F is for Fascism (Ferguson MO)

[jimbob]

You are moved by their cause....just not enough to be around it very much and certainly not to send your children to the same schools as those poor kids. No, none of that for you all.

But you can speak expertly on their plight...

Of course you can.

Im glad you resorted to another rhetorical scare crow. This time there's two "be around it very much" and I love this one " certainly not send your children to the same schools".

I'm still in school learning a craft and have no kids which means neither one of your deflections has any relevance to anything.

FYI I'm going to school in Milwaukee which is right smack in the middle of a very urban heavily african american population. Winston Salem is also heavily african american if you leave the bubble that spans from Wake's campus to the stratford area.

I also don't claim to be a "expert" but it doesn't gift you the right to dismiss people from weighing in on a topic due to assumption you make about the opinionaters of whom you have no knowledge of and which can be as they are in my case simply incorrect.

 

[avalon]

I thought this was an interesting read, on the local high school football team and its players:

Football in Ferguson

 

[PhDeac]

538 article shows that most cops don't live in the cities they serve. This is especially true for white cops.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/most-police-dont-live-in-the-cities-they-serve/

This is one factor in the us vs. them mentality.

If so, Ferguson would have something in common with most major American cities. In about two-thirds of the U.S. cities with the largest police forces, the majority of police officers commute to work from another town.
This statistic is intimately tied to the diversity of the police force: Black and Hispanic officers are considerably more likely to reside in the cities they police than white ones....

On average among the 75 cities, 49 percent of black police officers and 47 percent of Hispanic officers live within the city limits. But just 35 percent of white police officers do. The disparity is starkest in cities with largely black populations. In Detroit, for example, 57 percent of black police officers live in the city but just 8 percent of white ones do. Memphis, Tennessee; Baltimore; Birmingham, Alabama; and Jackson, Mississippi — also majority black — likewise have large racial gaps in where their police officers live.
Cities may also vary in their residency requirements — for example, Los Angeles doesn’t require police to live in the city; Philadelphia used to require that its officers live within the city boundaries. Furthermore, such regulations are enforced to varying degrees. Whereas Boston ostensibly has a residency requirement for police, for example, it’s routinely flouted — and the Census Bureau data suggests that about half of Boston’s police officers live outside the city.
Geography also plays some role. Jacksonville, Florida, has more than 80 percent of its police officers living within the city limits. That may reflect its sprawling boundaries; the city proper has an unusually high share of the metro area’s population. By contrast, the city of Atlanta, which is small compared with metro Atlanta’s population, has just 14 percent of its police force living in town.

 

[DCDeac]

HOLY SHIT!!!!!!! Wow. did they determine if that kid had anything on him? I couldn't tell in the video, did he reach for something? That's pretty much the most awful thing I've ever seen.... good lord.

Think he had a steak knife, pulled it out, threatened the officers, yelled shoot me, kill me now, etc...

If he was unarmed I might feel differently, but that video is akin to jumping off a bridge...

 

[TownieDeac]

I can only repeat what I said in an earlier post:

"Blind youthful idealism is hardly a new phenomenon.....and it is almost always followed & ameliorated by a maturing process involving decades of reasoning."

The problem isn't police, it's blind youthful idealism.

 

[ChrisL68]

While I agree with that to an extent, you can't gloss over the disconnect between the badge and the community, especially the black community.

You and I were probably taught growing up that you had nothing to fear from the police unless you'd done something wrong. Unfortunately, that's not the experience of a significant section of our society. Disproportionate stopping, stop and frisk policies, etc. fuel distrust that compounds the historically racist policies of our nation.

I do not think cops are the bad guy, or even really the problem in and of themselves, but there are several key issues that need to be addressed:

1) Our cultural racial bias - this is the hardest to fix, but starts with efforts to build bridges between the cops and community and foster communication (and yes, I realized this is idealistic and has no short term fix and honestly, prospects look dim for long term solutions). While no one rationally thinks that Wilson is a closeted Klan member who was out to get black people, racial bias certainly comes into play when situations like this are escalated to the point of deadly force. We need to understand that the Civil Rights Amendment didn't end discrimination and disparity - the problem is in each of us. During the heightened focus on children being left in cars, I read an article basically saying, "if you can lose your keys, you're capable of forgetting your kid in a car." The same is true here. If you've ever felt uncomfortable around someone of a different race, or been a little on edge because your driving/walking through "that neighborhood" in your town, then in the quick decision, tense situation like the altercation between Brown and Wilson, you might make the same decision he did based on ingrained racial bias. This doesn't excuse it (in either case, here or leaving a baby in a car), but it shows the deep seated biases we have as a country.

2) Lack of accountability/oversight of the police. Weapons discharges should not be handled internally, similar to the WI law recently passed. Surveillance in the form of dashboard cams/POV recorders should be phased in to provide accountability and clarity when situations such as this happen.

The militarization of our police force just exacerbates these problems because greater force is at the ready to use in these situations.

Great post.

 

[myDeaconmyhand]

Jhmd is so full of shit. Since when did going to UNC make you a man of the people? Last time I checked (when I lived there and worked on campus) there were a bunch of rich entitled pricks. The students who are academicilly qualified for elite schools, for the most part, come from wealthy families.

 

[Deacfreak07]

The problem isn't police, it's blind youthful idealism.

The problem isn't the police, it's making jokes about bob knight.

 

[Deacfreak07]

Jhmd is so full of shit. Since when did going to UNC make you a man of the people? Last time I checked (when I lived there and worked on campus) there were a bunch of rich entitled pricks. The students who are academicilly qualified for elite schools, for the most part, come from wealthy families.

jhmd comes from a family that sent a kid to Wake

 

[TownieDeac]

An officer shot a black teen, and St. Louis rioted...in 1962

There aren't many clear details surrounding Donnell Dortch's death on Sept. 23, 1962 — at least, not from the newspapers that wrote about it.

