Posted on 06/11/2015 1:37:04 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
It's been 250 days since our fallen brethren Michael Brown Jr. was fatally shot in Canfield Apartments in Ferguson, Missouri, by Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson.
Wilson got rich, famous and a vacation after killing Mike Brown, a phenomenon that is occurring all too often across the United States. In fact, an MXGM (Malcolm X Grassroots Movement) study has reported that every 28 hours a black person is killed by police. Accountability is the key. Accountability is the answer.
As you may remember, Wilson was not indicted and the community of the St. Louis and St. Louis County region still suffers for it. Ferguson's response sparked a movement and uprising from people of different congregations, ethnicities, genders and ages nationwide to stand up against this system and be a voice for black, brown and oppressed people.
Since the killing of Michael Brown, there have been numerous similar killings and then protests, rallies, direct actions and more. Yet it will not stop. From private attorneys to the Department of Justice, there have been several investigations of shootings of unarmed African-Americans. Yet we still cannot fully attain the transparency or accountability that we deserve from police officers. Ferguson is still everywhere if you're black.
Therefore, we must start moving in a way to create our own narrative. This means doing our own investigations of these incidents involving officers, who are sworn to protect and serve us. The system itself also needs investigating.
In other words, we need policies that establish accountability. Accountability by police would mean them taking responsibility, being liable and answerable for these travesties of justice. Looking at what accountability actually means, can we as a nation say our police departments are truly held accountable for their fumbling of community relationships?
The constant mistakes, bad judgment, racist motives and lack of transparency would result in immediate termination in any other fields in this country. Why don't normal morals and human standards apply to police officers?
They tell us police have the right to make it home. Well shouldn't every citizen in this country have the right to make it home? Or how about the right to be able to sleep in your home and not be killed due to reckless gunfire by police like 7-year-old Aiyana Jones, who was killed by Detroit police during a raid at her home. Final charges against Joseph Weekley, the cop who shot her, were dismissed early this year.
We must hold these officers accountable. In the St. Louis region, there have been at least 10 more police-involved killings since Michael Brown Jr., which happened in August 2014. Around the nation, there are too many names to name with similar circumstances with no transparency and no justice in the system: Kimberly Randall King, Vonderritt Myers Jr., Tamir Rice, Eric Garner and, more recently, Freddie Gray of Baltimore.
Fortunately there are indictments of the officers in the Freddie Gray case, but for the most part around the country, there is currently no way to hold these departments accountable. It seems as if they run the nation and we serve them instead of the other way around.
During protests in Ferguson, municipalities established many unconstitutional rules. For example, they refused to wear name badges even after the Department of Justice said they were legally obligated to do so. They refused to identify themselves. They continued to use illegal unnecessary force against citizens. Ferguson Police officers even issued a five-second rule stating that a person could be subject to arrest if he or she stood still for longer than five seconds while protesting. A federal court ruled against it. Yet, police officers are still on the normal predator policing tactic.
The Department of justice released a report confirming all the racial targeting that the Ferguson police department practiced against people of color and oppressed people in general. Yet police still use shoot-first tactics because there is no one holding them accountable. Ferguson is still everywhere if you are black.
That's right.
www.killedbypolice.net seems to be a good effort to track the ARD data But personally I want federal government tables. Though not always 100-percent trustworthy nevertheless I tire of seeing columnists or "DoJ says" used as sources of data.
The BJS ARD data I posted are several years old but the yearly numbers approach (75% ?) what www.killedbypolice.net says were killed in one year. And the BJS specified that not all local police departments were included in the ARD data.
Yup. To figure out how big a problem you have, you first need accurate numbers. Without them everybody stumbles around in a fog of positive or negative assumptions.
Get the numbers! Then we can argue about what they mean and what, if anything, we should do about it.
BTW, the article pulls one of the most idiotic of all attempts to mislead people. “A black person is killed by cops every 28 hours!” or whatever the number is.
This intentionally misleads people by failing to specify what a reasonable number should be. Should we expect one black person killed by cops every 2.8 hours, 280 hours or 2800 hours? If you pick a number, explain why it’s appropriate and why exceeding it is wrong. But they never do. These numbers, by intention, are free-floating and meaningless.
The link you post is at 508 for the year, which implies somewhere around 1100 for the year. Of course, somebody needs to go thru and vet each of those reports to see if they’re valid.
FBI stats seem to run around 400 something for a year, which is less than 50% of the number in your link.
The ARD data I am using are at the link above. That is from my original posting of the several tables combined into one. I included the link to my original table above in reply #12.
The 1000 is for 2014 More Than 1,000 People Have Been Killed by Police in 2014
This is where I just learned of www.killedbypolice.net. I did not include the Reason link above.
.. looking at the ARD numbers that I got from BJS they are actually in the 60% - 70% range; but I as noted BJS IIRC said that the ARD data did not include all police departments in the country.
OK. That makes sense. Whenever you want to deal with any issue, the first and most important factor is to quantify it.
FUMB
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