Ferguson

[Blambo]

Nah, it's fine. Remember that money is speech. If those reporters want to stand there, they just need to buy the property first.

 

This is definitely off topic but since you brought it up, considering donations and money to be a form of speech is actually an important step in reform because that puts the effectiveness of speech on a sliding scale, giving some people "more speech" and indirectly inhibiting the speech of others. If this is recognized, at least people can bring it up in mainstream conversation and have it be an issue.

[Bjorn]

The racism (and blindness) of Missouri elected officials is beginning to seep out of them.  The Lt. Gov. today gave this interview.  Jump forward to the 8:30 mark for his interview.   He starts off by advocating for "dawn to dusk" curfews.  Don't be black after dark.  Also don't have a night job. Then he drops these two nuggets at the end.

 

We don't do justice in America in the streets.  We have legal process that are set in motion that are designed after centuries of Anglo-American jurisprudence tradition, they're designed to protect the rights and liberty of everyone involved.

 

That's one of the great advances of Anglo-American civilization is that we do not have politicized trials, we let the justice system work it out. 

[Bjorn]

GODDAMMIT KANSAS CITY.  Try to not inflame the shit going on in the other side of the state. A KCMO cop is one of the people who helped spread an incorrect viral photo of a black man with a wad of cash and a gun, claiming it was Mike Brown.  This pic actually showed up on my FB feed this weekend and multiple people were defending it as real. 

[itsamoose]

GODDAMMIT KANSAS CITY.  Try to not inflame the shit going on in the other side of the state. A KCMO cop is one of the people who helped spread an incorrect viral photo of a black man with a wad of cash and a gun, claiming it was Mike Brown.  This pic actually showed up on my FB feed this weekend and multiple people were defending it as real. 

 

In general the recent uptick in Support Darren Wilson (the officer who shot Mike Brown) type campaigns have made me a bit uneasy.  All the people you'd expect seem to be clinging to the bad egg narrative, despite all the evidence to the contrary.  At least the guy is being reprimanded for doing this.  How many people do you think this guy has personally put at risk, just because he wanted to make a point?  If there is a perfect metaphor for police overreach or over reaction, this is it.

[Henroid]

The racism (and blindness) of Missouri elected officials is beginning to seep out of them.  The Lt. Gov. today gave this interview.  Jump forward to the 8:30 mark for his interview.   He starts off by advocating for "dawn to dusk" curfews.  Don't be black after dark.  Also don't have a night job. Then he drops these two nuggets at the end.

The sound you hear is my jaw hitting the floor.

[Merus]

Here is a guy with a clear roadmap to defusing the situation in Ferguson.

[Bjorn]

I'm angry tonight.  Well, I've been angry about this shit just about every night.  But right now I'm angry at some of my friends and their ability to live up to the depressing statistics that were presented earlier about white folks caring about this.  I spoke to a friend in StL today, and she was pretty blasé about it.  A "can't this just be over" attitude.  Then I hung out with some people tonight, and they all got kind of shifty eyed when I brought it up, and mumbled about how they hadn't really had time to pay attention to it.  Same thing when I brought it up over the weekend with some other friends. 

 

My friends are the kind of people who get apoplectic about net neutrality.  Who've actively campaigned for gay marriage.  In a couple of cases, they're people who have live protested over women's issues and risked arrest in one case.  They volunteer at animal shelters and take in homeless animals. 

 

It's not like I'm taking any sort of big action, I'm posting about it on social media and paying attention.  I'm not going to let it be invisible, and pass quietly by like so many other atrocities do in this country.  I just want to fucking scream at them.  THIS IS IN OUR GODDAMNED BACK FUCKING YARD.  This isn't in another country, or a thousand miles away on one of the coasts.  I could be in Ferguson in 4 and a half hours.  Four with good traffic and a heavy foot.  I've actually thought about running over to StL.  But I don't know if standing in solidarity would be helpful, or another outsider (and there may already be too many of those). 

 

Just fuck.

 

 

Here is a guy with a clear roadmap to defusing the situation in Ferguson.

 

Thanks for posting that, it's the calmest and clearest course of action anyone has presented. 

