This is a country where racism is saluted and police are given the green light to gun down people (and dogs) for almost no reason whatsoever. It's sickening.
On Tuesday, Michael Brown’s parents, Lezley McSpadden and Michael Brown Sr., received a $1.5 million settlement after filing a wrongful death lawsuit against the city of Ferguson, former Police Chief Thomas Jackson and former police officer Darren Wilson. ...
The settlement was... on par with one particular shooting in Maryland ― except, in this case, the family was white and the victim was their pet dog.
In May, a jury awarded $1.26 million to a family whose pet was shot and killed by Anne Arundel County police Officer Rodney Price in February 2014. Price, who was confronted by the dog in the homeowner’s front yard, was investigating a burglary in the neighborhood and claimed he was attacked by the nearly 5-year-old Chesapeake Bay Retriever named Vern.
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If you want to talk about racism in this country, you should probably pick a different poster child. Michael Brown robbed a convenience store and then attacked a police officer and reached for the officer's gun. If any police/civilian shooting was ever justified it would be that one.
Michael Brown was an 18-year old unarmed kid who stole a pack of cigarillos, and was shot 11 times by a cop for that offense.
This was not an armed robbery. It was shop lifting.
An investigation by the US Department of Justice found that the Ferguson Police Department, and the City of Ferguson, relied on unconstitutional practices in order to balance the city's budget through racially-motivated excessive fines and punishments, including the escalation of petty offenses to serious crime with assault by police (including a phenomenal number of dog bites) heaped on top.
As The New York Times reported (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/04/us/justice-department-finds-pattern-of-police-bias-and-excessive-force-in-ferguson.html ):
"Ferguson, Mo., is a third white, but the crime statistics compiled in the city over the past two years seemed to suggest that only black people were breaking the law. They accounted for 85 percent of traffic stops, 90 percent of tickets and 93 percent of arrests. In cases like jaywalking, which often hinge on police discretion, blacks accounted for 95 percent of all arrests.
"The racial disparity in those statistics was so stark that the Justice Department has concluded in a report scheduled for release on Wednesday that there was only one explanation: The Ferguson Police Department was routinely violating the constitutional rights of its black residents."
The Police Chief of Ferguson resigned, the City Manager resigned, and the Municipal Judge resigned, as they were all complicit in the long-standing institutionalized racism-for-profit in Ferguson, Missouri. About half of the Ferguson Police Department were forced to resign for racist statements and actions documented in the DoJ report.
The Ferguson police department paid a $1.5 million settlement in this case because this was a bad shoot and they knew it, while the family took the settlement money knowing that Missouri racism probably precluded an honest verdict.
what's crazy is, in this country a police officer can shoot a dog for correctly doing his work and the jury will agree the dog was right and prosecute the officer, whether or not the officer was ''afraid for his life''. but if you're an innocent brown, red or black human in the face of a scared, heedless, racist officer , no amount of right-doing and 'following the rules' by the victim will find the officer mistaken and guilty of murder. getting shot for a broken tail light or a bent fender, or even stealing a candy bar, smoking pot, or simply running down the street would be preposterous, were it a white person committing any of these acts. but if you have color in the USA, you're dead. absolutely disgraceful and horrifically sad. this has to change.
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