The Glade 4.0

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Definitive proof that Officer Wilson is not, in fact, a ham sandwich.

I have nothing to say about the verdict itself or even of my opinion of Wilson's guilt. However, lack of indictment by Grand Juries does not infer anything necessarily incorrect happened.

Ostensibly, Grand Juries exist to for the purposes of delivering an indictment where probable cause is all but established, hence the high rate.

Rather, it says more about the public outcry for charges/conviction in face of the DA's inability to establish probable cause, either because there factually is none or because he was incompetent.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

RD

I don't believe it was a federal grand jury. Furthermore, a grand jury indicts frequently because prosecutors don't typically waste resources on bad cases. I'm more inclined to believe they pushed this case due to public pressure, rather than a bunch of civilians are in cahoots to protect a cop.

Ever notice how most of the people who police shoot, around the world, in almost every country, are male? Police hardly ever shoot women -we get a free pass. It's almost always men. This can only be the result of sexism. I believe you men should be outraged. You should protest, even riot, set fire to the world, every time a male is shot by police. It can't be for any reasons other than sexism.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

For the record, I don't have a firm opinion on whether or not he should have been indicted, and I'm inclined to think that if he was, the evidence is sufficiently uncertain that he should be found not guilty. However, I do have a problem with a prosecutor bending over backwards to avoid indicting a cop who shot an unarmed civilian under circumstances that were at least questionable. One of the main reasons grand juries almost always indict is that the prosecutor largely controls what evidence they see and thus only shows them the most compelling evidence in favor of an indictment. In this case, the prosecutor chose to show the grand jury everything, including the exculpatory evidence, and allowed the defendant to testify at length about his version of events. That's very unusual. And it's on top of the fact that the prosecutor here could have just chosen whether or not to indict on his own instead of going to a grand jury. Somehow I doubt he would have been so solicitous to the defendant if that defendant had been a civilian instead of a cop. The whole thing seems like a set up to give the appearance of seeking an indictment while in fact stacking the deck in favor of the accused cop.

Snark aside, do you honestly believe race is irrelevant to how likely a cop is to shoot a suspect?

No, but in general, i think tendency to **** with cops is the most relevant factor with how likely a cop is to shoot a suspect.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Police in the United States appear to be trained to respond to every situation as though they are busting a Columbian drug lord south of the border. This has to stop.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Colombian.

And Colombia is WAY south of the border.

Otherwise, this might be true. It also has nothing to do with race, except to the extent that the "situations" to which you are referring may be more likely to involve certain demographics.

The evidence seems to fairly heavily lean toward the kid grabbing at the cop's gun. I would argue that any situation where someone tries to grab a cop's gun, the cop should shoot them. There's a different argument to be made about whether the gun should be unholstered to start with, which is what you're getting at here. That doesn't mean the cop wasn't right to shoot.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

We have a city in the middle of the state named Columbia. I often confuse spellings. This is compounded by the fact that Missouri is apparently the meth capital of the United States, so there are likely quite a number of Columbian drug lords being busted.

My statement about police training isn't limited to this incident, either. The high volume of shots fired when police decide they have to shoot someone is indicative of a certain training regimen. Moreover, if they are trained to fire a high volume of shots, it casts doubt on their judgment insofar as when it is appropriate to shoot in the first place. Incident reports suggest that the police are trigger happy, and err on the side of shooting civilians repeatedly.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

So... the difference between "shooting to kill" and using a gun as a deterrent.

I can see that. Shooting to end the current threat does not require two in the chest and one in the head. One in the shoulder will likely do the trick in most cases.

Seems to me, in most cases when police decide they need to open fire, the modus operandi is to not stop until the target is meat.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

It is indicative of no such thing. What it's indicative of are the limitations of the human nervous system. It certainly in no way suggests that the police "err on the side of shooting people". All you are doing here is allowing high visibility anecdotal incidents to act in conjunction with your own confirmation bias. It isnt that the police's training or judgement is in doubt- its that YOUR judgement on this issue is not trustworthy. Your unrealistic emotional responses to police action are your problem, not a problem of the system.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Given that American cops regularly unload more rounds in a single shooting incident than all the cops in any other western country do in an entire year, I suspect that "the limitations of the human nervous system" aren't the issue.

Is that an established fact or a fun hyperbole? (Not that there's anything wrong with that. I'm curious.)

I am undecided on this issue, so I'm going to give you a non-american example that recently struck me as "police overkill."

Three days ago, in East Vancouver, police shot a man standing in an intersection who threatened them with a two-by-four. Initial reports (and even video of the event) indicated they fired "many rounds" into the man at close range. This doesn't tell the whole story... They first, to their credit, tried to use "bean bag rounds" to convince him to stand down, unsuccessfully. Eventually he was shot and killed. I don't know how many lethal rounds were used, but it seems they gave him every opportunity to comply before eventually killing him.

