Rioting in St Louis

[GoIrish41]

Labor unions.

Thanks Obama.

 

[IrishLion]

I have no idea how the line you bolded and this thought have anything to do with one another.

Both are cases of stereotyping.

 

[wizards8507]

Thanks Obama.

I was being serious. Abusive police officers are protected by their unions the same way bad teachers are.

 

[BobbyMac]

Here's a cop who's being charged for crossing the line.

Connecticut police officer who stomped on suspect's head facing 10 years prison | Mail Online

You just never heard about it because it was a black cop... along with a white cop and a hispanic cop beating a hispanic perp.

Didn't fit Rev's Al and Jesse's criteria for outrage and justice.

Break the law, pay the price. Regardless of who you are or what you look like.

.

 

[JTLA]

Surely we can agree that police forces should get rid of the ones who are pre-disposed to use excessive violence when it is not called for. Why are these cases so often swept under the rug and the cops who do bad things not thrown off the force or into prison?

We absolutely agree. But, police are under constant scrutiny and review. Police who receive repeated complaints are penalized, suspended, and fired all the time. If for no other reason than avoiding lawsuits, police forces want to get rid of excessive violence for the same reason your company wants to get rid of sexual harassment. Lawsuits. It's also the same reason there might be an appearance of defending their actions, because the have to limit liability in court.

And don't forget, when people get those huge settlements against police, we are the ones paying for them.

 

[kmoose]

I have no idea how the line you bolded and this thought have anything to do with one another.

It's pretty simple, actually. Because someone got choked to death on camera in some other city, you think it is perfectly natural for people to be skeptical of the police's use of force. However, if people see images of poor young black men engaging in crime on an almost daily basis, and those people voice skepticism of whether or not a young black man involved in a use of force situation was really as innocent as his friends, neighbors, and peers claim; then that person is just a racist. And if he is white, then he is also an ignorant racist.

 

[GoIrish41]

We absolutely agree. But, police are under constant scrutiny and review.

I think black teens are, too. Maybe they could come to some arrangement that would work for everyone.

 

[GoIrish41]

It's pretty simple, actually. Because someone got choked to death on camera in some other city, you think it is perfectly natural for people to be skeptical of the police's use of force. However, if people see images of poor young black men engaging in crime on an almost daily basis, and those people voice skepticism of whether or not a young black man involved in a use of force situation was really as innocent as his friends, neighbors, and peers claim; then that person is just a racist. And if he is white, then he is also an ignorant racist.

No, I don't think because one guy got choked to death on camera in some other city that it is natural for people to be skeptical of the police's use of force. I think it because shit like this happens all the time. I know that in my lifetime I have seen far too many cases of police brutality reported to believe that it is just folks being folks. It is a problem and the people who it is the biggest problem for are the young black males who under the constant watchful eye of big brother, who seems to be just waiting to pounce at any trasngression. Walking down the middle of the street? Selling loose cigarettes? Are these now capital offenses? ... Is it only in poor black communities? This constant cascade of imagery of young poor black kids committing crime (for the record, I do not see this nearly as often as you do) may be the result of a deeper problem -- institutional poverty and racism that fill our prisons with young black men for committing the same crimes as young white men do at a 10 to 1 ratio. That should make the skin of every American crawl. I'm not calling any individual on here or anywhere else a racist -- I'm saying it is built into our society.

 

[irishog77]

What? Where did you hear that rape, assault, and murder ensued. I'll give you that some stealing occurred, much of it was for survival, but that other stuff outside of normal statistical crime is not at all factual. (Oddly enough the two biggest outright murder cases from the aftermath of Katrina have resulted in the actions of several cops coming to light and the subsequent forfeiture of their freedom.)

