Some notes on Ferguson, Missouri

The situation is complex, all real life situations are, and there is seldom any good excuse for rioting, but the root cause here seems to me to be that the police are becoming an occuping army. And I think this is not inadvertent… Polls show that the government is losing legitimacy, it has been for a long while. And without legitimacy, what have governments got except force?

So, the government is responding as you’d expect to it’s loss of legitimacy, by tooling up to control the public by force. And as other polls have shown the volunteer military would refuse to be used for this purpose, they’ve chosen to make the police into a domestic military.

You look around, NSA survailance, militarized police, we’re building a police state. Right out in the open. We’d better stop that while there’s still time.

Indeed, military gear used by the US overseas has been finding its way to American streets. Police forces in the US receive surplus military gear from the Defense Department under a program whose motto is “From Warfighter to Crimefighter.”

Why just have armed men fight overseas for corporate profits (and the plutocrats to whom same accrue), when there are plenty of opportunities here at home?
~

“The “scary clothes” argument is unimpressive”

Remind us, what is the “scary clothes” argument and who is making it? (Is this about Halloween?)

“Hilarity ensues”. Yeah… funny.

@Joshua W. Burton

Do you disagree with the claim the OP makes? You would perhaps argue that it’s not factual?

The chief said something about the protesters throwing bombs, which sounded strange and implausible.

The chief said something about the protesters throwing bombs, which sounded strange and implausible.

Those will be the Molotov cocktails, which count.

If the uniform wasn’t significant, they wouldn’t be required to wear it.

IDF training in crowd control

Really, this thread too? For what it’s worth, the Mem-Tzet (Israeli MPs, the only IDF police unit) are mostly trained for their primary duty, which is of course enforcing military discipline on the IDF itself. I’ve seen orange armbands at West Bank checkpoints, but they are behind the desk or in the car, and (except in ceremonial formation) I’ve never seen them civilian-facing with more than sidearms.

If Missouri police are learning crowd control from the regular IDF, or from US Rangers or Marines for that matter, there is a serious structural problem and it’s not the equipment load-out.

If you’ve been following any of the coverage of events in Ferguson, the police are not only dressed in combat gear. When they are in the midst of defusing(?) gatherings and riots and where there would at least be the appearance of a reasonable chance of violence they are – quite appropriately, wearing heavy combat gear.

In other scenarios they are dressed like every cop you’ve ever seen – tan shirts and black pants.

For those who have never seen or been in Ferguson, its not a nice place. Its a low-income quasi-industrial zone near the St. Louis airport – having driven around there its the kind of place an ordinary citizen might wish they had some combat gear available.

This isn’t a defense of the way that particular department has handled its business. Their approach at best can be described as heavy handed (some would use harsher terms)- helicoptering in for a single incident doesn’t necessarily describe what its like to operate in that community on a daily basis.

@Dr. Hilarius wrote —

“There is a qualitative difference between dealing with a police officer in a standard uniform and an officer dressed for combat. It affects the citizen but more importantly, it affects the mindset of the officer. Look like an army of occupation and you act like one.”

Exactly. And as Greg Howard adds in his excellent article, that mindset includes a particularly common target: black men. And boys —

“If officers are soldiers, it follows that the neighborhoods they patrol are battlefields. And if they’re working battlefields, it follows that the population is the enemy. And because of correlations, rooted in historical injustice, between crime and income and income and race, the enemy population will consist largely of people of color, and especially of black men. Throughout the country, police officers are capturing, imprisoning, and killing black males at a ridiculous clip, waging a very literal war on people like Michael Brown.”

Joshua W. Barton @ 18

When one is responsible for satisfactory outcomes one tends to look to those with the most experience for tips on how to proceed. At various points in U.S. history, it made a certain sense–perverted, in my view — for those in our government responsible for the management of subject populations to look to the Pinkertons, or to South Africa’s BOSS, or the DDR’s Stasi for practical solutions to their difficulties. In recent times, Israeli agencies seems to have had the most to offer.

There’s ample evidence, it seems to me, that Israelis of one flavor or another have counseled the CIA and U.S. Special Operations forces in how to manage the interrogations of prisoners of Middle Eastern origin. I don’t therefore think it’s unreasonable to suppose that other kinds of advice were sought from the same sources, and incorporated where convenient into the development of our own practices. Of course, I’d always defer to your first-hand knowledge of which Israeli agencies were, or may have been, involved. We mustn’t ever let hyperbole run ahead of the truth.

It seems like something happened here which didn’t need to. But until the matter is investigated no one can fully confirm or deny. With rioting comes a new ball game. The use of molotov cocktails kinda changes the approach the police have to using tear gas. Between the rioters, the news people, Al, the President and the Police there seems to be a 3 ring circus in play. No one really wants the truth they only want their side of the story to be told and believed. If the police were wrong we will know eventually. But to condone rioting no matter what color you are is intolerable.

I remember Watts and I think the government is trying to avoid another one. But all these people showing up every night is inspiring violence and lawlessness… Every one suffers and the news media gets to televise it. How irresponsible. Jim

“all these people showing up every night is inspiring violence and lawlessness… Every one suffers and the news media gets to televise it. How irresponsible. Jim”

So it’s the protesters fault? Merely for showing up?

You’re right. They should stay home and just get used to their obvious status as second-class citizens in Apartheid USA.

/sarcasm

@20 “Its a low-income quasi-industrial zone near the St. Louis airport – having driven around there its the kind of place an ordinary citizen might wish they had some combat gear available.”

Sentiments like this are part of the problem. I have worked on an ambulance in PG County and the poorer parts of DC, walking through a low-income quasi-industrial zone to get from the metro to our station. The type of zone where I had to walk around discarded needles and broken glass on the side of the road because there mostly weren’t sidewalks. I picked up drunks passed out in the gutter of bad neighborhoods, and I visited friends in those same neighborhoods while out of uniform.

At no point did I ever need or want heavy combat gear, or light combat gear, or any sort of gear not required for EMS. Bad neighborhoods are not a 24/7 open street battle. I maybe got the stink eye a few times, but at no point did the residents of these mostly black neighborhoods see a white person and become overtaken with an animalistic rage and begin firing guns in every direction. I rode my bike home past an open air drug market, and as pissed off as the dealers and gang members were about gentrification pushing them out of the area, no shots were fired.

So basically, your desire for heavy combat gear says a lot more about you than it does about Ferguson. Shitty neighborhoods are shitty. They aren’t inhuman.

@30 BJN
Whether I feel safe in Ferguson or PG county or any other bad neighborhood is not really the point. As you say, rough neighborhoods are rough neighborhoods – just because probably nothing will happen to me doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be wary that it might.

More relevantly, however, the cops that work that beat don’t feel safe there for a variety of reasons that go well beyond the present indents, which is why they would bother to procure the gear they have. Justified or not, it seems to be pretty useful gear for the situation at hand.

P.S. Thank you for your work as an EMS people like you get far less credit than you deserve.

Pointing rifles at people you don’t intend to actually shoot isn’t just useless, it’s counterproductive provocation. A lesson, Joshua Burton, that the IDF clearly understands. There are those who will counter-provoke (who should be dealt with by what we normally consider to be “police methods”), but the defense of freedom requires a refusal to be intimidated.

Thankfully cooler heads still prevail to the extent of not actually shooting, so far. But the fingers are way too close to the triggers.

I am thinking about the “broken windows” theory and how it uses the logic that subtle cues, visual and auditory signals send potent messages about security and survival.

If graffiti and a broken window can send a signal about how the environment is lawless and chaotic, what to make of the paramilitary uniforms and equipment by the police?
Don’t they also send an identical signal, that the environment is lawless and violent confrontation is imminent?
Isn’t reasonable for citizens to feel more afraid, not less? Isn’t it reasonable to expect to be treated with violence, not protection? How should a reasonable citizen react, when faced with military forces on the street corner, point weapons at us?

