How does a simple phrase, "hands up don't shoot" generate so much defensiveness and rage? Why should the fact that people say "black lives matter" mean that white lives (or blue lives) don't? To think that way is absolutely absurd.
I'm not going to parse evidence or make some complex technical argument that Michael Brown did or didn't have his hands up. To me, it doesn't matter if he did or he didn't. It never has. As I have said from the very beginning; the fact that Wilson chased Brown down and shot him after he had disengaged and tried to get away is all I ever needed to know. I believed from the start that Wilson screwed up on the initial stop and was in over his head very quickly. Once Wilson decided to pursue Brown and began firing his weapon without do regard for the public or the totality of the circumstances he was mostly acting out of fear and/or anger. As a cop who had my share of fights, I don't need forensic experts or ballistic evidence to tell me that. Wilson just didn't do the job that he was paid to do (that he swore an oath to do) correctly and that is what eventually cost Michael Brown his life. Period. Mistakes do happen in police work. People are non-compliant and sometimes they will fight you. The situation can go south quickly and sometimes you can overreact. Lucky for Wilson his supervisor on the scene covered him and the department and prosecutor’s office backed him up.
Thing is, you can argue the evidence. That is why the prosecution team has their forensic experts and the defense (if the suspect has money) gets theirs. That is also why when an officer shoots his weapon in the line of duty, his supervisor is supposed to secure that weapon at the scene, immediately.
You can even argue the facts. What was the time of day? Where were the suspect’s hands? How big was he? Was he running or stumbling towards you? That is why 911 recordings should have had records of where an officer is at the time of an incident and what he is doing. That supervisor is also supposed to take the officers statement, immediately.
You can't argue with math, and the data on this city is pretty clear. Race is a major factor in Ferguson Missouri and everybody from the police department to the prosecutor’s office to the judge are affected by it. There is of course a much larger problem with racism in law enforcement in general. That problem has been made painfully obvious over the last 18 months. Clearly the people who have never wanted to acknowledge that this problem exists are searching for anything to stick their heads back in the sand while many in law enforcement and their enablers just want people who don’t give them a pass to shut up. Its a throw back to the times when black folks were to be seen but not heard.
It is in fact unbelievable to see some of the idiotic excuses people have come up with for why they feel that black people don't have the right to complain about cops killing them.
"Well black people kill other black people every day so.." that logic is both tragic and spectacularly stupid. Tragic because anytime a life is taken it is a bad thing. Stupid because in those cases black people don't kill other black people as a representative of the state and under the color of law. Also, unlike police officers in most cases, the black people that commit those crimes will more than likely be indicted and sentenced for their crimes.
I cant count how many times I have read or heard people say how they believe that Wilson was right to do what he did because “this big, 400 pound black guy was rushing at him”. Once they realize how bad that actually sounds most people will just fall back to the “but he went for his gun” defense. That argument is also so fundamentally flawed that when I hear the media repeating this narrative in any form just makes me crazy. It leaves the average person that has no understanding of law enforcement with the impression that any form of resistance is going to usually result in death.
Police Officers who are effective at their jobs do not kill unarmed non-compliant people because they are big or black.
Police Officers who are effective at their jobs (and know what the hell they are doing) do not kill unarmed people because they “rush at them”.
Police Officers who are effective at their jobs usually do not put themselves in the position where they are shooting people in the back or people that are running away.
Police Officers who are effective at their jobs do not chase after unarmed fleeing suspects, shooting their weapons at them, no matter what they just did.
Most police officers go their entire career and NEVER fire their weapon at someone.
That is why the journalists like Jonathan Capehart who now feel it necessary to make these existential apologies for protesters using "hands up don't shoot" are so pathetic. Who are they actually apologizing too? Daren Wilson? Bob McCullough? The Ferguson police department? FOX News viewers? BS conservative outrage is to be expected, but this hand wringing among "liberal" journalists is ridiculous. Those protesters shouldn't be castigated they should be celebrated. They took a phrase “hands up don’t shoot” that originated from a case of obvious police mistakes and transformed it into a call for positive non-violent change. These young people have taken a tragedy and turned it into a movement that is trying keep law abiding citizens alive and compliant with law enforcement. How is that a bad thing?????
Now it seems that some folks in the MSM feel compelled to do a mae culpa because they chose to actually do their jobs and report the evidence of this case with some degree of skepticism. Evidence that was gathered by a racist police department and a racist judicial system in Ferguson that to a large extent has been financed on the backs of black people is now somehow not susceptible to using race as a factor in this particular case? To accept that without question just defies logic. Just because the DOJ could not prove that Officer Wilson used race as a factor when he shot Michael Brown, that doesn't excuse a case of ATROCIOUS policing, racist policies and leadership failures on every level. I would argue that the only time race didn't play a major role in this is the 25 seconds that it took for Darren Wilson to kill Michael Brown.
So before you apologize take a look back at the events of the past 18 months. In case after case when white officers have had the discretion to use deadly force in situations where black citizens are either completely unarmed or are not an active threat, they have chosen to kill that citizen. That is a cold reality that most police and some in the media don’t want to face. Unarmed black men and children are getting gunned down by police while in many cases white men who ARE armed and DO pose a threat to police are not killed.
Does anyone honestly believe that Michael Brown actually had the opportunity to "put his hands up" after Officer Wilson had shot him in the arm then chased him down and shot him in the face?
What about 12 year old Tamir Rice? Did he get the opportunity to put his hands up? He didn't even get 3 seconds.
What about Eric Garner? While the paramedics and officers on the scene stood there joking while they watched him die, if he had managed to hold his hands up, would that have saved his life? He actually did have his hands up when the officer began choking him.
What about John Crawford? His hands weren't up because his back was turned and he never even had a chance to identify who was shooting him.
What about Darrien Hunt? One minute he’s laughing and taking pictures with the police officers and the next minute he is dead. Shot in the back.
But when I turn on the TV and read the newspaper I see something totally different. I see white militiamen at Clive Bundy’s ranch pointing sniper rifles at cops, but there are no arrests and nobody gets shot. I watch white open carry activists walking around schools with assault rifles taunting police officers, but there are no arrests and nobody gets shot. I see white mental patients sitting in the middle of intersections with assault rifles threatening police officers, but there are no arrests and nobody gets shot. I read about an 18-year old white male who walks into a police station, fights with 3 officers, wrestles a gun away, fires it, and yet he was subdued and placed in custody.
When you have to fear for your life or your child’s life with any interaction with police, why shouldn't you question if black lives matter? When you live in a world with such a disparity in outcomes that you begin to question what your life is worth, using the slogan "black lives matter" is absolutely APPROPRIATE.
When black people peacefully protest and still have sniper rifles pointed at their heads and APC’s rolled into their neighborhoods chanting "hands up, don't shoot" is not only reasonable, it is NECESSARY for survival.