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I have friends who are doing organizing in SF and Oakland for protests related to Ferguson/coordinating Palestinian support as well, and can definitely ask them about it if you want. I've also done a good bit of research on it as well, so there's that too.ShadowCatboy posted:Could you elaborate more about the controversial grand jury decision? I've heard that there may have been either incompetence or malfeasance on the prosecutor's part when it came to how she handled things. The prosecutor's a guy fyi. There's a bunch of ways that he hosed up, but I think it was willful rather than just incompetence. First off, he should have recused himself. 70,000 people signed a petition urging him to do so, and a number of Missouri politicians outright said they had no faith in his ability to prosecute the case fairly. His Dad was a policeman killed by a black man so he was biased from the get go w/r/t the whole situation. He's made statements like "being a prosecutor is the closest thing to being a cop", and has a history of orchestrating grand juries that make sure police don't get indicted (this is the fifth time he's done it -- a lot of the other times were honestly way more hosed). He has a history of bias and shouldn't have been in charge at all. He failed to list the possible crimes that Darren Wilson could be indicted for, which is standard practice in Grand Juries at the federal and state level, and instead let the media narrative make it out to be murder or nothing. This makes it much less likely to get an indictment -- rather than presenting things like manslaughter etc. etc. as options, essentially only homicide was left on the table. It narrowed the scope of the jury when it's the prosecutor's obligation to do the exact opposite. He selectively called up and then dismantled witnesses, questioning those who didn't support the narrative he wanted while not doing the same to others, and threw in evidence/witnesses that shouldn't have been admitted in order to muddy the waters on the 'opposition' side. He started the trial before forensic teams were done collecting evidence, which further confused the jury, and then qualified and hedged about the actual facts to the point that it was unclear even once all the evidence was in what had really happened. He allowed Darren Wilson to testify for hours, which is unheard of at the Federal level (never done) and when it is done at the state level is used as an opportunity to poke holes in the defendant's version of events. Instead he let everything Darren Wilson said stand, prepped the jury etc. for his speech, and gave him time to tailor his defense to fit this hosed precedent that basically says that if the officer feels at the time that he's being threatened that whatever they did is justified. It's important to note that this case (whose name I'm forgetting, sorry) absolutely should not exist, and gives an out for police, given the proper presentation, to do basically anything. So, even if someone is exonerated under this statute, the statute itself is unjust, and any judgment made stemming from it is in question as well. He straight up presented a statute to the jury about shooting fleeing suspects that had been deemed unconstitutional decades before. He wasn't supposed to present exculpatory evidence to the degree he did, as various justices and whatnot have said. Afterwards, he released 'all the records of the trial' in order to let the public decide and whatnot, but then it turned out that he selectively released documents that he thought looked good and left out ones he didn't, and only just released the rest (some of the rest?) now. Among the records he didn't release were statements talking about Darren Wilson's reputation for harassing black residents etc. -- stuff that doesn't make him look very good. He used the grand jury not just as a means of exonerating Darren Wilson, but also as a way to twist the media narrative. Even if you believe that he conducted the grand jury in a way that was fair to Darren Wilson (which I don't think is true, but hey) it is absolutely true that it's very, very unusual for someone not to be indicted in a grand jury (a judge famously said that a prosecutor could indict a "ham sandwich" at a grand jury; in 2010 out of over 160,000 grand jury cases 11 returned without an indictment) unless they're a cop. Even if it were justice, the fact that it's only dispensed to the police is obviously wrong. He made a grand jury operate as if it were a trial, which is absolutely not what it's meant to be, and then rigged it for Darren Wilson. Even if Darren Wilson ultimately shouldn't have been found guilty of any crime, in our justice system that is absolutely not supposed to happen in a grand jury. There's honestly a good bit more, and this is nowhere near the most hosed thing that this prosecutor, St. Louis, or the nation has done w/r/t the police/race etc., but hopefully that gives you some idea. A big part of the anger over it is that it's indicative and a product of systemic injustice and racism in our country. e: Also, like, he's supposed to be a prosecutor, and you know, prosecute, what the gently caress. foutre fucked around with this message at 00:42 on Dec 15, 2014 |
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Dec 15, 2014 00:38
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RIP ZEEZ 
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Also you're basing it not just on your anecdotal experience with police in a different country, but also on.... police in television shows in a different country? The reason we have a bad relationship with the police is because they do a lot of lovely things -- to be honest, there are probably more people who have a better opinion of the police than they should than the other way around
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Dec 16, 2014 13:42