Wouldn’t it be reasonable to develop a sense of loathing and dread about the police who send visual signals that they are an occupying force, not protectors of the citizenry?

Sneering at this as “scary clothes” is preposterous- the visual of those officers swarming towards that unarmed young man tell a completely correct and accurate story- that it was the police who brutalized the citizens, and provoked the riot, even setting aside the original shooting.

I’ve been wondering whatever happened to Andrew F., zealous defender of police violence and senseless war everywhere. I guess we just needed the proper topic to bring him back.

The cops losing is the first step towards turning around the slaughter of unarmed black men.

Cops “losing” can be many things. The man that shot Brown hasn’t even suffered the embarrassment of being named in the media. That is the cops winning.

Brett @33: The root of the problem is that the government views the population as a hostile and occupied territory.

It’s heartening that Brett and many other libertarians recognize this. But I’m not sure they understand it. The police don’t view rich neighborhoods as hostile and occupied territory, and if they acted as though they did, they’d be out of a job or in jail very quickly. The government is not an autonomous force that seeks to aggrandize itself indiscriminately, as libertarians often suggest. On the contrary, it is exquisitely discriminating, as any acquaintance with the justice system (or pretty much any other field of large-scale social interaction) reveals. That is, it discriminates those with real social power — ultimately, control of investment, employment, production — from those without it, and controls the latter on behalf of the former. The government is the enforcement arm of a class society, as the education, mental health, advertising, news, and entertainment industries are the indoctrination arms.

Left-wing libertarians — the original kind, from Godwin to Kropotkin to Chomsky — have always understood this. Why can’t right-wing libertarians?

But, poor black neighborhoods also have to stop ACTING like a world apart. Police shoot unarmed people all over the place, it may be more common in poor, black neighborhoods, but it happens elsewhere. The riots? They don’t happen elsewhere.

We’re bashing the local police, and from what I can see, they’ve earned it.

But rioting is basically never a rational, or even moral, response to anything. The local 7-11 didn’t shoot Michael Brown. If the community had descended upon the local police station, and burnt it to the ground, I might have thought that excessive, certainly imprudent, but it would have been at least rational. Rioting was not.

We need to reform the police, absolutely. But let’s not avert our gaze from the other side of the problem: We need to reform the community, too. If there’s something wrong with the police, there’s something just as wrong with that community. And we can’t pretend that’s not so.

The local community’s culture is as broken as the police. Maybe more so.

Brett Bellmore @ 2

” but the root cause here seems to me to be that the police are becoming an occuping army. And I think this is not inadvertent…And I think this is not inadvertent… Polls show that the government is losing legitimacy, it has been for a long while. And without legitimacy, what have governments got except force?”

The word ‘government’ is doing a lot of work here. The poll you cite is one about the Federal government, not about the government of Ferguson. And what’s the connection between the Federal government’s fear of loss of legitimacy, and the antics of the police chief in Ferguson, an agent of the local government?

Btw (@5) it’s worth noting how often “scary clothes” (hoodies and the like) are cited as justification for treating young black men as suspicious.

Oh my god, a comment thread where Brett Bellmore is making sense! I may need medication. But, really, geo, is it necessary to quiz him on the entire catechism, to see if he’s converted?

So, just how many unarmed 18 year olds have to be shot in the back by the police before it’s OK for a community demands a change? How much police harassment are black people supposed to endure before it’s OK to protest? How many dead black men are you willing to overlook in your effort to believe that nothing is fundamentally wrong with America?

Perseverance, Bruce. Remember, according to Luke 15:7, “there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.”

I recommend the “Veterans on Ferguson” link (in the OP) to those here who think that the uniforms, gear, or tactics being employed in that Missouri town make any sense at all as an effective method of crowd control.

As for Ferguson, I had read that it is actually a low-crime town. Maybe that’s not accurate. But I would still note that towns can be gritty and struggling working-class and still be very decent places to live and full of very decent people, even by the most bourgeois standards. I would also note that drug dealers in Ferguson (and there must be some — this is America) are probably the least happy about all the disorder. It can’t be good for their business. In general, real criminals don’t like disorder of this kind because it interferes with their criminal enterprises.

Meredith @55:

Yes.

It’s not a “nice” neighborhood? And that explains/justifies police militarization there because – ?

geo @41, etc: The government is not an autonomous force that seeks to aggrandize itself indiscriminately

Sure it is. It’s just that it knows who its friends are and are not. The Federal government is a well-formed entity interested in its own interests, which are by no means identical with those of any other entity; eg, corporations are adversarial with respect to taxation and regulation. “Class” is a useful abstraction, but strictly speaking it isn’t the kind of thing that acts in a self-interested way … to speak that way is the fallacy of bad “group selection”. The militarization of local PDs is the distributed enforcement arm of the federal control function, enabled by cheap distribution of military gear by the DOD, the choice of laws to make and enforce, and so on. “Government” is bigger than the Feds surely, but whatever and wherever it’s about governing, that is control of the population. Basically, control for control’s sake. It’s been going on for so long (6ky or so) that people forget there are alternatives, but that’s just a failure of collective imagination.

… And what’s the connection between the Federal government’s fear of loss of legitimacy, and the antics of the police chief in Ferguson, an agent of the local government? …

The militarization of the police.

As the Welfare-state buyoff of the poor and working class is rescinded, there will be increasing difficulty in controlling them. Hence the police will be turned into an occupying army. Only a few weeks ago, one of ‘my’ legislators sent some mail around about how the Federal government was going to be sending local police forces money and equipment. We’re supposed to like it. ‘Government’ can be a mass noun, a kind of all-permeating substance. It’s not always just frozen, sculpted violence.

“As the Welfare-state buyoff of the poor and working class is rescinded, there will be increasing difficulty in controlling them.”

I wouldn’t press this particular line of reasoning, unless you want most people to become more, rather than less, sympathetic to the police. Most people do not need to be paid not to riot, and are not going to be favorably impressed by the suggestion that other people do so need to be paid.

mud man:
It’s just that it knows who its friends are and are not.

I’d put it a little differently: it knows who it can push around and who it can’t. Any government simply acts according to the balance of forces in the society at large. If the government of a country where control of production and employment is privately held and the owners are highly mobilized and class-conscious, while those without such control are poorly organized — in other words, in the contemporary United States — then when the interests of the two clash, it will accommodate the former. If the ownership class is sufficiently displeased — with the corporate income tax or anything else — it will abstain from investment, move production overseas, buy up media and initiate an ideological assault on government policy, and, of course, buy up the government at the next election. Non-owners, if unorganized, are not completely powerless, but they have very few comparable ways to influence government. Hence globalization, union-busting, the Great Risk Shift, unprogressive taxation, media concentration, etc. etc.

Basically, control for control’s sake.

This is about as cogent as the perennial conservative canard: people won’t cooperate; they’re selfish by nature. Arguments from human nature — in this case, an inherent drive for power (“control for control’s sake”) aren’t complete nonsense, but those who make them need to do a lot more work.

@Brett ‘Buy-off’ of reasonably livable circumstances, reasonably available jobs, reasonably affordable lives, social safety net in case of bad circumstances. We all need that kind of ‘buy-off’, because desperation will drive the civility of a person pretty damn quick. As it should – if your society is starving you, an expectation that you’ll keep quiet and polite is just another way to screw you over.

