Mike Brown shooting thread - No indictment! Get out and protest!

[Madrun Badrun]

sitting while black

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/08/the-problem-is-im-black/379357/?single_page=true

[I'm a Puppy!]

Dude shouldn't have Sat so aggressively

[Human Snorenado]

Wait for all the facts, brehs

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/ferguson-officers-excessive-force-lawsuits

In a 2012 lawsuit, a Ferguson officer allegedly hog-tied and choked a 12-year-old boy in the driveway of his home as he was checking the mail. The lawsuit accuses two officers of using "unreasonable and excessive" force.

[Phoenix Dark]

A chokehold is the most effective way to restrain a 12 year old boy. Do some research before complaining.

[benjipwns]

It worked didn't it?

[team filler]

white folks more concerned for some celebrity sluts getting exposed, than for an 18 year old kid being turned to swiss cheese in the street.

[Mupepe]

white folks more concerned for some celebrity sluts getting exposed, than for an 18 year old kid being turned to swiss cheese in the street.

esch is Indian. Direct your outrage on something that deserves and dont you dare piss on my parade

[Your Stalker]

 

[ZephyrFate]

yeah i know filler, i haven't seen *any* white people talking about mike brown and ferguson on the internet

that said, i can't help but notice the african-american community's shameful silence on the 40+ japanese people killed in a landslide a week and a half ago

We should really put dashcams on those landslides.

[Yeti]

speaking of cameras, Ferguson police were donated five body cameras

http://abcnews.go.com/US/ferguson-police-body-cameras-donation/story?id=25204118

[I'm a Puppy!]

Great now the Ferguson will start looking for bodies to put them on.

[chronovore]

"If you don't want to get hurt, don't challenge me."

http://thefreethoughtproject.com/atlanta-officer-arrested-burning-womans-body-attempting-flee-county/#CdP6y3whDWGdDwjO.99

Officer Tahreem Zeus Rana, 23, was arrested at an airport Thursday morning for kidnapping, murder, tampering with evidence, and arson while attempting to flee to Mexico.
killer

Last Friday, Rana met up with a woman named Valencia Woodard, 26, after responding to an ad she had posted.  Woodard had been in Georgia from New York for less than a week, it is likely she moved to be closer to her eight year old daughter who was living in Georgia with her grandmother.

Detective Stephen Cushing reports that Rana picked her up, brought her to a dead end street not even a mile from his house, and shot her repeatedly with his .40 caliber glock issued by the department.

Then he set her body on fire, and tried to flee for Mexico.

Cops.

[Phoenix Dark]

big surprise, Charles Johnson is full of shit (again)
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/michael-brown-felony-convictions-juvenile

[Dickie Dee]

I saw this a few days back and thought of that guy:

[Joe Molotov]

He's still working on getting that report, let's wait until we've got all the facts.

[Great Rumbler]

Ferguson PD is toast:

The U.S. Justice Department is planning to take a top-to-bottom look at the Ferguson, Missouri, police department -- which has come under fire for its past practices in the uproar over the shooting of Michael Brown -- officials told CNN.

A Missouri official and a federal official told CNN on Wednesday that the civil rights division of the Justice Department is preparing to launch a new investigation into police in the St. Louis suburb.

The review will examine previous incidents and complaints involving police, as well as its training, to examine how the department operates, according to the Missouri official. It will look at whether the practices of Ferguson police -- and only Ferguson police -- violate federal law or the U.S. Constitution, said an official briefed on the investigation.

[Positive Touch]

they need to look into st Louis county pd as a while dammit

[Barraco Barner]

The broader Justice Department inquiry will cover whether the police in Ferguson have a history of discrimination or misuse of force beyond the Brown case, but the Justice Department has not ruled out expanding it to other St. Louis County departments, one of the federal officials said. Both officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation had not been formally announced.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/04/us/politics/justice-dept-to-investigate-ferguson-police-practices.html

[Madrun Badrun]

Doing this for one city doesn't help the problem much.  From all the police misconduct stories that come out of NYC, they should get the same treatment. 

[Brehvolution]

They need to be made an example. There is too much history of fuckery with this department for it not to be investigated.

