Ferguson vs. Police

[Mike]

A district court in Missouri has granted an injunction filed against the police in Ferguson for their ridiculous "5 second rule" that was used to arrest numerous protestors. The rule was that if you stood in place for more than 5 seconds, you could be arrested -- with the goal of (a) keeping protestors moving and (b) having an excuse to arrest a bunch of protestors. Mustafa Abdullah, with help from the ACLU, sued over this and the court has agreed that the rule is clearly unconstitutional, and thus a preliminary injunction has been granted. The court notes that standing in place for 5 seconds is not a legitimate standard to be used for Missouri's "failure to disperse law" (or any other law).

First, the court doesn't buy the police's claim that the 5 second rule matches up with the failure to disperse law:

This statute provides no defense to this suit for several reasons. First, people were not told to “disperse” – in other words, to leave the area. Instead they were told to keep moving. Second, the order was given even when there were fewer than six people gathered. The evidence included examples where the order was given to one person alone, to three people attempting to pray, to a reporter and one other person, as well as to larger groups. And the order was given to people who were doing nothing to indicate they intended to violate laws of any sort, much less to engage in violence. In fact, nearly all of plaintiff’s fact witnesses testified that despite gatherings that were peaceful and law-abiding at the time, officers told people they must keep moving or they would be arrested.

Then there's the question of due process. And, once again, the 5 second rule is problematic:

Plaintiff is likely to succeed on the merits of showing that the keep-moving policy violates due process in both ways. Of course, in this situation there is no statute or ordinance being challenged. Rather, it is an unwritten policy, given to officers at their roll calls, instructing them to order people to keep moving whenever the officers thought it was appropriate to do so. Some officers told everyone to keep moving, so if plaintiff was unlucky enough to be standing in the vicinity of those officers, he would be told to move. Some officers told people they would be arrested if they did not move, but at least one officer told people that they had to keep moving but probably would not be arrested if they failed to comply. Some officers interpreted the policy to mean that people had to walk at a certain speed, others told people that they could not walk back and forth in a certain-sized area. Some officers applied it to members of the press, while others did not. Plaintiff and his other witnesses testified that they could not tell what would or would not be allowed at any given moment.

The rule provided no notice to citizens of what conduct was unlawful, and its enforcement was entirely arbitrary and left to the unfettered discretion of the officers on the street. This policy “necessarily entrusts lawmaking to the moment-to-moment judgment of the policeman on his beat.” See Kolender, 461 U.S. at 360 (brackets and quotation marks omitted). Like the gang loitering ordinance found unconstitutional in Chicago v. Morales, 527 U.S. 41 (1999), the keep-moving policy cannot meet constitutional standards for definiteness and clarity.

And then the good old First Amendment:

I conclude that it is likely plaintiff will prevail on the merits of his First Amendment claim, and given my conclusions about the Due Process claim, I need not at this time discuss the First Amendment issues in detail. The keep-moving policy – as it was applied to plaintiff and others – prohibited citizens from peacefully assembling on the public sidewalks. Although the state has a valid interest in maintaining order on its streets and sidewalks and in preventing violence by crowds, this interest is not sufficient to apply such a blanket rule to people assembling peacefully.... The evidence showed that the strategy burdened substantially more speech than was necessary to achieve its legitimate goals. In fact, one of the police witnesses testified that it only worked well during the daytime when there were no large crowds and no threats of violence – when the crowds grew unruly, telling them to keep moving was not an effective strategy. Thus, defendants’ own evidence shows that this strategy fails the requirement that “the means chosen are not substantially broader than necessary to achieve the government’s interest,”

Nice to see this ruling, though it would have been nicer to have this earlier -- but hopefully it will at least prevent future such actions.

Originally Published: Tue, 07 Oct 2014 16:10:46 GMT
source

[Mike]

A few more details have come to light on the police state experiment conducted in Ferguson, MO over the past couple of months. Despite repeated denials that continued all the way up until October 31st, the real reason for the FAA's no-fly zone over Ferguson has been revealed.

"They finally admitted it really was to keep the media out," said one FAA manager about the St. Louis County Police in a series of recorded telephone conversations obtained by The Associated Press. "But they were a little concerned of, obviously, anything else that could be going on.

At another point, a manager at the FAA's Kansas City center said police "did not care if you ran commercial traffic through this TFR (temporary flight restriction) all day long. They didn't want media in there."

