Michael Brown was Killed Because He Didn’t Prostrate Himself to Police Authority
Even if you don't think this killing was racist, it's hard not to agree with the premise of this article.
A white Jewish friend of mine was jogging in Santa Monica, and saw a motorcycle cop down the street, and figured he had time to cross before the cop was even close.
Instead, the cop sped up, cut my friend off, and asked him why he crossed when he saw the cop coming.
My friend didn't think much of it and told the cop the truth, he thought he could cross before the cop got there, but he sped up. Figure their business was done, my friend went on his way, only to find the cop waiting at the NEXT corner.
"Let me ask you again, why did you cross when you saw me coming?"
My friend figured the cop wouldn't leave him alone until he groveled, so he looked at the ground mumbled his apologies and said it wouldn't happen again.
It's not hard to imagine that to the nth degree if the person stopped is black and in a former Jim Crow state to boot.
What’s wrong Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson’s killing of the unarmed 18-year-old black teenager, Michael Brown, and with a Grand Jury decision not to indict him for that outrageous slaying, is what is wrong with American law enforcement and American “justice” in general.
Both actions were permeated not only with racism, which clearly played a huge rule in both the verdict rendered by a Grand Jury composed of nine whites and only three blacks, and in this tragic police killing by a white cop of a black child, but also by a mentality on the part of police — and apparently by at least a majority of the citizen jurors on a panel evaluating Wilson’s actions — that cops are authorities who must be obeyed without question, on pain of death.
Let’s recall the most crucial evidence in this killing: According to the New York Times it was two shots into the top of the head by Officer Wilson that killed Brown — shots that multiple witnesses confirm were fired after the unarmed Brown was on his knees, already seriously wounded by four other apparently non-lethal shots to arm, neck and upper right chest, with his hands raised and pleading “Don’t shoot.” The Times also reports that those shots, apparently fired when Brown’s head was leaning forward, or from a position above him, appeared to have been fired “not from close range,” a determination based upon an absence of gun powder residue around the area of the entry wounds.
It should not matter in the slightest whether or not Brown had first struck Officer Wilson inside his squad car during a scuffle, as claimed by the cop, or even that the officer, as he testified in an unusual appearance before jurors, “felt terrified” at that time. Nor does it matter, beyond being evidence of an inherent racism, that Wilson says he thought that Brown, approaching him at his car initially, “looked like a demon.” If the non-lethal shots that first hit Brown in arm, neck and upper chest had been fired at that early point, perhaps Wilson would have been justified in firing them in self defense, but it’s what happened after Brown tried to leave the scene that matter.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/11/27/michael-brown-was-killed-because-he-didnt-prostrate-himself-to-police-authority/
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