches couldn’t get any VC funding for it.
(Thanks to reader J for sending this in)
by John Cole| 89 Comments
This post is in: Gun nuts, Post-racial America, Assholes, Our Failed Media Experiment
When I saw this, my first thought was that the AP had brought back Karl Rove fan Ron Fournier:
BREAKING: Suburban Detroit homeowner convicted of second-degree murder in porch shooting.
— The Associated Press (@AP) August 7, 2014
The “suburban” was a nice touch (*WINK* *WINK*).
Another way of looking at it was a distressed young drunk woman who had just been in a car accident was knocking on someone’s door at 4 am, and rather than keep the door locked and call 911, the owner instead opted to open the door and blasted her brains all over “suburban” Detroit with a shotgun. Fortunately the jury took this more seriously than the AP.
Twitter has exploded with the hashtag #APHeadlines:
#APHeadlines Black youth charged with stealing police bullets: Found hidden in torso
— J. M. Braun (@braun_jm) August 7, 2014
#APHeadlines millions of Africans complain after free cruise to the Americas; slave traders find them 'ungrateful' pic.twitter.com/EolDxEiz4Y
— W.E.B DemBois (@Phil_Cosby_) August 7, 2014
Firemen cool teens off. Providing relief from the Suns hot rays. #APHeadlines pic.twitter.com/NOHbmQQisb
— DJ QUEEN (@THEDJQUEEN) August 7, 2014
Our media finds new and interesting ways to fail us every single day.
(via)
I Suppose That’s One Way of Looking At ItPost + Comments (89)