Law enforcement put FAA staffers in an awkward position with this request. The FAA (obviously) has nothing in the rule books that provides for blocking First Amendment-protected activity. While there would be the heightened danger of collisions if police helicopters were also in the area, it's not like this sort of situation hasn't been handled without incident before. (See also: news coverage of every demonstration/riot/police pursuit to this point.)

No, law enforcement simply wanted to keep news coverage to a minimum and control the narrative through the indiscriminate use of tear gas, a ridiculous (and unconstitutional) "five second rule" and the casual detainment of reporters at ground level.

St. Louis police claimed over and over and over again that the no-fly zone was for "safety," citing a single incident where a police helicopter was allegedly shot at -- an incident that only existed in the minds of those looking to keep the press from circling overhead.

[P]olice officials confirmed there was no damage to their helicopter and were unable to provide an incident report on the shooting. On the tapes, an FAA manager described the helicopter shooting as unconfirmed "rumors."

Small concessions were made when law enforcement realized what it was asking for was impractical (and mostly illegal). As one news director pointed out, his crew was eventually told it could fly over Ferguson but only at an altitude above 3,000 feet -- not exactly a height that produces optimal (or even usable) footage.

Whatever your stance on the shooting of Michael Brown by Officer Darren Wilson, the fact remains that nearly everything local law enforcement did in response was poorly thought-out at best, and an outright abuse of power at worst. Officials have lied to the public,

Originally Published: Mon, 03 Nov 2014 11:40:00 GMT
source

[stormium]

STL police union leader forsees violence

November 23, 2014 by Bob Priddy

A spokesman for more than 1100 St. Louis metro police officers fears violence–at several levels–when the Michael Brown grand jury files its report, no matter what the report says.

Executive Director Jeff Roorda of the St. Louis Police Officers Association says Ferguson policeman Darren Wilson is not the only area officer to get death threats since the Michael Brown shooting, and that includes him. But he says every police officer hopes people will respect the justice system and give it time to work.

Roorda says he’s “disturbed” by the idea that Ferguson police who were trying to protect life and property in August somehow provoked demonstrators to violence. And he worries about what’s coming. “Those protestors responded with violence for two weeks…The response of the crowd was to their own emotions and to their own goals, not to the police.”

He has told CNN the media has under-reported there were efforts to kill and injure police officers every night for the two weeks after the Brown shooting. He expects more of the same after the grand jury report comes out.

source

and this is the exact fucking attitude that enraged an entire city.

the ferguson cops 'expected' a civil disturbance, showed up in tanks and riot gear, unlawfully arrested/detained journalists and violated the people's constitutional right to peaceful assembly and free speech... freedom of the press.

[stormium]

FERGUSON, Mo. — Michael Brown became so angry when he was stopped by Officer Darren Wilson on Canfield Drive here on Aug. 9, his face looked “like a demon,'’ the officer would later tell a grand jury.

He testified that when Mr. Brown reached into the officer’s vehicle and fought him for his gun, Mr. Brown was so physically overpowering that the officer “felt like a 5-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan.”

And when Mr. Brown ran away and then turned to face Officer Wilson, the officer recalled, he did not raise his hands in a gesture of retreat, as many neighbors have said – he made “a grunting, like aggravated sound,” clenched his left hand into a fist, tucked his right hand under his shirt toward his waistband and began running at the officer, who shot him dead.

That account, a vivid and vastly different version from what many people believe happened on Aug. 9, was given by Officer Wilson when he testified before a St. Louis County grand jury in September.

The officer’s recollections of that day, told over several hours, was part of a trove of thousands of pages of documents released to the public on Monday after the county prosecutor, Robert P. McCulloch, announced that the grand jury had decided to bring no criminal charges in the case.

Officer Wilson’s version of events was just one part of a vast catalog of testimony and other evidence that the grand jurors absorbed during the three months that they heard the case. Yet it appeared to have helped convince the jurors, a group of nine whites and three African-Americans, that the officer had committed no crime when he killed Mr. Brown. On Monday, the announcement that there was no indictment set off violent protests, burning and looting throughout the beleaguered St. Louis suburb of Ferguson.

Most grand jury proceedings are swift and simple: a few witnesses are called, the prosecutor makes the case for an indictment and the jurors vote.

