Going to go out on a limb and assume that this is what you were complaining about me not responding to (cross thread shenanigans!!!). Honestly, I dropped this because my browser crashed and reset the green arrow thingies that tell you there's a new post since you last posted, and I never checked the thread again. But hey. I'm always willing to tell someone how they are wrong!
Almalieque wrote:
I was correcting your understanding of "hands up don't shoot", which happened before the DOJ report.
I'd say you were talking about what random people on the street wanted. I was talking about what the DOJ was actually investigating. When I said that the DOJ investigation tossed out the whole "hands up, don't shoot" rhetoric, I thought it was clear that I was talking about the actual DOJ report that I'd linked in the very post in which I made that comment. The point is that the DOJ investigation was about civil rights violation, not 1st degree murder. The idea that he was guilty of 1st degree murder (or any form of murder) was thrown out well ahead of the DOJ investigation. But, just in case anyone was really curious, it also happens to completely debunk that entire myth as well.
What he was charged with, and by whom doesn't really discount the fact that "hands up, don't shoot" didn't happen. Can we agree on that?
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For someone who pretends to know so much about this case should know that his testimonies changed.
How about you humor me and actually write down what testimony by Wilson changed? I'm not going to play 20 questions here. If you are going to make this claim, then you should maybe produce some kind of evidence to support it. Seems reasonable to me.
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You're using circular logic. Let me break it down to you. Assume a population of 67% race x and 25% race y. 80% of all contraband is found on race "y". Who do you target? Additionally, there is no causation between poverty and crime......
First off, you don't target people by race. You target them by behavior. This is the point you keep missing. You see a car speeding away from a known drug purchasing location. You stop them. Maybe they have drugs in the car. Maybe they don't. But you aren't looking at the skin color of the guys in the car when making the decision to pull the car over. If the known drug purchasing locations in Ferguson also all happen to be in the same neighborhoods where there is a higher percentage of black people, guess what that does to the statistics for being pulled over and searched?
What that stat tells you is that when cops patrol neighborhood X, where crime is low, they tend to be more accurate at stopping people who are actually committing a crime versus just happen to be in the area where a crime is committed. Which kinda makes sense if you stop and think about it (and if you've ever lived in both high and low crime neighborhoods). I'll again point out that you seem to be unwilling to even consider any factors other than race when looking at these statistics.
Also? We can debate
causation between poverty and crime, but
correlation absolutely exists between neighborhoods with high poverty and with high crime. So a racial group with a disproportionately higher percentage of its members living in poor neighborhoods will also have a disproportionately higher percentage of its members living in high crime neighborhoods. Thus, they will also be disproportionately more likely to be victims of crimes, and perpetrators of crimes, be arrested by the police, be falsely arrested by police, pulled over, pulled over without having done anything wrong, etc, etc ,etc.
All of those stats derive from the one starting one. That's the problem. Not police bias. Obviously, this doesn't prove that no police bias exists, but choosing to fight that battle while ignoring the far bigger problem of poverty among African Americans is (at the risk of introducing a tired analogy) like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. No amount of firing police chiefs, and judges, and city council members will make the conditions for the poor black person in Ferguson (or anywhere else in the US) any better. It might make one feel good to "fight the man", but at the end of the day, being poor will still suck, and black people will still be more likely to be poor and thus have far more sucky lives than every other group.
If you really want to fix this problem, drop the racism fight, and pick up the poverty fight.
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Were you expecting more bad behavior that involved white victims? If not, then why claim that the report was meant to stir up racial sentiment among race warriors.
I didn't specifically, but the shootings of the cops would seem to bear out my "red meat" statement. Honestly though I see it more as just protests and riots. Anything that gains news coverage helps those who profit from race based causes. What do you think happens to donation rates for groups like the NAACP and SPLC whenever there's an angry mob protesting in a town like Ferguson? Do you think that rich white guilty folks open their pocketbooks because they read a book on race recently? Or when they see black people getting tear gassed on TV?
There's a pretty significant motivation to create violence like that. Shootings? No. But some property damage and tear gas? Absolutely. And they need reports like the DOJ produced to keep people showing up for those protests, knowing that some will get violent and that the police will have to respond, and the media will have to cover it. Remember those nights of peaceful protest in Ferguson? Remember the hours CNN spent showing you people peacefully walking down the streets of Ferguson? No? There's your answer. They need media time. They get it with violent images on TV because that's what will get the news to cover it.
That's what I meant by "red meat".
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Malice doesn't equate to racism. If you don't think there weren't any malice done by any of the people or practices listed in the report, then you're just in denial.