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Sorry, let me clarify. I'm not trying to say that people should repudiate the idea of a police force and the rule of law. I'm saying that people should hold the police accountable when they act wrongly, and that blindly trusting them gets in the way of that. Yes, there are a lot of good cops, but they are people just like everyone else and they make mistakes. Further, there's a preponderance of evidence that the way we train policemen, the way that cultures in police stations etc. work, and the links between the prison system and the court system as well as the police all contribute to a culture that is racist and ultimately unjust. Obviously we still need the police and the rule of law (no poo poo) but we can do a whole lot better than we are now. Also, you're fundamentally misunderstanding the situation as well. The problem isn't just that Darren Wilson might be guilty and the opportunity to find that out was denied by a mishandled grand jury. The problem isn't just that Michael Brown was killed. The problem is that, with our current incarceration trends, one in every three black males born today can expect to go to prison at some point in their life, compared with one in every six Latino males, and one in every 17 white males. African Americans make up 13% of drug offenders, but 46% of those convicted. From 1980-2010 the police were twice as likely to arrest black youth, despite the fact that a studies over the same time period found that white youth were twice as likely to use illegal drugs. For adults, it was found that 5 times as many Whites are using drugs as African Americans, yet African Americans are sent to prison for drug offenses at 10 times the rate of Whites. The public defender system is, according to our Attorney General, "in a state of crisis" underfunded and failing to give poor people an equal shot at a fair trial. The majority of the people forced to use public defenders are black and latino, meaning that they have less of a shot in a trial all else being equal. We have counties, like in Ferguson, that fund themselves based on arrests which in practice has incentivized arresting poor minorities who can't fight the fine (because they can't fight it, the county is more likely to make money). We have private prisons that can lobby for policies that fill them. We have 5% of the world population and 25% of the world's prison population. Every other first world nation with lower crime rates arrests a lower percentage of their population than we do. I could keep going, but suffice to say our justice system is biased against minorities and the poor. Part of our justice system is a police force that is undertrained, has incentives to racially profile, discourages accountability (by making the internal affairs process operate within departments), etc. etc. Obviously there are good policeman, and of course we need a justice system, but the fact is the one that we have is profoundly broken, and unless people acknowledge the real state of our nation's police and justice system, and doesn't privilege police any further in a system that's already biased towards them. If you actually look at the demands of the actual organizing committee around Ferguson rather than a youtube video cherry-picking a few protestor's responses, you'll see that they aren't calling for the dissolution of the justice system or for Darren Wilson's head. They are asking for things like "an investigation into police brutality towards and harassment of minorities", body cameras, transparent records, etc. These are things that if you genuinely believe in police officers and the police force, you should support because it will exonerate them. It doesn't make sense to me that you can at once trust the majority of the police and support transparency and accountability.
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Dec 16, 2014 14:29
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Yeah, I was getting most of my info about what the prosecutor did that was hosed up from a panel of law school profs. However, I should have made it more clear that they weren't sure that he'd actually done anything illegal, just unfair-- especially because it's hard to know exactly how things are meant to work in Missouri grand juries specifically unless you have specialized knowledge, which I guess even they weren't sure of. The impression I got from the talk was that even if the grand jury process in this case did result in an ok result, it set a double standard for police and everyone else (especially minorities) as to what the role of a grand jury was (even Scalia, admittedly a while ago, said that the point of a grand jury wasn't to provide exculpatory evidence). What they didn't really go into, that I think would be interesting, is how to make it so that the legal processes better line up with what laymen think is just (with exceptions, of course, for when people who don't know much are just totally off, which I guess is where the kicker is). bitcoin bastard posted:Police thread has a couple of good counterpoints on 24x7 body cameras: people will be even less likely to talk to the police about crimes they witness, potential for invasion of privacy when police enter a private home, and dickhead supervisors who will review footage in an attempt to write up police for stupid poo poo ("looks like you took 16 minutes on that coffee break, that's a written warning"). That's interesting -- I wonder how that would function in terms of right to privacy. Seconding the request for a lawyer. Nocheez posted:I mention this because I am not sure that the Mike Brown case was the right one to ignite this cause. While his death is definitely tragic, we do not know for certain that Darren Wilson acted irresponsibly or with undue force. Mike being caught on camera committing a strong-arm robbery definitely hurts his image, and detracts from the impact of his death. The awkward thing about social movements is that you can't really choose what ignites action. I think that there are certainly a lot of more sympathetic victims to choose from, and it feels like the movement is trying to open up to that. However, I agree that having Mike Brown as the genesis or what have you gives people an in to say "well, this guy was actually not great so therefore all the demands stemming from it are unreasonable" which is really too bad.
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Dec 16, 2014 19:26
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