Trouble in Baltimore

[East]

..and let's not forget what happened in South Carolina this month where the cop was caught on video shooting an unarmed man in the back...and the other cop helped him cover it up..and both of them LIED...until the video exposed them....

Do you think for a minute the SAME people who always take the side of the cops would not be defending this cop had he not been caught on video???...and them assuming this is an "exception" is laughable...considering the complaints for years about this very thing...and the only time they own it is when someone tapes the fucker.

Even after the tape...a racist jury can let the fucker go free...and in South Carolina..I wouldn't put it past them. Meanwhile...how many black men on DEATH ROW have been found innocent with new DNA evidence...and how many were executed before DNA evidence was avaliable????

Funny how white America forgets the outrage THEY HAD with the OJ Simpson trial and how "outraged" they all were with the Justice System....yet they put their nose up when people of color make legitimate complaints... and dismiss them categorically....

The Ferguson thing ...we have official after official claim publicly that they are NOT racist...yet the emails that they all passed around proved them all to be liars. The people who defended them and said the racist charges were bullshit ...not a peep. Do we all think Baltimore wasn't paying attention?...and that they dismissed it all because..uh...the nice officials said they weren't racist? If someone sent me one of those emails...I would have their ass on a platter and they would hate my guts when I was done with them. WHO lets that crap pass as "humor" anyway???? (I know the answer of course)

As Shifty said..this is the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back...and fasten your seatbelts. As the poor get poorer...the people who want to pretend it isn't a problem will soon find out what a problem it really is. I used to tell my Libertarian friend who had ZERO empathy...don't think of it as a handout..think of it as protecting YOUR ASS when they get pissed off enough..and it will happen. You can't have 2% of the population owning 90% of the wealth without revolution...

[Butterfingers]

Years ago when my son was about 12 he asked me about my stance on civil rights and why I was constantly
bringing up racial inequality, police brutality and poverty in the inner city.
I told him that what "the man" did to blacks today, he would do to whites tomorrow. About 4 years later he was beat up by a cop and arrested, the crime? He was smoking.
The cop was showing him "who was boss". My son thought that this only happened "in the hood". Now he knows better.
This was not racism, he was white and the cop was white. We lived in a blue collar city, the police department
was rude and crude.
Blacks face this daily, it's not a once in a life time lesson. Violence begets violence. Add to this the "equitable redistribution of poverty" that supposed "free trade" has brought to our shores and we might get an idea of why their is so much anger.
If we can't digest this, perhaps it will be taught to us as it was my son... at the hands of those who are there to defend us.

[ceez]

sorry [MENTION=21084]Virge[/MENTION] but he was definitely not able to enter the van under his own strength.




but not all white cops are bad, and the riots were out of control. the protests I saw for Eric Garner were much more peaceful. it was nice to see the real people of Baltimore take their city back and I loved this video




I just hate it when I hear people say racism doesn't exist, I am a light skinned with African heritage (hope I worded that right) and have had racial slurs used against me by people I didn't know who were racist and the scary part is two of them were children. racism is something that gets past down from generation to generation to sheltered children. where I live 45 minutes away there's a town with signs that say "no blacks after dark" and 15 minutes away there's a family that hangs a huge nazi flag at night. for the towns with a large number of racist cops they have the power to change the reports and those who are not racist either fall to peer pressure or left in the dark.

(wanted to add more)
I also like to factor in that cops are still people too, some of them enter situations to early and find themselves cornered and buckle under pressure. after I gathered info from the Ferguson shooting in the end it just sounded like the cop bit off more than he could chew and should have waited for backup, he couldn't handle Michael Brown on his own and had to use his gun. a lot of times I do wonder if it was just an incompetent officer.

[ShiftyNJ]

Go a few days without shaving, put on scruffy clothes and sit on a sidewalk outside a business if you think there is equality in this country.

[strider65]

as a Southern man, I have read editorials from history in British newspapers that said slavery was going to haunt this country for a long, long time. 600,000 people died in our Civil War over what the South said was 'state's rights' and after Lincoln read the Emancipation Proclomation, became a lot more about slavery as a concept.

I've experienced racism from African American people... I've heard when I went up to get my mail 'what's white boy doin' here' and 'white boy this, white boy that'. I started to think my name was 'white boy'.

I don't think that African American payback is a basis for rebuilding race relations in this country. People seem to have forgotten that this young man was a thief and had stolen I forget what from a store, whose owner called the police which started the whole riot in the first place. Is it possible that he might have, oh, I don't know, paid for his purchase?

It's no excuse for the psychotic reaction of the cops, but neither is the rhetoric I've heard from African American people that 'it's payback time' or using this young man's death as an excuse to carry out a new TV or trash a CVS and burn it to the ground so that people who need to fill their prescriptions can't do it anymore. That's just astonishingly stupid.

Two wrongs don't make a right, people.

[strider65]

Shifty, I've been homeless before, long story, but I can definitely relate to your post.

People treat you differently... there is a wonderful scene in the movie "Pretty Woman" where Julia Roberts walks into a shop in Beverly Hills dressed like a pauper and the snotty staff wouldn't wait on her.

She walked in a couple of days later dressed to the nines and they were fawning all over her. She asked "do you all work on commission?" and they said 'yes' and she asked 'do you remember me from the other day?" and they said 'no'. she replied 'BIG mistake'. and walked out.

people are people and deserve to be treated with respect and dignity regardless of the circumstances they find themselves in.

[strider65]

Fast I understand your point but with all due respect, even dogs have the sense not to shit in their own bed...

[ShiftyNJ]

I have tremendous empathy for the vast majority of law enforcement personnel who are out there trying to do their jobs. I would not want to be assigned to patrol public housing projects where elevators don't work, there are no lights in the stairwells, and drug and gang activity is rampant. But I wouldn't want to live there, either, and it is not surprising in the least that there is violence between the two given the setting. I just wish we could get past the "us. vs. they" mentality and figure out what it would take to fix the rampant hopelessness and desperation that causes communities to break down like this.

[Virge]

[MENTION=13830]ceez[/MENTION]

Yep, you're right now that 2nd video has come out. It definitely looks different to see him dragged from where he was apprehended to the can.

Still I'm not rushing to form an opinion either way on this. There's definitely a lot to be remembered about rushing to judgments from what happened in Ferguson. No need to have to repeat the same mistakes that many did about that. At this time what anyone outside the loop "believes" about what really happened to Freddie Gray is all guessing/projecting based on their own their own sets of biases and thin air.

The justice system is much better at getting down to the truth that all of us are. And no matter what we say, think or believe only their decisions will count in the end.

[ShiftyNJ]

6 Police Officers Charged with Homicide in Freddy Gray Death
New York Times