But the grand jury in the Wilson case met for an extraordinarily long session, hearing what the prosecutor said was “absolutely everything” that could be considered testimony or evidence in the case. While what happens in the grand jury room is almost always kept secret, Mr. McCulloch insisted on making the transcripts of the proceedings available to the public immediately after the session concluded. Unlike most defendants, Officer Wilson testified before the grand jury.

The grand jurors in the Wilson case met in a St. Louis County courthouse on 25 separate days. They heard 70 hours of testimony from roughly 60 witnesses. And they confronted a jumble of forensics reports, police radio logs, medical documents and tapes of F. B. I interviews with bystanders.

After three months of hearing evidence, the grand jury began its deliberations last Friday at 3:04 p.m. By midday on Monday, they were finished.

Though the encounter between Officer Wilson and Mr. Brown took place in a matter of minutes, eyewitness testimony revealed an infinite array of subtle but crucial variations. Witness after witness took the stand to describe the same two minutes and agreeing on the broadest strokes: how it began with the struggle at the window and the first shots, and ended with Dorian Johnson, who had been walking with Mr. Brown, shouting “they killed him” and crowds descending on the scene.

Many witnesses first began to pay attention while the two were wrestling at the car window, though they often said they could not see enough to know what was going on. But even when the confrontation broke out into the open, the accounts diverged.

“I see the officer running behind shooting,” said one witness.

“When he gets out the car he immediately starts to shoot,” said another.

Documents Released in the Ferguson Case
“Let me stop you,” still another said. “He did not take off running after Michael.”

Testimony about the critical final moments – when Mr. Brown stopped running, turned and moved back toward Officer Wilson – lay along a spectrum.

Some hewed closer to Officer Wilson’s recollection. “I could say for sure he never put his hands up,” said one witness, a man who was working in the area and did not live there, and whose recollection most strongly bolstered Officer Wilson’s case. “He ran to the officer full charge.”

Others spoke just as confidently that events unfolded in a completely different way.

“Yes I personally saw him on his knees with his hands in the air,” one witness said in a recorded interview with federal officials that was played for the grand jury before he testified. The prosecutor questioning that witness did not hide her skepticism of his story, highlighting contradictions in his various accounts.

“Basically just about everything that you said on Aug. 13, and much of what you said today isn’t consistent with the physical evidence that we have in this case, O.K.,” she said to him.

Prosecutors did not seem to shy from pointing out discrepancies between multiple interviews of a single witness, or even at some points exploring the past criminal history of some witnesses, including Mr. Johnson, Mr. Brown’s friend. Several witnesses were asked if they felt pressure to conform to a certain story line, or if they felt fear if their recollections differed from the popular narrative. Some did acknowledge such fears, with one talking of losing 15 pounds from stress.

An older man in the nearby housing complex was blunt about what he saw happening.

“You have to understand the mentality of some of these young guys,” he said, describing those who flocked to the scene in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. “They have nothing to do. If they can latch onto something, they embellish it because they want something to do.”

That man dismissed the notion that Mr. Brown had raised his hands to the sky in a gesture that turned into a symbol for the protest movement in Ferguson. He was also adamant, however, that Mr. Brown had never charged at Officer Wilson but had staggered, wounded, his arms outstretched in a gesture of surrender.

“He had his hands up, palm facing the officer like, ‘O.K., you got me,’ ” the man recalled, adding at a later point that he himself had once been shot so he knew what it was like. The prosecutor pointed out that the distance Mr. Brown covered after turning was farther than the witness remembered, and a grand juror questioned whether he could really judge how menacing Mr. Brown appeared to Officer Wilson.

Still this man’s testimony was like that of several others, in that it neither matched up perfectly with Officer Wilson’s account nor with the accounts of those most sympathetic to Mr. Brown. Many witnesses expressed puzzlement at the moment when Mr. Brown stopped and turned — "That is something I wrestle with to this day,” one said. Some recalled shouting out to him at that moment or turning to their family members in horror. When Mr. Brown moved toward Officer Wilson, one witness said, he “just went forward like his body was just going down.”

As the weeks went by, the grand jury studied the brief encounter between Officer Wilson and Mr. Brown from seemingly every possible angle, hearing forensic testimony on one day, on another going as a group to examine a police vehicle similar to Officer Wilson’s. On Nov. 11, the prosecutors questioned a former superior of Officer Wilson’s in another police force, asking about his relationship with the African-American community as well as the standard police practices governing the use of deadly force (the witness had nothing but positive things to say about Officer Wilson).

