They didn't shoot him for his skin colour. This is my point.
Then you have to ask "why did they shoot him?" An unarmed kid who was already wounded, had his hands up, and was surrendering - and a trained cop with a gun says "I felt threatened"?? It doesn't add up.
Even if by some long odds the kid was shot for some reason other than his skin color, you still have the entrenched problem of the perception of racism by the police and "the system" in areas like Ferguson...and whose fault is that? Not the citizens. Other predominately black districts surrounding Ferguson do not have that problem, so why Ferguson? In Ferguson there is a history of conflict and strained relations between the citizens and the police that the police leadership there in that district have exacerbated and allowed to continue instead of addressing, facilitated by those in local and state office. Lemme tell ya, I'm white in a white community and even here that tension exists: police here have earned a rep for abuse of force that makes people wary. Overwhelmingly, our police are decent men and women who are to be admired and respected, and who do all in their power to honor their badges...and yet blatant violations occur both with individual officers and when the police are called to act as a unit. If they receive so much as a reprimand, there's an uproar from the union. One was such an obvious violation that the coop (with a history) had to be dismissed, and the union forced him to be rehired with full pay and an apology. The people are fed up. The distrust is there on both sides, and it does sometimes come into play on calls. If I were a sociologist I could have a field day with trying to figure it out. I'd hate to imagine how much worse things would be here if race were thrown into the mix on top of that. Well, not that it doesn't, but not so transparently or in overwhelming numbers.
Lest we get into the dangerous and wrong-headed territory of blaming the police, remember that many officers in Ferguson are black. We know there are a few bad people in every profession. What we're dealing with is more complex, a culture of corruption that seeps in from above and becomes hard to counter from the strata of the cop on the beat. It allows the bad few to flourish and thrive, and creates barriers of perception among some fellows, and reaches it's worst when clouded by the inevitable us-vs-them mentality that it gives birth to vis-a-vis the citizens.
So back to the case in question. The cop had a history of racism and abuse of force. The D.A. has a history of racism and getting bad cops off the hook (and in this case, he personally introduced a witness who is to say the least unreliable and on the record as a racist who has given untrustworthy testimony, the sole source who claims M. Brown "rushed the officer head-down like a football player"). He mismanaged the presentation of this case to the grand jury and to the public in ways that are hard to dismiss as merely incompetent, and look suspiciously like efforts to get the investigation dismissed. You've got a dead kid who may have robbed a store but had no weapon and was in no state to offer a fight - how does that justify even one shot, let alone an officer emptying his weapon into him?
How is it that the entire African community in any given city have a riot when one of their own, but a criminal, gets shot by the cops?
They didn't. That didn't happen, Anyone who tells you otherwise is a baldfaced liar.
What did happen is that a community that has endured along history of genuine racism at the hands of that particular police community, that has seen said injustice tolerated by the local and state government and never atoned for or recompensed, waited longer than they should have as this latest instance was slow to be addressed. They protested peacefully at first to apply pressure when nothing was done, and were ,met by police mishandling that exacerbated tensions. Agitators from outside the community joined in as an excuse to get violent. Finally, the sham of a manipulated grand jury once again told them that their lives in Ferguson for the foreseeable future will continue on as before: no law for the citizens, they don't matter. Then the people erupted.
it didn't happen because someone was shot. It happened because their local and state government told them via a manipulated system "your lives have no value and are not worthy of justice". Again. They thought that this time would be different, with the eyes of the world on Ferguson.
Tearing up your own neighborhood makes as much sense as trashing your own home in that terrible moment you've passed your breaking point and must release your voiceless rage that's been denied recognition time and time again. It happens. We should be doing what we can to address the problem. Blaming the victims doesn't get us there.
You may think I'm racist...
Not necessarily. Overly influenced by biased news and culture commentators with an agenda is more likely. Were their minds made up already? How outraged are they, and did they stoke your own sense of outrage? Gather the facts and weigh them. What rings true to you? I've my own bias, admittedly, but from where I sit the people who gathered the facts and then analyzed them seemed genuine to me in their efforts to be true to the facts as they emerged, and piece together a take that listened to every side. Giving a fair hearing to both sides of a story doesn't mean both sides have equal merit, or consist of equal truth.
Anyway, that's my understanding of it. Not all will agree, and I won't rebut them. Dig into it for yourself.
Man...I don't come to /VIP/ for politics!