Ratty said:
Therumancer said:
Right now I find no references to the upwards angle of the bullets, though the point about them all coming from the front is still being made. Ditto for comments about him likely having fallen to his knees after multiple gunshot wounds.
"Baden and Parcells focused on two shots in particular that correlated with witness accounts of the shooting. The first was the shot to that entered the top of Brown's head near his hairline behind the exit wound by his right eye. Parcells said he and Baden believed the shot was fired from above, down onto Brown's head, because the bullet appeared to have reentered into his right shoulder.
The other shot of note was the one in the middle of his right arm. "There was a witness statement that said [Brown] was walking away and he kind of jerks so that would have occurred when he was walking away, and then he turns around," Parcells said, demonstrating Brown's possible movements. "It's consistent with that."
Baden added that the bullets were fired from at least one or two feet away, and that there was "no evidence of a struggle." The only wounds apart from the bullet wounds were abrasions on Brown's face, attributed to him falling down after the shots to his head. "
-From the preliminary autopsy findings of Dr. Michael Baden and forensics pathologist assistant Professor Shawn Parcells.
http://www.thewire.com/national/2014/08/michael-browns-family-addresses-preliminary-autopsy-results/378686/
Therumancer said:
I'll also say that for those who have been accusing people who think like me of "defending police brutality" that the problem is people can't understand what it's like to be in the position of the cop. It's easy to sit back at a distance and say what a cop should or shouldn't do, and what's reasonable use of force, and how it's a "murder fantasy" to talk about how multiple potential opponents could justify lethal force even if someone says "I surrender" while other people might be continueing the fight. The cop has a right to come home alive too, and as I've said myself many times "I'd rather be tried by twelve, than carried by six". I was not a cop, but I was a Criminal Justice major, and I worked security for two casinos, both the size of small cities (I'm not kidding) and I had to deal with similar attitudes with people on the outside or from other non-security departments trying to act like they knew how security should handle dealing with rowdies in nightclubs, shut offs in bars, ejections, and escorts. It's easy to be an "expert" when your not the guy who risks having some guy break a bottle and try and stab you with the glass, or getting beaten to a pulp by a bunch of angry guys who have lost all their money, got loaded, and convinced themselves the casino must have cheated. Of course then again I was good at my job, I generally did not get into fights, and could control even tense situations. Albeit to be fair some of that did involve intimidation (such as making sure I had enough obvious backup on scene). The point is I understand to an extent, and being familiar with a lot of incidents, even in situations like that, the guy who puts his hands up and acts submissive could very well try and sucker punch you if he thinks your distracted.
This guy was a cop for six years. If he felt he couldn't handle an unarmed assailant he had plenty of time to get retrained or find another job.
Therumancer said:
At any rate, this case is going to get even more "interesting", and that isn't a good thing. When this is over it's likely to remain divisive and both sides aren't going to believe anything the other presents, no matter what evidence is on records, and the more "experts" are brought to re-do, and re-check everything the more complicated things are going to get. Not to mention that just about anyone should be concerned when the government ovverules the normal authorities and has a "special" anything rather than the intended people brought in. In a lot of cases that's sort of like being in the middle ages and being told that the local constable is being made to hand over the investigation to an "inquisitor".
Given the history of racial profiling and unrest in the county letting the "normal authorities" handle this is like asking the Catholic Church to handle the investigation and punishment of it's own people who abused children. And we see how that went for decades and decades and decades until finally they got pressure from outside authorities. Even if the local Prosecutor is somehow totally impartial the people of Ferguson don't believe he will be.
I did misstate the initial paragraph slightly. The point about the upward angle of the bullets is missing post-editing. As is the point about him likely having fell to his knees.
That said the reason for the third autopsy is that the shot to the top of the head could still have been gained if he was in the middle of charging. The witnesses also perjured themselves by claiming he was shot in the back/back of the head. What this means is that the witness testimony is now largely irrelevant on the point of the "execution" once he surrendered. The only part which still stands right now is that Brown reached into the police car to go for the officer's gun which caused him to be shot initially, what happened after that initial clash and what circumstances lead to more shots being fired are what's in question. We do not have the Cop's testimony, if the cop claims the guy tried to charge him (bending over to charge and bowl him over) this would wound also cooresponds with that.
This is probably why they want a third autopsy, because they are trying to hang the cop out to dry, and right now that evidence still isn't likely to get them a conviction.