"In the days after the hurricane when the city began to flood, tens of thousands of mostly poor black New Orleanians found themselves without food, water, or shelter, and were forced to depend on local and federal authorities to provide their basic needs. When authorities failed to provide these, New Orleanians were admonished for their positions to varying extents. On television, commentators wondered why these people did not just leave when they were told. On the pages of national newspapers, headlines announced “The Looting Instinct,” 1 “Thugs Rein of Terror,” 2 and the like. For the first days after the hurricane, news outlets focused on what we now know to be greatly exaggerated individual acts of crime and violence (Dwyer and Drew 2005). This illustrates a feature of the American media more generally. During the 1990’s, nationwide news coverage of homicide more than quadrupled while homicide rates declined by 33%. In the entertainment industry, television characters on prime time are murdered approximately eleven times as often as real people in the United States (Becket and Sanson 2004). Reality TV-shows such as “Cops” and “Law and Order,” and the violent film industry similarly inflate the prevalence of violent crime in the United States."

-The Criminalization of New Orleanians in Katrina’s Wake in Perspectives from the Social Sciences
By Sarah Kaufman
Published on: Jun 11, 2006

Where did I hear it? From friends and family members that lived down there and/or in Houston, Memphis, and Ft Smith, AR. I personally was in Ft Smith and Memphis both frequently in the aftermath. I also read about it. And watched about it in the news. Yes, some stories were retracted and later changed. And likewise, some of the statistics were later changed that, on the surface, seemed to indicate that the crime was not out of the norm for New Orleans...except total population for New Orleans and surrounding areas pre-Katrina was often used, instead of the reduced population during and post-Katrina. Obviously giving an accurate population count was difficult, but the population was reduced significantly.

I'm pretty sure cities like Houston, Memphis, Ft. Smith and others that took on Katrina evacuees saw rises in crime, both violent and non-violent. While that may be neither here nor there, it stands to reason that New Orleans itself would see an increase of crime as well.

Strangely enough, the 2 first hand reports of rape relayed to me from people I personally know stuck in New Orleans were both male-on-male. That doesn't have much to do with the conversation at hand, I just thought it was strange.

I do remember reading this NPR story about rape/sexual assault a couple years back.

More Stories Emerge of Rapes in Post-Katrina Chaos : NPR

 

[irishog77]

You are part of a long tradition of talking about black people as subhuman. Nothing more American than your post - never expected to see this stuff on a Notre Dame football site, but I've learned a lot here.

And you are part of a long tradition of not only assuming I was talking about black people, but you yourself of then assuming the worst of black people.

Do black people have some monopoly on acting as sub-human animals that I am not aware of?

 

[Redbar]

Where did I hear it? From friends and family members that lived down there and/or in Houston, Memphis, and Ft Smith, AR. I personally was in Ft Smith and Memphis both frequently in the aftermath. I also read about it. And watched about it in the news. Yes, some stories were retracted and later changed. And likewise, some of the statistics were later changed that, on the surface, seemed to indicate that the crime was not out of the norm for New Orleans...except total population for New Orleans and surrounding areas pre-Katrina was often used, instead of the reduced population during and post-Katrina. Obviously giving an accurate population count was difficult, but the population was reduced significantly.

I'm pretty sure cities like Houston, Memphis, Ft. Smith and others that took on Katrina evacuees saw rises in crime, both violent and non-violent. While that may be neither here nor there, it stands to reason that New Orleans itself would see an increase of crime as well.

Strangely enough, the 2 first hand reports of rape relayed to me from people I personally know stuck in New Orleans were both male-on-male. That doesn't have much to do with the conversation at hand, I just thought it was strange.

I do remember reading this NPR story about rape/sexual assault a couple years back.

