Forums → WEPR → Ferguson, Missouri protests

He has at least once committed theft and criminal battery and, according to news reports, he also "dabbled" in drugs and alcohol and made several rap songs with "vulgar lyrics." I believe he has a rap sheet as well.

Isn't it ironic that Brown is the perfect example of the black stereotype

The protest has just erupted into a furious ball of blatant ignorance, hysterical doom-saying, and self righteous reverse racism of whites. Just gets irritating.

Protesters threatened to shut down I-70 (major highway in St. Louis County) today

I'll start with a disclaimer: I spend a lot of time driving so I get all my news from NPR, with all the biases that entails. I will not cite any sources here because I don't care enough to look up the web articles that correspond to the various programs I've listened too, especially considering I listened to them across many states. End disclaimer.

There are a few things being said here that I do not agree with. First, it was brought up that Michael Brown committed a theft before being shot. The only relevance of this fact (and this was rightly brought up) is that it could provide motive for Brown to attack the police officer if he (Brown) thought that the officer was going to arrest him. But other people seem to be stating that Brown was a bad person. Why does that matter? The police cannot dispense justice. This is not Judge Dredd or Dicksonian London where the cops can just kill thieves. If Brown was an absolutely terrible person, if he was running a child slavery ring (for example), it still is not okay for a cop to just shoot a person. There has to be some sort of serious threat. Witnesses say that that was not the case in this shooting, but the investigation is ongoing.

I ask a question: do you guys think that racial aggression actually exists within the police force in the U.S. on a scale that would be noticeable to minorities? I think that it does. You look at the area of the shooting, and you see that the police force is almost entirely white even though a large part of the population is black. You see a far greater proportion of black people are pulled over at traffic checks and yet a far greater proportion of white people are actually charged with committing a crime. You see that when cops are made to wear cameras while on duty that charges of police aggression drop by something like 95 percent. When you take all of this together it seems like the most reasonable conclusion is that the police are unfairly targeting black people.

This doesn't mean that Brown's death was a murder.

It does, however, make the protester's haste seem more reasonable. If I had lived under these conditions it would be much easier to believe that the police officer had just up and shot Brown. And why wait for the system to work out what has actually happened when you have no trust in the system in the first place?

I think that protests like this happen because there is actual, justifiable mistrust of the police system by a large part of the population. I think that it is wrong to blame something like this on white guilt or reverse racism.

But other people seem to be stating that Brown was a bad person

Witnesses say that that was not the case in this shooting,

It does, however, make the protester's haste seem more reasonable

Some idiots got themselves arrested trying to block Interstate-70. I love how these protesters are, in a sense, trying to hold innocent commuters hostage as a means of getting what they want. Justice? Hardly.

There's a lot of focus on the fact that most of the officers in Furgeson are white, despite Furgeson being a mostly black community. I have to wonder how many of those officers actually live in Furgeson, because Furgeson is a ghetto.

Their message was sent and received.
Now they're losing the little respect they got from the public.
It's actually very annoying and they will lose many businessmen in the city.
Later they will whine about the lack of stores in their town!