Of course, this isn't the USA, and every situation is different no matter where you are. The Vancouver shooting was a controlled standoff, while the Brown shooting seems to have been a spur of the moment panic when a kid grabbed the cop's gun.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

On the bright side, I'm off an hour early for riot closure.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I don't know that they are so much trained to throw a lot of lead downrange, as they are trained to shoot until the threat is neutralized (shooting to wound is a myth). When their hit rate is 18%, they've got to throw a lot of lead down range to stop the threat.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

A great deal of truth here. It is generally believed that most people's accuracy under combat conditions degrades by 50% at a minimum from their noncombat performance. When combined with the fact that actual people have a tendency to move around that training targets find it very hard to simulate (plus the officer's own movement) we quickly find accuracy dropping into the basement.

There's also the fact that the human nervous system simply does not function all that quickly. A person firing a weapon at an enemy will almost always think they have fired far fewer rounds than they actually have. When the threat appears the brain starts sending all the commands to the body to start firing. Because the training regimen Coro is so worried about and cutely trying to hint involves wantonly shooting people really amounts to exactly what you said - fire until the threat ceases - commands to "fire" to the index finger tend to "back up" in the nervous system waiting to execute like pages in a print que. When the threat disappears, the brain starts telling the hand "stop." It can't always cancel all the previous commands in time though, so again, like pages in a print job you are trying to cancel, some still may execute before they can be stopped.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

The limitations on the human nervous system are why so many rounds are fired in an encounter. The number of encounters is a product of the fact that the U.S. A) contains around a third of the population of the western world all by itself in the first place and B) the problems U.S. cops face that simply aren't present in other countries. You will not find very many Michael Browns in these countries because they do not have a large population of people that think they are being targeted or picked on by the police when an officer politely asks them not to walk down the middle of the **** street.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Trying to specifically target body parts is totally unrealistic. In fact, the "one in the head" part is really pretty overly optimistic. If someone is doing something that justifies the cop firing in the first place, the officer should shoot center mass. If he is not doing such a thing, the cop should not be shooting him anywhere. Firearms are not for subduing or incapacitating. The goal is to stop the threat. IF the subject does, he does. That isn't the goal but it's likely and that's why makes it "deadly force". The officer should only use it when himself facing death or great bodily harm.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Race is a factor in how likely a person is to violate the law in the first place, and therefore come into contact with the police, of which a certain proportion of incidents will involve shooting. This is true because some races are educationally and economically disadvantaged as a group - poor people are more likely to engage in the sorts of behaviors and be in the sorts of places that will cause them to have a violent encounter with police.

Race is not very much of a factor in whether the cops fire mainly because no cop wants to end up in Darren Wilson's present situation - and he is nowhere near out of the woods, with the possibility of a Federal Civil Rights investigation by a DOJ department that is overrun with leftist crusaders and possibly a civil suit in a far MORE broken civil law system that uses the absurd "preponderance of the evidence" standard. Every cop in this country has been waiting for this situation to come along for years because dealing with black people that think every interaction with the police is about their race is a daily event.

Taly is being facetious, but she's right. Michael Brown's gender had far more to do with his death than his race. We aren't hearing about blacks getting shot by the police - it's black males. Just like in the MArtin-Zimmerman incident the sex of both parties is far more relevant than their race.

Imagine how reactions might differ if Officer Darren Wilson were Officer Darlene Wilson.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

You know, I sincerely doubt that if it were Darlene Wilson it would really make a difference to the Al Sharptons (nor the rioters in Ferguson) of the world.

I think it would really still be "white cop shoots black kid". When it really should be 6' 4" 300# young man assaults cop and is subsequently killed.

I think it would be easier for everyone to agree what the result of black cop shooting a white young man would be...

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

https://storify.com/FOX19/protests-in-c ... -down-i-75

So I was literally right in the middle of this (that is the protest engulfed my car on the way home)

No danger really but it's a little intimidating with a mob of angry protesters on all sides

Eh, a bit of both, I guess, but more fact than hyperbole. For example, in 2011, all German cops combined fired a total of 85 bullets - not 85 shooting incidents; 85 bullets in total for the entire country of 80 million people - and 49 of those were warning shots. Meanwhile in the US, cops in NYC fired 84 bullets at a single suspect in Harlem and cops in LA fired 90 shots at a suspect out there. And even though those are specific incidents, some quick Googling will show you that double-digit shot counts aren't unusual. NYPD shooting stats, for instance, show they fire 3-5 bullets per cop per incident on average.

