Well, that's a bit embarassing for HolderFollow

Seems to be a little something for everyone. One side can point to the multiple civil rights violations found against the department as a whole as vindication, the other can point to Wilson's potential charges being dismissed as vindication. I realize it's two separate reports but were released close to the same time.

I personally didn't comment much at all about the shooting itself (instead debating the later police response to the protests/riots) so I don't have much to add about this particular chapter.

[Edit: I first said Brown's charges which show how much attention I was paying]

Edited, Mar 5th 2015 5:25pm by Jophiel

Yes, because Officer Wilson was the sole person in the PD that wasn't racially targeting blacks. GTFOHWTBS. Contrary to your belief, Mike Brown wasn't held to the same standard as Treyvon Martin nor was it likely for the DOJ to come up with anything with their high standard. With the information released of the racist emails and practices, it only supports the notion that Officer Wilson probably racially initiated confrontation with Mike Brown which was part of the original story. Remember, Officer Wilson wasn't being challenged for being racially discriminatory, but was targeted for 1st Degree murder. The outcry from the sensible people weren't labeling Brown as innocent, but upset that Wilson was able to kill someone (who was left dead for hours in the road) without any indictment.

Yeah. Kinda obvious why one report was released right before the other was. Hand out some red meat speculation prior to the disappointment of reality.

It's getting to be a bit of a broken record when we keep hearing about all of this systematic racism that's rampant everywhere, but whenever a single instance of this is highlighted and focused on, it turns out to not be that at all. Um... Where is it again? Ah... Hidden. Right. But trust us. It's there. You just can't see it. We can't show it to you, and no one's getting convicted of it. But it's there! Really.

Did you bother to read my post because you have not contradicted a single point that I made.



The original story was that Officer Wilson stopped Mike Brown for Jay walking. The report says that the police ticketed blacks for walking in order to make revenue. Just like "stand your ground", you can initiate confrontation and kill out of self defense. You're focusing on the fictional emotional and baseless arguments used in this case, which I don't fully blame you since they were vocal. However, if you're going to act like you're intellectual on the subject, then you are expected to understand the difference in arguments.



Read above. Yes, because black people have made up stories that support statistics. When the city's finance director says "Unless ticket writing ramps up significantly before the end of the year, it will be hard to significantly raise collections" and blacks are disproportionally ticketed for walking, that is far from vague claims from a random person who might be racist. If you can't even acknowledge that, then you aren't even serious about this conversation.

Edited, Mar 7th 2015 3:37am by Almalieque

Yes. I did read it:



That statement, by you, is false. Hence why I responded directly to it, saying that it was false. WTF?



Um. Except that if you read the DOJ investigation (not the report they wrote in FPD in general), Wilson initially started to drive away after telling them to get out of the middle of the street. Hardly something he'd do if he was intent on ticketing them (he was, in fact, late for lunch with his finance and had no intention of dealing with the two). It was only after Brown tossed an expletive or three at Wilson *and* Wilson realized that the two matched the descriptions he'd heard about a recent robbery (including carrying around the cigarillos that had been reported stolen) that he backed up his car and re-engaged them.



Huh? I'm responding to the information in the DOJ investigation of the shooting of Michael Brown. I'm not sure what you are talking about.



Which is the kind of thing a lot of city finance directors probably say. At least partially because it's part of their jobs. You have to balance the guy who's job is to deal with city revenue against other voices in the city. But the report doesn't bother to do that. I'll leave it to you to noodle out why.



And? Blacks are disproportionally more likely to be both victims and perpetrators of crime, period. Almost entirely because of broader socio-economic conditions that exist nationwide, not just in Ferguson, MO. The problem is that you want to blame the disproportional outcomes on bias on the part of police, but that is almost certainly not the correct direction to go. Blacks are more likely to be ticketed, arrested, detained, etc because blacks are more likely to commit a host of crimes, from minor to major. They are more likely to commit those offenses because they are more likely to be poor and live in high crime neighborhoods where such offenses are both committed more often, and where there is a higher police presence (because of the higher rate of crime) and thus a greater likelihood of an offense being witnessed by a police officer.


