Open Thread: The death of Michael Brown and the situation in #Ferguson

This is so appalling indeed… I’m catching up with all the information, but it makes me so sad… reminds me of the saying “give me a threshold at which you’ll finally fight back”.

http://qz.com/249483/police-in-ferguson-may-look-like-soldiers-but-their-tactics-wouldnt-pass-us-army-muster/

Ally: There’s one other item I’d suggest putting in your list, when you encounter someone who starts in with Not All Cops. Even those cops who never do any of the other stuff in the list are part of the system that prevents those cops who do from ever facing any sort of corrective action. It is impossible that they are unaware of at least some of these abuses (if they are, I would sincerely suggest that that eliminates their credibility as cops anyway), and yet we are not seeing thousands of police officers refusing to accept unlawful and oppressive orders, nor are we seeing them in situations like this calling for the officer who screwed up in the first place to be removed from the force and face criminal charges.

The “Code of Silence” bullshit is a legit reason to hate ALL cops, even those who never commit any corrupt or oppressive acts themselves.

Damn, this shit is bad. Anyone who believes that black people don’t face racism in modern-day America should read this to get their head pulled out of their ass.

And an article from Amanda Marcotte on the incredibly awful handling of this situation by police and the undercurrents of paranoid conspiracy theory bullshit that underlie events like those in Ferguson. Context matters:

Time for some blunt talk: Right wing America has spent the past six years passing around paranoid urban legends that push this notion that Obama is trying to organize some secret “takeover” of the country, often involving fears that conservative white people will be rounded up into camps and other such nonsense. The racist paranoia of this is often subtextual but unmistakeable.

[…] a perfect encapsulation of right wing thinking on this issue: Equating the inclusion of black Americans with some kind of “takeover”.

Six years of whipping yourself into a paranoid frenzy is a lot of years. I don’t even know if it’s possible for a mostly white—and with 99% certainty, mostly conservative—police force to meet a crowd of mostly black protesters in a calm, rational state after spending six years wallowing in this kind of paranoid thinking. If you’ve been waiting on tenterhooks for the violent “takeover” that right wing email chains have been predicting for years, is it even possible to see a bunch of peaceful protesters for who they are? I’m guessing not. No, you’re going to think the mythical war has finally come, and you’re going to act like it.

I try to stay away from politics on this blog, but this seems to be a good spot for a little bit of politics.
The Republican’t party has long been the party of corporate interests, and has stayed politically viable by pretending to care about the social issues (anti-choice, anti-gay, etc.) of the religious right, who have been persuaded to vote against their economic interests, and also by bringing in a few groups that are usually religiously conservative but have other hot-button issues as well, such as the nativist/anti-immigrant bunch. The election of 2008 tolled the death knell for this coalition, showing how it depended on elderly white people who were not being replaced by younger people, white or otherwise, who are far less conservative on both social and economic issues. This message was confirmed in 2012. However, the Rs find themselves unable to move toward the center on issues like immigration and gay rights, and are actually being pulled farther to the right on issues like contraception, because they organized the Tea Party as a quick fix to the problems of 2008 and now find themselves in bondage to a base that has no tolerance for tolerance.
The result is that they have no ability to create and advance a program of policies that might appeal to people outside their base. Health care? All they can do is hate on and obstruct Obamacare, since they can’t come up with any plausible alternative that the anti-government right won’t hate. Immigration? Any plausible solution to the immigration issue would include a pathway to citizenship for many of the undocumented people who have become integrated into the US society and economy, but the anti-immigrants won’t stand for it — they’d even like to deport the Dreamers. But they remain able to obstruct due to the demographics of House districts, where Democrats tend to be clustered in urban areas while Republican’ts are much more dispersed, and the constitutional composition of the Senate, which favors small states that tend to be rural and thus lean Republican’t (except for the People’s Republic of Vermont). (As to the House, the most striking example is Pennsylvania, where the Democrats won the overall vote for the House but the Republican’ts took 13 of 18 seats.)
Given this situation, the only strategy remaining for the Rs is to play to the anger, hatred, racism and the rest of the negative emotional fears of their elderly white base, who can be persuaded that “They” are trying to take “their” country away from them — and hope to get enough of them to turn out to win the 2014 mid-term elections. I believe (or at least hope) that they will set themselves up for a crushing defeat in 2016, when, in particular, the Senatorial map is strongly skewed against them, and they have no plausible Presidential candidate who can survive the Tea Party dominated primary process.