In 2012, British cops fired their guns on three occassions over the entire year for the entire country. That same year, the NYPD had 45 shooting incidents. That's 15 times as many shootings by cops in a city with 1/7th the population of England and Wales. In other words, New York cops are roughly 100 times more likely than British cops to shoot suspects.

In 2011, Australian cops shot and killed 6 people while American cops shot and killed over 400. After controlling for population, that's 5 times as many here.

And so on and so forth.

I suppose. I always felt it was more common than that, but you're right.

In 2011, there were 6 killings by law enforcement officers in Canada. With about 1/10th the US population, that's like comparing 60 to your 400.

2014 has already seen 11 killings by law enforcement in Canada, which while up significantly, is still far, far below the US total in 2011.

Iceland had it's first police shooting of a suspect ever in 2013. (Of course, with a population of 320,000...that's equivalent to 1000 in the USA...but it's obviously not very common there. You'd have to compare multiple years.)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... amily.html

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

All of which speak to the type, frequency, and nature of crime found in those countries. Germany is a particular example; like so much of the rest of its national policy it is driven by not wanting to have even the barest hint of something that could be associated with Naziism - despite having the fairly typical European greater degree of public compliance and wider latitude for the police in non-lethal situations. Try mouthing off to the Polizei if they come to a bar fight in Germany - or for that matter do anything other than stand perfectly still until you're told what to do while they're there. You'll quickly discover they're allowed a lot more latitude than American cops in dealing with smartasses and German courts are not interested in your views on rights and freedom of speech. Many an American serviceman in Germany has found this out the hard way.

The fact that Germany allows its police to fire warning shot at all speaks to this. Warning shots are a terrible idea, and Germany is able to get away with this only because of the aforementioned high compliance and low crime rate. German police would be a danger to themselves and anyone around them in the U.S.

In pointing out the methods used in these countries, people like to point out situations like the guy with the machete outside Buckingham Palace not long ago, who was TASERd. Disregarding that A) British police do not carry firearms (well, most of them) and that in front of Buckingham Palace you also have soldiers with rifles, these comparisons are almost invariably cherry-picked to situations where the police have all kinds of time and room and backup to deal with a deranged individual out in a public space. Interestingly, these are also the cases most conducive to pictures and videos for third parties.

In Officer Wilson's case, the only thing in common was the "public place", (and no one had time, apparently, to whip out their Iphone and create a quick video for careful editing to put on YouTube, no doubt with appropriate commentary and music to point out Wilson's "obvious guilt" and cover up any inconvenient sound that might indicate what was actually going on). He was in his car, and he started the encounter by asking Brown not to walk in the middle of the street. Brown then became belligerent for no apparent reason and then Wilson saw the cigars realizing he was dealing with an armed robber he had a duty to apprehend.

Wilson was dealing with an opponent with apparently zero impulse control, and a wildly unrealistic sense of his own invincibility - well beyond what we normally expect from teenagers, and we don't know why, but we get some clues from his words to Wilson "You're too much of a pussy to shoot me" as he was trying to take Wilson's gun, and the actions and words of those defending him - he was a young black male, so in his mind no matter what he did short of pulling out a gun of his own and firing at Wilson, he believed anything the officer did was "hassling" him or something to that effect.

That belief "What I'm doing is no big deal, the officer should just let me be because I don't feel like I'm breaking the law, or don't care" is common to a lot of people, but when it's combined with a very large, very young man who feels no compunction about robbing a store in broad daylight. He felt that his skin color and unarmed state immunized him from being shot, and that anything he did short of using a weapon of his own (including trying to get Wilson's) would never be serious enough for anything to actually happen to hi, and he had an accomplice there willing to lie his *** off, even in defiance of plainly observable fact. Much like a school bully who pokes at a smaller kid over and over, and then wants to cry foul when the smaller kid finally slugs him, except he didn't cotton to the fact that the "smaller kid" was a cop that A) didn't want to get killed B) wanted to do his job and C) knew what the law allowed him to do and had the means and training to do it. Brown, for all intents and purposes, committed suicide by cop.

While each situation is different, the fact is that dealing with people like Brown is a daily event for police. Most do not end like this, mainly because most take place at night, in confined places, without passersby and TV cameras around. Yet we have people who insist that these events are a matter of:



For no reason other than their own cynicism and problems dealing with authority.

Brown is not an unusual suspect - he's pretty common. The circumstances that brought him to public light are. The problem we have is a public that is addicted to victim narratives. Our "system" cannot be effectively reformed at all until the public rejects people going on TV and painting people like Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and the alledged "victim" of the Duke rape case as victims. If we wante fewer people shot by the cops, people need to stop getting themselves shot by the **** cops. Then we can talk about cases of police excess and tactics. We cannot have an effective conversation while people are turning Michael Brown into some equivalent of Rosa Parks.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."