"Black Lives Matter" - it's stupid. Just cut the crap.....

[MickeyMinnieMom]

I like how he spoke of each individually. I like how he addressed the mayor and the police department and the chief. How he addressed the citizens of Dallas and everything they have been going through.

I liked these parts as well and thought that they were totally appropriate for a memorial service for the five fallen officers.

 

[cabanafrau]

I think you are missing the fact that that Police are also being shot regularly, that in these split decisions when someone is coming at them if they wait too long it's them that's dead instead, that is what the cops are risking.
I am not denying that it is likely that blacks are being pulled over more often, are dealing with police more regularly but that doesn't mean that they shouldn't comply with officers instructions. Don't run, don't come at them, if they have you pinned down to search you or handcuff you do t reach for your pocket, same rules apply no matter what the colour of your skin.

I didn't "miss" anything. I was discussing the use of deadly force from a different perspective in that particular comment. Nothing you've said negates the need to use such force very carefully, to suggest otherwise is foolish.

 

[Unas]

Did anyone watch the Memorial Service for the Dallas officers? President Obama addressed what these last 37 pages tried to do in a much more eloquent way. I strongly encourage everyone to find a video or transcript.

No surprise there.

 

[luvsJack]

I didn't say a bad neighborhood, I said a predominately black one. See how you associated a black neighborhood with a bad neighborhood? It's an excellent example.

The clothing, too. Why (unless it is obvious gang insignia) would someone's style of dress cause you to automatically assume they were dangerous? Because it is a predominately "urban" style?



I don't care. He was wrong. Dead {word I can't use here} wrong. How would you feel if that were your child? Would you think it was okay?

I had an argument with my daughter at Macy's over a prom dress (she is 17) she got sassy and didn't get dressed and get moving when I told her to. If you were in Macy's and saw me grab her by the back of the hair and slam her, face down, to the floor and then kneel on the small of her back while twisting her arms behind her what would you do what would you do?

Kind of like when I said "gang banger" and you automatically assumed I was saying "black". Works both ways.

You don't see the difference in someone that dresses like Steve Harvey compared to someone that dresses like Snoop Dogg? One is in fact a former gang member and has been in prison for murder. Can you guess which one?

 

[manning]

I said he was exonerated, and I understand what not guilty means. I studied to be a paralegal so I know the jargon. If they can't get an indictment in a Grand Jury, then no criminal charges will ever be brought. I have seen in other posts people hoping he would be criminally charged, I just inform what I found. I do have critical thinking and I know where so called news outlets tell lies that they never correct. Eric Casebolt will never get a correction from what the so called news outlets gave him, but at least he is working and will face no criminal charges.

 

[cabanafrau]

Ok, but the example you use here is NOT a reckless use of force -- and this is key to understanding situations where split-second use of force decisions are made. What is in the mind of the shooter at that instant is the governing principle used to determine whether the level of force was justified or not justified. IT DOES NOT MATTER what subsequent investigation reveals. If the shooter -- whether civilian or law enforcement -- honestly believes they or someone else are in danger of being killed or seriously injured, the use of force is justified...even if it turns out they made a mistake.

I agree with much of what you said, however whether the use of force is in the end judged reckless can't necessarily be fully decided simply by the factors I laid out because there well could be factors relating to what actions the shooter took or neglected to take prior to involving him or herself in the situation.

I would also suggest to you that the window within which a civilian in particular is deemed justified in their use of force is not as large as that of the police officer, for a variety of reasons.

 

[pigletliz]

This whole thread makes me sad. Prayers for all who have lost their lives, their families and their communities.

 

[MariMama]

It's actually closer to 50% not exactly a vast majority. Definitely a high rate but you also have to look at the underlying reasons men/boys join gangs. The education system is poor, the economic system has many poor blacks on the outside with no real way in. You find a kid 9, 10 years old and have him start making some money doing simple jobs and they got him.

Many of them also don't have fathers.

 

[Mikie]

Its funny, I keep reading the same adjectives being used throughout this thread to put down Black Lives Matter: violent, disrespectful, unlawful, divisive, aggressive, rowdy, criminal. Do you think it is a coincidence that these are the same prejudices often associated with blacks, and black men in particular? The same prejudices in fact, that BLM is trying to address? The same prejudices that may lead to, consciously or subconsciously, black men being treated differently in similar situations, and even killed in some instances? The same prejudices that may have led to Trayvon Martin's death?

