<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 it! I’m sure that’s what everyone is thinking about when they call someone a thug, that nefarious Indian cult.</p>
<p>:D</p>
<p>PG, I was referring to the treatment of the shooters after each incident. That felt similar to me.</p>
<p>I was just thinking what would happen if, perish the thought, shots rang out in my neighborhood and then my neighbor’s teenage son was lying dead or dying in the street. Here’s what I’d expect (none of which happened in the Ferguson case):</p>
<p>The police would immediately try to revive the kid, even if he was obviously gone.</p>
<p>A firetruck and then an ambulance would be there inside five minutes. </p>
<p>A police officer would be detailed to deal with the parents. He or she would be sympathetic and kind, even if the kid seemingly had done something wrong.</p>
<p>Police would be swarming the area, taking pictures, looking for evidence like bullet divots in the street.</p>
<p>There’s no way the kid would be lying on the street in the heat for four hours.</p>
<p>My neighbor’s kid would be treated as a person, and his death would be treated as a serious matter worthy of serious investigation. What I see in the immediate aftermath of the Ferguson case is a disregard of the humanity of Michael Brown and his family. They are not treated like people. </p>
<p>Fang, that’s disturbing to say the least @ #625. It also corroborates the statement of Tiffany Mitchell, who says the the first person who approached Brown’s body was an EMT, some 30 or 40 minutes after the shooting. </p>
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<p>Flossy, your argument might hold a little more water if the police * themselves * had shown the slightest interest in rendering aid, or even checking on Brown’s condition. Multiple eyewitnesses say they never bothered to go near him</p>
<p>“A pretty simple case of self-defense”</p>
<p>This comes back to the question of who is allowed to be afraid. If you follow me while I’m walking home at night am I allowed to be afraid? Am I still allowed to be afraid if I’m a black teenage boy? If you stop me and you have a gun, NOW am I allowed to be afraid? In that case what is my recourse? Should I run? fight? yell? struggle? try to get the gun away? If I choose anything but run and risk getting shot in the back am I instantly transformed into the aggressor in the situation? Can you then say that you feared for YOUR life because I fought back?</p>
<p>By the way, I have not heard anything that DEFINITIVELY pins the victim as the person in the video who assulted and battered the clerk and stole cigars. The video ALLEGEDLY depicts MB, but the timing and sequencing is not clear to me nor to my knowledge has there been a positive ID.</p>
<p>Agree with CF about appropriate treatment of anyone who has been shot and gathering evidence at the crime scene.</p>
<p>The similarities I was referring too include the mischaracterization of the victim in the press and the efforts to inflame the community which were sadly much more successful this time around.</p>
<p>No matter how “big” Brown was, he didn’t do more than shove the clerk. He didn’t beat the clerk up. He was unarmed. He didn’t go for the money in the till. If he was a “thug”, he certainly wasn’t particularly good at thuggery, carrying along, not a weapon, but a companion who obviously hadn’t the will to steal anything. His theft of the cigars might have been on impulse. It might even have been his first time doing any such a thing, given that he had no prior record of such behavior. ***And before anyone accuses me of believing otherwise, Yes. It was the absolute WRONG THING TO DO, made worse by the fact that he was a boy of large stature and build, thereby reenforcing the “scary black guy” fear his mere existence was undoubtedly more than adequate to instill. But, he came from a two parent home. He had no prior record. He had plans to learn a trade and thereby one day become gainfully employed. Too bad he didn’t remember that black boys like him can’t afford to do dumb ass things like rob convenience stores of even petty amounts of merchandise. </p>
<p>But in the end, it might not have mattered a great deal whether he’d stolen the cigars prior to his shooting death or not. It certainly didn’t matter in the Trayvon Martin case, that of another “big scary black guy” who was called a thug all across America , with his freakin’ skittles and iced tea. Who the hell did he think he was, going out on the streets with his hood pulled over his head? What the hell was he doing, if not looking for trouble? That’s what black boys do after all, right?</p>
