Quote:
Originally Posted by Dutch
This is what I was wondering about and it makes sense to me that it should be part of the trial.
DT, lots of wrong with that post, but I get it, it's an emotionally charged story. I would like to clarify that I am not blaming Mike Brown's death because he's black, which would suggest I am racist or prejudice. I'm not blaming him for doing anything that warranted him being shot to death. But like everybody else, I want to know what the truth is. And I don't want false descriptions of events. I've got an idea what shoplifting looks like, I've got an idea what robbery looks like, and this is a tweener, but I'm guessing that he did enough for it to be called a robbery. Walking into a store, reaching across the counter and taking $50 from the register is a robbery. Reaching across the counter and taking $50 worth of cigars is shoplifting? I just can't buy that logic.
|
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 crime suspect, 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.