[Henroid]

I have yet to have IRL encounters with people unaware of the protests or against them. I came close today in having two phone calls with my mother (who sides with terribleness at all times) but luckily they weren't chit-chat phone calls. Otherwise I would've gone nuts.

[Blambo]

Here is a guy with a clear roadmap to defusing the situation in Ferguson.

 

I've been thinking about how you could generally defuse tension between authority and non-authority figures and it seems like the best way is to change how power is represented in the community, like somehow instilling the idea in authority figures that they are still part of the community they're serving. I wonder if just giving a different face and name to the police, changing the aesthetic and tactical philosophy could diffuse tensions and maybe make the police view their job as a service to a community rather than as a military with an enemy.

 

A similar thing could be done to combat weird political parochialism and non-participation in politics, which is to somehow make politicians "us" instead of "them up there in washington".

[Bjorn]

Offcer GoFuckYourself walks through a crowd with a rifle pointed at chest height and says, "I will fucking kill you."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=8zbR824FKpU

[Problem Machine]

The police are currently raiding a church and 'confiscating' food and medical supplies

 

I can't even comprehend the fucking evil here

[Henroid]

The police are currently raiding a church and 'confiscating' food and medical supplies

 

I can't even comprehend the fucking evil here

What the actual fuck.

[itsamoose]

The police are currently raiding a church and 'confiscating' food and medical supplies

 

I can't even comprehend the fucking evil here

 

Do you have a link for this?  I can't seem to find one.

[Problem Machine]

https://twitter.com/Awkward_Duck/status/502138828849565696

https://twitter.com/MarvinBing/status/502137215154401280

https://twitter.com/PhilofDreams_/status/502134813567234048

[Gwardinen]

That is bizarre. This is a week in to a negative PR shitstorm and the police are raiding churches? Who thought that would be a good idea? I have mostly been saddened and angered by events in Ferguson so far, this is the first instance of outright confusion I've felt. It feels like a joke - "only way they could make this shit worse is by raiding a church, heh heh". What is going on over there?

[Bjorn]

https://twitter.com/Awkward_Duck/status/502138828849565696

https://twitter.com/MarvinBing/status/502137215154401280

https://twitter.com/PhilofDreams_/status/502134813567234048

 

Besides text reports (and retweets), I haven't seen anything definitive yet (like a church source or pictures).  And given how fast pics and vids are moving around the net, I'm taking this with a grain of salt.

[Problem Machine]

Simple: They think this is a war and they're attacking the supply lines

[Problem Machine]

Besides text reports (and retweets), I haven't seen anything definitive yet (like a church source or pictures).  And given how fast pics and vids are moving around the net, I'm taking this with a grain of salt.

Because the Ferguson PD are notoriously camera-friendly?

[Henroid]

This isn't a raid for drugs or contraband. It's because they're food and first aid supplies.

 

How is the president not going, "Okay that's it." I mean I understood so far because if he takes a hard stance, it invigorates his political opponents to fight him on other issues. But come on, how can anyone think this is acceptable?

[pkirkner]

It sounds like police didn't take any supplies from the church. Were supposedly investigating reports that people spent the night in the church, which is about the most ridiculous "crime" I've ever heard of. Is there any church on Earth that hasn't sheltered people under its roof during times of personal or community crisis?

 

edit: Still lots of conflicting reports about what went down, so who knows?

edit2: http://instagram.com/p/r7feCuD9Fr/

[undermind9]

I have yet to have IRL encounters with people unaware of the protests or against them. I came close today in having two phone calls with my mother (who sides with terribleness at all times) but luckily they weren't chit-chat phone calls. Otherwise I would've gone nuts.

 

i had an aggravating conversation with an acquaintance early last week who is a suburb-of-chicago firefighter/paramedic - who took the stance that there was no way a trained officer would make an unjustified decision etc.  

 

much more information has come out since then, but i havent followed up, but i hope with developments over the last week would less naive outlook has been adopted

 

(this goes for all the rest of america who maybe initially thought this was an excuse for rioting and police justified)

 

**i am nervous to even inquire with my Ma her thoughts, the one-sided story she may or may not have been fed could be infuriating

[Bjorn]

So beyond the obvious racial shit going on in Ferguson, understanding the racist economics of city funding helps clarify the history of the anger of the black population.  Jon and I early kind of argued about whether the protests were mostly about Brown, or whether they were morphing into something else.  I want to clarify that I don't think the protests are about these economic issues, but I do think years of frustration over things like this, which in part drive police behavior, helped build up the anger and resentment that popped a week and a half ago.