Speaking of which, I also see the same specific instances being brought up repeatedly. Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, etc. But as PP's have said multiple times, this isn't about any one incident. This is about ALL the incidents. That have occurred. That keep occurring. American has a problem, and has for a very long time. It isn't as simple as whites and blacks or cops and blacks. What is dividing us, what is dividing our country, goes back much further and is a lot deeper than Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter is a conduit through which a much deeper issue has began bubbling back up from the depths it has been hiding and festering in for so many years.

The truth is, you can see the worst in anything if you want to. You could argue God is a power hungry, vengeful, racist if you chose to see Him that way... and you would have plenty of evidence I might add. Or you could choose to see the good and him and embrace it. The choice it up to you. The truth is Black Lives Matter isn't a a defined group of people. It is both a sign and signifier. It is a voice for people that have not been heard. It is an alarm clock for america to wake up, a mirror we all need to look into. It is all of us. It is a feeling all black people have felt at one point in their lives... And one that we all hope to never have feel again.

I am enjoying your contributions to this thread and appreciate and agree with much of what you have written. I just have to comment on this specific bolded phrase above. They are prejudices if you assume characteristics about someone based on their skin color or some other superficial characteristic rather than on specific evidence. They are observable facts if you're talking about actions you've seen particular individuals take. SOME folks within the BLM movement or invading it (sorry, indistinguishable to an observer without a lot of research) use violent, dismissive, aggressive, rowdy, criminal tactics to try to advance their cause. It is difficult, if not impossible, to have any conversation or resolution with people behaving in this way.

As others before me have stated more eloquently, BLM sentiment is admirable, but the execution of tactics of many people within or attached to the movement exactly perpetuates/exacerbates the stereotypes you list above. How can someone scream "STOP stereotyping and accusing me of being LOUD and violent!" while throwing a Molotov cocktail at a police officer and honestly expect this to help advance any kind of solution?

Prior to reading this thread, I would describe myself as anti-BLM because of TACTICS, not because of SENTIMENT. I have been enlightened by a lot of the discussion and appreciate peoples' reasoned discussions. I am more likely to want to listen to calm, rational discussion of those who identify themselves with BLM instead of dismissing them out of hand as soon as the BLM title is evoked. I hope that more people genuinely interested in advancing the cause and solutions will try to understand why sharing the BLM umbrella with the violent protestors is completely counter-productive.

 

[manning]

I said he was exonerated, and I understand what not guilty means. I studied to be a paralegal so I know the jargon. ]If they can't get an indictment in a Grand Jury, then no criminal charges will ever be brought. I have seen in other posts people hoping he would be criminally charged, I just inform what I found. I do have critical thinking and I know where so called news outlets tell lies that they never correct. Eric Casebolt will never get a correction from what the so called news outlets gave him, but at least he is working and will face no criminal charges.

Granted I'm not a paralegal nor studied to be a lawyer. Here is what was explained to me by a lawyer.

The prosecutor thinks he has enough evidence to indict, he goes to a grand jury and presents the facts he knows.

The Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides that "No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury,
Generally speaking, double jeopardy attaches when a trial jury is impaneled, though there are some variations on a state-by-state basis. Because the grand jury is not making a determination of guilt or innocence, but rather whether there is a preponderance of the evidence that a crime has been committed, and probable cause to believe that it is the named defendant who committed the crime, the decision by such a grand jury to not proceed to an indictment does not preclude a future prosecution for the named crimes.

There is no judge present and the accused does not have a right to a lawyer.

 

[sunshinehighway]

This part is correct, and it applies to every situation where a prosecutor makes a decision to file or not file criminal charges. The question is not whether a person did something wrong or not.

The question is whether or not there is sufficient probable cause to believe a) that a crime was committed, and b) that the person in question committed that crime.

A decision to file charges does NOT mean the person is guilty. A decision not to file charges does NOT mean the person is innocent. The same is true of jury decisions. "Innocent" is not one of the choices a jury has, because it is not required for anyone to prove their innocence. Juries decide "Guilty" or "Not Guilty," nothing more.

You will sometimes see media reports saying no charges are being filed and therefore the person is exonerated. That is absolutely not true. All that happened is a prosecutor decided they didn't have a case that could be successfully prosecuted. This is totally and absolutely FALSE. In fact, most of the time police officers are held to a higher standard than average citizens.

Why? Because they have specialized training that gives them both special skills and special responsibilities.

In a shoot-don't shoot situation, a civilian would be granted an order of magnitude MORE latitude than a police officer -- because the point where you have no other option than deadly force is reached much earlier than it would be for me. If you're scared and pull the trigger, you're probably OK because you don't know what else to do. I have a lot of training in avoiding that "no other option" threshold than you do.

