But everyone agrees something happened at the car. Johnson’s first version was that the officer kicked the car door open into Brown, but that there was no scuffle. Most now say there was some scuffle at the car. And it’s really only the non-police witnesses who suggest he was shot in the back: if the cop actually tried to do so it would appear he missed. And I don’t know why the cops would ever have even tried to imply the shot an unarmed fleeing teenager.
Do you even read? At the end of my comment I clearly said: "And while this by no means justifies the killing of Mr. Brown, it’s also not the case that because the police have acted odiously deceptive ways that the accounts given by his friend and some other eyewitnesses are completely accurate, either. "
I think both of your scenarios are simultaneously possible. Black teen turns around to surrender with his hands up and starts going back to the police offer. From his perspective he’s giving up since he doesn’t want to get shot. And getting shot at might make you do something you might do if you were thinking straight. Cop sees this huge dude stop running away, then turn and come towards him with his hands raised. From his perspective the kid is coming to attack him. And since he’s a cop he feels he can’t back down or retreat, so he shoots.
Look, I’ve been clear that I personally believe a narrative that has the cop as the perpetrator of a crime here (and in fact, the presumption and treatment by the police that he isn’t is one of the key issues, aside from the shooting itself). However, this statement bothers me:
I fully recognize that one of the key points of debate is just who the victim is. Blaming a victim is, you are correct, an appalling thing, however, Labeling folks who disagree with you on that point as engaging in victim blaming assumes the point in contention.
If (and I find this personally to be highly unlikely) the person shot turned and charged the officer, there’s a very plausible argument, one I don’t happen to agree with but can at least understand, that he is not a victim at all. It may well be distasteful to have to engage in speculation on what a person who is not alive to defend themselves, but that conduct matters. We don’t speak of execution “victims”, that prison Bob Smith was the victim of “execution by lethal injection”.
Conduct leading up to and possibly precipitating the state ending a person’s life does not automatically make one a “victim” in the sense that you use it, even if that is the case FAR more often that it should be. And someone arguing that the person you view as a victim was in fact no such thing is not the same as victim blaming.
We don’t have all the facts and we can’t make a definitive conclusion, but we aren’t obligated to wring reality until we come up with a scenario that exonerates this particular one of the many police officers in the US who killed an unarmed black man. An unarmed black man was shot dead at range of 35 feet. All versions of events include that man fleeing the police officer to at least that distance before turning around to be killed.
Maybe you live in a world where people regularly, having put 35-40 feet between themselves an a gunman, decide it is time to turn around and charge the gunman. Honestly, that sounds completely extraordinary to me. Evidence might prove that the gun the officer was holding was defective and fired repeatedly without the officer’s control or that there was a second shooter on the nearby grassy knoll. If it does, I’d be willing to accept that. But I’m pretty okay with thinking that this police officer killed an unarmed black teenager without a good reason to do so at this point, especially considering how extraordinary a “good” reason to kill an unarmed teenager is.
If it were impossible for us to change our minds in the future when new facts came to light, then perhaps we’d have to keep our minds open to extremely unlikely-sounding scenarios just so that we wouldn’t be permanently locked into the wrong opinion. Fortunately, we can look at what we know - an unarmed black teenager will shot six times and killed - and have opinions about that and be ready to modify those opinions later if there is an actual good reason to do so.
In the now-famous video shot moments after Michael Brown’s death, there’s a background conversation in which an eyewitness claims that Brown was coming back towards the officer when he was shot.
What’s interesting is that NYT, in reporting on the autopsy results, specifically mentions this video, and cherry-picks two quotes out of it, while completely ignoring the audio of the witness who specifically states that Brown kept coming back toward the officer.
I already linked to that specific portion of the video, and while the witness says Brown was coming back to the police, it doesn’t say he “kept coming back.” And given that it’s an un-named, unseen source, maybe the NYT has certain journalistic principles which prevent them from using it. But they’re certainly not discounting the possibility that he charged the officer (which is very different than the innocuous term “came back” that the witness uses), as they quote the pathologist who acknowledges that charging may explain the bullet trajectory.
What is the “kept coming toward him” that both of those sources are referencing in their transcripts? Is “him” Brown or the policeman? In the preceding statement, it seems like “him” is the policeman. And I’m open to a different interpretation, especially as the audio is hard to pick out.
Disagreed on your take on the NYT choices. The two quotes they printed were thinner than what they didn’t post. One quote was a man saying something that he says “they said” (quote of a quote), and another is by “one woman who can be heard on the video”. Maybe they just published before the opposing background conversation was buoyant enough for them to know about it?
So is your argument that the law enforcement officers in that case were improperly trained, or just bad at their job?
They are trained to shoot to kill, but it doesn’t always happen that way. Even if you’re a well-trained marksman, people are moving when you’re shooting at them, and you don’t always hit your target exactly.
It’s not a question of whether the Secret Service was “bad at their job”. They were not shooting to disable that gunman. They missed. Something that’s actually pretty easy to do.
I don’t know which of us is misinterpreting the other, but let me just say this: I am not victim blaming IN THE SLIGHTEST.
I’m going to avoid ranting or trying to explain myself even farther. I’m angry too.
I’m angry at how much racism still exists in the US. Both in terms of the situation in Ferguson itself, and the blatantly racist responses from police officers, internet trolls and just plain random people.