 

 In St. Louis county, towns have increasingly depended on fines and court fees as significant parts of their revenue. In Ferguson, it's around 25 percent and in other towns, it's as high as 50 percent of their total revenue. This puts economic pressure on police departments, turning them into revenue collectors rather than law enforcement. And when 9 in 10 stops, searches and arrests are on blacks, almost the entirety of that part of the revenue stream is coming from the black population, functionally creating a new type of tax that is almost exclusively applied racially.  This is almost certainly unconstitutional, but since people with little power are affected, little has been done about.  It can also be a relatively complex case to demonstrate, as you need years of data to present a clear picture.

 

States have been trying to crack down on this for years, including Missouri having to legally go after it's own municipalities to stop them and capping revenue at 35 percent. But not every town has been caught, and there are a lot of tiny municipalities, even around St. Louis, that haven't been audited.

 

Edited to add: I've been arguing for years that America needs to redefine what we call taxes, because of reasons like this.  Taxes ought to be considered any money paid to the government, regardless of reason.  It would help clarify many of the discussions that people try to have about our tax system, and it would make racial abuses like this jump out like the sore thumbs they are. 

[Gormongous]

States have been trying to crack down on this for years, including Missouri having to legally go after it's own municipalities to stop them and capping revenue at 35 percent. But not every town has been caught, and there are a lot of tiny municipalities, even around St. Louis, that haven't been audited.

 

Just to deepen your analysis a little, St. Louis is a ridiculous mosaic of unincorporated municipalities, each with their own legal code, police, and administrative structure. I'm saying this as someone who comes from Dallas, which is a pretty decentralized city to begin with. In my experience, a lot of police revenue comes from exploiting the confusion of people expecting the rules of one municipality to apply one street over in another. It's bad enough that I have to be careful to park on one side of the street and not the other when visiting a certain friend, because a street-cleaning-day ticket costs $10 in Olivette and $80 in Ladue.

 

Theoretically, there's political pressure that the state of Missouri and St. Louis city could exert to encourage uniformity, but St. Louis city operates at a dramatic loss (free parks, museums, and shows abound), to the point that it regularly borrows from the county, and therefore has no incentive to bite the hand that feeds (and the state's not going to make an effort to influence the county without the city's backing). I'm white and pass as comfortably middle-class, so I have never had any interaction with the police of any municipality, but I have probably paid over three hundred dollars in parking tickets in five years here (although none of them were actually for parking illegally, just getting me for technicalities and unposted day-rules). It's a bizarre and awful situation, more so I imagine for people who'd struggle to pay a fifty-dollar ticket.

[Bjorn]

I've only got limited personal experience in Missouri (KCMO, Osceola and visiting StL now and again), but it's always struck me as being much less consistent than in Kansas.  Kansas never had the proliferation of small municipalities, and the ones we did have are mostly all dead now, consolidated into county seats. 

 

And all this doesn't even get into the secondary and tertiary effects of collecting revenue in this way, where people's car insurance rates are driven up and for the poor (20+ percent of Ferguson), makes it more likely that they will not be able to afford either insurance or vehicle fees (another tax), creating a feedback loop of economic crisis leading to minor criminal offense leading to economic crisis, and on and on.

 

I'm having an interesting discussion on Facebook right now with a retried priest from another city about this.  He said his parish (Episcopalian) at one time provided short term assistance through buying gas for people so they could get to work.  The courts ended up saying that the church could be held responsible for any accidents that people got into if the church didn't verify they had valid insurance before providing them with gas.  Resulting in a situation where people try to help break the cycle with short term help, but the government attempts to short circuit that intervention with more laws and attempts to recruit charities and churches as additional watch dogs.

[Dewar]

Interesting, here in Seattle most of the laws are pretty uniform over all of King County, with some additional special rules inside Seattle city limits. Things get a little more spotty as you get away from population centers, but you can usually count on each county being fairly consistent within itself at least.