Grand jury reaches decision in Ferguson case (Announcement Monday night)

[anvi]

The fact that the governor was on several hours ago talking about people expressing their disagreements civilly ect. ect. leads me to believe there will be no indictment.  Aside from hogging the spotlight, there would be no reason to try and soften up the ground if the news was otherwise.

[anvi]

Will throw in my half-cent, I guess.  

It seems to me the Ferguson police department is run with incredible incompetence and general heavy-handedness.  They have not recruited officers that are likely to build good relationships with the community; from what people in the area report, they profile quite a bit; instead of doing outreach and direct communication with the people they police, the department deals with the public through bad press releases, document dumps, and when those don't work, they put on riot gear and pull out the big guns.  They've built no trust whatsoever with the community, so when things like this happen, already having no trust, they continue to act, for the most part, horribly.  And all this does appear symptomatic of a larger national issue regarding the police and communities of color.  I hope the feds overhaul the place as they've overhauled other departments.

I'm a lot less certain about the specifics of this case than others appear to be.  I haven't read too much--a little testimony from the witnesses that has been released, the autopsy and forensics reports.  I try not to read editorialized testimony in these cases, because editors cut and paste wherever they see fit.  The prosecutor, given his own background, should have found a way to recuse himself from the beginning,  Returning no indictment given his background was bound to stink to high heaven.  It's hard for me to criticize the ruling of the grand jury per se; it consisted of nine white and three black jurors, and they unanimously declined to indict on five separate charges of varying degrees on the basis of lots of conflicting testimony and relatively straightforward forensic evidence that indicated Brown was at the very least facing Wilson when he was shot after a struggle in which the officer suffered some minor contusions.  They probably did feel that all this would not have a great chance of resulting in a guilty verdict in a courtroom where "beyond a reasonable doubt" would be the standard.  On the other hand, had the case been deemed worthy for trial, I think that would have made sense--an unarmed victim shot by an armed police offers under ultimately unclear circumstances perhaps should be tried in a court.  It certainly would have been a better idea for an actual trial to have taken place in view of the sentiments of the community and the fact that the issue had become a national one, though i do understand these are not proper grounds upon which to decide the merits of a possible indictment.  I can't say how I would have ruled as a juror; I wasn't part of the investigation that went on for weeks, and reading a bunch of editorials online and only a few documents from the proceedings is no substitute for that.

The rioting?  I understand the depth of the anger that induced it--it's indicative of much larger and much more persistent problems that need to be addressed on lots of levels by the whole country in more serious ways.  The anger itself I get, and even agree is called for.  But the act of going through with burning down businesses is, I think, a bad thing.  If the interest lies in restoring the well-being of a community, then the business owners and people who work in those businesses are community members too, and destroying those places, run by and worked at by people who had nothing to do with either the shooting or the ruling, only makes things worse in a number of ways.  (And no, dumbass white sports or frat riots are not good by comparison-they're immeasurably less justified.)  

I'm sure my "moderate hero" take on it doesn't satisfy anyone.  But i've been watching this along with everyone else since it's happened, and I do have friends who live, not in Ferguson, but very close to there, and seeing all of this pains me too, so this is what I think of it.  

[anvi]

Violence is an absolutely justified form of political action if you are first attacked and you have absolutely no other recourse. The people of Ferguson are never going to get justice through their racist courts and from their racist cops. They realize that and have acted accordingly.

You don't get justice by destroying the workplaces of people who didn't attack you.

[anvi]

Yeah, the more I read regarding the balance of the witness testimony and the conduct of the prosecutor and the assistant DA, the more convinced I am that this case really should have gone to trial.