I’m angry at how much power our country puts into the hands of people who can’t seem to use it responsibly.
I’m angry at people who think the answer to this is somehow putting more guns into more hands.
I’m angry at the way Ferguson PD especially has been undermining the wiser and more experienced voices.
I’m angry at how much of the mainstream media seems to tell the story from a white, upper middle class, cops-can-do-no-wrong angle.
I’m angry at the handful of punks with guns and molotov cocktails (assuming there really were any) turning peaceful nights of protest into more excuses for the cops to stomp faces.
I’m angry at people who can only get angry about looting and rioting, not about the killing in the first place, nor about the injustices at the root of every one of the problems in Ferguson right now.
Here’ s an interesting exercise…go to a hallway and step off 35 feet. I think you’ll find it to be a longer distance than you expect it to be.
Now the sequence of events as described so far involve a scenario where Brown is physically assaulting a seated Wilson inside his squad car thru the open window and reaching for the officer’s gun. Wilson gets a shot off in the car at which point Brown runs away. Then, depending on which to story to believe, Brown supposedly stops, turns around and then either charges back towards Wilson or puts his hands up to surrender. Wilson then proceeds to shoot Brown at least six shots from a distance of 35 feet.
Now go to the end of the hallway and look down at that 35 feet. I personally cannot make sense of this sequence of events and come up with a reasonable situation that justifies that many shots at that distance regardless of whether Brown was surrendering or running back towards the officer.
If he was coming back at the officer, six shots makes some sense. Cops are trained to shoot until the threat is down. Only one or two of those shots would have stopped someone from coming at them. I can’t condemn solely on that.
I give cops a lot of leeway about number of shots and placement. I shoot USPSA and the only pressure I have is time and trying to beat my score. I don’t have anyone trying to harm me. Shooting quickly and accurately is difficult. I’ve seen Master class shooters completely bone a stage and miss targets or hit ‘no-shoots’. Contrary to popular belief, most cops really aren’t “gun guys”. Many don’t shoot their gun except for the minimum training and re-qualification.
It is also surprising how fast people can close in on you and cause harm. Do a search on youtube for something like the 21 foot rule. Basically within 21 feet the average person can close distance and strike or stab you before you get your gun out. I’ve also see training video where people do things like shoot and turn. When the cop finally fires the assailant has his back turned to the officer - making it look like he just shot a guy callously in the back, when he was responding to a threat as fast as humanly possible.
Now - the point of all that wasn’t to defend the cop in this situation, but to point out that after the fact evidence doesn’t always conclusively prove what happened. I hope that with the FBI involved they do a thorough investigation, and if this cop went all vigilante that they put him away.
Also important to note - even if this cop acts were justifiable, I think there are a lot more examples out there where cops use of force is questionable to out right unjustified.
I’ll clarify to say that I can’t make sense of a scenario that requires any shots to be fired at that distance. 35 feet is a pretty far distance to shoot at with a pistol with any accuracy in a high-stress, volatile situation.
What I’m struggling most with is the event sequence whereby after being assaulted thru the window, the officer has to stop and put his vehicle in park, unlatch his seat belt (presumably), open the door, step out and away from the car in order to get a clean line of fire, aim and shoot multiple times at a (presumably) moving target 35 feet away.
Remember that Brown was running away at first (enough to get 35 feet away at least), then decided to double back and attack him again.
Now one can argue that most of these actions can be done very quickly in a fluid motion with his adrenaline pumping and maybe he shot from behind the car door a la Starsky and Hutch style…but It seems to me that the safest place for the officer if Brown had been attacking him would be to roll up the window, lock the door and remain inside his vehicle and call for backup.
I just can’t seem to reconcile the details so far.
Also: the whole “double back” theory just strikes a little too close to the Zimmerman defense to me.
Kind of reminds me of South Park “they’re coming right for us!”:
So the theory is that an unarmed teen made a crazed charge at an armed police officer and kept coming at him even after taking several bullets to the head and body? That’s sounds like either a zombie movie or a highly unlikely scenario.
What is all this about shooting to kill? What I was taught (from a civilian perspective, by my father, 15 years ago when I was young, I don’t even own a gun etc) is that you shoot tostop the threat. The fact that this frequently kills people is unfortunate, but you never ever tell anyone that you shoot to kill (all past, present, future tenses included) because such statements are evidence that you actually set out to murder the person you shot. Of course this all assumes that police are subject to the same laws as the rest of us, which is clearly not the case.
The person in the video never said “kept.” Kept would suggest that Brown continued to advance on the officer despite being told not to or despite being shot, or despite something. The voice in the video simply says he stopped running and started coming towards the officer.
Neither of the quotes the NYT pulled from the video are being used to assert some essential truth or fact about what brown did. The first quote is a woman’s opinion that the cop shot him because he wanted to. That’s clearly an opinion, and not a fact. The second quote itself contains the warning that it is hearsay (i.e., it includes the speaker saying “they said…”), and it seems to be used not to indicate that, as a matter of fact, that Brown had his hands in the air, but rather to indicate what the community was thinking: they thought (regardless of whether it was true) that Brown had his hands in the air. This dovetails with the quote of the woman: both are used to illustrate the community’s mood, and not what actually happened.