More Stories Emerge of Rapes in Post-Katrina Chaos : NPR

Hog I live in Baton Rouge, but I am from New Orleans, most of my family is still in New Orleans or the surrounding areas. I have exactly 6 cousins who are firemen and a couple more distant relatives that are also firemen, my best friend is a policeman, many of their families spent the storm and the next few weeks with me in Baton Rouge, while these guys were considered essential personnel and could not leave the city. Before I posted this I spoke to one of my cousins whose two brothers are also firemen, and my friend who is the cop. They both said essentially the same thing. My cop friend says in the aftermath of the storm there was virtually NO CRIME as you described. There were zero actual homicides, and zero rapes reported to the New Orleans Police Department. He is in the first district that covered the convention center and he said they also got reports of rapes there, reports of arson, but when they arrived there was none of that. People were in shock were beaten down and saying anything to try to get out of there. In actuality in the immediate aftermath there was virtually no major crime. Your statement that, "Sure, I'm all for any excuse to go rob people. My favorite part of Hurricane Katrina was the raping, assaulting, stealing, and murdering that ensued." Is completely false. The city had National Guard, Marine sniper's, feds, and local law enforcement, in addition to private security firms. It was the safest city in America. There was some initial looting or some might say scavenging, did some of it exceed immediate needs? Of course. Were there some assaults? Of course. Was there widespread opportunistic violent crime? No.

My cousins that are firemen are all spread out in different ladders around town they were sent out on search and rescue for weeks after the storm. They also describe desperate people trying to do what they could to get out of those conditions or survive in them. There were small instances of theft and looting but the conditions were by and large so dismal that there was more a sense of charity and concern than lawlessness.

I personally had to get to work on Friday, four days after the storm, I went right through the city, which was virtually impossible to do at that time, I can tell you that the city was buttoned down pretty tight. You had law enforcement and refugees. There were not large groups of people just parading around town.

If your friends and family were not trapped in the city, watching things first hand then they were seeing the same news reports as everyone else. Even the essential personnel was responding to reports they were hearing on the news, yet when they got boots on the ground or boats in the water it just wasn't as reported. If those two guys were indeed raped they did not report it to the NOPD, or maybe this stuff started to happen after the city was dry and people started to come back.

Your argument later about the crime rate once people started to move back into the city, or the crime rate in Houston, Atlanta, or wherever mass amounts of people relocated is more accurate, but that obviously is not what you were initially referring to when you made your first statement. No one is going to deny that New Orleans is a rough place, but the characterization of it by the media, following Katrina was another kind of damage that the storm brought on. Statements like yours show that in many ways those damages are more insidious and more lasting.

 

[peoriairish]

There was a chart going around Twitter over the past 24 hours that showed the traffic stops in Ferguson. People were losing their minds about it making assumptions that the police are profiling and that the tension between the police in the community is boiling over. Here is an interesting article that proves otherwise.

Police stops in Ferguson: What are the numbers? : News


**Found the tweet

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p>In <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Ferguson?src=hash">#Ferguson</a> out of 5384 traffic stops, 4632 were black drivers. Now tell me blk ppl aren't targeted. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/MikeBrown?src=hash">#MikeBrown</a> <a href="http://t.co/PFbwPn4ORd">pic.twitter.com/PFbwPn4ORd</a></p>— Hazel M Williams (@BeinMrsWilliams) <a href="https://twitter.com/BeinMrsWilliams/statuses/499328023137910784">August 12, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

 

[Booslum31]

I was being serious. Abusive police officers are protected by their unions the same way bad teachers are.

I agree!

 

[peoriairish]

And stlnd.... The literally torched the QT to the ground. The new stations filmed youths looting wheels and tires that cost thousands of dollars each not to mention the damage to the store itself. Weave shop and a Hibbet Sports were all ransacked. This wasn't some small thing. There was irreversible damage to many business that took a chance by bringing their business to that neighborhood in order to bring commerce and jobs to am otherwise sinking and poverty stricken community.

 

[MJ12666]

No, I don't think because one guy got choked to death on camera in some other city that it is natural for people to be skeptical of the police's use of force. I think it because shit like this happens all the time. I know that in my lifetime I have seen far too many cases of police brutality reported to believe that it is just folks being folks. It is a problem and the people who it is the biggest problem for are the young black males who under the constant watchful eye of big brother, who seems to be just waiting to pounce at any trasngression. Walking down the middle of the street? Selling loose cigarettes? Are these now capital offenses? ... Is it only in poor black communities? This constant cascade of imagery of young poor black kids committing crime (for the record, I do not see this nearly as often as you do) may be the result of a deeper problem -- institutional poverty and racism that fill our prisons with young black men for committing the same crimes as young white men do at a 10 to 1 ratio. That should make the skin of every American crawl. I'm not calling any individual on here or anywhere else a racist -- I'm saying it is built into our society.

