I am a little frustrated with my inability to get much reliable information about the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. I will say, however, that Dorin Johnson seems incredibly credible to me.
Based on his account, Michael Brown was executed in cold blood by a police officer for no reason whatsoever. What he and Johnson were guilty of was walking in the middle of the street. The police department is claiming that Michael Brown reached for the officer’s gun, but according to Johnson’s account, his friend was being choked and was merely trying to get away when he was shot for the first time. He was shot again as he fled. And, finally, after he kneeled down and put his arms up, he was shot several more times.
I have nothing really to go by except Johnson’s account. If he is that credible on the stand, and there is a fair-minded jury, I think a murder conviction is a strong possibility. If you know of other credible eyewitness accounts, let me know in the comments.
Thanks for posting that video. I can only imagine the rage I would feel knowing that my son/daughter/brother/father/friend was dead because of a senseless shooting by the police.
Hell, I am approaching rage just watching the video. It’s no longer hyperbole to say that it’s open season on black men.
It never has been hyperbole. It’s the simple reality that black people have always had to live with.
Not just black people.
Yes, and when will the rest of us, ashamed and appalled that sanction, indiscriminate lynching is common again, circle our wagons around these black communities to protect them.
The 21st C. Greenwoods of America need out outrage to be active on all fronts.
Twitter coverage from reporters, officials in Ferguson Live @StLouis
The Rev. Al Sharpton comes to Old Courthouse [Clayton, Mo] arm in arm with Michael Brown’s family NOW!
○ #MikeBrown
○ #Ferguson
○ #BlackLivesMatter
○
St. Louis Co. cops instead fired “pepper balls” that burst open on impact and released pepper powder http://bit.ly/1nMcN1q #Ferguson 2/
THIS is what Malcom was talking about!!!! I AM PROUD OF #Ferguson HoodiesUpMusicLoudTM @MrMilitantNegro
Hey, you are talking about my home town of the ’60s – St. Louis County. I had just gotten my drivers’ licence and wasn’t learned about racism yet. Being a white, innocent flower arrived a few years earlier from the ol’ country. Lost my best friend because apparently I had crossed into one of the “no-go” areas occupied by AfroAmericans. When we just arrived and stayed in a downtown hotel near Union Station, my mom wanted to enroll us in the nearest grammar school. We were refused, no ‘whites’ allowed. LOL This was before the communities were razed to the ground and the infamous high rise Pruitt-Igoe towers, a project meant for the poorer families. Disaster!
○ Why the Pruitt-Igoe housing project failed
between surface and 3,000 feet
h/t Russia Today
Without doubt the African American school you wanted to attend was fiscally unable to accept you. The administration would have been fired and funds severely cut.
My father was a Federal Title 1 funding Monitor throughout the middle southern states working for Johnson’s White House.
My sister and I were high school students in Houston in 1966. Our parents were refused our entrance to Yates HS which was one block away. It wasn’t the school and students that didn’t want us: it was the white city school administration that didn’t want my sister and I in an African American school. In fact, that year (10 years after the Civil Rights Act) was the first year of integration in Houston. A grand total of 34 10th grade kids integrated one white high school and a few more 4th graders integrated an elementary school. Of course, my sister and I joined the 34 at San Jacinto high school: we had 34 friends.
It infuriates me, in the wake of incidents like this, that there are people like the frequent commenter on this blog who condescendingly chides Frog Ponders for our general support of the President, using civil rights violations and the incredibly outsized incarceration rates for African-American males as a sign that the Obama Administration is implementing what he calls PermaGov policies in this area.
In reality, this Administration has done about as much as Congress, Executive Order limitations, and Justice Department policies allow him and AG Holder to do to reverse the long, long years of law enforcement and prosecutorial violations that are and have been particularly destructive to the rights of African-Americans. This has resulted in an actual reduction in the number of Americans who are in jails and prisons nationwide during Obama’s term. But the hell with facts, right??
