Unworthy Martyrs
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People can spin that tape of Michael Brown Jr in the convenience store anyway they wish. What I saw was a thug imposing his will on the weak. My interpretation of his actions on that day, just minutes before he was killed, was that of someone who thinks paying for what you get is for suckers. What I saw was a strong arm robbery, plain and simple. It wasn’t shoplifting; when he put his hands on that clerk he put any notion of that to bed.
Then Michael Brown went out on the street and had someone bigger than him impose their will on him….big time.
Karma’s a bitch!
That being said: The facts surrounding the shooting are still up in the air. Officer Wilson, according to the Ferguson Police Chief, didn’t confront Brown as a suspect in the prior robbery. The contact was about a couple of punks walking down the middle of the street obstructing traffic. After that it’s all confusing. Confusing stories from the police chief don’t help anything: One moment he makes it clear that there was no relationship between the robbery and the shooting, then a couple of hours later he says that, well, there was a kind of an indirect (possible) relationship. Mr. Police Chief…shut up until you can say something reliable.
How this is being policed is pretty keystone cop too. The authorities seem indecisive, unclear as to their intentions. All over the place. They can’t decide on tactics, they look weak, unable to cope with the situation. One day they look like a military occupying force, the next it’s all Andy Taylor and, omg! Barney Fife.
A major contrast that sticks in my mind is this: Cliven Bundy, with warrants out for his arrest, is giving interviews to the media and going about his business. Michael Brown, however, is dead.
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OK, Folks, I will address this further in a post, but for the time being, let us consider that we, collectively, do not know yet exactly what happened,… yet. At least not the full story. The. issue of whether blacks commit more crimes than whites is still open for debate. They are obviously caught more, i.e., see the stats from the NYPD stop and frisk program. While at least as many, if not more young white males acknowledge using marijuana, 93% of those arrested in the stop and frisk program in New York were black. Additionally, crime is a nebulous term which we think of as typical street crime. However, if you take most self report studies into account that 90+% of all people commit some act during there life time that could be labeled a crime, the issue of who commits the most crime turns quite a few shades paler. Looking at it from even another perspective, if we looked at the total damage to the country as a whole, in particular the economy, hands down it is the white guys who ought to be in jail. It would take a long time for the black street criminal to have the impact of Bernie Madoff, or the sub prime lenders Goldman and Sachs, AGI, Citibank and so forth did. But for those people the economy would still be humming along. So there needs to be a perspective here. We can get as mad as hell at the small time shake down artist like Michael Brown, if it was him, and police officer Wilson, because they are at out level and we can scream and holler, and something will be done, one way or the other. Our real anger is that we are getting crapped on everyday by the big players every day and they thumb their noses at us and we, the people can not do a damned thing about it.
amen, bill
Bill writes:
“The issue of whether blacks commit more crimes than whites is still open for debate.”
You’re kidding right my friend? 🙂 🙂 http://www.fbi.gov and http://www.bjs.gov
those statistics state fact without context mike. bill can speak for himself, but what i heard was something like this: if we criminalized, investigated and enforced the damage done to us as a people by the white upper class commensurate with that of lower class those statistics might look somewhat different. it’s another way of saying something like what i said earlier, “crime is what legislatures say it is.”
i’m beginning to feel some empathy with a young black man in our culture….walking around feeling like a suspect in search of a crime.
Agreed PJ. Why do more blacks commit crime if that is the case? It’s not rocket science is it?
Poverty creates most crime – well burglary and stealing anyway. Guess who’s the most poverty stricken in an area where black people commit the most crimes? Black people.
Go to an area where there are few black people and who creates the most crime? Poor white people.
Oh I’m good. I’ve a Sociology degree me you know 😉
That’s it Norman. Right on the money.
hmmmm…..norman, you make me think and that’s not always wise without a fire extinguisher handy.
i absolutely agree that poverty is one catalyst for crime, perhaps a prime catalyst…but before i could say “most” crime is precipitated by poverty i’d have to account for greed and the lust for power. that seems to be the fuel for these white collar guys who may be doing us a whole lot of harm without suffering the criminal consequences afforded to the lower level guys. what our legislatures don’t make crime, or what of that crime is enforced at very low levels might be victimizing our society even more than that which does show up in the “crime statistics.”
okay…all i had was one glass of water and it’s almost gone, so i quit!
As I said on J Bado’s excellent cartoon. If he was armed and dangerous then by all means shoot him dead. I believe he was unarmed.
A thug he may well have been, and a dangerous one at that, but, surely, if a criminal is unarmed they are arrested, tried, convicted and imprisoned appropriately for what ever their crime(s).
I may not shed a tear for this thugs demise but is it right to shoot an unarmed man? Six times?
Just asking…..
Mind you…..I like the ‘karma’ thingy 🙂
Is a theft and a shoving a potential felony if the store sees no reason to report it? I certainly don’t know.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/08/18/1322560/-Ferguson-Store-Owner-Says-NO-ONE-From-His-Store-Called-Cops-To-Report-Cigar-Theft?detail=facebook
That makes no difference. That’s like asking if a murder is a murder if the victim doesn’t call the police. In point of fact a witness, shopping in the store at the time Brown pushed, choked and otherwise threatened and intimidated the clerk, called police before he had a chance. The DailyKos has it wrong, because reporting the truth doesn’t serve them.
Blacks make up 12% of the population and commit almost two-thirds of the crime. Naturally the police are going to have more confrontations with blacks than whites.
timmy. accepting your facts, what does that mean? an obvious observation might be that blacks are more disposed to crime than are whites….which asks the question: why?
are blacks genetically predisposed to crime?
are blacks culturally disposed to crime?
is crime disposed to blacks?
crime is what legislatures say it is. the disparity between how legislatures treat the crime of cocaine possession, between powder and crack, insinuates that at least some crime might be disposed against blacks seeing as they (culturally) find the crack form more to their liking.
and then, part of what the problem is that those in ferguson are raging against is profiling….what might profiling have to do with that statistic? if the police are predisposed to looking for crime more in the black community than in the white, wouldn’t it stand to reason that they’d find more of it in the black community?
these issues are complex. i don’t have a lot of answers, but that doesn’t make the questions invalid.
michael brown was a punk and a thug…i have very little sympathy for him personally….but that doesn’t answer any of the questions about how and why he came to be dead…that’s another issue. that’s what people are begging for…give us some answers that make sense.
we’ve heard from civilian witnesses that are very disturbing…what’s officer Wilson’s version? why can’t we see his statement….surely he gave one. the police chief standing out there telling us what he could have been thinking, what he might have said isn’t helpful….what did he actually say? the people are left with one very ugly, and for the most part unchallenged, version.
releasing the tape of that thug in the convenience store and at the same time telling us that it is irrelevant to the shooting says something. it’s validating what many of those very angry people are saying: they see a cover up in the making. disparage the victim to deflect attention from the guilty. whether or not it’s true…it’s easy to see how it might look that way to many people.
As much as I respect your post my love of irony points out that when white guys like Clive Bundy claim they are being put down by “the man” and mouth off they are made folk heroes. When a black guy claims to be put down by the man and mouths off he gets shot.
The sad truth is there is more political benefit to killing black people than harm. And a big portion of our population still wonders why black people are pissed off.