It was 11:40 a.m. on a Sunday. Donnell Dortch was driving a car in Kinloch, the predominantly black St. Louis suburb where he and his family lived. And, as United Press International told the story, at some point in the 19-year-old's drive, a black police officer named Israel Mason stopped Dortch, who was also black.

This is where the details get fuzzy.

Donnell Dortch's death certificate tells the rest of his story with much more certainty and accuracy than the media's reports. As was common with very public, very contentious deaths, the wire services and local newspapers focused more on the protests and riots that followed Dortch's killing than on the death itself — or the altercation leading up to it.

Hours after his run-in with the police, Dortch died in a county hospital in Clayton, Mo., bleeding profusely from where a bullet, or bullets — it wasn't made clear how many — pierced his stomach. He was unmarried, survived by his father, Lonnie Dortch, and his mother, Mable Marable Dortch.

Kinloch exploded with anxiety and protest.

UPI describes Kinloch as a small, 6,500-person town, "one of several predominantly Negro suburbs in the St. Louis area which date back to Civil War days." (For some comparison, Kinloch, which shares a border with Ferguson, had about 298 residents during the 2010 U.S. Census — most of whom were black.)

Crowds of hundreds assembled before Kinloch's city hall in the days after Dortch's death, chanting "We want Mason! We Want Mason!" (The police officer was suspended from his post and eventually resigned.)

The tiny amount of surviving coverage about Donnell Dortch leaves us with many questions about what happened. Yet even now — despite hundreds of reporters having descended on Ferguson, Mo., scouring for details on a similar St. Louis death — it's still difficult to know what we're seeing and missing. What most can agree on is this:

 

[Deacfreak07]

An officer shot a black teen, and St. Louis rioted...in 1962

It wasn't the police, it was the Elvis Presley.

 

[jhmd2000]

Can you?

Tell when I have struck a nerve? Easily.

 

[jimbob]

An officer shot a black teen, and St. Louis rioted...in 1962

Well worth the read. Thanks for the link Townie. History repeats itself if not identically.

 

[deacphan]

I love that you pretend not to know what I'm talking about. Lots of expert opinions on the poor from a place with $60,000.00 tuition annually. Nice little fence you've built for yourselves.

ok, but what does living in "an expensive city" have to do with anything? also, why is "opinions on the poor" relevant?

 

[deacphan]

The problem isn't police, it's blind youthful idealism.

just imagine if bob knight were black and had accosted a cop in MO like he did in PR.

 

[jhmd2000]

ok, but what does living in "an expensive city" have to do with anything? also, why is "opinions on the poor" relevant?

It is curious to watch experts on poverty emerge from behind the gates of their gated communities (some with iron bars, others with golden barriers to entry).

 

[deacphan]

Jhmd is so full of shit. Since when did going to UNC make you a man of the people? Last time I checked (when I lived there and worked on campus) there were a bunch of rich entitled pricks. The students who are academicilly qualified for elite schools, for the most part, come from wealthy families.

i still don't understand what the plight of the poor has to do with this thread? did i miss where a guy with an ironically racist avatar lectured a bunch of rich, white college graduates (and one black sociology prof) on how this young man is dead because his mother had him out of wedlock?

 

[deacphan]

one of these days jhmd's lecturing us on the real problems in the AA community will sink in and these black folks we hide from will take responsibility for their affairs.

 

[jhmd2000]

i still don't understand what the plight of the poor has to do with this thread? did i miss where a guy with an ironically racist avatar lectured a bunch of rich, white college graduates (and one black sociology prof) on how this young man is dead because his mother had him out of wedlock?

Why don't you think Ph is rich?

P.S. And you can certainly tell when you've struck a nerve around here.

 

[TownieDeac]

I've told similar stories here before, but I always think Winston-Salem is a great representation of race relations in this country. So I grew up in Winston Salem. Went to a good, middle class elementary school in NW Winston and lived in a nice neighborhood. School was approximately 90% white, upper middle class. We had "Officer Friendly" who was a kindly old man that spoke to us in 5th grade about D.A.R.E. and staying out of trouble. He was friendly and everyone really liked him. We cheered him at assembly. He was a popular community figure. Then I tested into a gifted program for middle school. WSFCS decided approximately 25 years ago that their approach to the gifted program was going to be busing students from all over the city to attend Hanes Middle School, a perennially low-testing school in another part of NW Winston, in a particularly nasty area. It was a band-aid on a blighted situation, where they could use the high test scores of the gifted kids to prop up a continually failing school. The school and neighborhood had all the hallmarks of a poverty-stricken American neighborhood, drugs and violent crime among them. I saw drug deals, stabbings, shootings, arrests, school lockdowns, SWAT raids. When police came to talk to classes or to the school at large, they were booed, things were thrown at them, they were disrespected, distrusted. Once I graduated to high school, the situation flipped again. I was at Mt Tabor, by all accounts a very diverse high school, but back in the nicer part of town. For a school 3X as large as the middle school, there were 1/10th as many cops. Ours wasn't a city cop there, he was a "school resource officer" or a "rent-a-cop." He didn't get a ton of respect, but he also didn't get a lot of grief. He was fat and harmless, and instead of being actively hated, he was harmlessly teased. Where there was almost the same amount of drug use as the neighborhood in my middle school (albeit more prescription drugs, coke, weed), there was basically none of the violence. There was none of the institutional poverty, none of the racial tension, none of the distrust of the police.

This stuff splits very seriously among socioeconomic and racial lines. There's too much history at stake here.