Ferguson grand jury.

[AllPurposeAtheist]

what bothers me most here is the near total lack of transparency and the simple fact that police are nearly impossible to prosecute as if they could never do wrong in any shooting..
http://www.thenation.com/article/190937/why-its-impossible-indict-cop

Police shootings in America

First, the big picture. Last year, the FBI tallied 461 “justifiable homicides” committed by law enforcementâ€"justifiable because the Bureau assumes so, and the nation’s courts have not found otherwise. This is the highest number in two decades, even as the nation’s overall homicide rate continues to drop. Homicides committed by on-duty law enforcement make up 3 percent of the 14,196 homicides committed in the United States in 2013. A USA Today analysis of the FBI database found an average of about ninety-six police homicides a year in which a white officer kills a black person.

The FBI’s police homicide stats are fuzzy, and they are surely an undercount, given that they come from voluntary reports to the FBI from police departments all over the country. That the federal government does not keep a strict national tally shows just how seriously it takes this problem. A crowdsourced database has sprung up to fill the gap, as has a wiki-tabulation.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about these police killings, many of them of unarmed victims, is that our courts find them perfectly legal.

SCOTUS and the license to kill

Chapter 563 of the Missouri Revised Statutes grants a lot of discretion to officers of the law to wield deadly force, to the horror of many observers swooping in to the Ferguson story. The statute authorizes deadly force “in effecting an arrest or in preventing an escape from custody” if the officer “reasonably believes” it is necessary in order to “to effect the arrest and also reasonably believes that the person to be arrested has committed or attempted to commit a felony…or may otherwise endanger life or inflict serious physical injury unless arrested without delay.”

But this law is not an outlier, and is fully in sync with Supreme Court jurisprudence. The legal standard authorizing deadly force is something called “objective reasonableness.”

This standard originates in the 1985 case of Tennessee v. Garner, which appeared at first to tighten restrictions on the police use of deadly force. The case involved a Memphis cop, Elton Hymon, who shot dead one Edward Garner: 15 years old, black and unarmed. Garner had just burgled a house, grabbing a ring and ten bucks. The US Supreme Court ruled that a police officer, henceforth, could use deadly force only if he “has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.” The ruling required that the use of force be “objectively reasonable.” How this reasonableness should be determined was established in a 1989 case, Graham v. Connor: severity of the crime, whether the suspect is resisting or trying to escape and above all, whether the suspect posed an immediate threat to the safety of officers or others. All this appeared to restrict police violenceâ€"even if, in the end, Officer Hymon was never criminally charged for fatally shooting Edward Garner.

“Objectively reasonable”â€"what could be wrong with that? But in actual courtroom practice, “objective reasonableness” has become nearly impossible to tell apart from the subjective snap judgments of panic-fueled police officers. American courts universally defer to the law enforcement officer’s own personal assessment of the threat at the time.

The Graham analysis essentially prohibits any second-guessing of the officer’s decision to use deadly force: no hindsight is permitted, and wide latitude is granted to the officer’s account of the situation, even if scientific evidence proves it to be mistaken. Such was the case of Berkeley, Missouri, police officers Robert Piekutowski and Keith Kierzkowski, who in 2000 fatally shot Earl Murray and Ronald Beasley out of fear that the victims’ car was rolling towards them. Forensic investigations established that the car had not in fact lurched towards the officers at the time of the shootingâ€"but this was still not enough for the St. Louis County grand jury to indict the two cops of anything.

Not surprisingly then, legal experts find that “there is built-in leeway for police, and the very breadth of this leeway is why criminal charges against police are so rare,” says Walter Katz, a police oversight lawyer who served on the Los Angeles County Office of Independent Review until it disbanded in July of this year. According to Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Irvine Law School, recent Supreme Court decisions are not a path towards justice but rather a series of obstacles to holding police accountable for civil rights violations.

[Solitary]

A News reporter was hit in the head a rock while reporting about the looting and fires. What part of two wrongs don't make right do the people in Ferguson not understand? Does anyone think that the people looting and torching buildings give a rats ass about the kid that was shot? They were just looking for an excuse to act like a bunch of idiots. Burning down and destroying your own town, robbing stores, and hitting innocent people with rocks is not acting civilized, for any reason. If they want to avoid having people be prejudice towards them because they are black, then they should act like civilized human beings, not a bunch of wild animals.