Much of the forensic evidence, along with public and private autopsy reports, supported the narrative that Officer Wilson and Mr. Brown had struggled inside the police car.

A crime scene investigator described swabbing Wilson’s gun with a Q-tip; the subsequent D.N.A. report found Mr. Brown’s genetic material on Officer Wilson’s Sig Sauer pistol. Similarly, D.N.A. from Mr. Brown was also found on the officer’s uniform pants and shirt.

In his own testimony, Officer Wilson told jurors that Mr. Brown had grabbed the gun while the two scuffled at the car. The gun went off twice, once striking Mr. Brown in the hand and leaving blood splattered inside the vehicle.

The medical examiner who performed the initial autopsy showed the grand jury close to 100 gruesome photos of the wounds from every angle, giving exhaustive descriptions and lessons in the physics of gunshot wounds.

He described the soot, or unburned gunpowder, on a graze wound on Brown’s hand, proof that it was shot at a range of 6 to 9 inches.

Over the months, the grand jurors seemed to focus intently on the final movement Mr. Brown may have made toward Officer Wilson. The prosecutor asked witness after witness if it looked as if Mr. Brown were reaching for a weapon, though few said they saw anything like that.

Grand jurors asked if Mr. Brown, when he was moving toward Officer Wilson, seemed to have “any kind of expression, a blank look, aggressive look or anything”? They also had seemingly come to memorize the distances and challenged witnesses on their memories of the geography of the confrontation.

Forensic evidence was also presented that supported Officer Wilson’s statement that Mr. Brown was moving toward him as he opened fire outside the car, and continued to approach the officer after being hit by an initial volley of bullets.

The distance from the front wheel of the officer’s SUV to Mr. Brown’s body was 153 feet, 9 inches, an investigator said. Farther away from the car, the investigator showed with photographs, were two blood-spatter patterns – evidence showing that Mr. Brown was moving toward the officer, and the car, when he was killed in the second flurry of shots.

The medical examiner described the succession of bullet wounds to the chest and face that, in his view, would not have immediately incapacitated Mr. Brown. The prosecutors repeatedly questioned the doctor about this, driving home that Mr. Brown could have still been mobile after the initial several shots.

They seemed intent on emphasizing this point, which supports Officer Wilson’s description of Brown lunging toward him despite serious wounds.

A final shot through the top of Mr. Brown’s head, the medical experts all agreed, brought him down almost instantly.

After the shooting, Officer Wilson was taken to an area hospital, where a doctor found that he had a “facial contusion,” the medical term for a bruise. He was given a prescription for an anti-inflammatory drug.

Since they were not sequestered the way trial jury sometimes are, the grand jurors were also aware of the outside pressure to reach a decision

“I know Mr. McCulloch before has said there is a process and this is the process we have to follow,” one juror said in late September. “Is the NAACP, or these other, you know, coalitions, are they confirming what he is saying to the people of Ferguson?”

Last Friday afternoon, the jurors indicated that they were ready to begin deliberating. The two assistant St. Louis County prosecutors who had presented the case gave them information on the charges that they could possibly bring against Officer Wilson: murder, voluntary manslaughter and involuntary manslaughter.

“We were trying to give you a balanced presentation of the evidence,” said Sheila Whirley, one of the prosecutors, according to the transcripts. “So you might see us go back and forth because we were trying to keep it balanced for you, and get to the truth and hopefully that was accomplished. And I think you are going to make the right decision.”

source: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/26/us/fer....html?_r=0

so, no criminal charges... okay.... i'm fine with that but it still does not dismiss the fact that the police department as a whole acted in a totally unreasonable manner and should be held accountable for their actions... as a whole.

[NIK]

...every police officer hopes people will respect the justice system and give it time to work.

People hope that every police officer will respect the justice system and give it time to work. Not shoot people dead on the spur of the moment whenever they suspect that a crime might be about to take place.