As far as the rest goes, again, you don't know much about being a cop, or apparently understand what's implicit in that job where they need to worry about their own safety. I do to some extent from having taken Criminal Justice and the way I did security. One thing I do know about is something they refer to as "continuum of force" which is what I've mentioned before. As a general rule your typical person is supposed to use equal force to defend themselves, and attempt to flee dangerous situations if needed. A police officer, and certain other kinds of authority figures are supposed to confront wrong doers and can thus go one or more steps higher than the situation he's dealing with in order to take control when he engages in confrontation. In the most simplistic terms this basically means that if the guy is unarmed a normal person is supposed to defend themselves unarmed, a cop can use Mace, a Truncheon, a PR-24, or his handcuffs, if the opponent is armed with say a knife, then your typical person can also use a weapon of the same sort to defend themselves, a cop can pull their gun. This is a very basic analysis. In the real world other factors come into this, for example a police officer confronting a man much larger than he is, is not required to try and take the guy unarmed or use a nightstick and get it shoved up his butt. Likewise when facing multiple *potential* opponents continuum of force skyrockets, because even say two or three unarmed rowdies can overcome someone with a basic weapon pretty easily in the real world, so basically if your facing a situation where the odds could be two to one or more, then a cop in particular can whip out his gun and start blasting in most areas if he has to. This is also why so many incidents people don't understand happen, a group of youths bravely confronting the cops because they have confidence due to their numbers are actually putting themselves in greater danger if there is a serious altercation. As I pointed out, just because someone says "I give up" and goes to their knees doesn't mean they have actually given up, they haven't actually surrendered until they are under control, if say one guy says "I surrender" and you ignore him to deal with a rowdy friend and he tackles you or something you could get killed. On the other hand if it's one on one, and the guy surrenders and you can control the situation (call backup while you cover him, cuff him, etc...) then it's out of line. As I said from the beginning I thought the big question in this confrontation was going to comes down mostly to how the guy's friend acted during all of this, and what a lot of these witnesses were up to at the time, and whether the cop could reasonably have expected to be facing multiple opponents, in which case making sure a guy who tried to grab your gun is really out of it by shooting him even if he says "I give up" becomes pretty reasonable. Again if YOU were there and didn't want to die, you would probably do something very similar, it's common sense. What's more unless this cop is gigantic himself a 6' 4" guy just by getting violent can be considered armed himself, the same also applies if you know someone has martial arts training (or have a valid reason to suspect he does, like the guy wearing a shirt from a Martial Arts academy, or certain kinds of symbology common to martial arts students). Remember it's about control, not making it a fair fight. The more dangerous the guy is, the more the cops can do, especially seeing as the cops aren't acting to equalize, they are acting to take control while remaining safe themselves.
*THAT* said, the same laws and policies apply to everyone, the officials assigned to that area should be the ones to carry out activities and investigations in that area. Mob justices is the exact opposite of what the USA stands for. What's more controlling illegal protests that have gotten out of control (ie ones without permits) and riots is just doing the job, not police brutality. When you start calling in special people in a politically charged situation like this where politicians got involved before they even allowed the facts to be determined and a lot of people have a vested interest in the outcome for their own careers, that loads the situation heavily.
One of the reasons why I said "wait for an investigation" and am not more or less on the Cop's side now, is in part because of the guy's record. The dude has been working six years in this area without an incident and was actually decorated. He's not likely to be a racist or a thug with a badge. On the other hand, the guy who was shot WAS a thug, and he and the closest witnesses were both accomplices in a strong armed robbery attempt not long beforehand. That kind of theft is not a death penalty offense, but it does show you what kind of people they were, as does the way they were holding up traffic in front of a cop car, when it went so far as trying to grab a cop's gun... well yeah, that's something that can, and should, get you killed. That part was never in dispute in fact, this all comes down to whether the guy surrendered, the cop had control of the situation overall when he did, and the cop decided to shoot him when he did.
Another thing to also understand is the police are never transparent, it's how our legal system works. The police investigate, and then if a case goes forward the details are released in court. People cry about this in almost every situation that gets attention, but things work this way for a reason. One of the big problems we're dealing with now is that information control to prevent people from jumping to conclusions before all the facts are known and it's been decided what the prosecutor is going to pursue (if anything) isn't working when politicians and the media are allowed to take statements by the alleged victims and then run with them and spin things out of control. Politicians can make a career out of demonizing the police, and stirring tensions themselves so they can be seen as some kind of champion, the media just wants the most sensational stories possible and nothing is more sensational than causing riots due to alleged police misconduct. The fact that certain communities, like blacks, are impatient and easily manipulated by both the media and politicians (it's pretty much what Al Sharpton has made his career out of), and almost never wait for investigations and the sort means that things get unusually bad, unusually quickly in certain situations, and certain politicians and media outlets probably sit around with feelers out just waiting for something like Ferguson so they can run in to dump a bucket of gasoline onto the fire.
