Update: Police use tear gas on Berkeley protesters, six arrested after rowdy night http://t.co/ayvO9KgBqs pic.twitter.com/pnOQCSXasj
— SFGate (@SFGate) December 7, 2014FERGUSON, Mo. — In the decade that Ashley Bernaugh, who is white, has been with her black husband, her family in Indiana has been so smitten with him that she teases them that they love him more than her.Isn't that just perfect?!!
So Ms. Bernaugh was somewhat surprised by her family’s reaction after Darren Wilson, a white police officer here, killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager. Forced into more frank discussions about race with her family than ever before, Ms. Bernaugh, 29, said her relatives seemed more outraged by the demonstrations than the killing, which she saw as an injustice.
“They don’t understand it’s as prevalent as it is,” Ms. Bernaugh said, referring to racial discrimination. “It’s just disappointing to think that your family wants to pigeonhole a whole race of people, buy into the rhetoric that, ‘Oh, these are violent protests.’ ”
It is as if Ms. Bernaugh, a nonprofit organizer living in the St. Louis suburb of Florissant, is straddling two worlds. In one, her black mother-in-law is patting her on the back, saying she is proud of her for speaking out against Mr. Brown’s killing. In the other, her white family and friends are telling her to quiet down because “you don’t know the whole picture.”
The chants are angry, but simple: "I can't breathe!" "Hands up, don't shoot!" "Black lives matter!" They have echoed from the American heartland to the coasts in the wake of two recent grand jury decisions that cleared white policemen in the deaths of unarmed black men.Unfortunately, at base this is a revolutionary communist movement, which just ain't gonna fly after six years of the Obamunist!
Now, activists are counting on the rage behind those words to spur a movement that would force the country to confront the interlocked issues of race and policing and press the government to automatically take control of cases of alleged police abuse.
"They're asking for something simple. They want to be treated the same," New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said of protesters Thursday as he sought to calm a city where many were seething over a grand jury's decision not to indict Daniel Pantaleo, a white officer, in the death of Eric Garner.
Largely peaceful demonstrations broke out in New York soon after Wednesday's announcement of the Staten Island grand jury's decision. Protesters blocked major roads and gathered at landmark sites, including Times Square and Grand Central Terminal. Police made 83 arrests, mainly for minor offenses.
More large demonstrations erupted Thursday night in New York and throughout the nation, including in Boston, Washington, Pittsburgh and Chicago. As night fell in New York, helicopters thundered over lower Manhattan while protesters gathered in Foley Square, near the courthouse and police headquarters.
"It was a murder on video and there was no justice," said Mickey Thomas, a 21-year-old Hunter College student. "I definitely think we've had enough. I feel like there is a new civil rights movement."
Ida Dupont, a Pace University sociology professor specializing in criminology, said she too thought the Garner incident was an "open and shut case" with the video.
"It was so ridiculous to me that I had to be here today to show my outrage," Dupont said.
"I've been talking to my students about it," she said. "All the young people know something is seriously wrong."
At a different moment in time, the decision of a Staten Island grand jury not to an indict a white police officer for using a choke hold on Eric Garner, an African-American who later died after being taken into custody, would not be much more than a local news item in New York. But coming as it did on the heels of the much-publicized decision of another grand jury in St. Louis County, Missouri not to indict another white cop in the shooting death of another black man, teenager Michael Brown, the Staten Island deliberations were immediately dragooned into service by mainstream media talking heads, African-American leaders, and President Obama to reinforce a narrative of oppression of blacks by white police.And that's a profoundly sad statement on the priorities of far-left politics in America.
Though each of these two decisions appear to stand on their own as being reasonable interpretations of the law, together they appear to justify the upsurge in demonstrations around the country protesting police behavior and asserting that blacks are being systematically victimized. But whatever one may think of these rulings or of the police, those who are hyping this story need not only to think carefully whether the story they are telling is true but also whether the net effects of their campaign against the police will hurt minorities far more than it help them.
The facts in the Staten Island case seem to be as straightforward as the Ferguson, Missouri incident were muddled. The confrontation was caught on a video taken by a cell phone and showed that a chokehold was employed. The New York City Police Department has banned chokeholds for use but they are not illegal. The grand jury clearly believed that the tragic result was not the result of a crime but observers may well wonder about the use of excessive force or why an unarmed man resisting arrest for a petty crime wound up dying in this manner.
