As usual in these cases, I recommend everyone who’s interested pop over to policeone.com to read the comments and discover why:
A possible narrative:
Brown was running away. The officer fired at him and missed.
When he realized he was being shot at, Brown turned around. Maybe to surrender, maybe to try to rush the cop – he might have figured either one of those options gave him a better chance at survival than continuing to run.
Brown’s head may have been down because he’s already been hit several times and was instinctively trying to duck or protect his face, or because he was falling, or he was trying to rush the maniac shooting at him. If the above parts were true, this really doesn’t matter since the officer already intended to kill him.
I didn’t miss it, I just considered it pedantic.
Your narrative is entirely possible. But it also fails to fit with what either side has said, which was largely my point. Just because the police story (to the extent they’re really given one) isn’t very believable, it doesn’t mean that D. Johnson’s story must be entirely accurate, either.
Where have you heard this version, and when did the police say this? I don’t think the police ever claimed they shot him in the back; in fact, this would seem to be a pretty damning confession to make. Unless you thought the police shot him while he was running away backwards.
I don’t think the police—much less the officer in question—said anything about how Mr. Brown was shot, which was one of the sources of anger… so I really don’t know where you got this narrative from on how it means he/they were lying.
For someone who complains about people making unjustified conclusions and pushing their own narratives, you seem to be doing a pretty good job of it yourself. Look at where his body was. Look at where the police car was. And remember that all accounts put Mr. Brown next to the police care at one point. Yet even though his body is 50 feet or so away from the car, you’re saying it’s indisputable that the witnesses were lying about Mr. Brown running away. I guess we just have the most incompetent officer in the world who has the time to let Mr. Brown just stroll 50 feet away (after supposedly being punched in the face by him, in the police car), during which time I guess the officer is fondling his weapon and making his plans to shoot Mr. Brown, who is clearly a grave danger as he calmly walks—not runs—away from the police car. Sounds like an air-tight narrative to me.
I see. You thought the point of his actual comment was pedantic and so you chose to address a point that s/he wasn’t making. I’m cool with that.
I was curious about how often police officers fail to kill people they’ve decided to shoot at. It seems this data is not easily available, nor is it tracked centrally in any way.
Here is the result of some independent research, posted by Jim Fisher at his blog in late December of 2013.
It hardly constitutes conclusive proof, but it does indicate that the police doctrine of “shoot to kill” results in dead targets rather less than 100% of the time.
I never did until I spent some time in Burbank, CA…
I don’t take a stand on shootings, because I’ve learned that there are a lot of issues around it that I don’t understand. I inherently recoil when I think about guns, and I have had several acquaintances who were killed in accidental shootings. I have this huge emotional reaction to any kind of shooting that is straight up fearful, and if you ask me about my feelings about any shooting ever it’s that it should never happen, even if it was the most plain case of self defense you can imagine.
My husband has a completely different perspective, so I thought I’d share how this is being reported and talked about in new sources coming from a pro-gun, pro-police angle.
This is not my own opinion that a “clean shoot” is the correct way to look at it, that what might hold up in court as a valid police action still makes it the right action morally, but this is what is being discussed right now on the bizarro Boing Boing forums of the world.
Does your husband read the BB forums? What’s his take on how these conversations go over here?
I got this version from America Is Not For Black People
Which appears to have extrapolated the “fleeing” bit from the official police description (see http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/10/justice/missouri-police-involved-shooting/index.html):
The officer tried to leave his vehicle just before the shooting on Saturday afternoon, but Brown pushed him back into the car, “where he physically assaulted the police officer” and struggled over the officer’s weapon, Belmar said.
A shot was fired inside the police car, and Brown was eventually shot about 35 feet away from the vehicle, Belmar said, adding few details because he didn’t want to “prejudice” the case.
So according the the official police version he was in a physical altercation with the police at the vehicle and then was shot 35 feet from the vehicle. The official version does actually leave room for the version of events where Brown ran 35 feet from the vehicle, then decided to turn around and charge a police officer with a gun leveled at him. So, insofar as that version of events is plausible, the police did not imply they shot a fleeing suspect.
