Ferguson

[Oberon]

I must admit...I am surprised by the relative silence from most people here in GT, now if this had been about gun control I'd wager that this topic would be on four or five pages by now...likewise it seems, from what I can tell, that certain US media outlets are being either quiet about this or taking the side of the police (Fox I'm looking at you).

I mean, look at some of this stuff that's on social media:







Very strange, in my opinion anyway, the silence...

[Oberon]

Originally Posted by Betonov

Probably for crying to her because your father smacked you.

Possible Naaah, I think it was the same incident, either which way I learnt not to run out into the middle of the road.

[Dread Knot]

Originally Posted by Admiral Halsey

Isn't the St Louis police force the one running it and giving them orders?

It's definitely not just Ferguson PD. The officers who arrested the reporters in McDonald's seem to have been County police, and in the video of the Al Jazeera crew getting teargassed, a vehicle from the St. Charles County Regional SWAT is clearly visible. Seems there is plenty of bad to go around.


From the Twitters:

@GovJayNixon just confirmed that the State Police & Federal Authorities are going to relieve St. Louis County PD of their duties here.

A bit late, but a great first step

[Onkel Neal]

Originally Posted by Oberon

I must admit...I am surprised by the relative silence from most people here in GT, now if this had been about gun control I'd wager that this topic would be on four or five pages by now...likewise it seems, from what I can tell, that certain US media outlets are being either quiet about this or taking the side of the police (Fox I'm looking at you).

Well, if one says anything outside the acceptable politically correct line, he gets bashed as a racist.

Funny, I spent the night 18 miles from Ferguson MO, in Pontoon Beach, IL, at the Pilot truck stop. That very night, yes!

I do not know what happened between the police officer and the young man, I wasn't there. I do know one thing, you do not get into a scuffle with law enforcement and come out smelling like a rose. Maybe there was no scuffle, maybe it's a crazy killer cop. I don't know.

Originally Posted by Oberon

I also agree, but I have to ponder what has caused this move away from a respect for authority figures, is it a change in media that has encouraged us to challenge authority? Perhaps the increase (and I mean this in no anti-American way, bear with me) in media from the US which is broadcast across Europe and the import of the American culture? Now, before people get up in arms, one has to remember that the US was based around the challenging of authority and the belief that no one entity should have absolute control over the people, hence their inbuilt distrust of the government and, indeed, the police force. So, as we receive and digest that message in American media (I mean, how many times in US police dramas does the protagonist come up against a corrupt official high up in the bureaucracy that hinders their progress?) it has translated into our adaptation of that mistrust of authoritarian figures, which has in return lead to our media taking a more aggressive tone towards the police force, which the government has been happy to accept as it gives it free reign to impose its own agenda on the police forces which had previously been relatively free from government intervention (up until around the 1980s and the miners strike, really).
Equally though, there have been a number of embarrassing incidents for the police, which the media has seized on in its quest to find the worse news to broadcast for the British public (which brings me onto another point, when did it become fashionable for media outlets to focus purely on bad news stories?), for example, much has been made of plebgate, and the current scandal in Manchester, however a nice good news story happened in London the other day when the commissioner of the police interrupted an interview with BBC Radio London to chase down and arrest a couple of thieves. Now, while the front pages of several newspapers are happy to go with the Manchester scandal, I wonder how deeply buried inside the papers is the news story of Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe? Thus the problems are blown out of proportion and the merits are buried deep. This is not just a problem with the police, but also with the NHS (I mean, how often do newspapers print stories of people being saved by the NHS vs those being failed by it?) and Fire brigade...and just about every aspect of life in Britain, we have an unhealthy obsession with bad news and it is effecting our attitude towards those around us.

Getting back to America though, I came across this stat from CNN:



obviously take it with a pinch of salt but needless to say, true or not, it's existence is only going to further enflame the problem between 'Blacks' and the police in America, I don't see another 1992 happening but certainly there's going to be a stronger movement against what is perceived to be institutionalised racism.

Don't overlook the small matter of Ferguson is mostly a black community. All the white people got the hell out. So, it figures that the majority of the stops would be black people.



Edit: I wanted to add, there does seem to be a noticeable trend among small town LE to suit up in Rambo gear way out of proportion to the need. I saw a movie with my daughter a couple of weeks ago, and there was an advert for the League City PD, and man, it made them look like the Navy Seals on steroids. Police boats, tanks, dogs, I mean, complete overkill for a small town. I wish I could find this video on Youtube, it would blow your mind....

[Onkel Neal]

Found it!


Man, it make it seem like a war zone, it's a sleepy little town...

[Dread Knot]

In the movie The Dark Knight Rises, Christopher Nolan attempts to imagine what it might look like if a dangerous terrorist with a warhead confronted the military. That's the top picture.

The bottom picture is actual police response to a peaceful, daylight protest involving 100 persons in Ferguson, MO on Wednesday.



Kinda makes ya think. Wudda we need fiction for?

