re: #407 Lidane

The national guard should come in and step between the protesters and the Ferguson PD/St. Louis County Police. Only then might we see calm restored.

And I’m not joking. The police response has been to escalate violence at every step. The Ferguson PD and county police have undermined Capt. Johnson’s efforts at reconciliation, especially with the release of the unrelated video that Capt. Jackson admits has nothing to do with why Brown was stopped.

If it had nothing to do with why Brown was stopped, why keep trying to use it to infer how and why Brown acted in the stop by Wilson?

That’s what the right wing keeps doing. That’s exactly as the Ferguson PD intended - make people focus on Brown’s actions, not those of the officer who fired multiple times, hitting Brown at least six times from the front.

Witnesses say he was surrendering. Wilson kept shooting. The very act of continuing to shoot after surrendering is excessive force. He killed him. There is no excuse, though the right wing is trying to claim that the preliminary autopsy is somehow proof that Brown was charging Wilson (or that there were drugs involved, when there’s no proof of that either - toxicology reports aren’t going to be available for weeks). It’s a smear campaign to go after the guy who’s dead and can’t talk for himself. All that’s left is the evidence, and the police force that initially responded has a history of playing fast and loose with incident reports and has engaged in excessive force incidents in the past.

The Brown killing exposes all of this for the world to see. And the right wing is choosing to see what it wants - that they’re blaming a community besieged by a militarized police department that considers them animals and that peaceful residents are being forced to endure curfews while the militarized police run roughshod over equal protection and civil rights of everyone - journalists and private citizens alike.