I know - I wasn’t criticizing. Just pointing out how language can reflect a certain perspective, even if it seems innocuous.
No, we just discuss things between us - he tells me his take based on what he reads; I tell him mine. It’s actually very strange because it’s like we are reading two totally different stories for every news story ever. 
Makes for some interesting conversation; many of them end in, “ok, we’re done now,” because we never come to any consensus on anything.
Yes, definitely. I have read a lot of books lying around my house on these subjects, and I gather that in the heat of the moment, you really have to rely on your training, including concerns about legally how the shoot will be reviewed, because your emotions are so high and your perceptions are so messed up that you can’t trust your emotional judgement at all.
Every story has three sides. This is no exception. There’s the police version, the witness version, and the truth which we should find somewhere in between.
Nonetheless, the punishment for jaywalking should never be extrajudicial execution.
Incorrect.
What happened is an unarmed man was shot six times. That is the entire relevant part.
A thorough investigation commensurate with that reality must commence, as much dilligence is due as if the dead man were an officer, a president, or a street urchin.
Stop changing the subject.
I don’t know how anyone can, at this point, take a stand either way until more info is available. Right now, I have no idea which possible scenarios is correct, so I’m on the fence. Either…
…or…
And yeah, of course the punishment for jaywalking should not be execution (scenario 1) but the result might well be death if you reacted to being stopped for jaywalking by attacking the cop (scenario 2).
Yeah and why ist that so?
US police forces kill vastly more people than armed police forces in western Europe. It’s not a training problem but an attitude problem.
German police shot 8 people to death and injured 20 in 2012. Exactly 36 shots were fired at humans - in the whole of Germany, a country of more than 80 million people.
Sixteen people were fatally shot by New York City police in 2012, 14 were shot and injured by police. In 2012 331 shots were fired. NYC has a population of 8.4 million - a tenth of Germany.
And thats a justification for killing a suspect? Is the only type of force US police officer are able to use deadly force? Are they not trained to de-escalate or use non-lethal methods?
Same with the argument that he was a robbery suspect: Does every robber/thief deserve instant death as punishment?
Neither argument, robbery or charging, justifies killing this man.
In the country where I live the police tries to protect lives and doesn’t actively looking for excuses to kill people. Police isn’t allowed to lie and deceive and courts decide guilt and punishment. Didn’t think rule of law and human rights were such a foreign concept in the US.
You know, it’s quite a leap between what you want others to believe HE did, and what YOU WOULD DO. Empathize, but please stop presuming from a safe distance, if you could. It’s maybe more offensive to present yoruself as a mind reader of the dead than you realize it is? it is to me anyhow.
I too struggle to understand how an unarmed man was shot six times by a seasoned officer. That’s what happened.
People fail to the level of their training. The officer either failed here, or was trained for an outcome that includes an unarmed dead man.
Presuming what the victim did, or claiming the armed and trained officer was as much a victim, or that we consider the living healthy breathing officers circumsances FIRST… is victim blaming. And it’s gross, and totally derails productive conversation. Which is the point of some users of this board. I hope it’s not yours, because I agree with your points, but I don’t think we’re at that point in the conversation. We’re at the part where there is a dead man with six bullet wounds, and we try to figure out what can be done about it.
I pretty much think anyone who wants to focus on the fragmented moments of the thing is intentionally (maybe to defend their innocence, maybe to advance an agenda) clouding the big picture, where the details of one mans death, among THOUSANDS WHO DIE THIS WAY are fought over as if 4 or 6 bullets wold be relevant.
He is dead. They are all dead. Dead.
Angry doesn’t even begin to cover it.
I can’t think of any reason an unarmed person should be shot six times. Any eyewitness account, whether from the police or from the people in the neighborhood, will likely be biased. The way the cops have handled things so far, however, illustrate a lot of ineptitude.
