I would say that (absent extenuating circumstances like endemic corruption) communities should have police forces that are predominantly drawn from that town and generally representative of it, yes. A city that’s 67% black should not have a police force that’s 98% white and whose officers mostly don’t live in the city.
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I still hold out hope that the DOJ will bring an indictment.
This case is primed to be the watershed for investigations of LEO killings of civilians.
The timing of it allows the president to decide whether to spend
some amount of political capital in having the DOJ pursue it.
That Holder would be driving it?
Might well lend impetus to the approval of Loretta Lynch’s appointment.
A pair of opportunities I’m fairly certain BHO is considering.
jw1
.
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I’ve seen, perhaps through this site, a graphic from the PBS newshour that shows various witness statements and how they agreed and disagreed on key facts.
As a white person who has himself been subject to minor police brutality, I hardly think the police are always angels. I’m also not a lawyer. I guess my belief is that the evidence shows that the officer may have broken the law, but is so far from being sufficient to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt that it would be a travesty of justice for any grand jury to indict.
I realize that many people, white and especially black, will disagree with my conclusion.
I certainly feel that the concerns of the people of Ferguson are valid and need to be addressed. I probably feel more strongly than many that black people continue to get an extraordinarily raw deal out of American society, to our collective shame, and that the idea that we are a post-racial society is both ridiculous and horrible.
But at the same time, the attitude in the TPM comments section (and, often, that of the TPM staff, as indicated by their writing and selection of what to publicize) makes me sick at heart. Has done for a long time. [Edited to remove pointless snark.]
As did I.
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“The danger to a black child – if it was my child – the danger is another black.” — Rudy Giuliani
And the danger to a white child – and it is your child — the danger is another white. Just go and ask the parents of Sandy Hook Elementary.
It’s called proximity you prick. A white person is likely to be killed by another white person. A black person is likely to be killed by another black person, and so forth.
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I am so disappointed in rudy! He has slid down hill from 9/11 into the rubbish bin!
SLBinVA,
You say that “the prosecutor could have established probably cause very easily had he really wanted to.”
Here is a real request, if you care to reply. Please look here, at the series of witness statements, and explain to me how ANY honest jury could properly find someone guilty given the conflicting witness statements. Seriously, because I am a complete amateur when it comes to the legal system. There are twelve persons on the jury. Show me how you convince twelve people, with those conflicting statements, that someone (who is a police officer) should be put in prison for life, because their alleged crime has been proven.
I think you are probably right about that. Certainly Eric Holder has shown himself to be very interested in the Ferguson case, and I think you’re right about this case being the embodiment of the many other cases of police using deadly force against unarmed civilians. The number of those cases seems to be escalating, or it may just be that they are more likely to be reported now than they were a couple of decades ago.
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Which would make it all the more unfortunate that the evidence was not presented in a public forum so that the public could judge that for itself.
Consider, too, that since the prosecution seemed to be acting as defense attorney, you have in a sense heard (from official sources) only one side of the case, and have not heard the evidence against the policeman presented by someone actually interested in prosecuting it. Add to that the fact that the ADA who presented the jury (immediately prior to the testimony of Officer Wilson) with copies of the Missouri law outlining the circumstances under which shooting at a fleeing suspect was lawful actually gave them a version of the law that has not been in effect for quite some time. The standards she gave them had been struck down in the federal courts as unconstitutional. A correction was not made until after the jury had already heard Officer Wilson’s testimony (judging it according to the obsolete standards they had been given), and even then, they were not told what parts of the law had been changed by the court’s decision; that they were left to discover for themselves by comparing the two versions of the law. And when one juror asked “But does a federal court decision trump Missouri law?”, her answer was not the simple “Yes” that it should have been; it was, “You don’t need to worry about that.”
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But it won’t of course.
Conservatives are as incapable of shame, just as they are incapable of recognizing irony or humor (other than the Three Stooges variety).
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Thank you for the additional information, SLBinVA. I suppose more information may come to light if the DOJ does indeed step in. But I point you again to the PBS summation, and I ask you, again, how, given the conflicts on that checkerboard, any prosecutor could get a unanimous decision to convict out of twelve honest persons.
If you feel that we need to insist on video cameras on police, I agree with you. If you feel that the Ferguson police force should be controlled by federal authorities, I am ready to agree with you. But in our country we are not supposed to find someone guilty of murder because they work for a racist government. If we did, I suspect most government clerks would be in prison.
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That’s what I mean when I say that the prosecutor was acting as a defense attorney. The job of the grand jury is not to determine guilt or innocence; it is to determine whether there is sufficient evidence to go to trial. Prosecutors don’t normally dump masses of conflicting evidence in front of a jury and then say, “You figure it out.” They are selective in the evidence they present, and they offer counters to evidence that seems to go against their charges, either through their summations to the jury, or through sharp questioning of those witnesses.
Again, it is not the job of the grand jury to determine guilt or innocence, only whether there is sufficient evidence to justify a trial to determine guilt or innocence.
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“Probable Cause” isn’t what a jury relies on to convict someone.
It is, however, the basic standard for bringing an indictment, which precedes trial.
The DA could indict Wilson without a grand jury—and the way the DA handles the grand jury is well outside the normal range of how grand juries operate.
How you convince jurors—in a trial—is by using the American adversarial system in which both the prosecution and the defense present evidence and witnesses to that jury so that the jurors can make a decision on guilt or innocence beyond a reasonable doubt.
In a grand jury, only the prosecutor presents evidence, and the accused typically doesn’t testify because the defense doesn’t participate in the grand jury proceedings.
The entire case has been deliberately mishandled by the DA, because he wanted the outcome that the Grand jury arrived at.
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I still can’t understand (I actually do, however) why the libertarian set and the tea party fanatics who despise government intervention in their lives have no problem with agents of the state–the police–when they violate the human and civil rights of blacks.
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Rudy says…“look at me! Look at me!!”
The older the gop/bags get, the crazier they are!!
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Again, it is not the job of the grand jury to convict. And I don’t believe it requires a unanimous decision for an indictment, either, only something like 9 out of 12 jurors. And if instead it goes to a preliminary hearing (which is what usually happens, and that gives the defense the opportunity to be heard as well), you only have to convince the judge.
But a preliminary hearing would have been public, and I think one reason the prosecutor went to the grand jury instead was that he didn’t want the public to see how blatantly on the side of the accused he actually was.
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You’ll understand it if you just re-read the last six words of your own comment, which are things that the far-right believe don’t actually exist in any meaningful way.
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Giuliani = meat puppet. Trying to use irrelevant math to confuse people. The relevant percentage is, of all the people white cops shoot, what percentage is black.
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It’s the conservative way…
So, SLBinVA, you are saying that the prosecutor should have sought an indictment without any belief that he could obtain a conviction from a jury of twelve honest persons, and without believing that the evidence supported conviction?
Or, if I’m mis-characterizing the outcome of what you are saying, please explain how.
We aren’t supposed to indict in this country just because we think the guy did it, and because we are angry. We are supposed to indict, AFAIK, when we believe we have a chance of prevailing based on the facts in evidence.