[I'm a Puppy!]

Has the family brought a wrongful death suit?
Really this is how it ends.
If you protest and outrage you get marginalized and ignored.
But if you suddenly cost them millions and millions they'll pay attention then.

[Positive Touch]

yes because everyone was clearly ignoring all the protests of the last few weeks.

in other news OH SHIT OH SHIT OH SHIT @shaunking is connecting the dots between racist cops and the mo political power structure right now on his Twitter feed right now. YES YES YES white supremacy has always been allowed to hide in the shadows in this city despite being EVERYWHERE and I am SO FUCKING GLAD that efforts to bring it into the light are finally taking hold.

[Himu]

https://twitter.com/ShaunKing/status/507346636494745600/photo/1

[CatsCatsCats]

Apparently not the right guy?

[Phoenix Dark]

That's too good to be true, not buying it until I see evidence it's the right Charles Johnson. Pretty generic name.

[benjipwns]

Racist libertarian media out in full force trying to advance Koch interests and smear the police and whole St. Louis area justice system:
http://photographyisnotacrime.com/2014/08/29/incident-report-wheres-use-force-report-violations-ferguson/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/09/03/how-st-louis-county-missouri-profits-from-poverty/

The officer found that Bolden had four arrest warrants in three separate jurisdictions: the towns of Florissant and Hazelwood in St. Louis County and the town of Foristell in St. Charles County. All of the warrants were for failure to appear in court for traffic violations. Bolden hadn’t appeared in court because she didn’t have the money. A couple of those fines were for speeding, one was for failure to wear her seatbelt and most of the rest were for what defense attorneys in the St. Louis area have come to call “poverty violations” — driving with a suspended license, expired plates, expired registration and a failure to provide proof of insurance.

The Florissant officer first took Bolden to the jail in that town, where Bolden posted a couple hundred dollars bond and was released at around midnight. She was next taken to Hazelwood and held at the jail there until she could post a second bond. That was another couple hundred dollars. She wasn’t released from her cell there until around 5 p.m. the next day. Exhausted, stressed, and still worried about what her kids had seen, she was finally taken to the St. Charles County jail for the outstanding warrant in Foristell. Why the county jail? Because the tiny town of 500 isn’t large enough to have its own holding cell, even though it does have a mayor, a board of aldermen, a municipal court and a seven-member police department. It’s probably best known locally for the speed trap its police set along I-70.

By the time Bolden got to St. Charles County, it had been well over 36 hours since the accident. “I hadn’t slept,” she says. “I was still in my same clothes. I was starting to lose my mind.” That’s when she says a police officer told her that if she couldn’t post bond, they’d keep her in jail until May [from March 20th]. “I just freaked out,” she says. “I said, ‘What about my babies? Who is going to take care of my babies?’” She says the officer just shrugged.

...

The Foristell warrant stemmed from a speeding ticket in 2011. As mentioned before, Bolden didn’t show up in court because she didn’t have the money to pay it and feared they’d put her jail. It’s a common and unfortunate misconception among St. Louis County residents, especially those who don’t have an attorney to tell them otherwise. A town can’t put you in jail for lacking the money to pay a fine. But you can be jailed not appearing in court to tell the judge you can’t pay — and fined again for not showing up. After twice failing to appear for the Foristell ticket, Bolden showed up, was able to get the warrant removed and set up a payment plan with the court. But she says that a few months later, she was a couple days late with her payment. She says she called to notify the clerk, who told her not to worry. Instead, the town hit her with another warrant — the same warrant for which she was jailed in March.

Bolden’s bond was set at $1,700. No one she knew had that kind of money. Bolden broke down; she cried, she screamed, and she swore. She was given a psychological evaluation, and then put on suicide watch. She finds that memory particularly humiliating. Bolden would remain in jail for two weeks, until Foristell’s next municipal court session. She wouldn’t let her children come visit her. “I didn’t want them to see me like that,” she says. “I didn’t want them to think it was normal, that it was okay for one of us to be in jail. I missed them so much. But I wasn’t going to let them see me like that.”

...

