The Front Lines of Ferguson
grantland.com
grantland.com
Mob mentality is dangerous. There is a thin line between a "peaceful protest" and a riot. If you have seen other protests that have turned into riots (like in France where several innocent shops got destroyed in an anti-Israel protest), or in England where the riots got way out of control, you know what can happen. Its a few police trying to keep a huge crowd in control - and it is a scary job. Unfortunately being well-armed makes the crowds even angrier.
You don't prevent riots like this with tanks, you prevent them by having a healthy society. And ours is seriously ill.
> At first, the crowd was quiet, even peaceful, he said. But as night dropped, more began showing up. And cops came, too, with riot gear and assault rifles.
Here's my point. Would YOU have reacted the same way? I would not. Most people would not. Why are people trying to blame the police for their actions?
Interesting fact that just came up. The boy who was killed had robbed a convenience store just minutes before. http://www.stltoday.com/news/multimedia/videos/ferguson-poli...
And now the story takes a turn.
There's no point continuing the conversation with someone willing to mislead.
And so what if he did rob a shop? The penalty for that is arrest, charge, trial, conviction, punishment. Not drag to the back of a police car, shoot him in the head.
If you want people to care about your shit, they need to have some stake in it, some meaningful reason to respect it.
Compare that to police in full armor, with tactical weapons trained at the crowd, perched atop armored vehicles... It's no surprise to me that things got so far out of hand on Wednesday, but were completely different on Thursday.
I don't know the answers to the issues, and while I can analyze and say this is what should have been done differently at each step of this tragedy; not sure it is helpful.
I would be interested in hacker news memberships ideas of the issues underlying this situation.
Note: the radio station verifies the caller as best they can but, yes, we don't have a positive ID on the caller.
As usual, I see waaaay too much one-side "reporting" of the result with no attention to the origin.
> A shooting is a disproportionate response to someone walking in the road, riots and looting are a disproportionate response to an unjust death, militarized police is a disproportionate response to riots and looting, and Molotov cocktails are a disproportionate response to a militarized police force. > A cycle of violence will continue to escalate until one side will take a step back and often it takes a third party like the Missouri Highway Patrol to make that happen.
When a conflict is escalating, there are multiple layers of disproportionate response that allow outside observers at any point to interject how the people worrying about Layer X are ignoring Layer X-1, which allows other observers to interject that said person is ignoring Layer X-2, ad nauseum.
It's somewhat the inevitable result of people trying to process a complicated tragic situation with information overload into simple understanding that are inevitably influenced by their pre-existing biases and experiences.
[0]http://www.reddit.com/r/StLouis/comments/2dlq8w/the_first_ni...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8182939
These photographs of paramilitary soldiers shooting tear gas into groups of reporters and peaceful protesters turns my stomach. Likewise, allowing looting and destruction of innocent peoples' property is unacceptable. It's a despicable situation on all sides.
On its own, it looks to me as if one cop went berserk for some reason of his own. It had nothing to do with the police department or Ferguson. Some people are trying to make it out to be white cops picking on black people but, if that were true, you would hear of stories from that area all the time and you don't. Yes, there are tensions between the police and some in the community but, be aware, Ferguson is not The Hamptons.
No one needed to die over this. The cop apparently went berserk. However, this was more than just some kid walking down the street. As minor as this sounds, people walking down the street, blocking traffic, is something of a major issue in Ferguson. People are always complaining about this in that area. It's a real problem. Perhaps this "If I told you once I told you a thousand times!" incident is what finally set him off but this was HIS problem, not that whole department's problem or anything to do with Ferguson.
What I'm trying to say is, the REAL story is "Cop gets fed up and goes berserk" not "White cops murdering black kids".
While the radio station did its best to confirm the ID of the caller, we don't know for sure she's real. However, her recounting of the events is similar to what was reported on TV and radio within hours of the original shooting. I own some restaurants and frequently get police visitors. I've been told that the real story will come out later and little of what's been told by those so-called "eyewitnesses" is true. Specifically, "witnesses" claim Brown was shot in the back as he was running away. We will soon learn that isn't true at all.
While I thought it sounded like a cop gone berserk at first, more and more bits and pieces are leaking out along with the link above and, if confirmed, will tell you something I won't go into here and now.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7939710