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If Michael Brown had not attacked the policeman he would still be alive he stole something from a convenience store and when the police tried to question him he went into attack mode and went for the officers gun he is to blame it was an act of self defense.
Tell that to all the crazy rioters who are only causing more harm
The Gog: Unfortunately, that’s an inconvenient fact. It’s obvious the masses don’t care. Sad commentary on the situation in the U.S., with a significant level of ignorance and the opportunity to loot and destroy.
That’s a racist fact. It’s not allowed to be true.
I don’t think it’s right to play the “if” game. Someone is dead, rightly or wrongly.
Do people think Brown is innocent?
I dont understand the riots.
Can someone please explain?
Should Wilson have waited until he was on the floor beaten before he takes action.
Who says? He could have died from a million things between then and now. Maybe he would have gotten in a car crash or died in a skiing accident.
if trayvon could be obamas son, would michael brown be obama?
goofus – you are missing the point of the OP. I believe he is saying that it wasn’t whether or not he deserved to be shot in the scuffle, Goq is saying that he himself could have prevented it by not being in the situation in the first place. It wasn’t a drive by on a bystander.
Not only that, it is so like the masses (all cultures included) to make decisions based on media, heresay and wishes and then decide that that is what REALLY happened and discount the fact that the grand jury had all the details when making their decision but WE DON’T.
Poster: It all has to do with which version of the scenario people find most plausible. There were a lot of witnesses, who all said varying things.
After the altercation in the police car (in which Brown allegedly tried to reach for the poiceman’s gun), Brown ran away. What happened next is unclear. (Goq is right that Brown would probably still be alive if he didn’t confront the police officer, but that’s another story.)
Some witnesses say Wilson shot Brown while he was running away. If this is correct, he should have been indicted, because an unarmed guy fleeing from you is not a legally-justifiable reason for killing them, even if he just tried to grab your gun.
Other witnesses said Brown was moving toward Wilson when Wilson shot him. At least one witnesses (and Wilson himself) said Brown was running at him and getting close to him while he shot him. Wilson said he feared for his life.
Many people are inclined to believe the other witnesses, because of the sad history of racist violence in America. I don’t know which version of the story is true. Both sides sound fairly plausible.
Given the widely varying witness statements, it was understandable to decide not to indict (though it probably could have gone either way). From the prosecutor’s point of view, I don’t want to indict unless I think the person is actually guilty and deserves to be punished.
There are riots because in many people’s minds the decision not to indict is a judgment that what Wilson did was right, and sends a message that police can kill young black men even without a good reason (as they certainly have before) and get away with it. Rioting has long been a way in which people vent their anger and frustration. Of course it doesn’t make much sense, and hurts the community (though sometimes such events might inspire authorities to enact new policies that improve the situation on the ground.)
yytz – you make some very unusual comments.
Many people are inclined to believe the other witnesses, because of the sad history of racist violence in America.
I am pretty sure those “other witnesses” are young teenage black men and women. The “history of racism in america goes both ways.
Given the widely varying witness statements, it was understandable to decide not to indict (though it probably could have gone either way).
you cannot be serious. You think they didn’t indict because of the varying witness statements? You think it could have gone either way? Did you read the autopsy reports? Did you hear the hours (days?) of testimony? This was what I was referring to in my above post. The grand jury spent Gd knows how long on the evidence of this case and you are kind of summing it up as, “yea, well there was just so many different witness accounts it could go either way but they picked no”
Wilson was a Cop and Cops are supposed to be trained to deal with and arrest people without killing them. If in fact Wilson’s life was endangered by an unarmed teenager then he was doing something wrong, or was incompetent. If that’s not entirely his responsibility then it’s definitely the department that is responsible for training and managing the Cops responsibility.
If a truck driver in my company does something unprofessional and kills someone I and the driver would be held responsible on at least some level. Letting the Cops off scott free is wrong whichever way you look at it.
Wilson was a Cop and Cops are supposed to be trained to deal with and arrest people without killing them. If in fact Wilson’s life was endangered by an unarmed teenager then he was doing something wrong, or was incompetent.
I don’t agree with that premise.