Voss was able to get Bolden’s bond reduced to $700, but that was still too much for Bolden or her family to pay. The judge also told Voss that he wouldn’t consider an indigency motion until the next session, which meant another two weeks in jail. Bolden was taken back to her cell. The next day, her mother borrowed against a life insurance policy to post her daughter’s bond. “It doesn’t just affect you,” Bolden says. “It affects your family. Your kids. Your friends. My mother is disabled. And she had to help me out. My sister had to put her life on hold to watch my kids.”

Stories like Bolden’s abound across the St. Louis area. And despite the efforts of the ArchCity Defenders and legal aid clinics like those at Saint Louis University and Washington University, the vast majority of the people swept up into the St. Louis County municipal court system don’t have attorneys to inform them of their rights or to negotiate with judges and prosecutors.

There are 90 municipalities in St. Louis County, and more in the surrounding counties. All but a few have their own police force, mayor, city manager and town council, and 81 have their own municipal court. To put that into perspective, consider Jackson County, Mo., which surrounds Kansas City. It is geographically larger than St. Louis County and has about two-thirds the population. Yet Jackson County has just 19 municipalities, and just 15 municipal courts — less than a quarter of municipalities and courts in St. Louis County.

Some of the towns in St. Louis County can derive 40 percent or more of their annual revenue from the petty fines and fees collected by their municipal courts. A majority of these fines are for traffic offenses, but they can also include fines for fare-hopping on MetroLink (St. Louis’s light rail system), loud music and other noise ordinance violations, zoning violations for uncut grass or unkempt property, violations of occupancy permit restrictions, trespassing, wearing “saggy pants,” business license violations and vague infractions such as “disturbing the peace” or “affray” that give police officers a great deal of discretion to look for other violations. In a white paper released last month (PDF), the ArchCity Defenders found a large group of people outside the courthouse in Bel-Ridge who had been fined for not subscribing to the town’s only approved garbage collection service. They hadn’t been fined for having trash on their property, only for not paying for the only legal method the town had designated for disposing of trash.

...

Locals say the cops and court officers often come not only from different zip codes, but from completely different cultures and lifestyles than the people whose fines and court fees fund their paychecks. “It was always apparent that police don’t usually have a lot in common with the towns where they work,” says Javad Khazaeli, whose firm Khazaeli Wyrsch represents municipal court clients pro bono. (Disclosure: Khazaeli is also a personal friend.) “But I think Ferguson really showed just how much that can be a problem.” A recent St. Louis Post-Dispatch survey of the 31 St. Louis County municipalities where blacks made up 10 percent or more of the population found just one town where black representation on the police force was equal or greater than the black presence in the town itself. Some towns where shockingly disparate. In Velda City, for example, blacks make up 95 percent of the town, but just 20 percent of the police. In Flordell Hills, it’s 91 percent and 25 percent respectively. In Normandy, 71 and 14. In Bellefontaine Neighbors, 73 and 3. In Riverview, 70 and 0. Residents of these towns feel as if their governments see them as little more than sources of revenue. To many residents, the cops and court officers are just outsiders who are paid to come to their towns and make their lives miserable. There’s also a widely held sentiment that the police spend far more time looking for petty offenses that produce fines than they do keeping these communities safe.

If you were tasked with designing a regional system of government guaranteed to produce racial conflict, anger, and resentment, you’d be hard pressed to do better than St. Louis County.

...

Florissant is one of the larger towns in the county, with a population of about 52,000. It’s also a bit more affluent, which an average household income above the state average, although its employment rate is slightly lower. Last year the town issued 29,072 tickets for traffic offenses. Florissant collected about $3 million in fines and court costs in fiscal year 2013, about 13 percent of its 2013 revenue. As of June of last year, Florissant’s municipal court also held more than 11,000 outstanding arrest warrants.

For comparison, consider Lee’s Summit, a suburb of Kansas City in Jackson County with a population of 92,000. Yet despite being nearly twice Florissant’s size, in 2013 Lee’s Summit issued a third as many traffic tickets (9,651), and collected less than half as much revenue from its municipal court ($1.44 million) as Florissant. As of June of last year, Lee’s Summit held 2,872 outstanding arrest warrants, only one fourth as many as Florissant.