Adding to the ahistorical nature of these comments is our commenter’s support for Rand Paul. Yes, Rand wishes for the drug war to be reduced, and wants to restore voting rights for felons. Unfortunately, these are policies the radical right-wing movement is most interested in preserving and expanding. As a result, Rand will NOT make these issues a meaningful part of his campaign once the GOP primary season hits high gear, and if he does his candidacy will fail as thoroughly as his father’s campaigns did. Hell, he’s not really providing effective leadership on these issues now. If he were, we would have a Bill out of the Senate by now.
And we can see that the stone-cold racist law enforcement policies which have been implemented on the streets of St. Louis, New York and so many other areas of this Nation are supported by the radical right-wing movement. Let’s put it this way: the leaders and officers of the Livingston Police Department are not supporters of President Obama and Attorney General Holder in this area. Nor are the people who have created, enabled and enforced the NYPD’s racial profiling policies of recent years.
Impunity happens because the cops are smart enough to act where there are no cameras and no credible witnesses. Note that the in-dash camera was off and the wearable cameras the department had purchased had not been deployed yet.
And the St. Louis DHS Fusion Center taking over managing of the “riots” has made things worse.
Joe Lieberman’s revenge.
I’m now cynical enough to think that the cops has some of their “usual suspects” from other neighborhoods trash the local businesses in order to establish the “riot” theme in the media.
The neighborhood is protesting by standing and holding their hands in the air like Michael Brown was reported doing. That drives the cops nuts, and so they inflame the situation by orders to disperse, tear gas, and rubber bullets–which keeps the “riot” narrative going.
Bull Connor lives in St. Louis.
I guess I am cynical too, because I wondered about agent provocateurs. St. Louis does not have a history of rioting.
http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/st-louis-area-largely-spared-by-civil-rights-era-rioting/ar
ticle_b9a25f8d-efbf-5f4d-af88-173f543989fe.html
Don’t forget that Ferguson is 60+% black and that the PD has 53 members(I believe) and 50 of them are white.
That’s the sort of “police” department that’s better described as an army of occupation.
‘That’s the sort of “police” department that’s better described as
an army of occupationa Klavern‘FIFY.
The fact that the kid was shot so many times makes any explanation that exonerates the cop seem like 100% bullshit.
Nevertheless, we all know that’s exactly what will happen. And the cops won’t care that it’s 100% bullshit because they know the kid was guilty of EWB (Existing While Black) and that’s a good enough reason for them.
Nor will the US Department of Justice, which is scared shitless of the Cliven Bundys loose in this country and their right-wing political and media shields.
Speaking about Cliven Bundy, has our fearless DoJ executed that court order yet? Don’t bother, I’m 99.99% sure I know the answer.
Meanwhile, in another part of the world.
Jon Swaine, Guardian: Brian Schellman of St. Louis PD confirms these were shot at protesters. They are “less lethal wooden baton rounds”
What we need are a few Deacons…
You think that that sort of open carry would be treated like that of Cliven Bundy?
I remember outside the South that those self-defense groups got murdered by police in their beds.
But yes, in principle, we need some Deacons both for neighborhood security and to hold the perpetrators of chaos to account.
It would be open warfare, no doubt, and clearly one-sided, but compared to being shot down like fish in a barrel it seems like a less-bad idea.
You mean the time when the NRA was actually for gun control?
More details and the police declined to interview this witness.
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/eyewitness-michael-brown-fatal-shooting-missouri
The crazy scene in Ferguson last night
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/08/12/police-use-tear-gas-on-crowd/
thought provoking read
http://www.salon.com/2014/08/12/in_defense_of_black_rage_michael_brown_police_and_the_american_dream
/
The initial police report was plausible, but with eyewitness contradictory testimony, an impartial (if you can find one) investigator should be able to piece together forensic evidence to support one or the other. We have to remember that both the cop and the friend have motivation to lie. Do the details stand up? Multiple shots sound like panic or rage. By forensic details I mean things like the angle of incidence of the shots and powder patterns indicating the range. If Brown attacked the cop in his car as the cop claims, then the shots are point blank and with little angular deviation. If he was shot outside and as Brown was falling, as the friend says, the powder burns would be less and the angles farther apart, perhaps even from different directions as he spun. The truth is there, if it isn’t suppressed.
