I think you have done, in one long paragraph, what it took prosecuting attorney McCulloch 45 minutes to explain & several days to accomplish before his grand jury; you have tried Darren Wilson & found him not guilty. Unfortunately that is not the job of a grand jury. It is the grand jury’s job to determine whether probable cause exists to indite Darren Wilson; that is all. Eye-witness evidence was very contradictory & much emphasis was placed on physical evidence but, it is possible, that this was chosen selectively & with bias. Surely, the basic facts, that an unarmed youth was killed by a police officer, should be sufficient probable cause for a trial. In this case the State of Missouri was denied its right to cross examine witnesses in open court. Justice may have been done, but it certainly was not seen to be done.
]]>I don’t know what it’s like to live in the US, but I’ve just been seeing far too many videos of young, really young, black men/boys getting shot by police officers, and shot really, really quickly. I don’t think that there’s really any doubt that racism, be it unconscious or otherwise, and conditioning, is playing a huge role in these shootings.
Master Stroud:
Niceville rocks.
When it’s made into a movie/TV show/action figure, I would like a small role. It doesn’t even have to be heroic.
I certainly respect your experience and point of view, and I won’t argue the particulars of the verdict regarding Darren Brown, we’ve all been in that echo chamber long enough. It seems to me that policing is an extremely difficult and dangerous ( for a number of reasons, internally and externally) job, and that officers probably have to rely on instinct and conditioning more than observation and mediation. The officer who killed the 12-year-old in Cleveland fired his gun less than 2 seconds out the vehicle, and I think a uniquely American point of view where black men are seen as weapons unto themselves, inherently dangerous or demonic, underpins such instinctual and terrified actions.
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