You're shifting the goal posts though. You originally said that the crime stats showed "malice towards blacks". We can debate the degree to which any particular act by the police could be called "malice", but the stats themselves don't show malice, much less "malice towards blacks". Unless you are assuming that every time a cop pulls someone over he's motivated by malice, then your claim doesn't follow from the stats.
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You do realize that there was a major press conference where Holder himself expressed his concerns? Holder != media. Do you believe that Holder agrees with your statement that it "is all about stirring up racial sentiment among the usual race warriors."? If not, then your view is contrary to his. If you do, then his report is bogus and you can't pick and choose anything legit from it.
Yes. I believe that Holder's conscious decision with the report (and a number of public statements he's made) was to stir up racial sentiment. Which is why
the report is bogus.
What you seem to be confused about (despite me just explaining this to you) is that there were two things released by the DOJ:
1. The DOJ investigation into the potential for civil rights violation and charges related to the shooting death of Michael Brown by Officer Darren Wilson. Let's call this the
investigation 2. A DOJ report on allegations of racial bias in the FPD and the Ferguson city as a whole. Let's call this the
report The investigation is an actual legal investigation. It was written by legal experts, who are required to make recommendations as to whether to go forward with criminal prosecution. They are looking at actual charges and actual evidence and actual testimony and then weighing the probability of said evidence and testimony resulting in a successful prosecution. It's reasonable therefore to assume that the facts contained within are as accurate as possible and that it contains similarly accurate conclusions regarding the odds of any given allegation within the investigation being held to be true if presented to a jury (cause that's the whole point of the investigation).
The report is a political document. It's unclear who wrote it, but probably some policy people grabbed some stats and plucked some anecdotal cases to include. The whole thing is designed to start with a narrative and find data that supports it. There is no need to assess whether the allegations are accurate because the purpose is not to determine whether said allegations could stand up to a trial. It serves no legal purpose and has no legal weight. The only reason for such reports is the knowledge that people will read them, think they represent "the truth" and apply social and political pressure to enact the changes proposed within.
You keep treating them as though these are identical. They are not. When I dismiss "the report" but accept the facts in "the investigation", I'm not being at all contradictory. These are two different documents from two different groups of people (who may all happen to work at the DOJ, but in wildly different jobs), and with two very very different objectives. The investigation is about determining if a crime actually occurred (or at least whether a trial based on the allegation of a crime could result in a conviction). The report is about influencing public opinion on something (in this case race in Ferguson). That's it.
Think about it. This is the department of justice. If they believed that racism was rampant and systematic in Ferguson, why not actually pick some of those allegations and actually investigate them and prosecute them? Seems to me that if they honestly think that racial discrimination is in play by the police then the quickest way to get them to stop is to actually make some charges. If this is so rampant and so systematic, you'd think they could find at least *one* case strong enough to get a conviction, right? So why not do that? If this is really about justice, why not actually apply the law here? Why choose not to do that, but instead write a report with a bunch of vague unproven allegations and questionable stats?
Given Holder's history of using his position as Attorney General to push social agendas, I don't think it's a stretch to speculate that he might have ordered this report precisely because it would provide some kind of consolation for all of those who wrongly took the side of Brown in this case. Remember that high level civil rights leaders and even members of Congress made public statements of supports for the "hands up, don't shoot!" narrative. Having that proven to be a complete fabrication is (as I pointed out at the beginning of this thread) incredibly embarrassing. And when you consider the sheer number of high profile cases like this where it turns out after the fact that the initial claims weren't remotely close to accurate, one might make the mistake (in Holder's view) of applying some caution next time and waiting for the facts before rushing to judgement. And that would be bad for media coverage and bad for donations to "the cause". And that would just be bad (to Holder anyway). Not when he can help his friends out by ordering this report to be produced and make it so that the violence and strife continues, and to make sure that the next time some black guy charges a cop and gets shot, it'll also get reported in the most inaccurate and racial way possible, and the same people will leap on that false narrative hoping that maybe this time it'll actually be true.
Duke Lacrosse Team, George Zimmerman, Officer Wilson. All very high profile claims of racially oriented violence against a black person. All resulted in high profile civil rights folks taking a position publicly before the facts were known. All turned out to be very very different once the facts came out. All resulted in the offenders being proven to have not done what was claimed. There's a pretty poor track record on this stuff. In fact, it's somewhat shocking how you can almost draw a direct correlation between how loud the outrage is and how likely the case will be complete BS. As I said in my very first post, one would hope that eventually people would learn and actually wait for the facts before forming opinions and taking action.
But not if Eric Holder has any say in it.
Edited, Mar 16th 2015 8:52pm by gbaji 