But no more than in the Ferguson incident, the facts in that case are not really the point of the protests, the president’s statement, or what is being said about the case on the cable news networks. As awful as each of these stories may be, the willingness of the media to seize on every instance in which a white police officer kills a black civilian in order to make a point about race says more about the need of the left to fuel fears about racism for political advantage than a true flaw in the justice system or American society...
I wish there were a way to address the Ferguson controversy without generating further controversy. But that's not an easy task.Keep reading.
I have believed for some time that the Obama administration has fanned the flames of racial tension in this country rather than attempt to extinguish them, despite its claims to the contrary. President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, in my view, have been the main culprits, which is exceedingly unfortunate, considering the opportunity their historic roles present for making great strides toward racial harmony.
The question is: Do these gentlemen truly want to promote racial harmony?
If President Obama were trying to alleviate racial tensions, would he have accused the police department in Cambridge, Massachusetts, of "acting stupidly" in arresting a friend of his, Harvard professor Henry Gates? The statement was stunningly inappropriate because he took sides reflexively without benefit of all the facts and because presidents have no business weighing in on such local matters. Does anyone doubt that race was at the forefront of Obama's mind?
But if there was any doubt, Obama removed it when "the main message" he chose to impart from the Trayvon Martin matter was implied in this bizarre statement: "My main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin. You know, if I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon."
Fast-forward to the present and we learn that just days after the grand jury decided not to indict police officer Darren Wilson based on his shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the White House tweeted its endorsement of an article by Christopher Emdin, Ph.D., a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. The piece, "5 Ways to Teach About Michael Brown and Ferguson in the New School Year," appeared on The Huffington Post less than two weeks after the shooting incident and before all the facts were in and the grand jury was impaneled. In his introductory paragraphs, Emdin advises teachers and parents not to ignore these types of events: "Bringing the events in Ferguson to the classroom is not only best teaching practice but a way to establish powerful expectations for the academic year."
Parts of the article appear innocuous, such as the suggestion that teachers ask students what they have heard or know about Brown in order to "spark a powerful discussion that sets the tone for the school year." The teachers can use information gathered by the class to help "students unearth the facts, fiction, and mistruths in media coverage of the events in Ferguson."
This is what prosecutors think happened in Ferguson when Michael Brown was shot http://t.co/L2CoOOlv20 pic.twitter.com/4ltNxnuWAr
— The Independent (@Independent) November 25, 2014The New York Times has now pronounced on the “meaning of the Ferguson riots.” A more perfect example of what the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan called “defining deviancy down” would be hard to find. The Times’ editorial encapsulates the elite narrative around the fatal police shooting of unarmed Michael Brown last August, and the mayhem that twice followed that shooting. Unfortunately, the editorial is also a harbinger of the poisonous anti-police ideology that will drive law-enforcement policy under the remainder of the Obama administration.Wow.
The Times cannot bring itself to say one word of condemnation against the savages who self-indulgently destroyed the livelihoods of struggling Ferguson, Mo., entrepreneurs and their employees last week. The real culprit behind the riots, in the Times’ view, is not the actual arsonists and looters but county prosecutor Robert McCulloch. McCulloch presented the shooting of 18-year-old Brown by Officer Darren Wilson to a St. Louis county grand jury; after hearing three months of testimony, the grand jury decided last Monday not to bring criminal charges against Wilson. The Times trots out the by now de rigueur and entirely ad hoc list of McCulloch’s alleged improprieties, turning the virtues of this grand jury — such as its thoroughness — into flaws. If the jurors had indicted Wilson, none of the riot apologists would have complained about the length of the process or the range of evidence presented.
To be sure, most grand-jury proceedings are pro forma and brief, because the evidence of the defendant’s guilt is so overwhelming, as Andrew McCarthy has explained. Here, however, McCulloch faced a dilemma. His own review of the case would have shown the unlikelihood of a conviction. Physical evidence discredited the initial inflammatory claims about Wilson attacking Brown and shooting him in the back, and Missouri law accords wide deference to police officers who use deadly force against a dangerous suspect. Not initiating any formal criminal inquiry against Wilson was politically impossible, however, especially since the eyewitness accounts that corroborated Wilson’s version of events would have remained unknown. (Not surprisingly, the six black witnesses who supported Wilson’s story did not go to the press or social media, unlike the witnesses who spread the early lies about Wilson’s behavior.) So McCulloch used the grand-jury proceeding as a way to get the entire dossier about the case into the public domain by bringing a broad range of evidence before the grand jury and then releasing it to the public after the proceeding ended — a legal arrangement.