That said, I'm probably not worth having a conversation with on this right now. I'm just saying the same things I've said before. Right now I saw some very specific initial reports, followed by what seemed to be a massive media crackdown, and a call for a third autopsy when even after removing the most relevant parts the case still wasn't going to give certain people what they dearly want out of this situation. I'm not much of a one for serious conspiracy theories, but when a case like this has international attention, and everyone and their brother came running out to condemn the "brutal shooting" before all the facts were known, and now all these very important people and very powerful media outlets are going to look stupid if the facts don't fit their narrative, and all of a sudden details start changing (the kind of stuff you wouldn't make mistakes about) and they seem intent on re-checking every bit of evidence until they get someone who tells them what they want to hear... well I get suspicious. For once I'll say my own opinion isn't based on things I can actually prove, nor what someone will find by doing their own research (which is what I typically tell people) so there isn't much point about me discussing the details. Unless something seriously changes, I expect this cop to be doomed, and in five years I'll probably be one of the very few people who thinks he didn't do it because of all the "evidence" that will be manufactured given the way this thing has started to be run, and those with a political stake in the matter are pretty much undermining every aspect of the system.
To be honest I don't talk about it much, but this is the second major incident like this where I'm in a similar position. The other one has to do with "The War On Terror". I'm not a huge "Dubbya" fan despite what some people might think, and feel the way he ran the war he started was a joke on a lot of levels. However, one of the things I do not believe is that he started the war on false pretenses and failed to find WMDs. Indeed when we first hit Iraq, the Iraqi military surrendered, EPA guys and chemical engineers went around and were testing the water and such and found a lot of rivers especially the Tigris I think it was, were absolutely loaded with junk from chemical weapons. Basically the Iraqi military flushed their WMD as they surrendered so they wouldn't be caught with the stuff. I'm also one of those people who will point to guys like "Chemical Ali" being convicted of gassing Kurds, which doesn't make much sense unless Iraq had access to such weapons. This was all over the place for about 10 minutes, and then whoosh, it disappeared and now hardly anyone else admits it.
Another little fact that fits into that as well is how Bush was called to task by both foreign allies and people in the DoD for his hunt for nuclear weapons. A big issue for about 10 minutes was that Bush was going to parade a bunch of nukes around for the media to prove "I got them". The problem is that he can't do this as a matter of policy is to keep such devices as well hidden as possible as part of agreed on security. Making it clear that even if Bush found hundreds of warheads (which I doubt he did) he couldn't have actually showed them to vindicate himself. The idea is that the best way to protect WMDs is to ensure very few people, if anyone, know where they are. This is why you have stories about farmers finding missile silos buried under corn fields (mostly a joke), and also the inspiration for certain movies where nukes are lost on subs or planes, not every vehicle capable of carrying such ordinance actually loads it all the time, and a lot of times only a very few people know which ones are "hot" including potentially the pilots and captains. Hence why instead of a major international incident they say send some special agent out or whatever (like everything Hollywood exaggerates though). Another good example would the whole "MX Missile Program" from the Reagan era (I think that was the name) which was the basic idea of putting a portion of the USA nuclear arsenal on trains, with a number of decoys out there. The joke was to have the weapons so mobile and concealed that not only the President would know where they were at any given time (not that it mattered... Alzheimers and all... haha). The point is we suspect we know where a lot of the nukes are stored because we're told, but in reality most of our active warheads are treated in a way where it's almost impossible to find and steal them. A lot of allied countries do the same thing, and it's a policy of agreement because nobody wants to deal with a real version of the whole "terrorists raid the nuclear fort knox despite it's allegedly impenetrable security and hold the world hostage" scenario Hollywood does variations on. By policy apparently if Bush ever did find warheads, he would be under an obligation to make them vanish. Most people don't even remember some of this stuff, since it was again out there for like ten minutes, but it's another reason I rarely discuss that because as far as I can tell Bush never could have told us what he found. Indeed if he did he would have been labeled dangerously incompetent, probably more so than the stigma of having run a war under false pretenses.
I'm not going to argue the War On Terror, just saying that this vaguely reminds me of those incidents. At the end of the day unless the media keeps drumming something in 24/7 and creates a huge backtrail, it's almost impossible to prove something once the articles are taken down, unless you somehow found it mentioned in hardcopy or recorded it off TV or whatever.
