Hands up, don’t shoot

Good on those St Louis Rams players.

Good on those members of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Joe Scarborough doesn’t agree.

Scarborough believes they’re perpetuating a proven falsehood and they know it.

Scarborough insists it’s a lie that Michael Brown was trying to surrender when Darren Wilson shot him dead in the street for the crime of scaring Darren Wilson out of his wits.

I’m not sure how he knows it’s a lie. Same way a lot of racists know it, maybe.

They know the black guy must have been dangerous and doing something wrong, something that warranted an on the spot death penalty, because that’s the way they are.

Maybe he’s making the mistake a lot of people, mostly white people, well, probably almost only white people, are making, that the grand jury decision proved something instead of being a collective shrug of the shoulders, a group feeling that there wasn’t enough evidence that Darren Wilson had done something that warranted a trial by his peers, regardless of what Michael Brown was doing with his hands.

I’m putting the best face on the decision for the sake of argument. That’s not all that went into the decision, of course. But whether or not it was, it’s not a grand jury’s job to prove anything or declare that anything has been proven. A decision not to indict is no more a declaration of someone’s innocence than a decision to indict is a declaration of his guilt.

Maybe it’s just that Scarborough believes that in any encounter between a cop and a citizen it is the citizen’s responsibility to make sure the cop doesn’t kill him and that any cop, including an incompetent non-entity like Darren Wilson, will respond reasonably to reasonable behavior even if that cop’s frightened, angry, racist, incompetent, insecure of his own authority, in a panic, and too stupid to get in his car and call for backup when he’s lost control of a situation.

It was Brown’s own fault, then. If he’d had his hands up, if he’d really been surrendering, Mike Brown would still be alive.

The way Tamir Rice is alive. The way Eric Garner is alive.

“It’s a lie,” Scarborough said Tuesday on “Morning Joe,” in reference to witness statements that Michael Brown didn’t have his hands up in the air when he was shot dead.

“What is wrong with this country? What is wrong with these people? What’s wrong with these elected officials, they know it’s a lie. They know the cops didn’t shoot him with his hands in the air. They know it’s a lie and they’re doing this on that Capitol floor?”

“Unbelievable ... boy that would really be moving if that were the truth,” he added.

Apparently, whatever else is going on in his head, Scarborough is a literal-minded ass who doesn’t understand symbolism.

Clearly he doesn’t understand what’s happening or doesn’t want to understand or is pretending not to understand just to rile up his viewers for the sake of ratings.

If you don’t understand that it doesn’t matter what Mike Brown was doing or what he might have done before, it matters what Darren Wilson did, which was to decide while he was in the middle of losing his temper, losing his head, and losing his nerve because he’d lost control of a confrontation he’d started that another human being needed to die…

If you don’t understand that this is no longer just about Darren Wilson or Mike Brown…

If you don’t understand that it’s not just about Ferguson, Missouri and never was…

If you understand that when you say Brown’s name you need to add, at least in your head, the names of Tamir Rice and Eric Garner and John Crawford and Ezell Ford and on and on and on…

If you don’t understand that African American men and boys are on the front lines and targeted and victimized far out of proportion to their numbers because of systemic racism in our police departments and in the communities that employ them and in the country at large but that this is not only about race…

If you don’t understand that this is about out of control law enforcement agencies…

If you don’t understand that it’s about power, the power we give to those agencies and the power then delegated to individual officers, undertrained, unsupervised, unsuited to the job, and unaccountable…

If you don’t understand that it’s about the use, misuse, and abuse of that power…

If you don’t understand that one of those powers is the power to decide in an instant who lives and who dies and that very few people, even the smartest, bravest, most level-headed, best trained, and most responsible cops aren’t always up to making that decision and that most cops aren’t among that elite group, that most are like most everybody else, just average human beings doing their best to get through their workdays without screwing up, and that many, too many aren’t even in that group…

If you don’t understand that it’s about our as a society giving the power of life and death to incompetent non-entities and then excusing them and protecting them and even making heroes out of them when they abuse that power and demonstrate their incompetence because we, again as a society, are scared of our fellow Americans, which is a way of saying we’re scared of ourselves…

If you don’t understand that this gives police something no other Americans have, permission to be a law unto themselves.

If you don’t understand that Hands up, Don’t Shoot is symbolic of all that, then you are A. White and B. an idiot.

Like Joe Scarborough.

_________________________

Be sure to read Leslie Larson’s story, Four Members of Congress do 'Hands Up' gesture on House floor, at the New York Daily News.

Then, if you haven’t already, read Vox’s Ezra Klein’s take on Darren Wilson’s grand jury testimony. Ezra is careful not to call Wilson a liar but he isn’t shy about calling Wilson’s story unbelievable, in part and in total: At every single point in his telling, Wilson says something that just doesn’t seem likely to have happened in the real world.

But whether Wilson is lying or not, there’s no mistaking that in his version of how he wound up shooting Michael Brown dead in the street, Wilson describes himself as a man in a complete panic and too scared for his own life to think straight and act professionally or care about the life of Michael Brown.

And, finally, about it being a lie that Brown had his hands up? See this chart.

Comments

[JD]

Classic Mannion. Well done, Lance.

[Lucidamente]

What is wrong with these people?

I dunno, Joe, but your dog whistle seems to be working just fine.

[Ken Muldrew]

Trickle down. When the president does it, it isn't against the law. When corporations that are too big to fail do it, then it isn't against the law. When the spooks do it to protect us from very scary terrorists, then it isn't against the law. Now when police do it, it isn't against the law.

Under Bush/Cheney, and more so under Obama, the ideal that the US is a nation of laws, not men, has been discarded on the trash heap of history. All for the public good, you understand. But there are quite a few people who believe that their actions are for the public good, and why shouldn't they emulate the means employed by the leadership?