This is horrific.The murders,the response of the police and the reporting by the mainstream media.I could say more but previous commenter’s have put things far better than I could.

I will just say this.It’s like the police just don’t give a shit what people think,probably because they know that the racist ignorant bigoted section of the public are right behind them cheering them on.

Cops really, REALLY seem to forget that a taser is defined as a “less-lethal” weapon. It’s not a “non-lethal” weapon.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/08/13/taser-death-of-graffiti-artist-israel-hernandez-llach-revives-debate.html

If you can tase someone instead of shooting them, because that person is armed and dangerous, that’s good. You’re way less likely to kill with a taser.

If you are tasing someone multiple times to get them to comply, this in a situation where lethal force wouldn’t otherwise be justified, then you ought not to be using a goddamn taser.

If you’re using a taser in a situation where you could have talked someone down and not had things spiral out of control in the first place, you’re an idiot.

The irony is that pandering to the kinds of people that make up their base, only makes those who are middle line conservative get turned off from them. Which ends up concentrating their constituents into a smaller and tighter circle of paranoia and intolerance.

Also you have to understand that people have been primed by years of television, movies and thriller novels to think of the police as ” the good guys/white hats of America”. The police themselves have watched all these movies and tv shows with fine upstanding, noble white cops fighting the hoards of ” Black and Brown Thugs” and upholding civilization. We’ve all been inundated with the stories of how dangerous their jobs are and how they deal with the dregs of society and how they’re so sensitive, which results in alcoholism, divorce and suicide. Americans have all been as carefully brainwashed to have empathy for the police, no matter what they do as they have been brainwashed to automatically associate the word “criminal” with the word “Black”. Many of the excuses I’ve heard for the police of Ferguson come right out of the movies and tv shows we’ve been listening to for decades.

I think that says a lot about Americans ability to ignore what’s right in front of their eyeballs in favor of platitudes and happy lies. Also a complete inability to question any of the media they consume.

@mildlymagnificent:

But a fair average quality police officer who’s been _trained_ to keep in touch with the community would use such a golden opportunity to establish or enhance relationships.

Another problem (in addition to the racism) is that in many police departments, police are not being trained in community policing.
So when you arm a cop like a soldier, when you dress ‘em like a soldier, when you tell ‘em to fight in a war and then send ‘em out into a neighborhood that he has no stake in and doesn’t consider himself a part of, you get a very antagonistic, us-versus-them relationship between the officer and that community. I think that is really pervasive, and the rise of the stop-snitchin’ movement, whatever you think of it, shows there are entire communities in this country that are more afraid of police than they are of the people that the police are supposed to be protecting them from. That is a pretty terrible development.

I think that the us-vs-them of racism and the us-vs-them of the warrior cop is a situation where the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and not in a good way. Especially when the entire department is almost all white and the community is not.

Ally & freemage–Between knowing Grace Annam (online, as a regular on Alas) and knowing my uncle (a former cop) I can’t get on board with the “all cops are bad” thing. But I think there is probably not just a difference between the quality of officers, but the quality of departments; I don’t think that a state trooper hearing secondhand or in the news about corruption in a city police department, or a cop in one city hearing about corruption in another city, really has more power to do anything about it than we do.

http://www.blackgirldangerous.org/2014/08/things-stop-distracted-black-person-gets-murdered-police/

This young lady says it all

While I don’t speak for all WoC, I’d like to give a tearful, heartfelt THANK YOU! To everyone on this forum and a couple of others for proving to me that Black people are not alone in our outrage.

My heart has felt so heavy and I’ve been fighting back my tears and fears all week long. And as usual, every time one of these things happens, there are White people crawling out of the woodwork to hop on any ideological train they believe will run over some Black people. Like cockroaches, they exemplify my every secret and not so secret fear that White people are sociopaths who care nothing for lives that don’t directly affect their own. It makes me doubt my friends and give my co workers the side eye, wondering which one of them is harbor ing this toxic irrationality. It affects my relationships and I hate thinking such things about people I care about.

The past few days has done a lot to dispel a lot of those fears.

The bottom line is: What kind of person do you want to be? Some of the people on these and other forums have shown me that they, at least, try to live according to the “Better Angels of their nature” rather than their lowest impulses.

I thank all of you for the compassion and empathy with which you have approached this topic. ????