The tragic death of Michael Brown, a college-bound black male in Ferguson, Mo., is just the latest example in the past 25 years of brutal beatings and killings of unarmed black males by the police, from the highly publicized cases of Rodney King in Los Angeles, Amadou Diallo and
Abner Louima in New York City in the 1990s to the more recent killings of Eric Garner on Staten Island and Ezell Ford, a mentally impaired 25-year-old in Los Angeles on Monday.
In the first three cases, predominantly white juries were unwilling to convict the police despite overwhelming evidence of excessive force and intentional culpability to harm these victims. That would come as news to Justin Volpe, doing 30 years in the Louima case. Of course, it would require a whole ten seconds of google searching to find this out.
I am amused at some of info being put out. For example Brown was reported as being ‘college bound’. Another news narrative said he was in a trade school of some kind. Now I am an old (WWII) vet who went to ‘college’ on the GI bill. Then a college was not a ‘trade school’. Of course allowing for changing times I suppose all eggs are just eggs.