Meanwhile, riots, theft, and refusal to obey lawful police orders don’t help much and hurt the pro-Brown case with the public, hence the potential jury pool.
Meanwhile, riots, theft, and refusal to obey lawful police orders don’t help much and hurt the pro-Brown case with the public, hence the potential jury pool.
You do realize that police basically blocked ways for people to get home. And last night cops were caught, on camera, calling black people animals, right? Thankfully, that and more was documented by a local alderman plus some local TradMed people.
No, I just read that today (here). Nothing about that on network news. They just keep replaying the tape of window smashing and black people entering the broken windows and coming out with heaps of goods and the other tape of yelling and bottle throwing at police. How many potential jurors are going to hear that part about being blocked from dispersing?
Were those tapes labeled “File” by any chance or did they get a heads up for when the window smashers were coming?
Good question, isn’t it? How many viewers will ask? The “liberal media” has become the “right wing media”.
NPR interviewed a storeowner whose place was looted. the owner said it wasn’t ppl from the neighborhood, he knows them, they’d never do that to him
Did they say black people are animals or that rioters were animals? Makes a difference even if they meant the same.
I’ll never take a cop at his/her word. There’s simply no reason to believe them. It’s like taking the government’s claims about war and peace at their word. Makes no sense. I might eventually come to side with a cop with more forthcoming evidence (won’t happen often, that’s for sure, because rarely does the evidence back up the cops in these situations), but I’ll never believe a word from them. It has to come from outside evidence.
That itself is prejudice.
Maybe so, and it’s why I’ll never be selected to serve on a jury. But cops are enemies of the communities they’re served to protect. And it wasn’t the communities who declared war, but the State.
Once I tried to get out of jury with that ‘I don’t trust cops, they’re all liars’ line, and I got chosen BECAUSE of it.
Oh I would gladly serve if asked. I get why people want to get out of it, but I’ve no problem with it. But it’s what I would tell them. I’d also tell them in a fan of jury nullification.
Oh please. I’m a forensic scientist and I know the cop mentality at first hand. There’s a reason why the word “testilying” was coined. By cops themselves!
Yes, he was executed.
Period.
Thanks for posting this. I also find his account credible. It’s the degree of specificity about small details that convinces me. This sounds like someone who is recounting what happened exactly–not someone who is making up a story that only has the general gist.
It makes my stomach hurt to see the pain that young man’s mother is feeling. I can’t see how there can be any rational explanation for the officer shooting him so many times.
They left the kids bloody body on the streets or at least 4hr some reports said upwards of 9!!!
Why? A message to the neighborhood? ??
The problem with what an impartial jury will find is that it presupposes a prosecution.
And the nature of the judge’s instructions to the jury.
The police were murdering black men in Cincinnati in the late 90s and early 00s too. A lot of them.
Police officers are ultimately just guards in the capitalist cage we all live in.
Didn’t help that this nation had 2 criminal wars with ethnocentric racist overtone/undertones in the last 60 years and an recent administration that sponsored and gloated over Torture.
From Maddow Last Night:
Anger in Ferguson follows record of racial disparity
Rev. Al Sharpton, MSNBC host and president of the National Action Network, talks with Rachel Maddow about turning outrage over the shooting of Michael Brown into change to correct the evident racial disparity in how laws are enforced.
Part of the report?
She’s talking about a whistle blower in the St Louis County police depart. They had a “Lets have a black day”. A day where cops were to arrest as many black people as they could.
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-ma…..7652547718