If a truck driver in my company does something unprofessional and kills someone I and the driver would be held responsible on at least some level. Letting the Cops off scott free is wrong whichever way you look at it.
what if the driver was being attacked or charged at (as in wilsons case) and your driver took his truck annd ran him over, in order to save his life?
Truck drivers are trained to drive safely without killing people. So, coffeeaddict, in your situation why didn’t he just drive safely away? Huh? Huh?
Poppa,
You are entitled to disagree I guess….. I just find it hard to believe that a Police Officer wearing Mace a Taser and with the ability to call for backup as soon as things started getting contentious REALLY had to shoot the kid in the head multiple times in order to save himself. (even when arresting a girl in her 20s on bench warrant for failure to appear on a traffic ticket they call at least one other officer to be there. Ive seen it happen)
Coffee Addict,
You said,
“what if the driver was being attacked or charged at (as in wilsons case) and your driver took his truck annd ran him over, in order to save his life?”
If running him over was the ONLY way the truck driver was able to save himself then you would have a point. As I wrote above I just find it hard to believe that this was the case with the Police Officer. (it’s not a perfect comparison because Police Officers are supposed to be trained to deal with and neutralize such situations without panicking and a truck driver isn’t)
pba
good point
006:
We’re gonna do an experiment. Without googling or looking it up, tell us how tall and how heavy Michael Brown was.
Syag, how do you know the racial identity of the witnesses? Anyway, there were a lot of witnesses, and most of them did not really corroborate Wilson’s story.
However, some did, and if these witnesses were believable, then that creates enough doubt to justify the decision not to indict. It all comes down to who you believe (a judgment one is not supposed to make on the basis of race, quite rightly).
In law there is certainly such a thing as a close cases. Prosecutors and judges encounter them all the time. Does reasonable doubt exist? Reasonable suspicion? Is a contract term unconscionable? I’m not saying this is necessarily a close case, because I haven’t looked at all the evidence, but it seems like it might have been, since again it has to do with how many witnesses said what, who is believable, etc.
yytz – the information about the witnesses was spoken about on the news shortly after the incident. And there was conversation about the fact that the witnesses claiming he was running away were peers of his.
There were also autopsy reports that said straight out that he was shot in the head as he lunged for the gun. It is only a close case in your mind because you are somehow thinking you have the facts. Well the black community seems to think just like you. They figure that if that is what they assume and want to think – poof, it must be the way it was.
Either way, I just find it facinating that you speak about the jurors decision as if you have a clue.
I don’t hold of NPR much but this comes from their website:
“After sitting through hours of testimony and reading through thousands of pages of documents, a grand jury decided that there was not enough probable cause to indict police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old.”
I personally don’t know the facts, so I am not going to pretend I do. I would also like to believe that if the decision doesn’t match up with what I had hoped for, I would find a better way to show my disapproval.
In what I read about the autopsy, the autopsy did not resolve the question of whether Brown was charging at Wilson. So unless the news story is saying the opposite of what the autopsy report said, your assertion appears to be incorrect.
I didn’t say I disagreed with the decision. All I said is that it may have been a close case. As far as I know they made a reasonable decision.
Like you, I am bothered by people’s tendency to prejudge a situation and decide that things must be as they imagine them. Unfortunately this phenomenon–choosing sides and then interpreting or selectively creating or ignoring facts to support your side–seems to be the main factor between the world’s insane obsession with bashing Israel.
If I recall correctly, there were three autopsies. But either way, you are 100% right about the Israel bashing.
I think we do it about a lot of other things too. When the meah shearim crowd protested the hospital that took a child away from his mother there were mobs of protest calling racism. The problem is, I doubt most of them had a clue about the facts. And I grew up thinking some pretty inaccurate things about chassidish life that I “knew” were true because someone told me they were and it made sense to rally against their lifestyle. There are so many bandwagons we ride on in the name of justice, and the ‘occupancy objectors’ may be the most uninformed and damaging of all.
Syag, yes, good points. I think in psychology they have words for this kind of thing, like confirmation bias or egocentric bias. There’s also an innate tendency to see people from other groups as all the same, while appreciating all the diversity within one’s own group.