Young men do get killed elsewhere….like my town. You know what is different about my town and why there wasn’t a riot here? My town has a very active white voting population that is accustomed to being listened to. When the cops mistook a young (white) man from our community for a homeless person without advocates and killed him, three local council members were recalled for siding too much with the police and not asking for accountability.
Historically, the community in my town is used to being listened to, and if they are not listened to, they will vote out politicians.
I doubt very much that the folks in Ferguson are accustomed to being listened to by the authorities, or having a voice through traditional legal challenges.
Do I approve of rioting and looting? No. Can I see why someone would? Not from where I am standing, in my white suburban shoes. I also see a lot of people protesting in a peaceful fashion and getting tear gassed, though. We have the right to protest peacefully. We have the right to take photographs and video of police in public.

Also, people are talking down this particular neighborhood in Ferguson as a rough place based on how it looks and who lives there. Can we actually find some real statistics and numbers instead? What are the crime numbers actually like there, without redlining the place? I saw one story that said this was the first murder this year in that town…is that correct, or not? What are the actual facts?

Tonight the police in Ferguson look like everyday beat cops, and they are mingling with the demonstrators. Heavy trucks and assault rifles are nowhere to be seen. The sun is still up, the evening isn’t over, but things are much more peaceful than they were last night.

I think it was seeing pictures of the heavy armored police trucks in the streets after the Boston Marathon bombing that brought the issue of militarization of policing to my attention. Of course, nothing else about the two situations is comparable: the Marathon bombing was a serious crime and an act of terrorism that required a serious response. I’m merely noting that some of the photos of the police and SWAT teams in the Boston streets in the days after the Marathon bombing looked something more like an army than a traditional police force to me. Thus, though I hadn’t been following the roots of the issue in the transfer of surplus mil. equipment to police, I wasn’t too surprised by the ‘militarization’ issue here.

Here’s a link:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-174655/Helmets-berets-British-troops.html

Oops, I should be Not Dan Walker

@ geo #68: Arguments from human nature — in this case, an inherent drive for power

You misunderstand me: it’s not about human nature, but the nature of large organizations, which are thoroughly attuned to their own preservation or they wouldn’t have survived to get large. By the time an organization is as large as the federal government, humans are just the bricks. Humanism has nothing at all to do with it. “Balance of forces”, quite right.

Ain’t politics the shits?

For bob:

‘People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind — it’s Nazism, it will pass!”And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimised it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilisation in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.

Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being innconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not the crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the “coolies” of India, the “niggers” of Africa.’

-Aimé Césaire, ‘Discourse on Colonialism

LFC @76: As a citizen (not just resident — I do feel I am a citizen, finally, after more than 30 years here!) of Massachusetts, who had dear friends (including my daughter’s growing-up-and-still best friend and my confirmation-daughter, pregnant then with her first child, near the finish line when the bombs went off, eager to greet her husband on his way to that line — both of them doctors, devoted every single day to helping people and saving lives); who had a son (on only on his way to becoming a doctor then) and daughter-in-law (she from Iran, and she’s no stranger to a world of bombs), who were alerted to something strange in their apartment only a few blocks from the scene — helicopters overhead, police in the streets below — out of the blue…. Indeed, there may be uses for all this massive military shit, on occasion — when it’s used properly by well-trained people. (Not sure that was always the case in Boston on that day and the days afterward, but probably was, on the whole.)

Learned recently (from two lovely young men who grew up here, not from local newspaper accounts or anything general like that) that out here in the Berkshires, there’s a county-wide SWAT team that has — what? I have no idea what it has in the way of armored vehicles and weapons at its disposal. I was informed that the SWAT members train regularly. I hope so. That’s the real key. Training. I do wish more people would pay attention to the training involved both in using this massive equipment and, on the level of command, in deciding when and how to use it. But I do wonder. Yes, we could have a school besieged or some such, but how likely? Is a SWAT team really necessary in the Berkshires? (Or, at least, one equipped with — I don’t know what they’re equipped with!)

Anyway, I’ll end by noting my son-in-law’s visceral antipathy to a news story about Tsarnaev, more specifically, about some motion his lawyer had made on his behalf — my son-in-law grew up in a Boston suburb, where his parents and siblings still live, and he just can’t help it — and my daughter’s reminder to him: hey, I’ll be defending all kinds of people, including those who have done terrible things.

Life is complicated. But that’s okay, so long as people stay alert, work hard, train, imagine. But it does require lots of attention.

Apparently (1) the uniform worn by law enforcement/ gear-equipment deployed, and (2) their attitude towards members of the community make an enormous difference in how the latter reacts to tragedy. Since a MHP Captain who is a native of Ferguson took over directing security yesterday, tensions have defused and reconciliation between the two sides is underway.

This doesn’t lessen the personal tragedy for the young man’s family – or the families of so many other young men killed under similar circumstances – nor does it address the consequences of deploying/equipping local police departments as if they were soldiers under wartime conditions.

Perhaps the U.S. Conference of Mayors might call for a national commission to address this phenomenon – sort of like a 21st century Knapp Commission with the updated mission to investigate the militarization of local police departments across the U.S.

Meredith @84
Indeed, there may be uses for all this massive military shit, on occasion — when it’s used properly by well-trained people. (Not sure that was always the case in Boston on that day and the days afterward, but probably was, on the whole.)

That could be — I refrained from making a judgment in my comment about whether it was necessary/appropriate; I was just referring to how the pictures looked. (I can imagine how the event affected the city, and that’s one reason I didn’t want to make a judgment at a distance.)

Joshua W. Burton 08.14.14 at 5:14 pm

Another: “Remind us, what is the “scary clothes” argument and who is making it? (Is this about Halloween?)”

Joshua W. Burton (quoting): “Police deployed there wear uniforms and carry weapons that look more like . . . .”

You are right in a teeny tiny sense; the weapons *look* like military weapons, but that is because they *are* military weapons. The police have a large number of automatic weapons, with zero justification for 99% of them.[1]

[1] A SWAT *might* need a *few* automatic weapons, but that would be one for 10, 20 or 30 officers.

floopmeister @77
Thus the British (building on their experience of Northern Ireland) see the ideal urban policing model as soldiers in berets, walking along streets, while I seem to remember there was UK military criticism of the US patrolling model in Iraq of ‘in the Humvee wearing helmet and sunglasses’. Is this cultural?

As Ronan has already suggested, did the “US patrolling model” as you (floopmeister) describe it remain that way e.g. under Petraeus (who took over in Iraq in early ’07), or did he modify it somewhat? The Daily Mail article you linked has no visible date on it, so can’t tell when it was written and specifically whether it’s from pre-’07 or post-’07.

Did they really say that? It’s entirely a side issue from the topic, but … wow!

No, of course they didn’t say that. They would have said it, if their racism didn’t trump their enthusiasm, and reminding them of this afflicts the comfortable. (A homily omitted from the program is one that was not delivered.)

LFC and Ronan: I’m pretty sure that the US patrolling model in Iraq did change to be more sensitive (i.e. the UK ‘beret’ approach) but like Ronan suggested it seems to have been because the whole approach to the situation (the ‘politics’, again as Ronan suggested) changed.

It occurs to me that I needed to be clearer with my ‘is it cultural?’ question. I wasn’t specifically meaning the US vs the UK (i.e. UK good, US bad) – but instead questioning whether it’s a mindset (culture) which sees the primary concern of policing in a situation as is happening in Ferguson to be crowd control and force protection rather than broader community concerns and long-term rebuilding. In that sense it’s pretty similar to the point around ‘serve and protect’ that others have made, or Ronan’s point about timeframes – is it force and property protection (putting a lid on it all) or thinking about the longer scale ‘nation building’ aspects?

They didn’t say it, because they didn’t have any motive to pretend that Trayvon Martin wasn’t the aggressor in that situation, and properly killed in self defense.

Interesting. Entirely apart from the question whether he was “the aggressor” (*which I think cannot be determined now though it is at least possible), if he had been armed I would estimate there would be at least a 50% chance he would have survived. Maybe more than 50%.

