(Untitled)
Anonymous tweets the name of the officer in Ferguson who shot unarmed teenFour days of protests probably could have been shortened or even avoided if the city had reacted the way New York did after Eric Gardner's death at the hands of the police. Trying to hide the identity of the officer only inflamed an already incendiary situation
( Read more... )
I don't know of any other police shooting where the officer isn't identified. I don't know of any other case where the National Bar Association submitted a formal request for such information & indicated that the organization would petition a judge if necessary. The lack of transparency is unprecedented.
If the officer is being threatened, then the FBI should investigate those threats. We have a system for such incidents.
What we don't have is justification for how the police force has reacted in the wake of this killing. They are firing into peaceful protests & imposing unofficial curfews in a place where martial law has not been invoked. They are attacking & jailing journalists. They have brought dogs, sound cannons, tear gas & rubber bullets. I don't think the US has seen anything like this since the civil rights era.
The reason it's not being published is because the officer's life is in peril. They'll publish it if they charge him.
Wouldn't his life still be imperiled, by that logic? No matter when the name gets out, unless he's remanded into custody, I don't see how the supposed danger stops existing. The only way for that to occur is to never release the name at all, which I think is what the police is looking for. That no one will ever know who riddled that kid with half- to a full dozen bullets for the crime of jaywalking.
Reply
http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/14/us/ferguson-michael-brown-shooting-5-things/index.html
From this it appears that the officer shot in self-defense AT FIRST (similar to that 80 year old attacked in his home) and then, similar to the 80 year old man we talked about before, went beyond reasonable when he kept shooting until the 6' tall 200 pound aggressive man was dead. It looks like a bad shooting, but not quite the "unarmed kid with his hands up" that we heard about at first.
Meanwhile, on the same day, a 20 year old unarmed WHITE man was shot to death by police, too. No rioting.
http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/58300854-78/taylor-police-lake-salt.html.csp
Reply
But even if it is true, it's immaterial, because even the police chief admitted that Darren Wilson was unaware that Brown was a suspect in that incident.
Immaterial.
All eyewitness testimony goes against what the police has put out. All of it.
It's sad that you are coming to me with the same "aggravating circumstances" that you did with regard to Trayvon Martin. I don't know if you recognize a pattern here.
As for the last item, I actually had no idea of that, so if it got by my radar, damn. It just did. I'll check it out. At the same time, I have to ask right out of the gate: Did the police let the body lie in the street for four hours? In broad daylight? Because, if anything, that was what fueled the fire for the first round of protests in Ferguson.
Reply
Reply
Perhaps this account of community members intervening in looting attempts will change your mind. Or not. Either way, that speaks little to why you are blaming the oppressed community more than the immune-from-penalty police force that ignited the situation in the first place.
Reply
Leave a comment