<p>Here is an interesting piece that showed up in my newsfeed . . .</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/08/what-i-did-after-police-killed-my-son-110038_Page2.html#.U_DebbxdUU8”>http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/08/what-i-did-after-police-killed-my-son-110038_Page2.html#.U_DebbxdUU8</a></p>
<p>HImom, Michael Brown’s friend, who was with him, has said that Brown was the person at the convenience store. </p>
<p>CF: This is exactly it. When it’s “people who look like us,” the authorities perhaps subconsciously put themselves in the kid’s or parents’ shoes and respond accordingly. I was just thinking this morning about a situation with an old friend/coworker whose son has a history of major, major drug abuse and crime. He supplied heroin to a girl who died from OD’ing on it. The police and judicial system seem to have been incredibly sensitive to the parents and gone really easy on this kid. He served the shortest possible sentence, even though he had had numerous convictions for lesser offenses before the girl died. And he doesn’t seem better at all–in fact I just looked on our court access database to see that he has been dealing again and driving drunk.</p>
<p>I also know of another family whose son took hallucinogenic drugs, ripped off all his clothes, and broke into a house where a young girl was home alone. He messed up the house a bit and scared, but didn’t hurt, the girl. The parents hired expensive attorneys, the kid was routed into a special (and little-known) first-offenders program that involves zero jail time, and got to spend his fall semester in Europe as sort of a self-styled study abroad program while awaiting his return to college.</p>
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<p>Also no intimidation or harassment of the press.</p>
<p>Responding to Saintfan’s post #664: Exactly the questions I was attempting pose</p>
<p>@saintfan
The self defense argument turned on whether GZ felt his life was in danger at the moment when he fired his weapon. TM was on top of him bashing his head into concrete at that moment according to a witness named Jonathan Good. The police also testified to believing him that night. Another important factor was the 4 minutes when TM was at home and seemingly came back to the apartment complex. People are focused on the beginning, but the case turned on what happened at the end.</p>
<p>“Too bad he didn’t remember that black boys like him can’t afford to do dumb ass things like rob convenience stores of even petty amounts of merchandise.”</p>
<p>Yes. They can’t. My white son can’t rob c-stores either. This is not a particularly high bar there. </p>
<p>It is possible both that the guy was a thug AND that the police officer was unjustified. We don’t need to downplay Brown’s big-thug behavior to tell a different story. </p>
<p>Btw, it’s precisely scenes like that in the c-store that cause white women to clutch their purses tight when in certain neighborhoods. I wish it weren’t that way. </p>
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<p>Excellent point. It’s not just low SES blacks who are subjected to racial profiling. The coach of the Seattle Sonics, Lenny Wilkins, is a black man. Shortly after he led them to the NBA title in 1979, his daughter was pulled over by police as she was driving in her own high-end neighborhood. The cop figured that any black person driving that car in that neighborhood must be up to no good.</p>
<p>^^ Your son can do it and not have to worry about being labeled a thug. Your son can smoke marijuana and not be labeled a thug. There’s a lot of things black people CANNOT do.</p>
<p>No, PG, but if your son DID rob a convenience store, the consequences for him as a white kid would be a lot less harsh than it would for a black peer. And I’m sure if you’re like most parents you’d do what you could to reduce the impact of the crime on his life after that.</p>
<p>ETA: forgot to mention that in the second case I wrote about above, the young man was able to successfully avoid classification as a sex offender even though he m****bated in front of the little girl. And the victim’s family only requested letters of apology from the kid. Please tell me that would be the case if the perpetrator had not had the advantages he did.</p>
<p>Regarding the police not checking MB or allowing the nurse to do so, we don’t know yet how many times or where the bullets struck MB. Perhaps it was obvious he was already dead. </p>
<p>No-one’s kid can get into a scuffle with a cop and try to grab his gun after robbing a convenience store. </p>