Jump to content
Merus

Ferguson

Recommended Posts

Jesus jumped up Christ, I just watched one of the videos of the crowd getting fired on. How is any of this happening without state or federal agencies flying in going, "NOPE STOP THIS NOW."

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Gormongous, sounds like I live like 2 miles from you, near Tower Grove/South Grand.

 

I've been working this summer at a health care company in Maryland Heights, a predominantly white suburb about 10 miles west of Ferguson. The building has a lot of middle-aged white people working in finance and IT for the company, but also houses a call center for a pharmacy branch, which is staffed primarily by black people.

 

The past few days, there have been these weird clumps of old white people whispering among themselves (of course they don't stop when I get close since I'm white) about Ferguson, almost invariably mentioning the one-off "riots" as if that justifies both the original incident and the insane police response that has followed. It's been fucking gross. It makes me so mad, I want to scream at them every time I see it.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Jesus jumped up Christ, I just watched one of the videos of the crowd getting fired on. How is any of this happening without state or federal agencies flying in going, "NOPE STOP THIS NOW."

 

I'm wondering the same thing. This has been going on since Saturday, correct? How has there been no intervention?

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

"The police have GUNS! We're not going in there! Fuck it!"

(In a slightly more serious and yet not any less cynical response, I think it's probably closer to "These police are trained professionals and going in would undermine the entire justice system in the area so we shouldn't step in.")

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Kind of can't wait for John Oliver's show this weekend.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I'm seeing some things via my Twitter feed about Facebook apparently deleting content regarding Ferguson, even if just text. But I dunno how true it is or isn't.

 

I have personally posted articles about Ferguson and had them shared and they're still there. I would be SHOCKED if they are deleting things.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Worth quoting this:
 

Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson said 50 of the city’s 53 police officers are white. He said he made recruiting and promoting black officers a priority when he took over four years ago after a three-decade police career in St. Louis and St. Louis County.

 

Jackson said he promoted two black officers to sergeant in his first year in Ferguson, though one of those officers has since left for a better-paying job.

 

“I’m constantly trying to recruit African-Americans and other minorities,” he said. “But it’s an uphill battle. The minority makeup of this police department is not where I want it to be.”

 

Four years of prioritizing not having an all white police force, and they made it all the way to 94 percent white.  It'll only take a few more decades to have a good 20 or 30 non-whites on the force at this rate.  Of course, by then Ferguson will probably have a police force of a couple of hundred.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Four years of prioritizing not having an all white police force, and they made it all the way to 94 percent white.  It'll only take a few more decades to have a good 20 or 30 non-whites on the force at this rate.  Of course, by then Ferguson will probably have a police force of a couple of hundred.

 

Which is craaazy, because St. Louis has the most strong, proud, and active black community I've ever seen. It's obviously a problem coming from so many angles that there's just not a single solution to be had.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I think, out of all the approaches you can take, sending in tanks when people get upset that one of your officers shot a guy is maybe not the best approach

 

which you can discover for yourself in Battlefield: Hardline, coming soon from EA!

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I think, out of all the approaches you can take, sending in tanks when people get upset that one of your officers shot a guy is maybe not the best approach

 

which you can discover for yourself in Battlefield: Hardline, coming soon from EA!

 

Ughhhh I forgot that game was a thing. With all of the recent events, its existence strikes me as even more tasteless.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

This news is breaking, but apparently the St. Louis PD is being called to stand down. Governor Nixon is going to be making a statement about who is going to be given jurisdiction next.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

This whole situation has gotten me mad as hell.

 

Kind of can't wait for John Oliver's show this weekend.

 

Agreed.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

The whole thing is pretty scary. It's amazing that the police are capable of swooping in and basically doing whatever the fuck they want over there. I don't think there's much that the common person can do to fight back against such well equipped departments, the only people that could stop them would be the government.. and why exactly would they wanna do that? I wonder if our (the UK) bobbies on the beat are given ex-military equipment? 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Here is a misery statistic. SWAT teams are now used 137 a times a day, most often executing search warrants for drugs. So these aren't known criminals/hostage situations/active shooters, these are legally innocent people SUSPECTED of a nonviolent crime. SWAT door busts are used in 70% of warrant executions against non-whites and in 38% of white cases, despite drug usage being mostly equal across races. 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

The excellent article that Merus linked touched on a suspicion I have had regarding the militarization of the police. I think that a black president is absolutely frightening to a lot of rural whites in the United States. That and all this fear that Obama is going to take away everyone's guns (and I need to say that I have many, many anectdotal examples of people expressing this fear in a completely sincere fashion to me) is leading toward a mentality that it is the duty of the police to militarize not so they can deal with protestors, but so they can stand ground in a conflict with federal enforcement. I think there is a very strong belief in rural, white police departments that the federal government wants to disarm them (even though they are apparently arming them) and that they need to be armed to prevent it from happening.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Here is a misery statistic. SWAT teams are now used 137 a times a day, most often executing search warrants for drugs. So these aren't known criminals/hostage situations/active shooters, these are legally innocent people SUSPECTED of a nonviolent crime. SWAT door busts are used in 70% of warrant executions against non-whites and in 38% of white cases, despite drug usage being mostly equal across races. 

 

This tragedy just happened a few months ago.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/30/us/georgia-toddler-injured-stun-grenade-drug-raid/

 

Both of my grandfathers were Chicago cops for 25+ years, both retiring in the mid 90's. My grand father cited a very big change in protocol then, the hiring of bullies not peace keepers.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

It's really scary to see how the police just straight-up look like special forces.