I will agree with you regarding the police. I am white and I do not trust them myself. I give them a wide berth and have no desire for any interaction. However, we differ regarding your statement that the problem is "institutional poverty and racism". We as a society (at least in NJ) spend way more on public education in inner cities then the suburbs; and every company that I have worked for has made extraordinary attempts to recruit and promote minorities. I have had many friends at work who happen to be minorities and have never experienced any racial tension. If minorities decide not to take advantage of the educational and economic opportunities presented to them, they really only have themselves to blame.

 

[NCDomer]

There was a chart going around Twitter over the past 24 hours that showed the traffic stops in Ferguson. People were losing their minds about it making assumptions that the police are profiling and that the tension between the police in the community is boiling over. Here is an interesting article that proves otherwise.

Police stops in Ferguson: What are the numbers? : News


**Found the tweet

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p>In <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Ferguson?src=hash">#Ferguson</a> out of 5384 traffic stops, 4632 were black drivers. Now tell me blk ppl aren't targeted. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/MikeBrown?src=hash">#MikeBrown</a> <a href="http://t.co/PFbwPn4ORd">pic.twitter.com/PFbwPn4ORd</a></p>— Hazel M Williams (@BeinMrsWilliams) <a href="https://twitter.com/BeinMrsWilliams/statuses/499328023137910784">August 12, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Without knowing the actual basis for the stop makes those numbers insignificant as they relate to the "black people are targeted" claim.

Ferguson is predominantly black at 67% being black and 29% being white based on the 2010 census. (Wiki cite). Blacks accounted for 86% of the traffic stops there while just 12% for whites, so blacks were stopped at a higher rate even when factoring in the demographics.

Additionally, for all we know, 70% of both blacks and whites did something to warrant the traffic stop. If someone swerves at night, have a blown taillight, etc.; their odds of being stopped increase.

 

[Voltaire]

To be fair, who doesn't love free stuff?

 

[peoriairish]

Without knowing the actual basis for the stop makes those numbers insignificant as they relate to the "black people are targeted" claim.

Ferguson is predominantly black at 67% being black and 29% being white based on the 2010 census. (Wiki cite). Blacks accounted for 86% of the traffic stops there while just 12% for whites, so blacks were stopped at a higher rate even when factoring in the demographics.

Additionally, for all we know, 70% of both blacks and whites did something to warrant the traffic stop. If someone swerves at night, have a blown taillight, etc.; their odds of being stopped increase.

Right. But something that the STLToday article mentions is that the white residents in Ferguson are statistically higher in age. As we know, the older you get, the less likely to do anything to require a traffic stop. According to the statistics, Ferguson is better than average for the state of Missouri when it comes to proportion of black residents involved in a traffics stop and subsequently searched.

 

[irishog77]

Your statement that, "Sure, I'm all for any excuse to go rob people. My favorite part of Hurricane Katrina was the raping, assaulting, stealing, and murdering that ensued." Is completely false./QUOTE]

Completely false, huh?

 

[connect the dots]

Sucks for the family of the boy who was killed but this is freaking bull shit.

32 arrested, 2 officers injured after riots, looting, gunfire and chaos in Ferguson | KMOV.com St. Louis

I thank you for creating this thread, and bringing your ignorance, and the high number of uninformed posters that frequent Irish Envy, to my attention.

 

[NoJusticeNoPeace]

America Is Not For Black People

The United States of America is not for black people. We know this, and then we put it out of our minds, and then something happens to remind us. Saturday, in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Mo., something like that happened: An unarmed 18-year-old black man was executed by police in broad daylight.

By now, what's happening in Ferguson is about so many second-order issues—systemic racism, the militarization of police work, and how citizens can redress grievances, among other things—that it's worth remembering what actually happened here.

