Name of Ferguson police officer who shot Mike Brown revealed

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The Guardian has something of a livestream from the press conference: Ferguson protests: Michael Brown family calls for calm amid criticism of video release – as it happened | World news | The Guardian

Of note, Chief Jackson said Wilson was unaware of Brown being a robbery suspect.

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You actually still have no idea whether Brown robbed and assaulted a store owner, because it’s not proven and we don’t even know if it’s Brown in those video stills. He might have been a suspect for a minor larceny … that could have been sorted out without lethal force

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Ferguson PD have finally got someone working PR. An evil, awful someone, but someone who knows what he’s doing. This is a calculated strategy to:

  1. Deflect attention away from the shooting of an unarmed teen.
  2. Attack the character of the victim.
  3. Undermine the efforts of local activists and the authority of state officials and Captain Johnson from the Missouri State Highway Patrol who have worked with them.
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I don’t give a shit if he was a suspect. I don’t give a shit even if he was guilty - which is not something the police get to decide anyway.

Robbery does not carry a death sentence.

The police are not the judiciary, they don’t get to impose sentences.

In the case of concern that a suspect is armed (I’m being ultra generous to the police in allowing that this might even be the reason they shot him), they should err on the side of not shooting unless certain they themselves are at risk, even to the point of getting shot at first. They’re meant to be the good guys.

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And there’s also this:

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I sincerely hope he wins his appeal.

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Yeah, and they were going to charge Mike Brown with “impeding the lawful flight of a bullet” in case he survived.

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I wonder/hope some of this is on tape.

Even if they guy stole something, that doesn’t merit lethal force. If he struggled in the cop car, it might. But if it went down like the reported eye witness said where he was on his knees with his hands up staying “don’t shoot me” then the threat is no longer and lethal force isn’t merited. Neither is standing over the body and shooting again.

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This is one from L.A. (Downey, CA) that sticks out in my mind…
Cop with Machine Gun shooting an unarmed guy in the back. Stupid (harmless) guy kept on running away…
The city ended up paying out a $4.5M settlement for a wrongful death/civil rights suit.
Police officer cleared in Michael Nida shooting

Prosecutors declined to criminally charge the officer, citing Nida's resistance and that he had run from officers three times.
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This is important.

At the time of the killing, the officer performing the execution had no better justification than jaywalking.

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In the first news conference the Chief strongly implied (and garbled the sentence) that the officer was responding to the robbery call, but in the hasty second news conference, the Chief admitted that Brown was not being stopped because of the robbery.

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Exactly. But he’s a cop, so it’s going to be a long time before Justice is served in this case, if it ever is.

Here is a case of a pharmacist who fended off an armed robbery. He had shot one of the robbers (the one who had a gun) and chased the other out the door and down the street. That one got away, so the pharmacist returned to the store.

In the quote below, Ersland is the pharmacist, and Parker was the erstwhile robber.

[quote]“We conclude the physical and forensic evidence showed that, when Ersland returned to the pharmacy and shot Parker five times in the body, Parker was unarmed and unconscious but alive, and did not pose a threat to Ersland or anyone else in the pharmacy,” the judges wrote in the 39-page opinion.

“Evidence further showed that, in order to shoot Parker, Ersland stepped across Parker’s body, turned his back, went behind the counter, put down his empty revolver, opened a drawer, took out the Kel Tec, walked to where Parker lay on the floor, stood over him, and fired five shots almost straight down into Parker’s body, close together and in rapid succession. Ersland did not appear flustered or hurried, and acted in a deliberative manner,” they wrote.[/quote]

Ersland is serving a life sentence for first degree murder.

Link to the full story.

If the incident that resulted in Mike Brown’s death is even remotely like what the eyewitness has described, then Darren Wilson committed murder.

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After today’s developments, I will not be surprised if most of the Ferguson PD is revealed to belong to a secret white supremacist society.

They already do.

The Ferguson PD.

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I read, in one of these threads, that the chief of police displays the Confederate flag.

I took it as hyperbole at the time, but if it’s not… :open_mouth:

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Displaying the Confederate Flag is a clear signal: “Non-whites, ESPECIALLY blacks are not welcome.” It is a racist intonation, one of the few remaining outward signals of racism within the premises.

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The notion that black people routinely get away with crimes is pretty fucking bizarre. Divorced enough from reality that I don’t think I’ve heard it from even the nuttiest of racist wingnuts, with the possible special-case exception of the first O.J. trial. Where are you seeing this lunatic assertion?

Are you willing to subject the, alleged, killer of Mike Brown to the same standard of justice?

To which I respond that there are a number of unarmed white Americans that get shot by police, “so why aren’t we hearing about that?”