I'm so glad that our police do not receive this kind of equipment.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

The excellent article that Merus linked touched on a suspicion I have had regarding the militarization of the police. I think that a black president is absolutely frightening to a lot of rural whites in the United States. That and all this fear that Obama is going to take away everyone's guns (and I need to say that I have many, many anectdotal examples of people expressing this fear in a completely sincere fashion to me) is leading toward a mentality that it is the duty of the police to militarize not so they can deal with protestors, but so they can stand ground in a conflict with federal enforcement. I think there is a very strong belief in rural, white police departments that the federal government wants to disarm them (even though they are apparently arming them) and that they need to be armed to prevent it from happening.

 

Funny enough, Sean had a tweet that I agree with which is the opposite of what you suggest. Police forces are PART of whatever this destructive force that will terrorize innocent gun owners is. They're going to roll straight over whatever extended pistol magazine you have and not stop.

 

https://twitter.com/vanaman/status/499324287384182784

 

It's really scary to see how the police just straight-up look like special forces.

I'm so glad that our police do not receive this kind of equipment.

 

I'm glad your police don't, either. I find it terrifying.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I think the reason it doesn't freak out the local militias and such is because they have friends and family on the local state-sponsored SWAT team. I think that the police departments view themselves as bastions of states-rights against the wave of federal influence, rather than as federal agents.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Thus is insane to me. Irish police (Gardai) don't even have guns normally, the idea of a military style police force is unfathomable.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I think the reason it doesn't freak out the local militias and such is because they have friends and family on the local state-sponsored SWAT team. I think that the police departments view themselves as bastions of states-rights against the wave of federal influence, rather than as federal agents.

 

That's because the people in local militias are white people.

 

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/saw-ferguson

 

More reporting on what's happened.

 

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/8/13/2nd-shooting-ferguson.html

 

http://america.aljazeera.com/tools/pressreleases/statement.html

 

https://twitter.com/XaiaX/status/499810544119857153/photo/1

 

An Al Jazeera news crew was specifically targeted with tear gas and their equipment was dismantled.

 

 

I apologize for the amount I've spent gabbing, but not my words or fervor. It affects me deeply that something like this is allowed and frankly encouraged, and at this moment I feel helpless to do anything beyond inform others.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Justice is a spiritual question. Pragmatism & politeness never pass judgements on fairness of systems. Capitalism is fundamentally antagonistic to justice. Its rational agent acting on self-interest is rewarded handsomely for psychopathy. Such grade-A rational agents, from atop the pyramid, heartened by the holy glow of their own self-righteousness, have reshaped the public realm in their own image.

 

War is such good money. Every single federal jurisdiction in the US has a stake in the military industrial complex. The industry is dispersed like that on purpose. There is no incentive for any representative or senator to not take part in war profiteering. Even if they speak out against a war, they make sure to claw each others eyes out around earmark season to bring some of that bacon to their constituents. All other industry in the country is fucked, in some places war is the only big game in town. And once the money starts rolling and the toys are always super new and improved (or really just shiny and freshly pooped out by the graft machine, creating pretense for the excess value to be siphoned out of the earth and blood and into the coffers of the owners) room needs to be made, and secondary market gets flooded. America spends as much as the rest of the world combined on its military. Lots and lots of toys... same toys that spill into the secondary black market and turn whole chunks of Mexico into erzats warring states (Mexico all-around is a great case study for the last half millennium of capitalism).

 

Militarized occupation-force-styled police is totally in the interest of the owners and not an accidental whoa-how-did-this-happen oopsie. From the right perspective there is no difference between the US agents waging an urban war of suppression in Afghanistan and municipal bureaucrats firing water cannons at black people in Missouri. Drug war, likewise, is an international conspiracy to keep (usually color-coded) underclasses everywhere well-fucked. It was the drug war that provided the excuse to get municipal cops everywhere into ninja SWAT gear to begin with.

 

Poor people here, poor people there, same continuum. There ain't no party but the class war party cause the class war party don't stop.

 

So anyway, justice is a spiritual question. We need to get religion on all this. Irrational, frenzied.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I think the reason it doesn't freak out the local militias and such is because they have friends and family on the local state-sponsored SWAT team. I think that the police departments view themselves as bastions of states-rights against the wave of federal influence, rather than as federal agents.

 

I think its a lot simpler than that, as Badfinger pointed out. It is a race issue. There is an incredible double standard wrt weapons based on race. Especially when many of the police are white in an area with a centuries long legacy of racism, but it is an issue all over the country.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Reading through other news this morning, there's this story about what to do about wild/feral horse herds in New Mexico.  This quote jumped out at me:

 

“People are willing to die for these horses,” said Gary Miles of the Placitas Animal Rescue. “I know I am.”

 

Miles said any new roundup of horses could spark a “Cliven Bundy situation,” referring to the Nevada rancher and his armed supporters who got into a confrontation in April with federal government over public land use.

The Bureau of Land Management recently posted a notice at the Placitas Post Office notifying residents that the agency plans to remove around 48 horses on BLM land sometime between now to Dec. 31.

 

“We’re not saying when we will go out there because we want to prevent a Bundy-type situation,” Brenna said. But he added that BLM officials will only remove horses on federal lands and not those roaming on private property.

 

I'm just trying to imaging what would happen if a bunch of legally armed black people decided to descend on Ferguson to show off their rights and "protest" government overreach.  It'd be a fucking bloodbath.  The police would just fucking shoot everyone.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Anyway, I am planning to contact my congressional representatives to ask for an investigation into police murders and brutality and efforts to demilitarize the police nationwide. I don't expect anything, of course, but hopefully I will at least get a response. Ferguson is an example of a much larger issue that I would like to see addressed. 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now

×