Michael Brown was walking down the middle of the street in Ferguson's Canfield Green apartment complex around noon on Saturday with his friend Dorin Johnson when the two were approached by a police officer in a police truck. The officer exchanged words with the boys. The officer attempted to get out of his car. At this point, two narratives split.

According to the still-unnamed officer, one of the two boys shoved him back into the vehicle and then wrestled for his sidearm, discharging one shot into the cabin. The two ran, and the police officer once again stepped from his vehicle and shot at the fleeing teenagers multiple times, killing Brown.

According to Johnson and other eye witnesses, however, the cop ordered the friends to "get the fuck on the sidewalk," but the teenagers said they had almost reached their destination. That's when the officer slammed his door open so hard that it bounced off of Brown and closed again. The cop then reached out and grabbed Brown by the neck, then by the shirt.

"I'm gonna shoot you," the cop said.

The cop shot him once, but Brown pulled away, and the pair were still able to run away together. The officer fired again. Johnson ducked behind a car, but the cop's second shot caused Brown to stop about 35 feet away from the cruiser, still within touching distance of Johnson. Multiple witnesses say this is when Brown raised his hands in the air to show he was unarmed. Johnson remembered that Brown also said, "I don't have a gun, stop shooting!" The officer then shot him dead.

After that, the narratives dovetail again. Brown was left where he died, baking in the Missouri heat for hours, before he was removed by authorities. The officer was placed on paid administrative leave.


Michael Brown is not special. In all its specificity, the 18-year old's death remains just the most recent example of police officers killing unarmed black men.

Part of the reason we're seeing so many black men killed is that police officers are now best understood less as members of communities, dedicated to keeping peace within them, than as domestic soldiers. The drug war has long functioned as a full-employment act for arms dealers looking to sell every town and village in the country on the need for military-grade hardware, and 9/11 made things vastly worse, with local police departments throughout America grabbing for cash to better defend against any and all terrorist threats. War had reached our shores, we were told, and police officers needed weaponry to fight it.

Officers have tanks now. They have drones. They have automatic rifles, and planes, and helicopters, and they go through military-style bootcamp training. It's a constant complaint from what remains of this country's civil liberties caucus. Just this last June, the ACLU issued a report on how police departments now possess arsenals in need of a use. Few paid attention, as usually happens.

The worst part of outfitting our police officers as soldiers has been psychological. Give a man access to drones, tanks, and body armor, and he'll reasonably think that his job isn't simply to maintain peace, but to eradicate danger. Instead of protecting and serving, police are searching and destroying.

If officers are soldiers, it follows that the neighborhoods they patrol are battlefields. And if they're working battlefields, it follows that the population is the enemy. And because of correlations, rooted in historical injustice, between crime and income and income and race, the enemy population will consist largely of people of color, and especially of black men. Throughout the country, police officers are capturing, imprisoning, and killing black males at a ridiculous clip, waging a very literal war on people like Michael Brown.

"There's a long history of racial tension and misunderstanding in this region," St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Aisha Sultan told me over the phone yesterday. "Especially on the north side."

This sort of thing—especially on the north side—is what gets glossed over a little too easily when we try to fit a particular incident into a broader narrative. Ferguson is a small town of 21,000, mostly white until the 1960s, when whites fled anywhere but where they were. Today, Ferguson, which is a bit north of St. Louis is mostly black; Ferguson and St. Louis County police are mostly white. That fits a metropolitan area flanked by two rivers that divide neighborhoods and regions by race, the sixth-most segregated in the United States.

To people, like me, from the coast—I'm from Maryland—St. Louis can seem like a blank in the the middle of the country, a place where people and even ideas get stuck on the way to somewhere better, or at least somewhere else. But St. Louis is like New York (the fourth-most segregated metro in America), or Los Angeles, or Miami, or Dallas, or Washington, DC, only more so. Far from a blank, St. Louis is often regarded as the most American of America's cities.

"It is a microcosm of the rest of the country," Sultan said. "If this can happen in St. Louis, it can happen in any city."