Conversely, I also have a great deal more training and experience in evaluating threats than you do, and I probably will identify threats much more quickly than you will and much more accurately. So I probably will see threats you don't see. In some cases, that will mean I diffuse them. In other cases, I might use force much earlier than you would and leave you scratching your head. Or...your inability to identify the threat could leave you dead.

I think you misunderstood me. If I were to behave the way that officer did there'd no question that I was wrong. I guess that's what I meant by more leeway. It's harder for a jury to judge the actions of an officer just because of the nature of the job. Something that might seem completely inappropriate might be completely appropriate for an officer given the situation. That's what I meant by different standard.
The poster I was addressing seems to be confusing a lack of charges with doing nothing wrong. At least that's how I'm intrepreting his posts. As you said, charges not being brought isn't the same as saying the actions were appropriate.
He seems to be saying the fact that the grand jury didn't indict means nothing inappropriate happened.

 

[JimMIA]

If they can't get an indictment in a Grand Jury, then no criminal charges will ever be brought.

This is incorrect. There are three ways someone can be charged -- the most common way is an arrest by a law enforcement officer, a prosecutor can directly file charges, or a grand jury can return a true bill (indictment). But even if a grand jury declines to indict, either the prosecutor or police could still file charges.

 

[JimMIA]

Double jeopardy means that a person cannot be tried twice for the same offense. It could be a jury trial or a bench trial, doesn't matter. A grand jury proceeding is not a trial.

However, a person can be tried for very similar crimes in different jurisdictions. That occurs most often when there are both state and federal statutes which can be used to cover the same incident. In this context we're discussing in this thread -- police use of force -- a classic example would be an officer being acquitted of murder, but then being tried in federal court for violation of the deceased civil rights. That is NOT double jeopardy, even though the person is being tried for exactly the same set of facts.

 

[disneyjunkie]

The site I used was because a lot of the mainstream news outlets like CNN and MSNBC and NYT don't always give the whole story. In fact, they slanted towards BLM. This one gave more of a balance to what had happened. Everyone has their own opinions, but most of the people talking were from BLM and not the people who lived in the area. This gave some perspective to what happened in McKinney. By the way, the officer involved in McKinney was absolved of any wrong doing. It happened on June 23, 2016.

O.J. Simpson was found not guilty. Do you agree with that decision? If not, then perhaps you can understand why I (and
I'm sure many others)won't change my opinion based on that idiot cop being absolved.

 

[Geoff_M]

Did a study really find there aren’t racial disparities in police shootings? Not so fast.
http://www.vox.com/2016/7/11/12148452/police-shootings-racism-study

In spite of Vox being a heavily slanted opinion site, I'm not a big fan of reflexively tossing aside a story because of its source, instead I prefer to address the flaws in its contents. I read the Vox criticism of the Fryer and found it to be pretty heavy on speculation and light on facts. I'll highlight a few of them:
1) Vox's Lopez is dismissive of Fryer in part because it "only" examined what happened after an officer decided to stop someone. Lopez laments "That excludes a key driver of racial biases in policing: that police are more likely to stop black people in the first place, producing far more situations in which someone is likely to be shot." Huh? There has to be interaction between the police and a possible suspect before anyone gets shot. How does "more situations" call Fryer's findings into question?
2) Lopez says that the sample size was "limited", but doesn't provide any proof as to the sample size not being statistically meaningful. He also avoids says that the study included looking at over 1,300 shootings over 15 years, which I think most people would find to be plenty of data points. The data also covered 4% of the entire national population.
3) Lopez feels the Fryer study is flawed because it only included data that city police departments gave up willingly and didn't include cities with past histories of policing issues. While I'm sure that Lopez would have preferred that Ferguson, MO's data would have been used, the claim made by groups such as BLM is that deadly policing disparities are systemic to our country. That's why they've been protesting not just in Minnesota and Louisiana, but all over. Prof. Fryer also doesn't have the power of subpoena, so what's he supposed to do? He's left with the data that's available to him. If these problems are truly systemic, then which large cities you pick shouldn't really matter much.
4) Lopez states that the police report data used by Fryer cannot be trusted because we know that police lie. Without a doubt this happens, and it's an easy argument to claim, but given the large volume of data in the sets used by Fryer, you'd have to assume that the lying was pervasive and primarily involved suspects of one race.
5) Lopez minimizes the results of the Fryer study because it flies in the face of other findings. He says, for example "It’s unclear why the study didn’t look at (FBI data regarding police shootings)" that shows a racial disparity. Well, if you actually read what Fryer was trying to do with the study, it's pretty obvious why Fryer didn't use the FBI data. Two reasons jump out: Fryer was looking for data sets that contained reports encompassing all types of force that was used (not just shootings). Secondly, the FBI data doesn't contain the type of control context that Fryer was looking for. Give the lack of context, it's not too surprising that the FBI data implies something else.
6) Lopez embraces Fryer's findings of racial bias in the use of less-than-lethal force, but poo-poo's it when it comes the use of lethal force. He seems to want to have it both ways.

