http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8v-Pd62hq0w
It goes without saying that my efforts to avoid more Ferguson commentary is a failure. The race-baiters, grievance-mongers, police-haters and cynical Democratic-base-goosers are engaging in an orgy of self-righteousness, aided by an uncritical news media and encouraged by public sentimentality and ignorance. This is horrible for the rule of law, law enforcement, race relations and the nation, but to close our eyes and repress our gag reflexes, hoping it will go away, is cowardly and irresponsible. This stuff is dangerous, to be blunt. Lies always are, and public policy built on lies will always result in harm and distrust.
The onslaught is much more powerful than I expected: several member of the Congressional Black Caucus actually brought the false “Hands up! Don’t shoot!” rallying cry onto the House floor yesterday. Charlie Rangel is using the lawful shooting of Brown based not on race but on his conduct alone to re-open demands for slavery reparations.
In this context, I’m entering this video blog by John Randolph, a.k.a “Jay Smooth,” a popular and outspoken hip-hop DJ with pretenses of social relevance. It is genuine mind-poison. “Smooth” is sure smooth: he’s articulate, facile, a good actor, attractive, and facts mean absolutely nothing to him. Here he spins a persuasive justification for the Ferguson riots based on a series of demonstrably false premises: garbage in, but insidiously persuasive garbage out, especially to his audience. It begins with an apparently popular tweet he made before the grand jury results came out, which said, “The fundamental danger of a non-indictment is not more riots, but more Darren Wilsons.” If Wilson was not indicted for lawfully protecting himself from a subject who attacked him, more police will protect themselves from attacking suspects? The tweet is cleverly misleading: it assumes, without stating, that a racist cop murdered a black youth, and the video blog proceeds accordingly from that assertion. The truth is that the danger of having an indictment would be to allow mob justice and vengeance to preempt due process and fairness. Not surprisingly, Smooth later reveals that he sent essentially the same dishonest tweet about the George Zimmerman trial.
I could write at length about the myriad deceptions in Smooth’s essay, but it literally speaks for itself. Sadly, I found this on Barry Deutsch’s website, where it was used approvingly to launch an open thread on Ferguson. It’s sad, because Barry is smarter than this, but he is a hard left true believer, and bias makes us stupid. Eventually this episode will undermine the credibility of advocates for legitimate, needed reforms. The protestors who would destroy Officer Wilson and the whole police profession with it have demonstrated the willingness to adopt fraudulent narratives to support their objectives: who will now be able to tell when their arguments are honest, if they ever are? As Rich Lowry wrote in P0litico,
When the facts didn’t back their narrative, they dismissed the facts and retreated into paranoid suspicion of the legal system. It apparently required more intellectual effort than almost any liberal could muster even to say, “You know, I believe policing in America is deeply unjust, but in this case the evidence is murky and not enough to indict, let alone convict anyone of a crime.”
No, instead they, and “they” includes Mr. Smooth, continue to declare Officer Wilson a symbol of all police and of a racist justice system, who shot down a gentle,”unarmed black teenager” as he surrendered with hands raised, who was not put on trial for murder because he is white, because the justice system is rigged, and because young black men aren’t “valued” by society.
______________________
Pointer: Alas!
Ethics Alarms 
Until trust, respect and affection are known to be present on both sides by both sides, not much sense will be talked about this affair. By either side. Reason can’t deliberate.with certainty during this level of emotional noise.
In other words, you can’t get there from here. That is why the idiot who didn’t get dead Brown out of the street for 4 hours is the real villain in this mess. It’s not a crime, it’s just so outrageously provocative. I’m pretty sure that it wasn’t even intentional disrespect, but its hard to recover trust after something like this. On the other side, why would anyone who believes in honesty and facts trust Jay Smooth
So, who was supposed to get him out of the street? Was the medical examiner tied up? Sometimes, the medical examiner is required to sign off before the body can be moved. It may not have been the fault of the police.
It was the fault of anyone with any authority who didn’t think, “Holy crap. we have to process this and get the body out of the street fast, or there will be big trouble.” $ hours is inexcusable.
This raised the question: What is the average time from shooting to body removal in these types of cases? 4 hours might seem like a long time, but is it significantly longer than average? Would 2 hours be long enough to process the scene accurately?
Doesn’t matter whose fault it was, it was a bad idea. Might even say stupid, and certainly provocative, whether intentionally or not.
I had my husband ask a former colleague, a homicide investigator, how long a typical crime scene takes to process. His answer was this: “Depends. But you don’t move a body until overall pictures have been taken by CSI and the ME/Coroner responds – could be 2-6 hours. If it’s inside, out of public view, could be even longer. The body is a piece of evidence and we need to make sure everything is documented to aid in the investigation.”
And that’s for a typical scene.
Yes, but other considerations can’t be ignored either. In this case, you 1) tell the ME to get his ass there ASAP, if he has to ride a fire truck, siren blazing 2) You put up some kind of barricade around the scene so it isn’t so provocative; 3) You make every effort to show that you are moving it along, and 4) you anticipate the issue and immediately get out in public and explain why a the process took as long as it did.
I had no idea that a 4 hour period wasn’t reasonable, but in this special case, that display of what the community took as disrespect really drove the anger
I completely get that that’s what the community saw. I imagine (and this is totally my guess) is that what the police understood was that this was NOT a typical homicide scene. This was a police shooting and they knew that they had better dot their “i”s and cross their “t”s and account, and photograph, and record, every single scrap of evidence there was because once that body was moved.. it was over. What may have been an excruciating attention to detail on their part was read as disrespect by those watching from the sidelines.
