"Just the facts" don't answer the main question #MichaelBrown

"Just the facts" don't answer the main question

by digby

Doug McIntyre at the Daily Beast scolds people who question the Grand Jury decision not to indict Darren Wilson because he says that we won't face the clear facts:

I wasn’t there when Brown had his fatal encounter with the now former Ferguson police officer. Chances are neither were you. I also wasn’t on the Sea of Tranquility when Neil Armstrong took “one giant leap for mankind,” but I believe mankind took a giant leap.

In other words, we’re all entitled to believe things about events for which we weren’t present. But the fact is that the testimony of multiple grand jury witnesses supports Wilson’s version of events, as does the forensic evidence. Still, there are many millions who have reached the same conclusion as Michael Brown’s mother; they don’t believe a word of it.
[...]
It’s healthy to be skeptical of official sources, but at some point we have to agree on something or else consensus and civil society as we know it will shatter like the plate glass in a Ferguson Missouri storefront.

Setting aside that there were plenty of witnesses who disputed Wilson's account, that Wilson's behavior after the event was highly questionable,that the Grand Jury process was bizarre and unusual, this whole line of discussion in a red herring. The reason people are upset about the non-indictment isn't because they don't believe Darren Wilson testified truthfully, it's that his decision to shoot Michael Brown was based upon dubious justification. It's perfectly fair to think that a trial is the proper place to sort out the question of whether a policeman should have killed an unarmed citizen under this set of facts.

You could believe that Brown was belligerent and that he reached for the gun and that he hit Wilson and still believe it's wrong for a police officer to get out of his car and shoot an unarmed suspect who is several feet away from him. If there's one part of Wilson's story that it's certainly reasonable to wonder about, it's that he thought Brown was reaching for his waistband and charging him like a demonic, comic book super-villain. Some of us think that too many people are having this particular delusion and shooting too many unarmed kids and that the system is far too lenient about it.

Apparently this alleged "finding of fact" ends all the questions and means that we're also supposed to agree it's fine for police officers to shoot unarmed teenagers if they think they look like demons. Do we now have consensus on that? I hadn't heard.

And, by the way, there's a long history of the unarmed black "brute" allegedly forcing white people to kill them. There used to be a "consensus" among white people that this was ok. It's not. It never was. And there should be plenty of skepticism when people use that defense.



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