When other people have guns, it really makes sense to have a gun yourself. And shoot first.

Ronan: The US is not an authoritarian country.

97: It is “interesting” how the mood of the community changed when the appearance of the police changed from that of an occupying army.

Might I suggest that the measure of an “authoritarian country” not be the orders from the top or who/what is giving the orders or how the orders are enforced…

…but rather should be observed at the bottom as to the degree to which the populace obeys?

So that a perfectly authoritarian country would not be one with a brutal and brutalizing internal security system but a country that barely needed a police force at all, or could afford to have their police disarmed, gentled, supportive and guiding? The most authoritarian country would be the one with the least amount of crime?

Hilarious @35: Many police officers never fire a gun, apart from range practice, in their careers. Yes, this country is awash in guns but this does not translate into police being involved in gun battles with criminals with regularity. Most shots fired involve domestic violence suspects refusing to leave a residence and surrender.

Yes, yet officers might wish to be prepared for the very unlikely contingency in which they are involved in a gunfight. That is why your co-counsel’s father likely carries 2-3 magazines. That this officer carried an additional one or two doesn’t strike me as terribly significant.

Sixty-plus rounds of ammo exceeds anything any suburban cop will ever need. It’s an indicator of a mind set, equating a low-crime beat with combat in Iraq.

30-45 rounds is also probably more than any cop will ever need, but that’s not an uncommon amount. These are low-cost (they don’t weigh much) preparations for low-probability, high-impact contingencies. The mindset this falls into is that of anyone whose job involves being ready for emergencies, including those which are unlikely. He may well think that the line between the unlikely situation requiring two magazines and that requiring three or four is slim – chronologically it might be the difference between a gunfight lasting 30 seconds and lasting 50 seconds.

BTW, the ‘stand your ground’ has been repeatedly implemented in a way which is better described as ‘stand your ground, white man’. Trayvon would be on death row if he had had a gun and defended himself.

He may well think that the line between the unlikely situation requiring two magazines and that requiring three or four is slim – chronologically it might be the difference between a gunfight lasting 30 seconds and lasting 50 seconds.

He should also carry a really good first-aid kit.

Because if he gets into a situation where he needs to re-load 3 times before he can get more ammo, he will almost certainly be a casualty.

“BTW, the ‘stand your ground’ has been repeatedly implemented in a way which is better described as ‘stand your ground, white man’. ”

Oh, really?

That’s what we call “epistemic closure”. You can’t change your mind, because you’ll only take information from people you already agree with.

The original source of the information was the Tampa Bay Times. They have a nice display of the data there.

Assuming you actually have any interest in data that might contradict your predjudices.

You’re a brain-dead right-wing troll. I will no longer respond to, or even read your comments. I would recommend this as a policy to the other commenters. FOAD.

#104: “The mindset this falls into is that of anyone whose job involves being ready for emergencies, including those which are unlikely.”

So how many cops carry first aid kits? Which is a far more likely emergency situation for any cop. Or are we defining emergency in a sexy macho way here, rather than helping the public with more mundane problems.

#115

Brett your numbers do work out. But they might not mean what you think they do.

Why do blacks shoot each other so much more than they shoot whites or whites shoot whites? It might be that blacks feel the legal system will not work for them when they need to sue each other. (Or whites too, of course.) So, lacking laws, they are more likely to try to settle things by force.

And if they then face murder charges when they have an altercation and one of them gets killed, what if the courts are more likely to allow a “stand your ground” defense because they don’t mind blacks killing blacks? If a jury believes that the killer was trash and the victim was trash so just forget it, let him go kill somebody else like himself, better for society that way….

Nationwide, in 2011 blacks were more than 5 times as likely to kill other blacks as they were whites. This could be because most of their dealings were with other blacks, or because they could get away with violence against blacks but not against whites, or maybe partly because they might get framed for crimes more often.

Meanwhile whites were more than 13 times as likely to kill other whites as blacks. This could be because most of their dealings were with whites, or because they had other ways to intimidate blacks, or maybe partly because they tended not to get prosecuted for killing blacks.

Whites who kill blacks are much more likely to get a successful stand-your-ground defense than whites who kill whites, who usually do better than blacks who kill blacks, who of course do better than blacks who kill whites. One possible interpretation is that whites mostly kill blacks when they are obviously justified so of course they don’t get punished as much. Another possible interpretation is that the system is biased against blacks. I don’t see how to choose between those just from the numbers.

If blacks commit murder at a much higher rate than whites, and comprise a smaller percentage of the population, then you would logically expect a much higher percentage of black/white deadly altercations to involve a white victim and a black perpetrator, than the other way around.

That would be true if blacks killed people at random. As it is, white-victim/black-perp is not nearly as high as you would expect.

If blacks killed people at random seven times as often each than whites killed at random, and the killing was all random, and when both were armed sometimes the victim managed to win, then it would make sense that when a white killed a black it was much more likely to be self-defense than when a black killed a white.

whites murder blacks: .78*.17*x = .1326x
whites murder whites: .78*.78*x = .6084x
blacks murder blacks: .17*.17*7*x = .2023x
blacks murder whites: .17*.78*7*x = .9282x

Without knowing anything about the details we could figure it was 7 times as likely that the black was the aggressor than the white, whichever one wound up dead.

But if whites in fact kill blacks disproportionately, more than they kill other whites, then the numbers change. The published numbers go the other direction but that could be because of racism, murders of blacks that do not get counted, or are left unsolved, or that a black is convicted of.

And so when you claim that these numbers prove your assumptions, you must rely on your assumptions to interpret them in ways that support your assumptions.

You’re a brain-dead right-wing troll. I will no longer respond to, or even read your comments. I would recommend this as a policy to the other commenters. FOAD.

The brain-dead right-wing troll shot! He scored! The brain-dead right-wing troll has won another round!

Why did you choose to give him the satisfaction?

…from http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/editorials/the-nine-commandments-of-policing-and-how-ferguson-police-forgot-them/article20076106/

Robert Peel’s Nine Principles of Policing

1. To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.

2. To recognize always that the power of the police to fulfill their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.

3. To recognize always that to secure and maintain the respect and approval of the public means also the securing of the willing co-operation of the public in the task of securing observance of laws.

4. To recognize always that the extent to which the co-operation of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives.

5. To seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws, by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of the public without regard to their wealth or social standing, by ready exercise of courtesy and friendly good humour, and by ready offering of individual sacrifice in protecting and preserving life.

6. To use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient to obtain public co-operation to an extent necessary to secure observance of law or to restore order, and to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective.

7. To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.

8. To recognize always the need for strict adherence to police-executive functions, and to refrain from even seeming to usurp the powers of the judiciary of avenging individuals or the state, and of authoritatively judging guilt and punishing the guilty.

9. To recognize always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.

J, I don’t think my numbers prove anything, particularly, beyond that, if you want to demonstrate injustice, you need to look at particulars, not aggregate numbers.

The disparity in Stand your ground numbers could demonstrate injustice, or not, depending on the underlying facts. You have to make assumptions beyond the numbers to conclude that they prove injustice, OR justice. Justice is in the details, not the numbers, you can’t see it from orbit.

I’ve simply demonstrated that the numbers are, in fact, facially consistent with Stand your ground not operating in a racist manner. Contrary to Barry’s assertion.

I’m quite content with a lot of blacks getting off on Stand your ground basis. The murder rate among blacks is extraordinarilly high, which means that a lot of blacks are ending up in circumstances where self defense is perfectly justified. And self defense is a human right, blacks have as much right to it as anyone.

No, I have to base the argument on crime statistics. Perhaps you will assert that the crime statistics are a result of racist enforcement and racist witnesses, that it’s racism all the way down to the surveillance cameras, but I say, if that’s your argument, racism isn’t a conclusion on your part, it’s a premise.