[Carjacker]

This whole thread reads like a TYT//TMZ show....all about the 'rights' of these 'poor,looting and rioting urban dwellers' and not on any other factual evidence of the destruction, race baiting and out right lies of these 'protesters' and the 'civil rights leaders' who congregate and foment violent reactions to a police 'presence'.
The so-called 'news' is sensationalist at best and will do anything to get viewers - lying and beating the drums of mass hysteria to create more 'news'.
These are the same type of news people who claim Gottfrid Svartholm is a criminal and cry for his blood - as they create a murderous rampage of deceit and propaganda to further the strife in Ferguson.
Has the OP - for that matter, has ANYONE - read or heard anything other than the left-wing liberal media on this incident?
Black 'protestors' calling for the death of the Officer - the scared witnesses (also Black from the neighborhood) who testified to the Grand Jury on behalf of the Officer ,verifying his version of events - and they had to do it anonymously for fear of their own lives from the thugs who want only one narrative - that a White cop executed an unarmed Black teen. Oh yeah, a Black 'teen', 6'4" ,290 lbs and who had just strong-arm robbed a conveinence store. Still think he was 'unarmed'? 6'4" 290 lbs, that kid was a weapon himself.
Every supposed 'witness' to a so-called 'execution style killing', claiming he had his hands up LIED outright - the evidence backs it up , from the autopsy to the blood spatter in the streets ,to the fact that Brown's BLOOD was found on the officers weapon and inside the patrol car, bearing witness to the fact that the perp had to have been in contact with the officer's gun in a struggle after hitting the officer as reported.
But ,yeah, dont think about that or any of the multitudes of evidence backing up the Officer's story...just call racism - scream it, cry out for 'Justice' (ie., the officer's death) and wait for the next opportunity to lash out at White people - or if you are White, pour out that White 'guilt' youve been brainwashed that you have inside you in attacking and destroying your own people.
There is an official motto that the Mossad has "By Deception, we shall win."
And, without me saying the answers, I question you- who ,and of what race, owns and controls almost all multi media that we, the Public, consume and believe in?

[stormium]

<snip>

guilty or acquitted (acquitted as the case is); i'm okay with that... what i'm not okay with is the militarization of civilian law enforcement and the fascist attitude of an aspiring police state.

the FACT of the matter is that in the united states we have a constitution that expressly forbids almost everything the ferguson police department did and they need to be held accountable for that. if the department is not held accountable for their own violations of the law, then i dunno what the implications should be.

maybe it really is just about screaming 187 on a motherfuckin' cop.

187 on mother fucking cops

187 on mother fucking cops

excerpt from Sublime's April 26th, 1992

Cause everybody in the hood has had it up to here
It's getting harder and harder and harder each and every year
Some kids went in a store with their mother
I saw her when she came out she was getting some Pampers
They said it was for the black man
They said it was for the Mexican, and not for the white man
But if you look at the streets it wasn't about Rodney King
It's bout this fucked up situation and these fucked up police
It's about coming up and staying on top
And screaming 187 on a motherfuckin' cop

[Carjacker]

<snip>

the FACT of the matter is that in the united states we have a constitution that expressly forbids almost everything the ferguson police department did and they need to be held accountable for that. if the department is not held accountable for their own violations of the law, then i dunno what the implications should be.

maybe it really is just about screaming 187 on a motherfuckin' cop.

187 on mother fucking cops

187 on mother fucking cops

excerpt from Sublime's April 26th, 1992

Cause everybody in the hood has had it up to here
It's getting harder and harder and harder each and every year
Some kids went in a store with their mother
I saw her when she came out she was getting some Pampers
They said it was for the black man
They said it was for the Mexican, and not for the white man
But if you look at the streets it wasn't about Rodney King
It's bout this fucked up situation and these fucked up police
It's about coming up and staying on top
And screaming 187 on a motherfuckin' cop

Tell that to the main criminal who took an Oath to protect the Constitution but has blatantly and arrogantly broken every promise,statement and Rule of Law that can be found - including the Constitution, but for fear of being called a 'racist' , people cower and hunker down in the homes believing that they are safe, that his dictatorial actions wont affect them....

Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

[stormium]

Occasionally even a blind squirrel finds a nut. And so, Eric Holder’s Justice Department has found an injustice. Only it’s not the one they think.

The Department of Justice’s “Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department,” released this week, has been widely touted as incontrovertible evidence that Ferguson law enforcement is systemically racist, its Jim Crow–era animus expressed in policing practices targeting Ferguson’s majority-black population — this even though the Justice Department declined to charge Darren Wilson for a civil-rights violation in the shooting death of Michael Brown. Moreover, it is “important to understand [the] Ferguson Report not as an aberration, but how white supremacy actually works.” So tweeted The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates. No doubt the report will feature prominently in discussions of this weekend’s commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Selma’s Bloody Sunday.