The funny thing is that no one is denying that Brown and his friend were both walking down the middle of the street. Right in front of a cop. No one is denying that when the cop told them to get out of the middle of the street, they refused to do so. Perhaps if blacks are more often ticketed for jay walking in Ferguson, it's because they're doing it more often?



Except that, despite the media narrative and the regular mention of the interaction between the FPD and African-American citizens in Ferguson, there's nothing in the report to conclusively show that these statics are actually the result of a racial bias with regard to policing in the city. Have you read the whole report? I have (both of them now). It's interesting what is not in there. Lots of cases of bad police behavior where the victim was black. But not much in terms of ratios and analysis of said ratios. And no actual conclusion about the root cause being "racism". That's what the media reports, but it's not actually in the DOJ report itself.

The DOJ report just happens to only list cases of bad behavior that involve blacks (or only report the skin color of the victim when it's a black person, it's hard to be sure). Which is a pretty sure sign that the report isn't about serious analysis of the potential for racism by the FPD, but is all about stirring up racial sentiment among the usual race warriors.



Acknowledge what? The claims aren't even in the report. The report is just written in a way to make it easy for those reading it to come to that conclusion, and then write that conclusion in the headline of their articles about the report.

Did you read either the report or the investigation? I've read both in their entirety. Maybe you should start there and then get back to me when you're done.

Not really, no. It's actually a fairly decent sign that there were actionable offenses. I know that in your world this always means that they were "forced" to do it because of "politics" or "the media" or "Obama gremlins" or whatever else prevents you from admitting that there was any factual basis behind it but most of us aren't stuck behind your wildly partisan goggles.

1 person was fired & 2 people resigned over their racist emails, which proves exactly what I was thinking. The DOJ is prepared to dismantle the Ferguson PD (like Wilson's former precinct was dissolved for racism issues) if they fail to come up with appropriate reforms, so they're every bit as bad at their jobs as they showed they were after Brown was shot.

That if you look close enough at any police force in America, you'll find one person who did something stupid and embarrassing enough to the department to warrant firing, and two other people who did things not quite embarrassing enough to get fired, but enough to be asked to resign? Yeah. Newsflash. That's not news.



And why is the DOJ prepared to do that? Because there's an angry mob demanding it. Selective justice is not justice.


The point is that the report of racism among the FPD as a whole exists solely because the DOJ was not able to prove any civil rights violation involved with the Brown shooting itself but desperately needed to show that there was some problem sufficiently bad in Ferguson to legitimize months of rioting. That's what this is really about. The report serves exactly the purpose it was used for in this thread. To be used to respond to anyone who points to the DOJ investigation into the Brown shooting as an example of race based overreaction.

Heaven forbid we recognize spin when we see it.

Um... Because it's false. The investigation by the DOJ against officer Wilson was entirely about whether he committed a civil rights violation. I even listed the US code number in question. While I'm sure there may have been some people out there somewhere who thought he should be charged with some form of murder, that was *not* what the DOJ was investigating. Since I started this thread, and my topic was about the DOJ investigation, you are wrong to say that it wasn't about civil rights, but was about murder.

Get it? Sheesh!



I have no clue what point you're trying to make here. Wilson's testimony did not contradict his own testimony. That doesn't make any sense. You're acting as though the wild rumors and speculation that surrounded the case are all true, while the actual facts and testimony is not. Maybe you should actually inform yourself of the facts of the case first. Heck. Start by reading the investigation I linked earlier.



Sigh. I already addressed this. Blacks are more likely to live in poor neighborhoods with high crime rates. High crime rates mean greater police presence. Which means... wait for it... greater relative rates of false arrests, searches of people who aren't carrying contraband, etc, etc, etc.The problem is that you are assuming that race is the cause of any discrepancy, when it's far easier to explain it by geography and racial mix within said geography.