To me, the addition on context in Fryer's study is key. Instead of pouring all of the incidents into one large pot and effectively treating each incident or death as interchangeable, Fryer takes a much better look at things by asking a very important question: "OK, given the same basic set of factors when the police decide to stop someone, what are the likelihoods that force will be used against a possible subject and is there evidence of racial disparities when such force was then used?"

 

[ASchwa]

I think you misunderstood me. If I were to behave the way that officer did there'd no question that I was wrong. I guess that's what I meant by more leeway. It's harder for a jury to judge the actions of an officer just because of the nature of the job. Something that might seem completely inappropriate might be completely appropriate for an officer given the situation. That's what I meant by different standard.
The poster I was addressing seems to be confusing a lack of charges with doing nothing wrong. At least that's how I'm intrepreting his posts. As you said, charges not being brought isn't the same as saying the actions were appropriate.
He seems to be saying the fact that the grand jury didn't indict means nothing inappropriate happened.

Stop putting words in my mouth, you have no clue what I think. I have seen Grand Juries not indict criminal actions and I have seen miscarriages of justice. I have seen terrorists hailed as heroes while real heroes get the proverbial shaft. I see lies that become rallying cries while truth gets locked out. When will you admit that the girl was told three times to leave the scene. When does her not leaving become wrong? Why does he have to repeat himself? When is it that a person takes personal responsibility for their actions? Apparently because of BLM there doesn't seem to be any responsibility taken by people. Michael Brown wasn't responsible, he decided to steal, shoved another person who objected to him stealing, then attacked a police officer, but that's not wrong. Some people here believe that he is an appropriate poster boy for BLM. That is disgusting.

 

[sunshinehighway]

O.J. Simpson was found not guilty. Do you agree with that decision? If not, then perhaps you can understand why I (and
I'm sure many others)won't change my opinion based on that idiot cop being absolved.

Or a very public figure who it was recently announced won't face charges. My guess is s/he wouldn't argue that person acted completely appropriately either.

 

[ASchwa]

O.J. Simpson was found not guilty. Do you agree with that decision? If not, then perhaps you can understand why I (and
I'm sure many others)won't change my opinion based on that idiot cop being absolved.

Given what the Jury had, acquittal was inevitable. The worst thing that came out of that trial was the Kardashians.

 

[disneyjunkie]

I think often we are oversimplifying the appearance by focusing on skin color. Certainly, it plays a role in how one reacts to a person, but there's much more to it than that.

If I'm a cop & I pull over someone who looks & dresses like say Steve Harvey, I'm not too likely to think I need to be on my toes. OTOH, someone who looks & dresses like Snoop Dog? Yeah, I admit it. My guard is up. Of course my guard is also up if I'm pulling over someone who looks like Ron Pearlman in Sons of Anarchy garb - much MORE so than the previously mentioned Steve Harvey lookalike.

What's the income level of these black citizens who are being targeted? Is it across the board or primarily low income? And if the latter, does the nature of targeting low income factor in as much as skin color?

Now, driving through a bad neighborhood with my doors locked? Absolutely. My black friends do that as well (unless they can avoid the neighborhood completely, which they prefer).

How in the world can a police officer or anyone else determine someone's income level just by looking at them?

 

[JimMIA]

I would also suggest to you that the window within which a civilian in particular is deemed justified in their use of force is not as large as that of the police officer, for a variety of reasons.

I disagree. In almost every situation, the average citizen will be given much more latitude in their decision to use force. Use of force situations are not common for citizens and the expectations for their responses and decisions is far lower than it is for police officers -- as it should be.

About the only situation where I think officers are given more latitude would be in retreating or pursuing someone.

Generally, citizens are expected to retreat from threats as much as they can, rather than confronting threats, and they are not allowed to pursue fleeing criminals. In most states, there is statutory language that says officers are specifically not required to retreat or refrain from lawful police action because of resistance or threats -- obviously because it is law enforcement's job to arrest people who are not necessarily enthusiastic about going to jail.

A few years ago, Florida -- in a fit of abject legislative stupidity, IMHO -- removed that requirement from citizens with our "Stand Your Ground" law. But that's another question.