Blacks, on average, are a lot more likely to commit murder than whites, on average. This tells you precisely nothing about any particular black or white you meet, but if you’re arguing statistics, you have to work with the statistics, and that’s what they say.

Brett Bellmore @ 115

It’s hard to see why you draw the conclusions you do about race & stand your ground, given this data.

“Eleven white on black Stand your ground cases. 1 convicted, 6 justified, 4 pending.
Ten black on white Stand your ground cases. 3 convicted, 4 justified, 3 pending.”

In other words, in cases of whites shooting blacks, whites are acquitted by SYG 87% of the time; while in cases of blacks shooting whites, blacks are acquitted by SYG just 57% of the time. Put another way, whites are 3 times more likely to win when they’ve shot blacks as are blacks when they’ve shot whites. Hardly color blind, is it?

“But he has an explanation for that.”

An explanation which is irrelevant to the data subset he highlighted. Once whites shoot blacks, they’re 3 times as likely to benefit from SYG as are blacks who shoot whites. No matter how more or less likely one group is to shoot anyone.

“The point is, you don’t know whether the statistics represent justice or injustice, racism or impartiality, unless you undertake a detailed examination of individual cases.”

Why offer the data, if you think it’s meaningless?

You have to make some seriously contested assumptions in order to decide that the crude statistics represent injustice and racism.

It depends on the statistic we’re talking about Take the divergence between black and white income and wealth. There are two possible explanations for this: either blacks are poorer because of past and/or present racism or blacks are lazier people. So the statistics force you to either admit that racism is real, or to be a racist yourself. (The “contested assumptions” in this case would be that racist beliefs are false.)

The statistics on justifiable homicides aren’t quite that simple. I think, nationally, while the vast majority of homicides are intra-racial, there are about twice as many black-on-white as white-on-black homicides. So it’s not crazy to think that a higher proportion of white-on-black homicides will end up being legitimately justifiable than black-on-white.

However, I don’t see anything that could explain the scale of the discrepancy Plume linked to @113. Eleven to one?

Thanks, J Thomas, but I am not asking you this question.

However, I don’t see anything that could explain the scale of the discrepancy Plume linked to @113. Eleven to one?

The cases in which blacks kill whites may be very different from the cases in which whites kill blacks. Roman doesn’t seem to have even looked at how frequently a claim of self-defense was made in each of these situations.

Right. The evidence Brett presented isn’t strong enough to justify much of a change in belief, so you should believe more or less whatever you believed before.

I think, nationally, while the vast majority of homicides are intra-racial, there are about twice as many black-on-white as white-on-black homicides. So it’s not crazy to think that a higher proportion of white-on-black homicides will end up being legitimately justifiable than black-on-white.

However, I don’t see anything that could explain the scale of the discrepancy Plume linked to @113. Eleven to one?

It takes a racist argument, but I’ll sketch out how one could go.

Imagine that you are carrying a gun because you believe it will help you protect yourself. A couple of big black guys threaten you for some unknown reason. Your wallet, maybe? I dunno why they threaten you, let’s leave that part out. They threaten you and you quick, like you were trained, pull your gun out of your concealed holster and try to defend yourself. If you kill at least one of them, it’s a white on black murder trial assuming it goes to court. If they kill you, it’s a black on white murder trial. Ahead of time you thought your gun would protect you. But what are the real odds? They didn’t threaten you expecting to get killed, they probably knew what they were doing and were ready to stop you quick if you acted up. So is your chance really better than, say, one in three?

So if it’s 2 black-on-white killings for every white-on-black killing, that’s compatible with it being *all* blacks attacking whites and *no* whites attacking blacks. If whites in truth never attack blacks, then wouldn’t an 11:1 ratio make sense? If every single white-on-black killing is really self-defense, is it so unreasonable that 22% of them would be ruled self-defense by the courts?

Try it a different way. What result would we get if we assumed that the court rulings were correct?

For both black-on-black killings and white-on-white, the courts rule about 4% of them justified. If the courts are right, that implies that if you set out to kill somebody, it’s 24 times as likely that you will kill them than that they will kill you. (But there’s a chance they will get away without killing you, possibly leaving you with an attempted murder charge.)

We assume the courts are correct that 22% of whites who killed blacks were self-defense. Then 78% of whites who killed blacks were murderers. And nearly 9% of the time that blacks tried to kill whites, the whites killed the blacks instead. Maybe the courts are more than twice as likely to call the whites justified because of racism? Or possibly whites are just better at self-defense?

Assuming 4% or 9% of blacks attacked by whites killed the whites in self-defense, we get an insignificant fraction of blacks accused of murder getting it ruled justified. It all fits together except the 8+% of white-on-black self-defense.

However, if 10% of the black-on-black murders were really white-on-black murders where a black man was arrested instead, then none of this fits together after all. Or if there were 250 white-on-black murders a year nationwide that did not get reported to the people who compiled the statistics.

Like the Martin/Zimmerman thing. If Zimmerman had not been arrested, would it have counted as murder? Justifiable homicide? Would it have been counted at all?

Let me add this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/15/world/europe/amsterdam-black-pete-zwarte-piet-verdict.html?_r=0

I mean, really. I am one of those (many! what — some 40% of the “white” US population?) WASP’s whose ancestors (as known and imagined as such — let’s not get into the fact that most US black people share my 1630’s, 1700’s biological ancestry, in one way or another) came in the 1630’s (sometimes after some time in Amsterdam) — along with a few stragglers, who came in the early 1700’s (those mostly my southern side(s)). (I’ve only recently been learning about them all from way back when — I am so WASP that no one in my family ever thought it a big deal that, yeah, everyone came from “way back” and didn’t worry about details. Now I am learning — really interesting! Who knew, for instance, that some 1690’s Charlestown rigger helped lead to me?) Even so (as I try to imagine their worlds, feel for their challenges), even I get this — it ain’t the same for whites and blacks. A little American history is in order. And colonial(ist) history. It’s really not rocket science. People can absorb this history, critically and thoughtfully. Read. Listen. Learn.

Ta-Nehisi provides some excellent bibliography in recent posts. Or try, say, Jill Lepore. (Start with The Name of War. As Coates himself is happily open to considering, the Indians have as strong a claim, at least, as African Americans.)

“It is a racist claim but to tell whether it’s true we would need to find out how often the courts reach the correct conclusion.”

Really, J, I’d like to know your definition of “racist”. Isn’t there an unavoidable component of irrationality in “racism”, which precludes true beliefs rationally applied being “racist”?

My definition of racist talk, is talk that says one race is better than another in any way that people care about. If we say that blacks in the USA kill more than whites in the USA do, that’s racist. But if the statistics are correct, it’s a racist true fact.

Also blacks in the USA get killed a lot more. The statistics say they kill each other a lot more, and if the statistics are wrong — for example if police kill well over a thousand blacks a year and blame it on other blacks — that would be really hardcore racism. I’m not at all ready to claim that happens, and also while my instinct is to disbelieve it, I’m not going to rule it out at this point.

Oh, and, “But in that case around half of the black-on-black murders should get off, if we assume that the original attacker wins about half the time.”

To be clear, the SYG statistics are for people who make a legal SYG claim. A lot more whites do this than blacks.

I didn’t notice that statistic! A lot more whites than blacks try to claim SYG? That would make a difference.

Perhaps this is because blacks assume that SYG is administered in a racist way, and don’t bother to mount a SYG defense? While whites do not assume that the system is rigged against them, and so go ahead and use it.

Maybe more blacks have trouble getting a fancy lawyer.

You can really hurt yourself by assuming up front that you haven’t got a chance. Perhaps blacks are suffering from self-fulfilling assumptions of racism.