Here’ something else: When a cop gets out of his car, after he’s pulled someone over say, he often adjusts his gun belt. This is often interpreted as a sign of aggression on the part of the person pulled over. In reality, that gun belt weighs 12-15 pounds (cops don about 20-22 pounds of gear) and the belt shifts as they ride in their vehicle. They are simply readjusting that weight for comfort as they exit the vehicle. I mention this because what we as civilians see cops doing, and make assumptions about what they are doing, is not always accurate about what is really taking place.
My curent experimental bullshit discriminator is to ask the person why as a moral agent they did or sid something which they knew would offfend/bait provoke you. If he answers readily and fully, with obvious joy tha someone ffrom an opposing position asked, you know you have a good opponent (who you can respect, trust and like and vice versa). Other wise you have no reason to talk to him (for example if he has to think hard it means he only considered selfiish needs and does not respect you). Try the test on yourself, why did you choose the fairly full on language that you diid in this post? You see? For you it’s easy, but for Fox News? …..
Why? Because pussy-footing around utter offal and social poison lets it off the hook, that’s why. There are no two sides to this part of the issue. The death of Mike Brown had nothing to do with race. Someone is provoked because I call an irresponsible, ignorant lie that should not be sent into the public discourse to inflame and deceive others is an irresponsible, ignorant lie that should not be sent into the public discourse to inflame and deceive others? Too bad. The point is that they need to stop it, and understand why what they are doing is flat out wrong, indefensible, wrong.
Which would get you a 10/10 honesty and likeableness rating on the Bruceometer. As would a similarly full and instantaneous reply from DJ Smooth sayng ‘because I want you to feel pain you overbred lard ass whitemuthafucka, you want facts, so I lie, you want reason I give you crazy, you want polite and nice – I give you raphate, Wrong? Talkin’ to me from your padded chair, mutha – I show you wrong – eat fist!’ Again a 10/10 score..
Then we’d only have mutual respect to build. But honesty is the key. And you can tell by the speed and certitude of the response if it’s a fib. Logical lying in real time is expensive on brain load, the effort shows.
As for respect, the only reason too discuss the matter is that neitther of you and DJ Smooth actually knows what is wrong while decent people hold a different view.
As for progress the nature of the question ‘why as a moral agent did you give deliberate offfence’ puts the subject to an abstract level away from the problem and on to the relationship. I’m not saying you should accept the argument I put in DJ Smooths mouth as a pure appeal to emmotion, but the guy who makes it can be respected and a parting arranged on some good terms.
Both sides? You talk as if there is some murky or questionable information in regards to this situation, there isn’t. You comment as if an equal number and quality of lunacy is occurring, there isn’t. This isn’t a political debate of ideas or interpretation of law, it is a flagrant lie some are championing in an effort to convince stupid people that white people in positions of power are using that power to protect other whites so they can go kill black people. I suspect many have to have a psychological disorder and they are getting off on building this dialog which is stoking all the unrest. They want to be part of civil rights history, even if they have to create a chapter based on a lie. There are reasonable people who wanted to use the attention this incident garnered to talk about police militarization, most have gotten of the train by this point and we are left with those who ignore the facts and lie in an effort to fuel unrest.
I hate conspiracy theories but I just saw one where it was talking about neutralizing moderate and conservative black leaders such as Bill Cosby and Thomas Sowell before the expected grand jury return, yes Cosby is an unethical leader but as can be seen by the support he receives still one who has some relevance.
The bottom line is it is unethical to distort or lie about this incident to further the unrest, no leader should do it regardless if their cause is a worthy one or not. Yet again society is under attack by a primarily progressive minority utilizing unethical tactics.
Am I just massively confused, or are there people in the comments section of that post arguing that the ‘probable cause’ standard employed by the grand jury is too low, whereas if the standard had been ‘a preponderance of the evidence’ or ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ they would have been MORE likely to return an indictment? What??? My brain hurts.
“Charlie Rangel is using the lawful shooting of Brown based not on race but on his conduct alone to re-open demands for slavery reparations.”
Reparations. Ugh.
Many moons ago, a black friend of mine mentioned the need for reparations. I asked him why on earth should I be held accountable for something I didn’t do on the assumed basis that my ancestors did the thing (they did not, by the way, as part of the family in the mid 1800s was dirt poor migrant workers in Louisiana with a partial indian background who barely survived and were often in a murky area in regards to the law, another part of the family migrated from Illinois to Arkansas to Texas for the opportunities provided by the vastly unsettled Texas, one of whom actually went to medical school, nearly completed by the outbreak of the Civil War and was drafted out of medical school for his knowledge to be a Regimental assistant surgeon…the experience of which caused him to never go back to practice and essentially become a barely surviving farmer who almost never spoke again. Another component of the family, from Virginia, deeply religious, found themselves fighting on both sides of the war). I asked him why on earth should he be the benefactor of any compensation when he was not even the victim of the crime just the assumed basis that his ancestors happened to be slaves (they were).
His reply: “Well, you have inherited from your ancestors material possession that ultimately was taken from my ancestors denying me that inheritance”. A) No I didn’t (dirt poor if you’ll recall). B) No you weren’t.
By that logic (and it is only logic if we stop looking at people as individuals but as groups), then actual compensation for the original crime – taking that group away from Africa against their will – would be to return them to Africa. Actual compensation for the subsequent crime would be to restore just enough material wealth to compensate for an estimated loss.
He didn’t like that idea.