Ferguson: 'America Is Not For Black People'

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And then his body was just left in the middle of the street for over three hours in a pool of blood. No emergency services called, no ambulance, nothing. After several hours, they just shoved his body into the back of a police SUV.

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Greg Howard’s article is excellent. Money quote:

If officers are soldiers, it follows that the neighborhoods they patrol are battlefields. And if they’re working battlefields, it follows that the population is the enemy. And because of correlations, rooted in historical injustice, between crime and income and income and race, the enemy population will consist largely of people of color, and especially of black men. Throughout the country, police officers are capturing, imprisoning, and killing black males at a ridiculous clip, waging a very literal war on people like Michael Brown.

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Well, he was shot six times, and the purpose was to kill him.

We don’t call emergency services for the victims of that form of state-sponsored murder that we call execution, why should it be any different in this case?

Note: this is sad, bitter sarcasm on my part, and not directed at kopper.

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The comments on that post had a link to an amazing tumblr:

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America doesn’t seem like it’s for people with a conscience either.

Goddamn what a clusterfuck this place has turned into.

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Agreed, an amazing collection of activists.

Sad that so many would respond (and probably have), “Well, if you don’t want to be thought of as a sleazy, boozing thug, don’t post pics of yourself looking like one. Duh!!” /Sigh

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On at least one positive note, even the St. Louis city police chief thinks this is a counter productive, racist mess and refuses to loan any city police to the idiocy. As a resident I guess that is slightly cheering, but I already knew the city and county are very different.

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It would be a lot more encouraging if the St. Louis police chief were telling the Ferguson police that they needed to stop abetting murder or they would be charged, but you are right, its good that this particular outburst of insanity appears to be localized.

Sarcasm aside, LEO always shoot to kill - that’s how they’re trained & also why they tend to fire so many bullets when they discharge their weapons. Do we know yet if this killers gun only held six rounds and that’s why he only fired six shots?

The analogy only goes so far: http://qz.com/249483/police-in-ferguson-may-look-like-soldiers-but-their-tactics-wouldnt-pass-us-army-muster/

I acknowledge your point, but as Howard says (“police officers are . . . waging a very literal war on people like Michael Brown”), it’s not an analogy.

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“Shoot to kill” is supposed to mean, “If you are shooting, you should not be doing something dumb like shooting for a leg or an arm, just shoot for center of mass - if lethal force is not a good option then don’t start shooting in the first place.” It’s not really supposed to mean, “If you shoot someone in the chest and they are helpless, bleeding out on the ground, put another few rounds in them to be sure they are dead.”

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Fair enough. It just seems to unfairly tarnish real soldiers by association. Then again, US and other modern armies are something of a historical anomaly. Even as the have become more deadly, or maybe because they are, they have become more careful with civilian populations. Even enemy civilians.

Yes, but in this case the people of Ferguson are the enemy, not civilians who are in the way.

And that “more careful with civilians” stuff only happened because democracies demanded it. No one wanted another WWII where cities got carpet bombed. The US seems to get away with an awful lot of civilian casualties as long as the civilians are brown-skinned presumed-to-be-muslims.

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Why is that true in the USA, and not other countries?

Of the 85 bullets used in 2011, 49 were warnings shots, 36 were aimed
at criminal suspects, 15 people were injured, and 6 were killed

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I don’t own any firearms myself but I received instruction in firearms safety when I was younger. Firing warning shots can be quite dangerous to innocent civilians, and shooting to wound is also discouraged among armed police in the UK as well as the US for a number of reasons. According to the following documentation, armed police In the UK have been instructed to give verbal warnings only and not to fire warning shots.

http://www.pfoa.co.uk/110/shooting-to-wound

http://www.pfoa.co.uk/uploads/asset_file/1983%20HO%20Guidelines.pdf

Having said that I hate trigger-happy cops and the havoc they wreak. I enjoyed shooting sports when I was younger but when my wife and I lived for a couple of years in a country where the private ownership of firearms was strictly prohibited we felt safer than we do in the US.

While I am not 100% sure on the history, I think it evolved from various legal suits. Basically if you pull your gun and fire it is because you were in fear of your life or the life of others. Warning shots or shooting to wound means it could be argued that you weren’t in mortal danger and your actions were unnecessary. ie, you just shot a guy in the leg because you wanted it to. It leaves them open to lawsuits. Same with warning shots - those bullets have to come down somewhere. The other side of the coin is that if you are in mortal danger, you need to STOP the threat as fast as you can.

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You might like to think that but you’d be wrong. Outside of the patriotic circle jerk that is the USA, US soldiers are recognised as borderline war criminals. Remember Abu Graib et al?

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Because we’ve all gone insane on this side of the Pond. It’s every American’s right to kill or be killed, just look at the proliferation of the “Stand Your Ground” laws. The only thing that has any value here anymore is money. The only life with real value is a corporation, individual life - less so, the life of an African-American male with a poor lifetime earning potential, even less.

That cop would be in more trouble if he shot an ATM.

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