Evil must be called out.

[raspberryrain]

Evil must be called out. It must be recognized as evil if it is to be stopped.

Jim Crow attitudes, and decisions derived from them, must be called out.

White nationalism must be called out.

I heard President Obama’s little speech after the grand jury decision. He talked about being a nation of laws. Don’t pretend, sir, that this decision was the rule of law. This was a Jim Crow kind of decision, and it should be called out as such.

And instead of playing to white racists and then patronizing to blacks, how about the President tries to enforce the law? No, looting won’t fix anything. Letting a bad cop walk without so much as a manslaughter indictment won’t fix anything either.

Without credibility in the eyes of the populace, the justice system is going to find the enforcement of law very difficult. And this was not really credible.

It’s not a grand jury’s job to decide a case and acquit or convict; that’s to be done in open court. Has the Washington culture of secret courts and assassinations made the president forget that? This was an attempt to avoid having a proper trial for a police officer, and use secret grand jury proceedings instead.

It seems to me that this is not about law, but politics. Apparently there’s one faction that want police officers (and presumably other agents of the state, like soldiers, spies, and these days so very many mercenaries) to be excused for misuse of lethal force. There’s another faction that want to protect civil rights and hold public servants to a higher standard. And the tiebreaker in this case are the racists, who want it to be legal to kill black men.

That doesn’t have to mean that 50% of the populace either believe in general police brutality or excuse murdering ethnic minorities. These probably aren’t the ratios of those attitudes in the general populace, but in those allowed to make decisions in the name of the “rule of law”: Public servants and the ruling class.

That seems to mean there are still old-fashioned Jim Crow racists in the USA’s local governments, and they can at least make an ad hoc majority with the Judge Dredd fascists long enough to make sure no police officer is punished for killing a mere “colored boy.”

This is very bad.

Comments

[raspberryrain]

Today I’ve seen a few comments to the effect that Mike Brown brought it on himself by fighting a cop. You know, I actually kind of thought that, or wondered that, at one point, a few days after the shooting.

But I read more on it, and the reason I think Officer Wilson should have been tried is that he fired at fleeing suspects in a residential area, and when one tried to surrender, Wilson blew his head open.

Whatever struggle may have happened at the vehicle, that’s bad police work on its face. To put it mildly.

If it went to trial, and Wilson were somehow (incredibly) acquitted of both murder and manslaughter, well, a lot of us would still be angry, but at least the public would hear an actual court case. Not even indicting the man stinks of corruption. St. Louis County and the state of Missouri have pretty much tossed away any credibility with the public.

Things are going to get a lot worse, because once again, the authorities went for the cover-up. Instead of calming the public down, they are inviting open rebellion.