Somehow it’s easier for poor people to think they haven’t got a chance than rich people. Funny how that goes….

In general, it seems like poor people are far more likely to lose murder trials than rich people. Even rich black people. But then, they are also far more likely to be arrested for murder than rich people. Come to think of it, isn’t it reasonable that rich people would commit fewer murders? When you have money you can pay people to kill for you, and not get caught murdering people with your own hands even if the killer is caught.

Maybe poor blacks are suffering from self-fulfilling assumptions of poverty. If they just *believed* they weren’t poor….

Because the police ARE “civilians”, at least in theory. They’re just paid to do what everybody has a legal right to do. Yes, you actually do have a legal right to arrest people. The difference is, if you make a mistake, you’re screwed, if the cop makes a mistake, he has immunity.

Maybe we should take that immunity away…

There’s something to that. I can imagine problems.

A black policeman once explained to me that when you join the police you lose the right to go to prison. Regular people can commit crimes and go to prison and after it’s over they pick up their lives again. But if a policeman goes to prison he can’t expect to get out of it alive at all. The other inmates are likely to kill him before the first month is up.

If policemen were likely to go to prison for their mistakes, how many people would be willing to do that job?

BTW, one way of getting a raw estimate is to see who gets away with what. As pointed out by many, the Bundys wpuld have been put in jail long before their forurth losse in court, for non-payment of rent. And the police would have responded with true military levels of force, if people had gathered in armed defense (or rather, offense) of a black family facing arrest.

Brett: “Because the police ARE “civilians”, at least in theory. They’re just paid to do what everybody has a legal right to do. Yes, you actually do have a legal right to arrest people. The difference is, if you make a mistake, you’re screwed, if the cop makes a mistake, he has immunity.”

One out of 100 times, he says something good.

When challenged about what the data shows, you say the data isn’t dispositive, that one must look at the facts in every case.

Note that it’s very hard to come to any conclusion about systemic effects if you’re compelled to look at each case in isolation. Some might find even making this sort of request evidence of bad faith.

@ J Thomas

Less is more.

Social systems are organisms as well as mechanisms. They grow, move, metabolize, evolve. At times they may even exhibit a kind of low intelligence.

Murder is not an observational category. The SYG trials come at the end of a criminal justice process involving a lot of discretion first by police and second by prosecutors. In many cases, the SYG defence is surely mounted successfully in the police station, and there’s no prosecution. In others, the cops don’t buy the SYG story and send the case on to the prosecutors. US criminal justice would collapse without extensive plea bargaining, which is unlikely to be colour-blind. (Assume a non-racist but 100% careerist prosecutor considering a plea bargain with two perps, in similar circumstances apart from race. She may think the black perp is more likely to be convicted at trial, so offers a worse bargain than to the white perp, so the black is more likely to go to trial). A proper analysis would start with non-domestic gunshot homicides and then look at the chances of standing trial, the frequency of SYG defences within the trial, and only finally the success of the defence.

J. Thomas: you’re a nice fella and all, I am sure, but you do tend to go on a bit.

Ah! That’s probably what Layman’s #152 was about. It came right after my #151 which was short, and I wondered what he meant.

Thank you.

Statistical arguments are just sound bites unless you pin down what the numbers are actually connected to, and the background assumptions you make about them. Often that can’t be done in a few words. Sometimes it can be done but it’s a whole lot of work.

James Wimberley’s #156 is very good! He points out that sometimes the police do not pass information along to the DA, and then the statistics are not compiled. And sometimes the DA chooses not to prosecute, and also then the statistics are not compiled. Etc. There is room for racism in those steps, and also it gives us an explanation why the self-defense argument usually fails — if the DA thought it would succeed he probably wouldn’t take the case to trial.

So my idea that we can use the published statistics to estimate the frequency of actual successful self-defense falls apart.

Andre F – and the evidence for shots fired at police and all the other nastiness being? At the moment it looks exactly like you are taking the police authorities word for the situation, as well as believing, against the testimony from people who have trained in riot control, that turning out tooled up to take on Saddam Hussein is a good and sensible riot response.

“Note that it’s very hard to come to any conclusion about systemic effects if you’re compelled to look at each case in isolation. Some might find even making this sort of request evidence of bad faith.”

Or to put it more bluntly, if all you look at are race and conviction rates, you are pretty much forced to conclude that race explains conviction rates.

Well, no. If you find a strong correlation then it shows that there is something that connects them, but it doesn’t show what that is.

If you look at whether the people actually did what they were convicted of, you might conclude that conviction rates are driven by guilt. Or might not, if race is the real explanation.

So maybe blacks get convicted more because they do more crimes. Or maybe they get convicted more because racists convict them more.

Or if poor people do more crimes, and more blacks are poor, that would explain it. There are lots of possible explanations.

If you don’t look at whether they were really guilty, how can you conclude they weren’t properly convicted?

How do you decide whether they were really guilty? You can look at all the evidence the court looked at, assuming it’s all available. And look at all the comparable evidence in cases against whites where the whites got let off. Fifty of each, randomly chosen ought to be enough.

Also you should look at a sampling of people who pled guilty of lesser crimes that might have been plea bargains, and look at all the evidence to guess whether they were really plea bargains and check whether more whites got plea-bargained to lesser sentences. Fifty each of those might be enough too, randomly chosen. Also look at the numbers to decide whether they’re comparable.

Then you should look at a sampling of the people who were accused of murders etc who didn’t go to trial at all. Like Zimmerman almost didn’t. Look at all the evidence the police had on them, and decide whether the police did the right thing not taking it further. Fifty whites and fifty blacks, and again check whether the numbers of each make sense.

After you do that, then come back here and report your results. It could be like:

“I have looked at a lot of cases and I have determined by the evidence and my own cogitation that the courts were influenced by a significant amount of racism.”

Or “I have looked at a lot of cases and I have determined by the evidence and my own cogitation that the courts mostly got the right results.”

See how impressed we are by that.

On the whole, I think I am with Brett Bellmore on the epistemology. J Thomas’s points just reinforce my sense that one would have to immerse one’s self in the cases, to deal with the complexity fairly and objectively. One might summarize that research with statistics, but without doing the detailed investigation, there simply is not enough information in the statistics alone to reliably discover any information worth discovering. To use the statistical approach because one did not want to get bogged down by details is not a valid excuse.

Brett: Why is it a good idea to limit the firearms that can be privately purchased? If you can answer this question, you can answer your own. You need to explain why the rationale for limiting private purchase of firearms doesn’t apply to cops, why the utility of the arms you want the cops to have doesn’t imply utility to non-cops.

Brett, you made a particular and positive claim. You asserted that it is best if police officers have access only to whatever set of weapons can be purchased for private use. What is your reasoning for that conclusion, or were you merely posing it as a policy possibility, without endorsement?

Bruce, yes, verified. As in photographs of persons attempting to light them and in the act of throwing them.

I noted the gunshots at police as simply “reported” because that’s all I’ve seen: reports. I have not read an article in which the journalist claimed to have witnessed someone shooting at police, nor have I read an article in which the journalist stated what the evidence might be for concluding that someone was shooting at police. So for me, at least, these remain unconfirmed reports.

“I noted the gunshots at police as simply “reported” because that’s all I’ve seen: reports.”

I’ve seen no reports of gunshots fired at police. I know one local journalist claimed on twitter that he heard gunshots fired, but later admitted they might have been fireworks as reported by lots of other tweets. And gunshots are largely things you hear, not things you see, so I don’t know how to account for claims that one heard gunshots fired *at* anything. If one hears bangs (reports) in a crowd, or in a riot if you prefer, how can one know specifically it is gunshots (not something else) fired at police (not by police)? By the sound?