It does. On August 5 in Beavercreek, Ohio, 22-year-old John Crawford was killed in a Walmart when a toy gun he had picked up from inside the store was apparently mistaken for a real gun. LeeCee Johnson, who had two children with Crawford, said that she was on the phone with him, and that his last words before she heard gunshots from police officers were, "It's not real."

On July 17 in Staten Island, New York, 43-year-old Eric Garner, a well-known presence in the neighborhood who sold illicit cigarettes and kept an eye on the block, was killed after breaking up a fight when NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo used an illegal chokehold on the asthmatic man. "I can't breathe," he said, before he died. "I can't breathe."

There was Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla., and Oscar Grant in Oakland, Calif., and so many more. Michael Brown's death wasn't shocking at all. All over the country, unarmed black men are being killed by the very people who have sworn to protect them, as has been going on for a very long time now. It would appear that cops are not for black people, either.

After Brown's death came his demonization. First, we heard that Brown had run for stealing candy from a store. Then we were bombarded with a photo of Brown in a red Nike tank top on a stoop, posing for the camera.

This photo, in which Brown was flashing a "gang sign"—a peace sign, actually—was presented as proof that the teenager was a thug; his friends and family now not only have to work through their grief, but against a posthumous slur campaign. Johnson described his friend in an MSNBC interview as cool and quiet. Brown's uncle, Bernard Ewings, said in a Sunday interview that Brown loved music. Brown's mother, Leslie McSpadden, said that he was funny and could make people laugh. He graduated from high school in the spring, and was headed to college to pursue a career in heating and cooling engineering. Monday would have been his first day.

By all accounts, Brown was One Of The Good Ones. But laying all this out, explaining all the ways in which he didn't deserve to die like a dog in the street, is in itself disgraceful. Arguing whether Brown was a good kid or not is functionally arguing over whether he specifically deserved to die, a way of acknowledging that some black men ought be executed in the street.

To even acknowledge this line of debate is to start a larger argument about the worth, the very personhood, of a black man in America. It's to engage in a cost-benefit analysis, weigh probabilities, and gauge the precise odds that Brown's life was worth nothing against the threat he posed to the life of the man who killed him. It's to deny that there are structural reasons why Brown was shot dead while James Eagan Holmes—who on July 20, 2012, walked into a movie theater and fired rounds into an audience, killing 12 and wounding 70 more—was taken alive.

To ascribe this entirely to contempt for black men is to miss an essential variable though—a very real, American fear of them. They—we—are inexplicably seen as a millions-strong army of potential killers, capable and cold enough that any single one could be a threat to a trained police officer in a bulletproof vest. There are reasons why white gun's rights activists can walk into a Chipotle restaurant with assault rifles and be seen as gauche nuisances while unarmed black men are killed for reaching for their wallets or cell phones, or carrying children's toys. Guns aren't for black people, either.

Sunday was Brown's vigil, and several hundred people congregated in Ferguson. They began to march toward the Ferguson police station in protest. Police met them in full riot gear, with rifles, shields, helmets, dogs, and gas masks. Protesters yelled, "No justice, no peace!" They called the police murderers. They raised their hands in mock surrender, saying, "Don't shoot, I'm unarmed."

And then the protest turned violent, as some citizens began to break into, loot, and set fire to storefronts in their own community.

Police officers shot tear gas and rubber bullets. Thirty-two people were arrested that night. Two policemen were injured. There was nothing easy to make of it. It was a senseless and counterproductive attack on the community; it was the grief-stricken flailing of people who knew it could have been them, or their friends, or their brothers or sons. Whatever it was, it was met with force.

On Monday morning, Sultan went back to Ferguson, where she witnessed citizens cleaning up debris from the night before. Some were shocked by the violence; others said that they'd been backed against a wall, forced into necessary evil. Sultan interviewed an 11-year-old boy about the rioting. "I don't know why they hate us so much," he said. "It seems like police are about to go to war with the people."