And whenever there’s a sense that one’s group is under attack from the outside, people tend to revert to hard-core group loyalty, “My country right or wrong” and such, whether or not they’re right.
Germany even claimed that it started WWII in self-defense, as crazy as that sounds (perhaps because people can’t help but rally around their leader in times of external threat).
“Some witnesses say Wilson shot Brown while he was running away.”
**
I don’t know how he was killed, but I will assume, by the way how bullet get into the body, an expert /pathologist can determine, if person was shot when he run away or toward policeman.
You can’t shot someone in his chest or forehead, if he running away.
awesome points.
When I was a bnos leader I found that the girls from the telshe families and the girls from the non-telshe families were banding (sp?) together against each other very fiercely. When I was able to determine that a lot of it came from feeling ‘under attack’, just as you said, I was able to break some of the walls down. They each worried that finding good things in the “other” girls would threaten their view of how they themselves should be. If only we could feel united by better things we might not have to feel so defensive.
Thanks — that’s an interesting example!
000646: The police officer said he DID NOT have a taser in his car.
Also, claiming young black men are killed by white police officers all too often hence the righteous indignation doesn’t hold much water if you factor in how much more crime is comitted by this same group and that most officers in the US are white.
Just one example, Gideon Bosch – a white, emotionally disturbed Jewish guy – was killed by police officers; supposedly when they felt threatened. One may argue that officers’ judgement is often faulty under pressure, but blaming it on race when there were other factors at play is just an excuse to act out.
Racism causes the problems indirectly.
Mammale,
You said,
“000646: The police officer said he DID NOT have a taser in his car.”
Well that would be incompetence or irresponsible.
The point is that it is really hard for me to believe that a Police officer acting in a correct and thought out manner would really be in a position where an unarmed person would kill him if the officer didn’t use lethal force. Why did he get out of the car himself? Couldn’t he have waited for backup? Did he mace the kid, hit him with a club when he charged? Why couldn’t he shoot the kid in the legs, or somewhere besides the head?
I’m not saying that I think that the officer should be put on trial for first degree murder but him and his department definitely carry some responsibility. I can’t believe that this HAD to happen the way it did.
The excuse “whoops bad call I was under pressure” does not cut it when your job is to be trained to deal with these types of situations and react correctly without panicking and your failure to do so results in a death. It just doesn’t. (The job the police are given is NOT to react that way! Anyone can go around confronting people who they think are doing something wrong and then shooting them in the head when they get into a fight with them. The reason we have police is specifically to avoid those kinds of situations)
Denying this is in my opinion counterproductive and silly.
So, 006, how many pages of the grand jury evidence have you read? 10? 50? 100? 500? All of it?
You’re already holding at anyone disagreeing is “silly,” so I assume you must have read all of it. Is that correct?
I know he got out of a car with no backup and without a taser to chase a hostile subject and ended up blowing that subject’s head off. That’s all I have to know in order to say that the Police Officer could have reacted differently and not killed the guy.
The reason the cop wasn’t indicted is that he’s not a ham sandwich (can I say that in here?).
Poppa,
The Officer himself admitted it on national TV
Syag,
The facts I mentioned above were stated by the officer on National TV
Really? Tell me how you know that.
Syag,
The facts I mentioned above were stated by the officer National TV
646 – wow, you seem to really know a lot about things you don’t have informaiton on. If I give you some newspaper clippings about a malpractice case can you fill me in on who was guilty there, too? I might even have some witnesses who were in the cafeteria at the time.
646 – I apologize for my frustrated attitude. As you may have read in the posts above, I see and experience so much destruction and divisiveness in klal yisroel from people jumping to their own conclusions and making assumptions with such certainty in their words. You speak so confidently about things you only know bits about. I believe ALL of us should learn the difference between things we know to be true, and things we assume to be true.
In this situation it may not be a big deal, but this is the exact same attitude you hear from people who question rabbinic decisions, bais din decisions, parenting decisions etc. They know there was foul play, they know it was handled wrong, and so on. It’s something we all need to work on and I respond strongly because of the havoc it often wreaks.