Bruce, see my post @31 for links to photographs. They are unmistakeable.

As to Fox News, I have no idea what they’re showing, as I don’t find them worth the time.

Layman, here’s another:

https://twitter.com/PDPJ/status/499754224134012928/photo/1

and another:

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/molotov-ferguson.jpg

“I don’t really understand the purpose of disputing these.”

‘Disputing’ is not the right word. I’ve simply not yet seen a single photo which shows either an ignited Molotov cocktail being thrown, or the resulting burst of flame resulting from the impact of one. The one photo rebroadcast everywhere turned out to be of a protestor throwing back a police munition, likely a smoke or tear gas grenade. The photos you’re offering now may be an attempt to light a molotov, but if so it’s the worst molotov ever constructed.

To be fair, the events would probably have been better documented if the police hadn’t been attacking reporters. Which IS pretty well documented. But this is life, not, a movie, there aren’t cameras at every angle, and retakes if you miss filming something.

The police need to be equipped with cameras and microphones recording everything around them while on duty, with averse legal presumptions if they ‘malfunction’.

“But this is life, not, a movie, there aren’t cameras at every angle, and retakes if you miss filming something.”

I just find it odd that there are many photos, even videos of police using munitions – tear gass, smoke bombs, etc – yet there are apparently no photos of protestors with ignited molotovs, no photos of ignited molotovs in flight or bursting, no reports of any burn injuries to police officers, or damage to vehicles, caused by molotovs.

“Perhaps now that the local police have decided to violate the DOJ’s embargo, we’ll learn more of what was actually going on.”

Do you think the DOJ is preventing the local police from releasing any information about the actual shooting, or do you think the decision to release information which tars the shooting victim while withholding information about the shooter was entirely a local one…?

Fireproof suits as the remedy, eh guthrie? Not bad – that one actually made me laugh.

Layman, so if I understand you correctly, if elements in the crowd only create and hurl poorly constructed Molotov cocktails, then the police officers confronting them need not be concerned about more effectively constructed Molotov cocktails or other attempts to maim and kill police officers? That’s so absurd that I’m sure I’m misreading you.

Let’s say instead that you wish to be prepared for, and perhaps deter, any such individuals, who have already displayed a willingness to create and launch firebombs against police officers from the middle of a crowd of protesters, from making additional attempts or from returning with rifles (something not difficult to acquire in Missouri). Deploying a SWAT team, and prominently displaying a sniper (and there’s little doubt that “display” was part of why he was positioned in so exposed a manner), may or may not be your choice, but it’s well within the bounds of reason.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-23344883

“When the instruction comes through, officers first put on a layer of flame-retardant cotton clothing from neck to feet, then blue overalls and then heavy duty plastic padding, covering every exposed area, and then military-style boots.”

I get that if someone is preparing to throw a bomb, shooting them dead is perfectly reasonable and legal from a self defense perspective. But for riot control tactics, it might be best in the long run not to inflame the crowd.

That said, to be fair Ferguson PD did actually follow the PSNI method of rubber bullets, rather that live fire, in response to molotovs but people are complaining about that.

#189

I don’t know why people are so on about Molotov cocktails. Shooting Michael Brown, riding around in military uniforms with automatic weapons threatening people, beating up and arresting reporters, and lying, are acts of war, and war can be expected in response.

Isn’t this a traditional tactic?

You kill some people, the survivors protest so you kill some of them, they protest some more so you announce that they have started attacking you so you have to kill them in self-defense.

Cf Gaza.

Again, we really need to require police to wear cameras. It seems to work very well in the communities that have tried it.

Who knows, might work for politicians, too…

Why stop at police and politicians? Why not all government employees?

And also all government contractors.

Anyone else? Oh! Lobbyists.

And set the cameras to turn on after hours whenever two politicians or a politician and a lobbyist etc are in the same room. Otherwise they’ll do almost all of their business after hours and it interferes with their sleep.

Not that it matters, but being shot in front corresponds with the account of a witness who said that Michael Brown was shot after stopping, turning around, and raising his hands.

> there’s no good reason for the resistance

Well, no. So they must be doing it for bad reasons, yes?

Which means… how should you trust their claims, given that they’ve refused the measures that would let these claims be validated?

I only trust their claims insofar as they provide evidence consistent with them. While police resistance to video clearly indicates they have something to hide, this doesn’t imply that they have something to hide in every single individual case. It’s quite consistent with most police interactions being legitimate.

“Where are those witness reports?”

For what it’s worth, here.

“And when the shooting stopped, Johnson and his legal team have told investigators, the police officer who pulled the trigger did nothing to save the man he’d just shot. “The officer doesn’t attempt to resuscitate,” Johnson’s attorney, former St. Louis mayor Freeman Bosley Jr., said in an interview Saturday. “He does not call for medical help. The officer didn’t call it in that someone had been shot.””

It is a bit unclear to me why you’d bother trying to resuscitate somebody who was that shot up. Aren’t you at some point permitted to notice the person is dead?

““The officer chases Big Mike. He fires a shot and hits Big Mike in the back. ”

And the autopsy shows he was not hit in the back. So much for that witness’ testimony.

I want a system in place where we don’t NEED testimony. I want cameras. Sometimes they’ll show things the police would rather weren’t seen. (Though evidence is, with cameras rolling, the police are better behaved.) Sometimes they’re going to show that the police are in the right.

But either way, they’ll show what happened. Not what interested parties what people to THINK happened.

I don’t think delicate questions about the position of Mr. Brown’s arms are going to make much difference to anyone. The police story (hulking Black criminal assaults innocent police who are just doing their job) was constructed and works for White racists; they will continue to believe it no matter what further evidence is presented, because it accords with their view of the world. The Black objects of their fear and dislike, having long experience in such matters, will not believe anything the authorities say, especially that an unarmed Black teenager was charging a police officer who had started shooting at him. The higher authorities will huff and puff, but their beliefs prevent them from doing anything. There is more to worry about here than fixing the evidence.

The Democratic Party shot Mr. Brown?

I don’t think either party proactively seeks bad race relations. But both will exploit them to their own advantage. That said, it is the Republicans who need this more than the Dems. The Republicans are truly demographically challenged, and have become almost exclusively white, and white in the “get off my lawn” form. If GOP leadership can not pump up its base with the idea that it is threatened by the Other, then it really has no chance. Hate radio plays that persecution/unifying tune 24/7, from Limbaugh to Coulter, etc. etc. It’s really all they have now.

The real winners in this are plutocrats and oligarchs, the folks pulling the strings for both parties. They benefit from class warfare between the lower and middle classes, as well as racial enmity. It keeps people distracted from the real threat: them. Plutocrats and oligarchs.

Layman. I gotta say I get the sense you’re being a bit of ass and just denying stuff to be difficult, rather than doing 5 secs googling and admitting the obvious. Are you on board with the gunshots and molotovs, yet? The witness accounts are below:

http://theconservativetreehouse.com/2014/08/15/exceptional-catch-the-jj-witness-video-eye-witness-audio-of-mike-brown-shooting-sharing-brown-doubled-back-toward-police/

“Not that it matters, but being shot in front corresponds with the account of a witness who said that Michael Brown was shot after stopping, turning around, and raising his hands.”

Eyewitnesses get stuff wrong, because they’re stressed, have a limited viewpoint, and reconstruct their memories. So I don’t approve of the gloating. But he wasn’t shot in the back. The first four shots were to his arm, and he wasn’t shot with his arm raised.

Abbe: I get that if someone is preparing to throw a bomb, shooting them dead is perfectly reasonable and legal from a self defense perspective. But for riot control tactics, it might be best in the long run not to inflame the crowd.