There are many towns in St. Louis County where the number of outstanding arrest warrants can exceed the number of residents, sometimes several times over. No town in Jackson County comes close to that: The highest ratios are in the towns of Grandview (about one warrant for every 3.7 residents), Independence (one warrant for every 3.5 residents), and Kansas City itself (one warrant for every 1.8 residents).

Just inside the courthouse/gymnasium door in Florissant, two police officers and a court clerk check people in. In the middle of the gym, about 200 chairs sit neatly aligned in rows. Court has been in session for over an hour now, but most of the seats are still occupied. About 80 percent of the people in the gym tonight are black, even though blacks make up just 27 percent of the town. According to statistics compiled by Missouri’s attorney general’s office, 71 percent of the people pulled over by Florissant police in 2013 were black. The search and arrest rates for blacks were also twice as high as those rates for whites, even though whites were more likely to be found with contraband, a contradiction that has also been widely reported in Ferguson.

According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, blacks make up less than eight percent of the Florissant police force. The judge and both prosecutors are white. In nearly all the towns in St. Louis County, the prosecutors and judges in these courts are part-time positions, and are not elected, but appointed by the mayor, town council, or city manager. According to a recent white paper published by the ArchCity Defenders, the chief prosecutor in Florissant Municipal Court makes $56,060 per year. It’s a position that requires him to work 12 court sessions per year, at about three hours per session. The Florissant prosecutor is Ronald Brockmeyer, who also has a criminal defense practice in St. Charles County, and who is also the chief municipal prosecutor for the towns of Vinita Park and Dellwood. He is also the judge – yes, the judge — in both Ferguson and Breckenridge Hills. Brockmeyer isn’t alone: Several other attorneys serve as prosecutor in one town and judge in another. And at least one St. Louis County assistant district attorney is also a municipal court judge.

[benjipwns]

holy fuck Balko's killing me with this thing, it's been a while I wasn't prepared:

One of those pending warrants was for “Jack” (he asked that I not use his real name), a black man who looked to be in his 60s whom I met briefly at the Cool Valley courthouse. I noticed Jack as he was chatting through a teller’s window with the court clerk. He was getting increasingly frustrated. I followed him outside and asked why he had been in court. He said he had recently been stopped by a police officer. He hadn’t been issued a citation for the stop, but a search of his name apparently showed a warrant stemming from a 20-year-old speeding ticket. With late fees and added fines, prosecutors said he now owed $615.

But he said he was angry because no one could show him the original ticket. They could only point to the warrant. He believes it was a mistake, and wondered why the warrant wouldn’t have shown up the other times he’s been stopped over the last 20 years. But the court officers had no time to argue with him. They handed him a piece of paper showing what he owes, with instructions for his payment plan. He is to come back to court each month and pay $50 until the full amount is paid off. If he misses a month, they’ll put out another warrant for his arrest.

I showed the form the clerk gave Jack to several local attorneys. Most agreed that a good lawyer could probably get the warrant cleared and the fine dismissed. It’s doubtful, for example, that the officer who issued the ticket is still around, and if he is, that he’d remember the ticket. But Jack (he asked that I not use his real name) didn’t know any of that. One attorney attempted to look up the Jack’s record to find the warrant, but not all the municipalities use the designated legal databases. Cool Valley is apparently one of those that doesn’t.

“I’ve asked prosecutors for a client’s file and they’ve flat turned me down,” said one local attorney. “They’ll say ‘Here’s a list of his warrants, but we can’t show them to you. Just trust us.’ Or they’ll just staple a blank form to a manilla envelope, write my client’s name on it, and call that his ‘file.’ They’re giving me the runaround, and I’m an attorney. So you can imagine what happens when people try to work within the system by themselves.”

[Phoenix Dark]

hopefully the DOJ drops a bomb on the entire department.

[benjipwns]

It's not just a single department, it's the whole fucking county.

[Phoenix Dark]

True, but I'll settle for Ferguson to be an example.

[benjipwns]

It's not just a single department, it's the whole fucking country.

Fixed.

[Kara]

If debtors' prison was good enough for Robert E. Lee's father, it's good enough for people who aren't me who live in socio-economic hardship already.