The Times is silent about that evidence, of course. Blood and DNA traces demonstrated that Brown had initiated the altercation by attacking Wilson while Wilson was inside his car. Brown then tried to grab Wilson’s gun, presumably to shoot him. Such an assault on a law-enforcement officer is nearly as corrosive to the rule of law and a stable society as rioting. But to the mainstream media, it is apparently simply normal behavior not worth mentioning when a black teenager attacks a cop, just as it was apparently normal and beneath notice that Brown had strong-armed a box of cigarillos from a shopkeeper moments before Wilson accosted him for walking in the middle of the street. Amazingly, anyone who brought up that earlier videoed felony was accused of besmirching Brown’s character, even though the robbery was highly relevant to the encounter that followed (and showed that Brown did not have much character to besmirch in the first place, something his sealed juvenile records would likely have confirmed).
Even if we ignore the exculpatory evidence, it is absurd to blame the riots, as the Times does, on McCulloch’s management of the grand jury or the way he announced the verdict. There would have been rioting if the grand-jury proceeding had lasted one day, so long as it failed to indict Wilson for murder. It is unlikely that the rioters even listened to, much less carefully parsed, McCulloch’s post-verdict press conference, which the Times finds biased. It is equally absurd to imply that the grand jury’s decision not to indict resulted from unprofessional behavior on McCulloch’s part or from prejudice that somehow infected the proceedings. Not indicting officers for good-faith shootings in the course of their duty is the norm, not the exception. There have been no indictments of Missouri officers for shootings since 1991. Houston grand juries have cleared officers of shootings 288 consecutive times. The Brown verdict was par for the course and not the result of some flawed, partial process.
The Times then goes into blazing hyperbole about the reign of terror inflicted “daily” on blacks by the police in Ferguson and nationally. The Times coyly cites “news accounts” — i.e., its own– claiming that the police in Ferguson “systematically target poor and minority citizens for street and traffic stops — partly to generate fines.” The Times has no evidence of such systematic targeting, proof of which would require determining the rate at which blacks and whites violate traffic and other laws and then comparing those rates to their stop rates. Studies elsewhere have shown that blacks speed at higher rates than whites. Blacks likely also have lower rates of car registration and vehicle upkeep, for economic reasons. Moreover, if authorities are using traffic fines in order to generate revenue, they would presumably “target” the people most likely to be able to pay those fines, not the poorest residents of an area.
Even more fantastically, the Times claims that “the killing of young black men by police is a common feature of African-American life and a source of dread for black parents from coast to coast.” A “common feature”? This is pure hysteria, likely penned by Times columnist Charles Blow. The public could perhaps be forgiven for believing that “the killing of young black men by police is a common feature of African-American life,” given the media frenzy that follows every such rare police killing, compared to the silence that greets the daily homicides committed by blacks against other blacks. The press, however, should know better. According to published reports, the police kill roughly 200 blacks a year — most of them attacking the officer. In 2013, there were 6,261 black homicide victims in the U.S. The police could eliminate all fatal shootings without having any significant impact on the black homicide death rate. The killers of those black homicide victims are overwhelmingly other blacks, responsible for a death risk ten times that of whites in urban areas. In 2013, 5,375 blacks were arrested for homicide, which is greater than the number of whites and Hispanics combined (4,396), even though blacks are only 13 percent of the national population.
The Times trots out the misleading statistic published by ProPublica last month that young black males are 21 times more likely to be shot dead by police than young white males — a calculation that overlooks that young black men commit homicide at nearly ten times the rate of young white and Hispanic males combined. That astronomically higher homicide-commission rate means that police officers are going to be disproportionately in black neighborhoods to fight crime, where they will more likely encounter armed shooting suspects. If the black crime rate were the same as the white crime rate, the victims of police shootings would most certainly also be equal among the races. Asians are minorities, which, according to the Times’ ideology, should make them the target of police brutality. But they barely show up in police-shooting data because their crime rates are so low.
For the years 2005–2009, a significant portion of victims in the ProPublica study — 62 percent — were resisting arrest or assaulting an officer as Michael Brown did. The cop hatred that activists and press organs like the Times do their best to foment significantly increases the chances of such aggressive and dangerous behavior...