Do you really think they care about Michael brown of course not it’s just an excuse to go out and rob stores many of which are probably black owned
Syag,
Again, what I said was what officer Wilson said happened.
They care.
You are referring to the facts you stated, I am referring to the conclusions you are drawing:
If in fact Wilson’s life was endangered by an unarmed teenager then he was doing something wrong, or was incompetent.
Letting the Cops off scott free is wrong whichever way you look at it.
Well that would be incompetence or irresponsible.
. . .it is really hard for me to believe that a Police officer acting in a correct and thought out manner would really be in a position where an unarmed person would kill him . . .
I can’t believe that this HAD to happen the way it did.
That’s all I have to know in order to say that the Police Officer could have reacted differently and not killed the guy.
It seems to me that those conclusions follow from the facts that I (and Wilson for that matter) stated. You are entitled to disagree. I would be curious to know why though.
I am not necessarily saying I disagree. Those conclusions I listed are NOT fact, they are your opinion based on the facts you pulled out of the media pool. I am saying that I would never feel confident enough to make a statement about someone being incompetent based of media opinions. I would state it as my thought or opinion, and make a disclaimer that my opinion is based on what I have heard. I don’t believe anyone should ever hear pieces of a story, even many pieces, and then turn around and say definitively, “that man was incompetent”. How would you know for sure? And why do you believe that you have enough information to make such statements? I am not asking this of you, per se, I am saying that it is that attitude that I am objecting to.
Another example – I spoke to someone who “knows” that a certain rav picks and chooses who gets food on their table. They told me that they had all the facts about someone who went to the rav for money and was turned down. They knew the person well and they know it happened. They may even have been with the person when he asked for money. The were so confident because they “knew” all the facts. And they felt VERY free to shout it from the soapbox.
What I knew was that this poor person had been day trading. He had taken the money the rav gave him for his bills and lost it all. He lost his mortgage and maxed his credit cards. The rav told him he needed to go for help before he could get more help with his bills. This friend will NEVER know those pieces and will forever be touting the evils of this rav who let someone go hungry (going on 20 years now, he still brings it up)
My point is, you DON’T have all the facts, and a Jew should ALWAYS keep in mind the fact that he NEVER should feel so confident that he can can condemn a man, any man, not even a random police officer. We just don’t know the truth.
Rebyidd u know that they don’t if they really did they would protest in a normal way not burn down there own neighborhood like mishiguim
But my point is that the conclusions I made follow from the facts that I DO know from the fact that the Police Officer said them, and you don’t seem to be disagreeing with me.
“I don’t believe anyone should ever hear pieces of a story, even many pieces, and then turn around and say definitively, ‘that man was incompetent.'”
While I overall agree with what you’re saying, I just wanted to point out that we do something similar when we vote, or have any political opinion whatsoever.
Few people are really enough of an expert to have an opinion on most public policy questions, or the question of which politician is most competent. So we have no choice but to read a few articles and make up our minds. (That is, unless we always vote for a particular party because we think it embodies Torah values more, or something, but that decision too is based on incomplete information.)
If King Shlomo were to write Koheles today I have no doubt there would be a long section about politics and how it is the vanity of vanities. Especially now with the ubiquity of blowhard talking-heads with extreme and arrogant opinions on everything, individual Americans are encouraged to spend much of their time reading others’ misinformed opinions and spouting their own.
Is this really what we’re meant to do on this earth? Is this really compatible with engaging in as much Torah, teshuvah, mitzvos, middos-improvement, chesed, etc. as we can? Or, more kabbalistically, achieving our neshama’s tikkun in this gilgul?
Of course not. It is arrogance, vanity and striving after wind! But try telling that to the millions of political-junky chatter-boxes on Twitter and Facebook. Modern culture has nearly ruined us. Let’s push away the fashions of the day and focus on our souls, improving ourselves and the world in whatever concrete ways we can.
None of this is to say people shouldn’t become experts on particular topics and then become activists who work for practical changes in that area. All power to them! But sitting around pontificating about all the issues of the day is meaningless.
Not all of the people are burning down the neighborhood.
And acting absolutely insane does not mean they don’t care.
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