Here's the thing, and I keep on saying this. If you think this is about Mike Brown you're not paying attention.
Did Mike Brown get in a fight with the cop? Yeah, most likely.
Was his DNA on the gun? We don't know. The cops didn't bother to check for it.
At what distance was he initially shot from? We don't know. The cops didn't bother to determine it.
Were the injuries inflicted on Darren Wilson life threatening? Absolutely not. I've been more beat up in falling down stairs.
Where is the police report on several incidents? All it says is "Police Report"
Where are the medical examiner's pics? There are none because the medical examiner's camera battery was dead and he couldn't be bothered to get it charged or get a replacement battery despite the fact that the body was out there for 4.5 hours.
Would this have gone to trial if it had been treated seriously? Most legal experts say yes. Now they do admit conviction would have been difficult but they generally agree that the grand jury was pretty much a set of softball questions to kill this from ever getting to trial.
Did Mike Brown deserve to get shot? I'd say no, but let's play devils advocate and say that maybe he did. Does that matter to the conversation here? Where you have such an obvious disregard for due process and didn't even bother to do the investigation thoroughly. It is obvious that the PD thought, "Just another dead thug. Whatever." Instead of taking it seriously. And this is what people are angry about, after Trayvon, that guy at Wal-Mart, the kid with the bb gun and so many others, people feel like it's open season on brownies out there and that the system to ensure that it isn't is horribly broken because it's obvious they don't take these deaths seriously. Meanwhile a bunch of white people take out semi-automatic weapons and blockade federal police and not only is not a single shot fired from them but they actually back down and the armed people are viewed as heroes.
What we have here is a huge mass of people giving their vote of no confidence in their police and justice departments. You can character assassinate Mike Brown all you want, but you can't pretend that the PD here took any of this seriously. That's not really debatable. And that's what's infuriating so many. That's why whatever Mike Brown did doesn't really matter, because the system was stacked against him from getting anything close to justice if he was innocent. If the PD had come out and done a thorough investigation, actually called out Wilson when he said that he felt like a 5 year old hanging onto Hulk Hogan when he's just one inch shorter than Brown instead of saying "You poor baby", if the medical examiner had done his job and not just been like "eh, someone else will take care of it." if we had DNA on the gun. If we had distances. If we had a viable reasons as to why Mike Brown was such a threat at 150 feet away. Then yeah, chances are I'd be on the side of thinking it was unfortunate but might've been justified. But we don't have any of that, and haven't had any of that for a ton of incidents like this and instead what we have is a military force that only feigns at accountability. It seems to me that a self professed libertarian would understand all this.