Key Ferguson fact: Nearly all the protesters arrested were from out of town http://t.co/eD4M6OV69O pic.twitter.com/Uk20vs6YCC
— IBDeditorials (@IBDeditorials) December 2, 2014Revolutionary Tourism: As shattered glass, car fires and protests blight Ferguson, an interesting fact is emerging: Nearly all of the arrestees hollering revolution are from other cities. Obviously, this isn't about Michael Brown.More.
In the latest batch of radicals busted over the weekend for disturbing the peace in Ferguson, 15 of the 16 didn't even live in Ferguson. They were from places as far away as Chicago and New York.
It's no anomaly, either, but a pattern.
Police said that of the 51 protesters arrested in the protests of Aug. 19 and 20, 50 were from places like New York, Des Moines and Chicago.
They come from groups like the ANSWER Coalition, the New Black Panthers, the Revolutionary Communist Party, the Organization for Black Struggle and the Soros-linked U.S. Human Rights Network.
So any talk about riots and mayhem in Ferguson being a spontaneous uprising or a grass-roots civil society effort by Ferguson's locals is nonsense...
This is why I hardly do anything like this on the net. If you are a right-winger or God forbid, a white cop defending his life, you will get nowhere on the net. This is why we should go “Ferguson” on all of the Fed buildings if we all had half a brain.Also at Fire Andrea Mitchell, "GoFundMe removes conservative blogger’s fundraising page for Darren Wilson."
By embracing the 'need for change' premise promoted by Al Sharpton and company, the media is complicit in spreading the lie that America is racist and blacks are mistreated.
Here’s a quiz for you folks in the media: What happens if you’re out doing “man on the street” interviews but none of the men on the street fit your “narrative”?Keep reading.
If you’re CNN, you stop interviewing them.
It has been remarkable to watch the last few days as America’s self-styled “most trusted news network” has sent out teams of reporters to various areas of Ferguson, Mo., ostensibly to cover the protests there. While their cameramen are watching cars on fire and stores being looted, the reporters ramble on about how “most people here” are “peaceful protesters.”
Where are these peaceful protesters? The reporters can’t seem to find any. Instead, they turn to outside experts and some carefully vetted religious leaders to talk about “the real message” of the protests.
On Tuesday night, CNN correspondent Jason Carroll was reporting, “Most of the protesting we saw in front of the Ferguson Police Department tonight was peaceful.” Then as he started trying to explain the fires burning behind him, he was approached by three of the protesters, who proceeded to get in his face and yell at him because he was promoting a “certain narrative” — the police narrative. “You don’t understand!” one screamed.
Anchor Don Lemon quickly went elsewhere, saying he was worried about Carroll’s safety. When Lemon returned to Carroll later in the broadcast and asked him what the men were saying to him, Carroll refused to say. The reporter was stonewalling because, he explained, these men didn’t “represent” the peaceful protesters who were really the story...
CARTOON: Thanksgiving -- the Birth of the Democrat Party http://t.co/jSXDdkrBFY #TurkeyDay pic.twitter.com/XfSNongXuE
— Doug Ross (@directorblue) November 27, 2014Ouch!! RT "@OlegZeltser: Just saying... pic.twitter.com/rA1kHjzv6i"
— LincolnHeadPenney (@HappiKamper) November 30, 2014Columbia County, Ark. — There’s no sign of it here in Magnolia, Ark., but the boycott season is upon us, and graduates of Princeton and Bryn Mawr are demanding “justice” from Wal-Mart, which is not in the justice business but in the groceries, clothes, and car-batteries business. It is easy to scoff, but I am ready to start taking the social-justice warriors’ insipid rhetoric seriously — as soon as two things happen: First, I want to hear from the Wal-Mart-protesting riffraff a definition of “justice” that is something that does not boil down to “I Get What I Want, Irrespective of Other Concerns.”More.
Second, I want to turn on the radio and hear Jay-Z boasting about his new Timex.
It is remarkable that Wal-Mart, a company that makes a modest profit margin (typically between 3 percent and 3.5 percent) selling ordinary people ordinary goods at low prices, is the great hate totem for the well-heeled Left, whose best-known celebrity spokesclowns would not be caught so much as downwind from a Supercenter, while at the same time, nobody is out with placards and illiterate slogans and generally risible moral posturing in front of boutiques dealing in Rolex, Prada, Hermès, et al. It’s almost as if there is a motive at work here other than that which is stated by our big-box-bashing friends on the left and their A-list human bullhorns.
What might that be?
