Quote:
Originally Posted by molson
I understand what you're saying. I think part of my frustration in this thread and these topics generally is how I'm just so wired to try to avoid implications that aren't necessarily true based on the facts we know. When it was reported that Brown committed the robbery, the media immediately assumed that the officer stopped Brown as a suspect in that robbery. But as I pointed out in post earlier, part B is not at all a necessary implication of part A. This kind of stuff, the implications that accuse people of racism (and by extension, of all law enforcement as being racist, which I know is what people think), I get the same frustration over the lack of logic, but there's then an emotional component too.
Just because Brown committed robbery, and was then killed, it doesn't necessarily mean that the officer specifically "executed" him because he committed the robbery. It could be better or even worse than that. Maybe he killed him because he said something about the officer's mother. Maybe it was lawful force. Maybe it was non-criminal but poor judgment. ...And just because an officer indicated on a report that Brown was a robbery suspect, and that action doesn't "seem like" a robbery to someone, it doesn't necessarily make that officer a racist (I know that was DT making that implication and not you). Someone can always get a break when they're actually charged. But on an initial report, about a suspect in a crime, a police officer should report the crime that he thinks was actually committed, not the one he thinks "feels" the best.
And I'm sure when people read that they just think I defend the officers no matter what. This is the same tension that came up in the Zimmerman thread. But when you're prosecuting a guy like this officer, or Zimmerman, you have to be aware of these issues, both the ones that make a case stronger and especially the ones that make the case weaker. You have to be able to see what the facts actually infer, and how likely those inferences are sound, and not just what your emotion and bias tell you they must mean.
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I'm not sure that was the implication in my post...it was more that the crime was categorized as a "robbery" because he was black rather than "shoplifting" if he was white. But that was before I saw the video - I'm not up on all those specifics - if it was him reaching across the counter to steal the cigars then I can certainly see that as more of a "robbery" regardless of whether he was black or white. I was under the impression that it was literally him grabbing some stuff off the counter and walking away with it.
Regardless - I don't think a white suspect of this type of "robbery" gets pursued with nearly as much vigor by the cops, nor shot in such a situation. So maybe that's my assumption of where race played into it, in which case I'm fine with that.