[Human Snorenado]

poop, wrong thread

[Great Rumbler]

[Positive Touch]

stories like those are a dime a dozen in north county. i saved hundreds of dollars a year just by moving to the city, where they dont have time pull everyone over and run them through the courts/jails. and " fixing" only ferguson will solve nothing; all other cities in noco operate the same way. the only reason west and south county dont have the same problems is because they basically operate as sundown towns. and of course none of this touches on the problems with city cops.

im hoping for a miracle  brehs

[Human Snorenado]

You could just move out of what sounds like a hellhole

[Positive Touch]

I could never abandon vess soda

[toku]

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/09/urbanshield-oakland-police-militarization

"Homeland Security made a DNA machine to see if ppl have real US relatives when they apply for visas. 90 min results."

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BwtJV1AIYAAjII7.jpg:large
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BwtJ_mKIQAA5Lqh.jpg:large

[benjipwns]

Unrealistic, the level headed guy wouldn't exist.

[Joe Molotov]

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/09/urbanshield-oakland-police-militarization

"Homeland Security made a DNA machine to see if ppl have real US relatives when they apply for visas. 90 min results."

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BwtJV1AIYAAjII7.jpg:large
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BwtJ_mKIQAA5Lqh.jpg:large

This is like Lord of War, with less hookers.

[Madrun Badrun]

http://theadvocate.com/home/10181682-123/brpd-cop-accused-of-sending

Part of the string of texts read: “I wish someone would pull a Ferguson on them and take them out. I hate looking at those African monkeys at work … I enjoy arresting those thugs with their saggy pants.”

Another part of one of the texts reads: “They are nothing but a bunch of monkeys.”

[Himu]

Good. Enjoy, asshole.

[Rufus]

That's almost comically racist.

[seagrams hotsauce]

Surprise surprise, it's looking more and more like the "he charged them" claim is indeed total bullshit.

Among the claims that ignited the fury over the fatal shooting of Michael Brown were that Ferguson police Officer Darren Wilson chased the unarmed teen on foot, shot at him as he ran away, then fired a barrage of fatal shots after Brown had turned around with his hands up.
Almost all of the witnesses who shared these accounts with media either knew Brown; lived at or near the Canfield Green apartments, where the shooting occurred; or were visiting friends or relatives there.

But there were two outsiders who happened to be working outside at the apartment complex on Aug. 9 — two men from a company in Jefferson County — who heard a single gunshot, looked up from their work and witnessed the shooting.

Both have given their statements to the St. Louis County police and the FBI. One of the men agreed to share his account with a Post-Dispatch reporter on the condition that his name and employer not be used.

The worker, who has not previously spoken with reporters, said he did not see what happened at the officer’s car — where Wilson and Brown engaged in an initial struggle and a shot was fired from Wilson’s gun.

His account largely matches those who reported that Wilson chased Brown on foot away from the car after the initial gunshot and fired at least one more shot in the direction of Brown as he was fleeing; that Brown stopped, turned around and put his hands up; and that the officer killed Brown in a barrage of gunfire.

-http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/article_14a3e5f8-6c6a-5deb-92fe-87fcee622c29.html

‏@MichaelSkolnik
I've been told by confirmed source that two construction workers who witnessed #MikeBrown shooting and said he had his hands up are White.

-https://twitter.com/MichaelSkolnik/status/508277636208943105

[Great Rumbler]

Come and get your L, JayDubya.

[I'm a Puppy!]

But we can't trust the new witnesses. I mean they might have black friends.

[Madrun Badrun]

Ya but everyone has a black friend and a gay friend

[Positive Touch]

now that white people have verified this we can all sleep easy

[benjipwns]

This is why it's always funny when people rush to judge white people, when who always, always saves the day in the end?

[Your Stalker]

I'll wait 20 years for the real facts to come out. You know how those FBI guys are.

[benjipwns]

They still haven't found that Arab guy who did the Oklahoma City Bombing.

[benjipwns]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-atypical-approach-grand-jury-in-ferguson-shooting-receives-full-measure-of-case/2014/09/07/1dec6ffe-339b-11e4-8f02-03c644b2d7d0_story.html

The St. Louis County prosecutor’s office is taking an unusual approach with grand jury members who are weighing evidence against the police officer who shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown last month, experts and county officials said.