I've attempted to explain this to you many times on this forum, but you either don't get it, or wont get it. If you replace your focus on race in an area with one on crime rates in an area, then the stats make sense. If you then go back and look at the racial makeup of those areas, it explains the apparent racial discrepancy. If blacks make up a disproportionately higher percentage of the population in high crime areas, they are going to suffer all of the effects of that environment disproportionately as well.




Um... I think you are confusing the DOJ investigation into the Brown shooting with the "report" they released about the FPD as a whole. Those are two different things. The actual official investigation into a possible civil rights violation proved to be very embarrassing for Holder and all of those who declared the shooting to be a whole bunch of things that it wasn't.

The report is pretty obviously about trying to find something to blame whitey for. It's more of a political document designed to influence opinion than an investigation into whether any crimes were committed (or civil rights violations as the case may be).



I said that blacks were more likely to live in poor neighborhoods, and thus more likely to be both victims of crimes and perpetrators of crimes (and more likely to have run ins with police), not because of their skin color, but because of the environment they are living in. Your problem is that you keep obsessing over the skin color. But that's not the cause of the problem.

Imagine I have two bags of marbles. I randomly poured 100 red and 100 green marbles into the two bags, and by chance bag A got 70 red marbles and 30 green ones, while bag B got 30 red ones and 70 green ones. Without looking at the contents of the bags, I grab one of them and put it in my pocket, and the other I hold in my hand swinging it around whilst walking down the street, randomly smacking it (and the marbles inside) against the pavement. When I get to my destination, I find that half of the marbles in the bag I was swinging have become cracked and scratched.

Now. Regardless of whether I was swinging bag A, or bag B, the result will be a disproportionate amount of damaged red versus green marbles. But that's not because I choose to damage one over the other, or I like one more than the other. It's the same with race. It's wrong to assume the intent is to target one race or the other. Not when there's a much more rational environmental explanation at hand.



No. The crime stats don't show malice at all. Just as the fact that more of one marble being damaged than the other in my example doesn't show malice towards a particular color. You are choosing to interpret it as malice. That's your error. And as long as you do, you'll fail to support actual solutions to the real problem (why blacks are more likely to be living in poor neighborhoods with high crime rates). You're part of the problem.



I wouldn't say "produce", but rather "make people assume". Worked on you, didn't it?



I never said "only blacks are committing crimes". We're not talking about absolutes here. We're talking about relative percentages. And, as I've explained repeatedly, those differences can easily be explained by looking at relative racial populations in different environments. Change the environments and you change the crime stats. Trying to force cops to not enforce the law in some areas because doing so would result in higher rates of black incarceration, searches, etc, is the absolute backwards way of addressing this.




Um... What the DOJ said is in the report. Did you mean to say that you've read what the media has told you about the report? Cause that's not the same thing.



I don't know what information you think is contradictory, so that's kinda tough. I already linked the investigation, and I believe someone else linked the report (if not, it's easy enough to find). How about you start there?



Um... But you haven't bothered to read the DOJ report or investigation. If you disagree with what I've said about either, then you're free to read them and refute what I said. But until you do so, it's kinda silly to just insist I'm wrong because I'm telling you what's in the reports, but you can't confirm that because you haven't. I'm not even sure where to begin with how ridiculous you're being.

[quote]If Holder were saying what you were saying and I were the one saying something different, then you would have a point.[/quote]

Huh? Why don't you just read the darn information first. Ok? It's obvious you have no clue what's going on.

Edited, Mar 10th 2015 4:47pm by gbaji

Except I didn't say that they created the reports in order to please everyone. I said that the results of the reports provided something for everyone.

In other words, I'm not disparaging anyone's intent in order to to shelter my preconceptions like you are.

Not really but I can't muster any enthusiasm to debate it with you. Go on believing whatever you like.

Glass stones, living homes. Something to that affect. Guess we didn't learn anything from this afterall.

I don't think you understand what the Justice Department does or the authority it has over the situation.

He thought Mississippi Burning was a dystopian fable about the overreach of government.