re: St Louis: Unarmed teen shot and killed by police, riot in progress.

I would bet that this has been posted already, but just in case it hasn't

Grand Jury methods from St. Louis Post-Dispatch

From the article:

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A judge tries to balance members’ gender, race and geography. Here, a grand jury meets on Wednesdays for four months. The current one is set to expire Sept 10 but will be extended to hear all the evidence in the Brown case, McCulloch said. He said the grand jury had three black members, out of 12 total.

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Police cameras are important, but they’re useless without policies to ensure they’re used properly

this is the guy that's behind all of the great pieces out on the militarization of the police.

kid "charged" the cop winds up shot in the back

This is an almost unbelievable reaction considering how little is known at the moment. Will there be apologies to the officer if he is vindicated?

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Will there be apologies to the officer if he is vindicated?

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Seems to me that there are simple solutions to those issues. Change the FOI laws. Make policies where an officer is punished for each occasion his camera is turned off when there were no incidents. For example, first offense, a warning put in his personnel file. Second offense, paid suspension or something and so on. The officer can avoid it if it can be clearly and convincingly be established that the camera malfunctioned.

If incidents are involved, change the law whereby a presumption is created that the cop's actions were unlawful unless, again, it can be established clearly and convincingly that the unit malfunctioned through no fault of the officer or department. There are officers out there who do turn off their dash cams before abusing their authority. By creating a presumption of wrongdoing, you are only affecting that 1% of cops who abuse their power. The 99% of good cops, well their cameras won't be off so it won't be an issue.

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Just because the cops don't have a video, doesn't make it and less true that he was defending himself from a thug.

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I don't think my statement said anything of the sort. I was just acknowledging what rumors were out there and what I doubted. I didn't say how that would impact the case either way. Just that I doubt there's a smoking gun type video out there for either side.

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In most occupations, there's a chance of accidental death. Law enforcement is the only occupation I can think of where there is a chance that someone wants to intentionally kill you. That seems like a reason to be fearful of it.

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This also brings into light the possible reason for the "us vs them" attitude". There aren't any songs that say "Frick the Electrician", "Frick the Pharmacist", etc etc

Keeping it going for the election cycle


Edit - YES! TOP OF 800!

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here's what I can't figure out: if the cop had the shite beat out of him, why not show pictures of that immediately. Nobody riots if you show that Brown beat up the cop before getting shot. It becomes obvious that it was self-defense. Makes zero sense to hold onto this for a week and let riots occur.

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The videos I want to see are other videos at the scene of the cop. Surely there are some from closer up than the one that we've seen and surely, if he sustained that injury at the scene, there will be some sort of sign of that injury, or even him rubbing it or someone else looking at it.