On Monday night, police again took the streets as demonstrators again marched in nonviolent protest, holding their hands high. Police again fired rubber bullets and tear gas, and again blocked off the main streets, not allowing anyone in or out. Police were photographed sweeping into side streets, and pointing guns over fences into backyards. It spilled over into today. They ran helicopters and drones over all of it; they shot tear gas; they ran up on citizens with guns drawn.

"Return to your homes," they yelled over megaphones.

"This is our home," the people of Ferguson answered. There wasn't—there isn't—much more to say.

 

[NoJusticeNoPeace]

Without knowing the actual basis for the stop makes those numbers insignificant as they relate to the "black people are targeted" claim.

Ferguson is predominantly black at 67% being black and 29% being white based on the 2010 census. (Wiki cite). Blacks accounted for 86% of the traffic stops there while just 12% for whites, so blacks were stopped at a higher rate even when factoring in the demographics.

Additionally, for all we know, 70% of both blacks and whites did something to warrant the traffic stop. If someone swerves at night, have a blown taillight, etc.; their odds of being stopped increase.

A higher percentage of white people searched are found with contraband than black people in Ferguson as well.

 

[Rack Em]

I swear I opened the thread about the riots in Ferguson, not the politics thread.












Jesus Christ Superstar guess I'll just read the local news.

 

[calvegas04]

well damn everyone and their mom is an expert on the city of Ferguson now.

 

[stlnd01]

And stlnd.... The literally torched the QT to the ground. The new stations filmed youths looting wheels and tires that cost thousands of dollars each not to mention the damage to the store itself. Weave shop and a Hibbet Sports were all ransacked. This wasn't some small thing. There was irreversible damage to many business that took a chance by bringing their business to that neighborhood in order to bring commerce and jobs to am otherwise sinking and poverty stricken community.

OK. More than a couple - but not that really that many - businesses were looted. We all agree looting is stupid and wrong. But QuikTrip wasn't "taking a chance on" Ferguson when it opened a gas station on a busy thoroughfare. Neither were the weave shop or the chop suey joint. A half-mile up the road there's a giant Target-anchored shopping plaza across the street from the headquarters of a Fortune 500 company. Ferguson has seen better days, but it's not East St. Louis. (and, yes, CalVegas, unlike most of the posters on this thread, I've spent a fair bit of time there).

My real point was that - for all the chest-thumping on here and elsewhere about looters tearing up their community - most of the people out there the last few nights have been peacefully protesting what they believe to be a serious injustice - the latest of many - by local police and local government. It's not an uncommon belief in the black neighborhoods of St. Louls, and from what I know of their experience it doesn't seem like an unfair one. When the police show up to this protest armed like they're rolling Baghdad, people are going to take that the wrong way. Can't say I blame them.

 

[cody1smith]

I thank you for creating this thread, and bringing your ignorance, and the high number of uninformed posters that frequent Irish Envy, to my attention.

Not exactly sure how to take this? What did i do?

 

[cody1smith]

I thank you for creating this thread, and bringing your ignorance, and the high number of uninformed posters that frequent Irish Envy, to my attention.

Always gets me how people can get all upset over someone else having a different opinion than what they share. I am not mad or even upset about the posts of anyone on here. My suggestion to you if you do not like what is said or you are tired of all the under minded posters on here then find a new place to discuss things? Or create a new site where everyone must share your opinion.

 

[dublinirish]

Why America's Police Are Becoming So Militarized - Business Insider

But it is hard to see why Fargo, North Dakota--a city that averages fewer than two murders a year--needs an armoured personnel-carrier with a rotating turret.

Keene, a small town in New Hampshire which had three homicides between 1999 and 2012, spent nearly $286,000 on an armoured personnel-carrier known as a BearCat. The local police chief said it would be used to patrol Keene's "Pumpkin Festival and other dangerous situations".

 

[GoIrish41]

Why America's Police Are Becoming So Militarized - Business Insider

That pumpkin festival can be a blood bath if one isn't prepared.

 

[anarin]

Someone always dies at the fair