[Onkel Neal]

Is this the same "peaceful" protest that turned into a mob riot with full scale looting?

[Oberon]

Yeah, there's a definite gung-ho attitude there, makes me wonder how long they'd last in the NYPD.

Still, the local authorities seem to have managed to pull their collective heads out of their backsides and put someone with a bit of sense in charge and it helps that he's the right colour, so to speak.
Let's hear it for Captain Johnson:



"When I see a young lady cry b/c of fear of this uniform then that is a problem”

Well said, sir. He's also ordered police to remove their gas masks, and is setting up media staging areas. Sounds like a man who a) knows how to de-escalate the situation and b) knows how to handle the media. Hopefully this thing will wind down now.

I think that this is another lesson to the US PD that using overwhelming force against a reasonably small protest in an attempt to crush it does not work, not back in the old days and especially not now when everyone has a camera on their mobile phone.

Now I don't know if Brown instigated a skirmish with the police, or whether it was an overzealous copper, either is entirely possible. However the reaction of the local PD to the incident and to the protests of the public has only served to keep this unrest going as long as it has. I mean, this protest is only a small fraction of the size of the 2011 London riots, and we didn't even use tear gas during them...heck, we didn't even use Baton rounds...we just sort of saturated the area with police and waited for the rain. So I think really in the grand scheme of things the response was somewhat disproportion to the level of violence in Ferguson.

I guess we'll just have to see what happens tonight after the vigil, needless to say Alex Jones is loving it: http://www.ustream.tv/RealAlexJones

[Oberon]

Originally Posted by Neal Stevens

Is this the same "peaceful" protest that turned into a mob riot with full scale looting?

I didn't see or hear of any of that during last nights protests, a couple of molotovs thrown but that's it. I think the only thing that's been looted is the local QuikTrip, and that was on Sunday.

[Onkel Neal]

Originally Posted by Oberon

I didn't see or hear of any of that during last nights protests, a couple of molotovs thrown but that's it. I think the only thing that's been looted is the local QuikTrip, and that was on Sunday.

[Oberon]

Originally Posted by Neal Stevens

Hey, if a couple of molotovs are considered a full scale mob riot in America then you've had a very lucky life.

[CCIP]

Originally Posted by Oberon

Hey, if a couple of molotovs are considered a full scale mob riot in America then you've had a very lucky life.

Bingo

And likewise, I think it's an incredibly naive view that the actions of some/few invalidate the wider concerns and causes involved. And if it does, why such vocal American support for a particular side in the conflict in the Ukraine? More than a couple of molotovs thrown there. Interesting how that works.

[August]

I thought this article makes some great points:

Part of the reason we're seeing so many black men killed is that police officers are now best understood less as members of communities, dedicated to keeping peace within them, than as domestic soldiers. The drug war has long functioned as a full-employment act for arms dealers looking to sell every town and village in the country on the need for military-grade hardware, and 9/11 made things vastly worse, with local police departments throughout America grabbing for cash to better defend against any and all terrorist threats. War had reached our shores, we were told, and police officers needed weaponry to fight it.
Officers have tanks now. They have drones. They have automatic rifles, and planes, and helicopters, and they go through military-style boot camp training. It's a constant complaint from what remains of this country's civil liberties caucus. Just this last June, the ACLU issued a report on how police departments now possess arsenals in need of a use. Few paid attention, as usually happens.
The worst part of outfitting our police officers as soldiers has been psychological. Give a man access to drones, tanks, and body armor, and he'll reasonably think that his job isn't simply to maintain peace, but to eradicate danger. Instead of protecting and serving, police are searching and destroying.
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.

http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/ame.../+leahfinnegan

If it walks, talks and acts like a duck,.... it may very well come to believe it is a duck. That's what is happening with our police. We equip them as soldiers and they are going to start acting like soldiers.

[Oberon]

https://medium.com/the-nib/officer-f...y-28e8d9399bbb

Good article August, and I agree with you. I am in support of the police as an entity, my grandfather was a policeman, and yes, he was moderately racist too, but that was in the 1950s, and we're supposed to have moved on, the police are a force for the public, not for the state, and institutional racism and disproportionate force has no place in a modern police force, in any country.

[eddie]

I'm sorry this young man lost his life, whatever the reason was. This guy lost his life after an altercation with a cop. But more kids lose their lives at the hands of other kids, you find yourself starting to get numb to it, sadly.

But when there are over 200 murders in Chicago so far this year, we hear about it all the time. Throw in the murders from other large cities with illegal guns every where (and no I'm not against guns) its starts to be very repetitive in the news. Sad that we have become that way, unless a cop shoots someone. Where are the protests in Chicago? Aren't those kids lives as valuable as this kids who was killed in Ferguson? So if kids kill kids, its just the way it is, but if a cop shoots a kid, we protest. Makes sense to me.

And no, I'm not taking the cops side in this shooting, have no clear idea as to what happened.