<p>“Actingmt, are you saying Trayvon Martin would have assaulted George Zimmerman had George not gone after him that night?”</p>
<p>That’s a lot like saying Brown was shot for shoplifting. No, I’m not saying that at all.</p>
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<p>A point which couldn’t be underscored more at my private LAC considering the prevalence and openness of marijuana and psychedelic use when I attended. </p>
<p>Then again, my LAC was around 74% White at the time and most students came from higher SES families. Does make one wonder…</p>
<p>That’s not to say local cops didn’t harass students…but it was mainly for political demonstrations espousing progressive-left or what they considered “deviancy” like GBLTQ causes…not drug use. </p>
<p>Also, one close college friend who was a year or two ahead of me who was a double-degree scholar(Chem and Viola) who happens to be Black and from a higher upper-middle class family in an upscale NYC suburb* recounted how he was stopped multiple times while DWB. </p>
<p>What made it worse was the fact he was given a BMW for his 18th birthday after graduation as his parents are well-off professionals earning high incomes(doctor and fortune 500 executive). He’s had cops openly question how he could have had such a nice car at his age and …“you must have done something illegal to get it”. </p>
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<li>He’s also had issues of being stopped by local cops during his adolescent/teen years because he was WWB in a mostly White upper-middle class suburb.<br></li>
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<p>Nevermind.</p>
<p>Deleted, too.</p>
<p>Cobrat, you beat me to it. I believe that “Thug” is a short-hand term for the word “Thugee,” which as I understand it, was a cult of nefarious persons in India ages ago.</p>
<p>That’s not shoplifting on the store video. It’s menacing, intimidating assault. I wouldn’t call him a violent perpetrator (thug, punk, whatever term you like) if he had secreted items on his person and simply walked out of the store. Police are dealing in real time with assessing situations and risk. Yes, I watch that video and consider him to be more threatening than a teenage girl shoplifting from forever21. He’s huge, he’s clearly intimidating. I’m not afraid of his companion who seems passive and puts back the cigars on the counter. It does make me wonder how Brown interacted with the officer just minutes later.
And I’m a liberal, I was angry Zimmerman got off, and I don’t live in the suburbs. </p>
<p>Just because stand your ground was not officially sited by the defense, it was the elephant in the room the entire time, made possible by the Florida law which makes even arresting a person who shoots another, siting that he “felt threatened”/“feared for his life”, much more difficult than had the law not been enacted. It’s one reason Zimmerman was allowed to walk that very night, and wasn’t charged for weeks. Pundits, talking heads, chat room forum participants and the general public, spent a lot of time speculating on how the Stand Your Ground law affected the way the case was handled in it’s aftermath. It certainly greatly affected public opinion over even the validity of the charges against Zimmerman, as was evidenced by discussion of the case here on CC at the time.</p>
<p>Well, I don’t think we want to rehash that case here again but in the end it was a pretty simple case of self-defense mucked up by Florida politics. He was allowed to walk because the Sanford Police Dept. believed him. That’s why an out-of-town prosecution team took over when it blew up into a national story. It took a while. </p>
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<p>Ok, let’s use your statistics. African Americans make up approximately 13 percent of the population but they account for 28.2 percent of arrests. If being arrested closely correlates with committing a crime (which is true) then African American are disproportionately more likely to engage in crime than any other race.</p>
<p>My comment was about prison incarceration. Arrest would reflect people going to jail and people going to prisons. The FBI statistics show that African Americans commit 38.3 percent of violent crimes. Violent crimes are what usually land you in prison and usually what most people are afraid of. Madoff stole far more than a bank robbery with a gun, but most people fear the bank robber with a gun more than they would have feared Madoff.</p>
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<p>This is simply mathematically incorrect. I’ll give a made-up example to explain why the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premises.</p>
<p>Suppose that men and women committed crimes at equal rates. Suppose also that women were never, ever arrested, but men were sometimes arrested, and typically a guy who was arrested had committed a crime.</p>
<p>Then it would be true that being arrested closely correlated with committing a crime. But it would not be true that men were disproportionately more likely to engage in crime than women.</p>
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<p>This suggests to me that black youth are disproportionately targeted by law enforcement.</p>
<p>And don’t even start me on the inequality of educational opportunities for black vs. white kids in this country–which of course contributes to all of the problems we are talking about here.</p>
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<p>Arresting Officer Wilson would be a good start.</p>
<p>Racial profiling has to stop… And when white police departments commit crimes against black citizens, they must face legal consequences. </p>
<p>How is this racial profiling? If telling a kid to get out the street is racial profiling because the kid is black we end of with the situation we have right now. Looters with an audience of a police officers afraid to use force. </p>
<p>Racial profiling will NEVER stop. Never.</p>
<p>“Arresting Officer Wilson would be a good start.”
Without even a full investigation? What if it turns out that your. Assumptions about what happened aren’t quite correct?</p>
<p>“how prejudicially leading this video can be in causing folks of a certain complexion/persuasion to automatically believe certain narratives and discount/minimize others.” </p>
<p>You’re right. I’m prejudiced against people who rob convenience stores. I’m also prejudiced against people who carry guns in public (who aren’t policemen or security guards). </p>
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<p>And yet yesterday you repeatedly referred to Brown as a “fleeing/dangerous felon,.”</p>
<p>Wrong. The question was if he was a dangerous fleeing felon would the shooting be justified. It depends on details was the answer. We don’t have details, yet. We know he stole the cigars. I don’t think anyone believes that’s why he was shot. Good grief. I hope not. But, maybe they do. Sigh.</p>
<p>"The reason this is so similar to the Martin case is because the same players are using the same playbook.</p>
<p>…including the perpetrators of the shooting, and the law enforcement community surrounding/supporting them."</p>
<p>This feels qualitatively different from Trayvon Martin. For one, the Ferguson PD is a public servant, not a private citizen. There is no special obligation to stop when a private citizen asks you to - there is when a police officer asks you to. </p>
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<p>People are arrested all the time without a full investigation. If anything, an arrest can sometimes be the start of a full investigation depending on prosecutorial and LE discretion.</p>
<p>Especially considering, when determining whether to arrest someone, only probable cause is needed, an exceedingly low legal standard. </p>