The new unit of outrage: the CentiDarren

[Xavier_Onassis]

The fact is that there is no type of peaceful protest that will change the verdict, or even the way that events in which a cop shoots an unarmed civilian. There is probably no type of violent protest that will have much effect, either, other than to underline to the individual policeman what can easily happen when some White cop shoots some unarmed Black person. The least that can happen is that you will lose your job.

Perhaps this is unfair. But, it you were the Mayor the Chief of Police in Ferguson, how could you possibly keep Wilson on the force?

Darren Wilson may be as innocent as the driven snow, but as they say, "He'll never work in Ferguson again." Perhaps they will buy him off clandestinely, so as not to provoke even more outrage. I have heard that they were trying to get him to resign before the grand jury hearing, so as to provide some sense that at least one thing will change. I am sure that Wilson's lawyer told him not that it was not in any way in his interest to do this. I find it hard to believe that it would have been in Wilson's interest to resign.

In any case, there is a fund to which those who support Wilson can donate, and I imagine that he will be able to live on that and perhaps seek a job in someplace where he might be more welcome. Perhaps in the Idaho Panhandle, Alaska, Arizona, some mostly all White town in Oklahoma. And of course, he could contract with a ghost writer to sell a book. All he has to do is be smarter than Joe the Plumber, not an overly difficult feat. Poor Joe the Plumber could not keep his feet out of his mouth and seems to have struck out on his fifteen minutes of fame.

Some clever soul once proposed that if Helen of Troy had the face that launched a thousand ships, then beauty could me measured in milliHelens, one milliHelen being the amount of beauty needed to launch a single ship.

We could apply this to Darren Wilson, the cop who caused enough outrage to burn a hundred buildings. One CentiDarren would be the outrage required to burn a single building.

So perhaps some lesson can be learned from this mess after all.

[Plane]

  And what lesson would this be?

   That if you are a policeman being beaten by a young man, you can only defend yourself to deadly effect if he is white?

    How many police shooting incidents of white persons have occurred this year?
    How many incidences of Black civilians being shot by other black civilians have occurred?

     Perhaps an hundred of so , I haven't looked it up yet.

     But if it amounts to an hundred killings and we haven't heard of them , then each of these incidents is less than a miliDarren, because they all together haven't burnt one building.

[Xavier_Onassis]

Ferguson is the tale of two stupid people. As well as an incompetent city government.

Michael Brown was stupid to shoplift those cigars. No one needs cigars.

Darren Wilson knew that all he had was a gun. He could have purchased mace or even a taser, but he didn't. He had been fired from a previous police force, in Jennings, where the entire police force was fired because there was an imbalance between the White cops and the Black majority of the population. Jennings made the right choice. The White people who ran Ferguson did not. They chose to finance their city by ticketing the residents. People hate the cops that ticket them for trivial crap, and take away their entire weekly grocery budget just to make a quota.

Now Brown paid for his stupidity by getting gunned down. Darren White paid for his stupidity by losing his job. Maybe he can get a job in Idaho or somewhere that  he is not perceived as a Sargento Garcia with a big Z carved in  pants.

[Plane]

  He had mace, no tazer.

    If he had grabbed the mace , or a tazer, while his attacker had a hold of his pistol all those holes would have been in the other guy.

     Why must both of them be stupid?

     This is not Tango.

[Xavier_Onassis]

Duh.

He saw the kid walking down the street. All he had to do was reach for his mace.
Darren Wilson was stupid. But unlike Michael Brown, he was being paid not to be stupid.

[Plane]

Duh.

He saw the kid walking down the street. All he had to do was reach for his mace.
Darren Wilson was stupid. But unlike Michael Brown, he was being paid not to be stupid.

  So...

    Whenever a policeman sees a young black man he should grab his can of mace.

[Xavier_Onassis]

Actually, neither of them needed mace. I understand that Mace is ineffective against people who are high, and they say that Michael Brown was high at the time he was confronted by Darren Wilson.  Wilson needed some pepper spray. It does not kill, and does disable attackers, who then can be arrested and charged with theft of cigars. Anything that would have prevented Wilson shooting Brown would have been better off for both of them and everyone in Ferguson. So far, only the advertisers of programs covering this incident have benefited. I am against people being shot. Even large, Black potheads.

[Plane]

  A small number of years ago I was stopped for a red light violation.

    I pulled into a parking lot and cut my engine.

     The police car parked behind me to cut off my escape and the policeman approached very close to the side of my vehicle with his hand on his pistol.

     The police are taught to make few assumptions.

     They do not know at first meeting that they have stopped a peaceful fellow.

[Xavier_Onassis]

 Whenever a policeman sees a young black man he should grab his can of mace.

=========================================================
Not necessarily. As I understand it, Brown was approaching the cop. At that point, is he had some pepper spray, he would have been wise to have it in his hand.

Anything that would have prevented a death would have benefited both Brown and the cop and Ferguson as well.

[Plane]

   Would a different behavior on Michael Brown's part have prevented or mitigated this situation?

[Xavier_Onassis]

Different behavior on the part of either or both  Brown and Wilson would have made a difference, of course. Just as it would have in the Trevon  Martin/ George Zimmerman case.

There is a video going around showing a cop that looks like Wilson telling a guy that he is breaking the law to videotape the cop. This is untrue, and demonstrates that Wilson was either ignorant, a prick, or both.

[sirs]

Brown made a series of tragic decisions, that directly led to his death.  The only one Wilson made was apparently in defending himself.  The idea that they're both somehow equally culpable is ludicrous

[Xavier_Onassis]

I did not say they were equally culpable.

But the cop was paid to protect and defend. He could have waited for backup. He could have been better prepared. he could have stayed in his car.
Judging from his testimony, he was not all that competent with his gun.

The net result of this was that Ferguson was neither protected nor defended.

[Plane]

 If you were Chief of Police , the police would stay in their cars most of the time?


   Wait a minute , didn't this altercation start before he got out of his car?

[sirs]

I did not say they were equally culpable.

They aren't even closely culpable

But the cop was paid to protect and defend.

Which INCLUDES defending his own life, not just everyone else's, from thugs like Brown.  He was assaulted, and was then getting away.  He did call for back-up, but the radio got switched to a different channel in the assault, and Wilson didn't find out about that until after it all finished...which means, back-up would have never arrived.  And when Brown again began to charge again, he had no other choice, under those conditions.  So, no, what happened was a series of tragic decisions by Brown, that brought about his death.  Had he complied, right from the beginning, he'd be breathing just fine, and still be doing his strong-arm robberies, without any issues