Instead of telling grand jury members what charges they believe police officer Darren Wilson should face, they are leaving it open-ended for now and involving the grand jury as co-investigators.

The prosecutor’s office is also presenting evidence to the grand jury as soon as it receives it, rather than waiting until the St. Louis County Police Department and the FBI have completed their investigations. Police probes are typically completed before a case is presented to a grand jury, county officials said.

As a result, jurors in the Wilson case are hearing from every eyewitness, seeing every telling photo, viewing every relevant video, and reviewing all DNA, ballistics and other test results from county and FBI labs, said Ed Magee, a spokesman for county prosecutor Robert McCulloch. They will hear testimony from Dorian Johnson, the friend who was with Brown when he died, but it is unclear yet whether they will hear testimony from Wilson.

“Normally they hear from a detective or a main witness or two. That’s it,” Magee said. “This gives us an opportunity to present all of the evidence to jurors who represent St. Louis County. They will make the decision.”

Susan W. McGraugh, a criminal-defense lawyer and a professor at the Saint Louis University School of Law, said that the approach is allowed under the law and that prosecutors sometimes use it in high-profile cases.

“The prosecutor may want cover, which they can get by sharing the responsibility with the grand jury,” McGraugh said. “So when the public reacts to what does or does not happen, they can go back to the fact that the grand jury played a large role in the decision. They can say, ‘We let these jurors, who are your peers, hear what witnesses had to say. This was their decision.’ ”

[Himu]

[thisismyusername]

Seems completely reasonable to me. The defense can't really say anything if the jurors go "we see it *this* way while your police investigation says different."

[Great Rumbler]

[Great Rumbler]

I do what I want, filthy trashcan monster. 

[Phoenix Dark]

Surprise surprise, it's looking more and more like the "he charged them" claim is indeed total bullshit.

Among the claims that ignited the fury over the fatal shooting of Michael Brown were that Ferguson police Officer Darren Wilson chased the unarmed teen on foot, shot at him as he ran away, then fired a barrage of fatal shots after Brown had turned around with his hands up.
Almost all of the witnesses who shared these accounts with media either knew Brown; lived at or near the Canfield Green apartments, where the shooting occurred; or were visiting friends or relatives there.

But there were two outsiders who happened to be working outside at the apartment complex on Aug. 9 — two men from a company in Jefferson County — who heard a single gunshot, looked up from their work and witnessed the shooting.

Both have given their statements to the St. Louis County police and the FBI. One of the men agreed to share his account with a Post-Dispatch reporter on the condition that his name and employer not be used.

The worker, who has not previously spoken with reporters, said he did not see what happened at the officer’s car — where Wilson and Brown engaged in an initial struggle and a shot was fired from Wilson’s gun.

His account largely matches those who reported that Wilson chased Brown on foot away from the car after the initial gunshot and fired at least one more shot in the direction of Brown as he was fleeing; that Brown stopped, turned around and put his hands up; and that the officer killed Brown in a barrage of gunfire.

-http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/article_14a3e5f8-6c6a-5deb-92fe-87fcee622c29.html

‏@MichaelSkolnik
I've been told by confirmed source that two construction workers who witnessed #MikeBrown shooting and said he had his hands up are White.

-https://twitter.com/MichaelSkolnik/status/508277636208943105

But according to my expertise, construction workers lie all the time.

[Joe Molotov]

Don't trust these cacs, PD. If anything, their testimony has now convinced me that Mike Brown was high on bath salts and charging like a rhino at the time he was killed.

[Madrun Badrun]

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/09/07/watch-nypd-officers-take-turns-beating-bronx-man-after-search-turns-up-nothing/

[chronovore]

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/09/07/watch-nypd-officers-take-turns-beating-bronx-man-after-search-turns-up-nothing/

I know that it's probably a drop in the bucket compared to NYC's budget, AND that the real outrage is the trespass against the "suspect"/victim, but taxpayers should be completely pissed off at the kind of behavior which costs millions of dollars when a lawsuit hits. That money doesn't appear out of thin air.