But the report is hardly unassailable. As Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald and many others have noted, the “disparate impact” criterion on which the report heavily relies compares the number of police interactions with blacks to the black population, when the meaningful statistic is the number of police interactions compared to the number of black lawbreakers. The report pointedly neglects that question. Of course, this is not to say racism is nonexistent in Ferguson. Certain bits of the corroborating evidence for the report’s allegations — noxious e-mails from Ferguson officials, for example, and the lack of disciplinary action taken against their senders — are repugnant.

But what the material in the report reveals is less a culture of racial animus than one of predatory government: “Ferguson’s law enforcement practices,” states the report, “are shaped by the City’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs.” In the interest of expanding its treasury, Ferguson has employed its police department — 58 officers, policing a town of 21,000 — as an enforcer of the myriad municipal regulations that, rigorously enforced, nickel-and-dime the citizenry to the local government’s benefit. This is the injustice on which the Justice Department has stumbled, which helps to explain the city’s racial tensions — and which merits urgent correction.

In 2010, the city’s finance director encouraged Ferguson police chief Thomas Jackson to “ramp up” ticket-writing to help mitigate an anticipated sales-tax shortfall. Not only did citations increase, but so did the issuance of “companion charges” — for example, charges for speeding and failure to maintain a single lane, to accompany DWI charges. One stop can yield six or eight citations, and officers have been known to compete to set single-stop records. Indeed, within Ferguson Police Department, because opportunities for promotion have been tied to “productivity” — that is, enthusiasm for ticket-writing — officers have perverse incentives to issue citations, and in concert with police and prosecutors, municipal courts regularly enforce the payment of fines in a way that compounds what a single defendant owes. The report recounts the case of a woman for whom a single 2007 parking infraction — two citations; penalty: $151 plus fees — has led to multiple arrests, jail time, and more than $1,000 in additional fines, half of which she has yet to pay.

The Justice Department’s report squares with an extensive essay by Radley Balko, published in September in the Washington Post:

Some of the towns in St. Louis County can derive 40 percent or more of their annual revenue from the petty fines and fees collected by their municipal courts. A majority of these fines are for traffic offenses, but they can also include fines for fare-hopping on MetroLink (St. Louis’s light rail system), loud music and other noise ordinance violations, zoning violations for uncut grass or unkempt property, violations of occupancy permit restrictions, trespassing, wearing “saggy pants,” business license violations and vague infractions such as “disturbing the peace” or “affray” that give police officers a great deal of discretion to look for other violations.

He notes how, in Bel-Ridge, a number of people had been fined “for not subscribing to the town’s only approved garbage collection service.”

The complex question of the relationship between wealth and race comes into play here, but it might reasonably be said that this practice — of police and prosecutors and courts together — disproportionately affects black communities not because they are black, but because they are poor. They do not have the means to escape the justice apparatus, unlike the comparatively wealthy, who can pay a fine and be done with the matter — or hire an attorney, and inconvenience courts that prefer the ease of collecting fees to the challenge of arbitrating cases. To this effect, Balko quotes Thomas Harvey, an attorney for ArchCity Defenders, a St. Louis–based legal-aid group: “These are people who make the same mistakes you or I do — speeding, not wearing a seatbelt, forgetting to get your car inspected on time. The difference is that they don’t have the money to pay the fines. . . . When you can’t pay the fines, you get fined for that, too. And when you can’t get to court, you get an arrest warrant.”

This is what happens in Ferguson. The white population is comparatively wealthy, and it lives in neighborhoods that have very low crime rates. The police do not expend time or resources extensively policing those areas. Much of Ferguson’s black population, though, lives in a fairly compact region, parts of which have high crime rates, and so are intensively policed. The tendency of police to be on the lookout for crime combines with the pressures to prove productivity and the knowledge that poorer residents are the most squeezable turnips. In such a situation, who can be surprised that racial tensions have been increasing for years?

Of course, racial activists are quick to convert correlation into causation: Black residents bear the brunt of police attention because they are black. That is not necessarily true. And it misses the larger, and more virulent, problem. Far more alarming in Ferguson than whether vestigial racism animates a policeman here and there is the perversion of the law, and of the positions of those sworn to protect it, to buck up the treasury on the backs of the most vulnerable, whoever they may be.

source: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/41...ian-tuttle

[Hary1946]

Very astute. I've long argued that the various -ism's which allegedly pervade our society are symptoms rather than causes. And you can't solve a problem by worrying at the symptoms.