That’s a perfectly fair point, but it’s incredibly difficult to make that kind of judgment from afar. It’s also the case that having at least one overwatch team, with lethal capabilities, is probably standard operating procedure for any crowd control force faced with the real possibility of a violent riot or mob.

Difficult to judge from afar unless, of course, you’re being quoted in a Washington Post article. Then it’s perfectly okay to make similar judgments on the basis of a few photographs. I thought that The Washington Post article I have in mind, headlined as showing what veterans think about Ferguson, and instead featuring a few quotes from a couple of Iraq vets who looked at a few photographs, was as absurd as it was typical of the horrendously poor media coverage of Ferguson.

@guthrie: reading through the entire article, I’d note that it specifically quotes law enforcement officials from other nations, such as the Netherlands, who said that they would respond to “petrol bombs” with lethal force. I’d also note that non-lethal rounds, depending on their type, can be fatal if aimed effectively to that purpose. So I wouldn’t necessarily draw the conclusion that the police force you’re describing wouldn’t use lethal force against someone hurling bombs at them.

@Layman: I think you’ll find that in the events in Ferguson, the use of militarized police forces…predates any claim…of the use by rioters of Molotov cocktails. Thus the latter, true or not, is not the cause of the former.

Could be. The particular photographs I saw were of a deployment following, but sure, they may have been deployed before. And one of the reasons would be a concern that certain elements may show up and use the protest as an occasion for lethal violence. Which is precisely what they did.

As to your inference of cause – that seeing a SWAT team deployed causes someone to construct a bomb in an attempt to burn to death, or severely wound, police officers – let’s just say that I’m impressed with the audacity of your reasoning. The equipment of the officers no more caused Molotov cocktails to thrown than they caused looting of liquor stores.

To say nothing of your claim about gunshots fired ‘at police’.

I wrote “reported gunshots at police” and noted explicitly that I described them as reported because I did not read any articles describing the evidence for them.

@Anarcissie: I don’t know why people are so on about Molotov cocktails. Shooting Michael Brown, riding around in military uniforms with automatic weapons threatening people, beating up and arresting reporters, and lying, are acts of war, and war can be expected in response.

“military uniforms” – police wore uniforms clearly identifying them as police.

“automatic weapons” – doubtful

“threatening people” – “Disperse or you will be arrested.” Yeah, definitely an act of war. Go grab your bow and arrows, Rambo.

“shooting Michael Brown” – we have no idea whether it was a justified or unjustified shooting.

“war” – not war, just thuggish acts hijacking what could have been a peaceful protest, which acts involving aggravated assault, attempted murder of law enforcement officers, maybe (this could be a stretch) acts of terrorism, rioting, looting, vandalism, burglary, etc.

If it turns out that the officer who shot Brown committed an unmitigated act of murder, then I’d be in favor of the death penalty. But the hand-wringing over police showing up to face a crowd they clearly judged to contain violent elements geared up for that possibility is just silly.

“The evidence shows the police fired on the demonstrators using tear gas, smoke grenades, rubber bullets, and baton rounds before there was any credible evidence, or even a claim, of molotovs or gunshots.”

The below link evidences gunshots TWO HOURS after the initial shooting.

http://www.ksdk.com/story/news/local/2014/08/09/police-shooting-ferguson/13832083/

Brett Bellmore 08.18.14 at 10:06 am:

Well, now we have autopsy results, six shots, all hitting the front of his body. Seems a trifle excessive to me, but at least it does confirm witness reports that he was shot while charging the police. He certainly wasn’t shot while running away from them.

A witness report[s?] available on an epistemic-closure-oriented website. I recall the early news reports saying that Brown had his hands up and he was backing away from police. Now, the epistemic-closure Reactionary Right has turned this into a claim that he was running away when shot? Is that what they’re attempting to refute?

The comments at that linked article are enlightening, entertaining and horrifying. (We learn that Brown was a thug, a punk, a hoodlum, blacks are the ones who are racist – and abuse their voting rights, that our President and Attorney General belong in prison. That was from one comment which had 2,936 likes when I looked.)

The video appears to have spread to other sites, as evidenced by the link from Abbe Faria 08.18.14 at 7:07 pm. But Abbe, after charging Layman with being an ass, doubles back and points out that eyewitnesses get stuff wrong.

The police probably want to interview that person who is alleged to be overheard on that video. It would improve their political position greatly.

“The police went into combat mode following acts of vandalism and looting which occurred on the night of the 10th. The issue, ISTM, is that combat response became their default reaction to all acts of protest from that point on.”

The best timeline’s here: http://www.vox.com/2014/8/11/5988925/mike-brown-killing-shooting-case-ferguson-police-riots-st-louis

The combat response was not the default reaction from the 10th. The 12th for instance was notably peaceful, except for a shooting in response to a gang armed with shotguns and pistols. It’s on the 13th that there’s the full on military response and the militarisation pictures hit the media.

The police (and I’m defending policy, not condoning specific acts of abuse) gradually escalated. Uniformed officers policed peaceful protest at police hq on the 9th. SWAT used teargas in response to looting, rioting and arson on the 10th (with 20 police cars damaged). Riot gear and rubber bullets were broken out when further looting happened on the 11th. On the 12th armored vehicles were used. The full on militarisation on the 13th only occured after confrontation with an armed gang the previous night.

Abbé Faria @ 216

It is a good timeline, and it corroborates my point. Here’s their recap of the events of the 11th, when police first denied the right to peaceably assemble, met protestors tricked out in riot gear, and began using tear gas:

“Continued protests — and police dispersals — on Monday, August 11

— After Sunday night’s unrest, a protest and rally scheduled for 10 a.m. Monday morning was canceled, and the mayor of Ferguson said that anyone who attempted to show up to the rally would be arrested.

— Regardless, people still turned up at police headquarters to protest. Police officers were there with riot gear.

— After about two hours, the police succeeded in getting the crowd to disperse and started making arrests.

— On Monday night, protests continued. Groups gathered in the street, raising their hands in surrender and chanting, “Hands up, don’t shoot.” It’s become the unofficial motto of the Ferguson protests.

— Police also attempted to disperse these protests, moving down W. Florissant, the main street in the neighborhood. This time, they used tear gas and explosives to clear crowds and fired rubber bullets. One report indicates that police cocked their rifles at protesters. Police told protesters to “go home,” but several residents protested that they were trapped in cul-de-sacs while the main road was closed off. Police also threatened press with arrest if they didn’t leave the scene.

— One family was standing in their backyard, which borders W. Florissant, while holding their hands up in protest. Police fired a tear gas canister at them, into the backyard:”

Not “…any site that disagrees with [me]”. IJReview and TheConservativeTreeHouse don’t bother to hide their rightward slant.

But I am reminded of a scene from South Park, in which the Turd Sandwich calls the Giant Douche at turd sandwich.

I guess that makes me the Giant Douche in this scenario.

Again, I do not call just any site that disagrees with me an epistemic-closure site. I don’t know who you are referring to as the people who agree with me, or why you direct this conversation in their direction and away from…oh, I think I get it.

Refusing to listen to people who disagree with you is [epistemic closure].

I use the term “epistemic closure” in its recent political sense – which I understand to be about listening to those who confirm one’s bias, and interpreting information through a filter of confirmation bias – so I can see how refusing-to-listen could be equivalent.

If I refuse to listen to people who disagree with me, does that make you disappear as far as I’m concerned?

Enough about you.

My skepticism is about a story that appears primarily (only?) on Reactionary-Right-Wing-Framing sources, and contains more analysis than information, and is based on the words an unidentified person overheard in a recording by an unidentified person, which conversation identifies actors with pronouns that could be easily swapped. Reading a few comments by people who appear to frequent those sites lets me know that they frequent those sites to hear what they want to hear – see the comment I noted above – and those sites appear to deliver, in spades.