Federal report says wilsons hands were down, that he charged officer Wilson and that there was no evidence to support a charge
One of the witnesses most critical to the public's misperception of what happened....Dorian Johnson. Arrested today for interfering with an arrest and drug charges. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...nson-michael-browns-friend-arrested/70929034/
A day after he filed a lawsuit against the police department. I wonder if they were keeping an eye on him.
And you'd have probably been murdered. Let's face it, if you have the opportunity to get out of an area like that, you take it.
To anyone who thinks the Ferguson protests were pointless or didn't have an impact: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry...nicipal-court-reform_55a90e4be4b0c5f0322d0cf1 The Ferguson Protests Worked Were the riots costly and destructive? Yes. But reform never would have happened without the unrest. FERGUSON, Mo. -- Nearly a half-century ago, a University of Missouri law professor named T.E. Lauer issued a warning. Missouri’s network of municipal courts, he wrote, were “a modern anomaly” generally “overlooked or ignored as the misshapen stepchildren of our judicial system.” It was “disgraceful,” he argued, that poor people accused of municipal ordinance violations didn’t receive lawyers. Arresting and confining citizens for petty violations of municipal codes was unnecessary. Many municipalities, he wrote, had clearly “conceived of their municipal courts in terms of their revenue-raising ability,” and those financial incentives influenced judges' decisions. He questioned whether the term “kangaroo court” would “too often validly apply to municipal court proceedings.” That was 1966. The Civil Rights Act was two years old. Martin Luther King Jr. was still alive, and Barack Obama had just turned 5. Dozens of young girls in St. Louis were treated for minor injuries sustained at a Beatles concert. George Wallace, who had tried to prevent black students from enrolling at a public university after promising “segregation forever,” was governor of Alabama. In the ensuing decades, those “kangaroo courts” enabled small towns, especially in St. Louis County, to pad their budgets by extracting fines from people for extraordinarily minor violations of municipal codes -- under threat of jail. Arrest warrants were issued for thousands of people, for supposed crimes like wearing baggy pants, missing a special sticker on their car, or failing to subscribe to a designated trash service. Residents who had to endure these local courts described them as “out of control,” “inhumane,” "crazy,” “racist,” “unprofessional” and “sickening.” The decades between Lauer's warning and 2014 brought no significant reforms to Missouri's municipal courts. Then, on Aug. 9, a Ferguson police officer's bullet that killed 18-year-old Michael Brown brought an end to the inaction. ... Law enforcement leaders said Ferguson was a wake-up call. “If not for the unrest, we wouldn’t have seen municipal court reform. It’s certainly a game-changer,” said Kevin Ahlbrand, president of Missouri’s Fraternal Order of Police and a member of the Ferguson Commission, created by the governor to correct economic and social conditions that fueled the unrest. St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar told The Huffington Post it was “a shame that we haven’t had the political will before 2014” to look at the municipal courts. “If you went to a very affluent area in St. Louis County, how long do you think a program would last where speed cameras were put up on arterial roads coming into subdivisions, and people were given letters saying they were going to be arrested? It would last about five hours,” Belmar said. “You know that and I know that, and that’s part of the problem. Yet in areas that are not as affluent, and where folks really are struggling with issues of poverty and education and crime and everything else that goes along with it -- unemployment -- they don’t have the ability really to voice that opinion. They can’t leverage change. That’s a good thing that’s come out of all this.” ... “Who was talking about police brutality at this level before Ferguson? It wasn’t being talked about," Aldridge said. "It took that unrest to happen for people to understand the reality of what is to be an African-American man and woman.” Predominantly black communities, like Ferguson and Baltimore, have been “targeted” and harassed for a long time, he said. “Unrest comes from people tired of being oppressed and deprived. They’re tired of being picked at and poked at,” Aldridge said, adding that he didn’t condone the Ferguson violence. But it did make people understand how serious the situation was, he said. “When a baby is crying and you aren’t paying attention because you’re on the phone, it’s not until he goes to knock something off the table or something breaks or the chair falls, that you start to pay attention," Aldridge continued. "That’s what the young people did. It took for burned down property to get the attention of elected officials here, the attention of the media and the attention of the United States.” ...
It's interesting to see how people are so desperate to trivialize or distract from a problem in society when it doesn't fit what they want to believe.
The better question is if this means that no one will ever attack a cop and end up getting themselves shot.....after all, that's what the riots were really about at the time.
It sucks for Wilson, who is paying a personal cost for a problem the police department created. It's not very fair, but it happens to a lot of people that they have to suffer for the institutional failures of organizations they get associated with. He'd be best off switching industries.
The institutional issues in Furguson had nothing to do with it. He's suffering because a criminal attacked him and he shot him in self defense....the community then branded him as a racist and that's the nationwide perception.
That's unfortunately what happens when your police department and legal system systemically treats a group of people unfairly (poor people, in Ferguson's case, but a lot of overlap with "black"). When those people cease to accept it, there tends to be collateral damage, and he's part of it.
Again, that wasn't the problem here, that's an attempt to re-write history in order to justify really foolish actions after the fact.
I mean, are you trying to tell me the completely r****ded "Hands up, don't shoot" chant those halfwits STILL do had something to do with a "police department and legal system systemically treating a group of people unfairly". Of course not.
I'm not going to bother having that part of the discussion AGAIN about what were the true causes of the Ferguson unrest. I think it's sufficient to say that the public opinion still has not coalesced on a consensus opinion on why things happened, as evidenced by the fact that people like me are still upset about Ferguson despite findings that Darren Wilson did nothing criminal. As it pertains to Wilson though, in my opinion its unfortunate and it sucks that he pays the price. He's not quite the innocent victim, but he does seem to be the scapegoat.