Do you're children, or you, act like this when prejudice is directed toward you, or you don't like the verdict of a jury? If this is the way they act before the police shooting, and don't listen when an officer tells them to stop, or a woman says stop, they deserve to get shot. I'm tired of hearing prejudice when black thugs get caught breaking the law. Every cop I have known in Joliet, my home town, was a thug in High School, and when two thugs met and one has the permission to shoot to kill, and you didn't listen to his demands, you got shot, white or black, armed or not. Nothing new there, go looking for trouble and you will find it. Solitary

[the_antithesis]

I look forward to all kinds of idiots putting forward their opinion on this without having the first clue what the facts are.

Try not to set your cat on fire.

[Poison Tree]

Does anyone think that the people looting and torching buildings give a rats ass about the kid that was shot? They were just looking for an excuse to act like a bunch of idiots.

You are right. The response has only fractionally been about Brown. Instead his death has been an excuse for people to latch other issues onto local anger. Then you add in--especially with all this buildup and announcements about the impending grand jury result--out of town agitators arriving and it is no longer about what it was about.

Do you remember the 1999 Seattle World Trade Organization riot? It was another one of these things where everyone knew for months that there were going to be clashes with police so anyone who wanted to cause trouble showed up even if their cause had little or nothing to do with the WTO.

[Cocoa Beware]

Why are these people riot...er... what are they protesting exactly?

They want it so that someone can rob a convenience store, start punching a cop in the face, fight for his weapon...but...if he loses that fight for the weapon, let him just surrender and the rule of law goes back to being strictly applied.

Sounds reasonable to me... 

[AllPurposeAtheist]

First separate why people are rioting and address the reasons for rioting and not just assume it's people with no grievance doing it for no reason other than for kicks. Rioting and looting are not some new phenomena done only by people out just to destroy their own places, but we have nearly an entire race of people who feel under attack by an extremely oppressive system.
I'm not saying it's justified, but I can certainly understand the frustration people are feeling. It seems counter intuitive, but rioting often will get the attention of people capable of instituting changes.

[Jmpty]

https://storify.com/betakateenin/white-people-riots

[Mermaid]

Why are these people riot...er... what are they protesting exactly?

I have seen some fucked up shit on the internet today as a result of this verdict.
You don't have to look very hard to find the answer to this question.

[stromboli]

Its an almost no win situation, because anyone can use it as an opportunity to do what they want,from robbery to getting even with some store owner for a slight to just elevating tensions on purpose to create more hostility from day to day. I can understand the frustrations that lead to it, but I don't see anything gained by it.

[Mermaid]

I think we can finally throw out the myth that racism is dead in post-Obama America.

[stromboli]

I think we can finally throw out the myth that racism is dead in post-Obama America.

An unfortunate sad truth. we're back to the mid-50's.

[Mermaid]

We never left.

[Cocoa Beware]

I have seen some fucked up shit on the internet today as a result of this verdict.
You don't have to look very hard to find the answer to this question.

If youre going to assault a police officer and try to take his weapon... then I cant see how its all that outrageous if you end up dead as a result.

If you want to rally under a banner of perceived injustice, this is piss poor choice if you ask me.

Its true that in the states blacks are often singled out by law enforcement, and it is ridiculous; but I cant see how this helps with any of that, or anything else for that matter.

[_Xenu_]

This whole thing is ridiculous. Acting like a bunch of animals and burning down your community because a violent thug and thief pretty much committed suicide by cop.

In all seriousness though, it sounds like that cop got some real sweetheart attention from the prosecutor.

[aitm]

First separate why people are rioting and address the reasons for rioting and not just assume it's people with no grievance doing it for no reason other than for kicks. Rioting and looting are not some new phenomena done only by people out just to destroy their own places, but we have nearly an entire race of people who feel under attack by an extremely oppressive system.
I'm not saying it's justified, but I can certainly understand the frustration people are feeling. It seems counter intuitive, but rioting often will get the attention of people capable of instituting changes.

I have not spent the time to read the grand jury report, but if the forensics and the science backs the officer, what does that say about the "eye-witnesses" who lied about what they saw? What does it mean when a community will invent their own facts to support a person simply because they are the same color against another. Do you think if the officer was black this would have happened? I have never supported the argument that racism is dead, it is not. It is perfectly acceptable to point out to the world that white people are still racist, it is however, rather stunted to make a claim that the man is keeping you down by burning the establishments of your neighbors who share the same skin tint.