Ferguson DOJ Report

Post Reply New Topic

I know, right? I can't figure that out. Why wouldn't these people want to put blacks in office? Why would they just stand by while whites keep getting reelected without the desire to vote a black in unless there's some sort of funky gerrymandering going on.

That would never happen around here.

That's systemic oppression in action. The blacks want no part of anything that's even remotely connected to the system because it always turns out badly for them.

All you need do is park a cop car near a polling place and you have instant and VERY EFFECTIVE voter suppression.

Well, their next election will be interesting then...

Absolutely.

I think what grieves me the most about this whole thing is, looking at the protesters and seeing the surface dialogue - you'd have absolutely no idea what's going on in Ferguson. You wouldn't know anything about a police department being utilized as a major revenue source and accordingly having a warped culture. You'd think this is all about a white officer shooting a man for being black after he waved his hands high when really the whole story is in reverse order - ie. it's everything that the department did up to that point that this is about.

Is our media good for anything anymore? Give it enough time I'm starting to wonder whether they'll even be able to get the commercials right.

I doubt that they will revise anything. When called out on it they go back to saying Brown was a thug who deserved what he got. They say the Justice Dept. cleared Wilson, when all they said was there was not enough evidence to charge him with violating Brown's civil rights. That's a lot higher bar than simple criminal charges. Even if Brown did exactly as the only survivor claimed, the report of severe oppression and frequent violations of people's civil rights stands on it's own merits.

The report clearly ties all those institutions together in a conspiracy to oppress and violate people's civil rights...

Here's at least part of the answer to your questions...
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/08/1 ... -to-fix-it

Good Lord!! !
That report is like reading something from the Jim Crow era and I haven't even read the whole thing yet.

I have one problem with the report: Why is it a justice issue when blacks are 50% more likely be the subject of an arrest warrant, but not a justice issue when men are 5,000% more likely to be on death row? [1]

You can claim that men are more violent, but the same claim could be made about blacks [2] [3].

You could claim that men aren't disadvantaged relative to women in the way that blacks are disadvantaged relative to whites, but all members of the military in the last three decades (at least) were fingerprinted. That makes it easier to link them to crimes, and they're mostly men [4].

I'm asking for one thing: Don't pretend to be shocked, shocked when there's racial inequality in enforcement, and then yawn when there's gender inequality.

This should be added: Even if you assume that there is no disparity whatsoever in the identification of perpetrators (despite differences in fingerprinting), there is still a five-fold (500%) gender disparity that's not explained by the FBI data in link #2. That's ten times the disparity in arrest warrants in Ferguson.

Oh look, a white man wants to make this about him...

Yes, there's probably a bias against men in the legal system. Yes, that's a bad thing. It's also not what this discussion is about.

Grow up.

Firstly, the bias against men falls even more heavily on black men. (They're fingerprinted at a higher rate, too.)

Secondly, your side already put white men front-and-center with your tale about wh***y gunning down an innocent black kid who had his hands up (which wasn't true). You ignored every rule of evidence to push that narrative-of-convenience, and now you would like to go back to your Whitey-bashing by shifting focus to a disparity in arrest warrants.

(It's fair to point out that heavily Democratic, highly educated Minneapolis - where I live - also has a very bad record [1], as does our demographically-similar sister city [2]. That isn't good election year politics, though.)

Thirdly, you and the educratic left have zero credibility on racial issues while you hold young people's futures hostage to college entrance tests that are known to favor kids whose families can afford tutoring (read: suburban whites). You didn't kill Jim Crow. You gave him an honorary Ph.D and a department chairmanship.

Fourth, by definition you cannot have a discussion about whether people are being treated equally under the law if it's limited to just one area of law.

Fifth, what I pointed to was ten times worse and has been going on nationally (not just in the South) since before the Civil Rights Movement. Get a grip.

I hope so. Another thing that's very apparent is that civil rights organizations like NAACP and SPLC have also failed the Ferguson community. They should have been in there drawing attention to this situation, registering people to vote and getting them to the polls.

Then again, 16000 warrants will have a profoundly chilling effect... Who, with even a minor beef, is going to tempt fate by REGISTERING with the local government and showing up at a polling place?

I think they should issues a general amnesty for all outstanding misdemeanor warrants and start from scratch. Unfortunately, that's not likely to happen, and it might not be enough anyway.

Even if they start doing things right, and fairly, from here on, the effects of this level of oppression won't be mitigated in a matter of months or even a year or two.

What he said...

The racism is incidental here, the major takeaway is that an entire local government essentially existed for no other reason than to sustain itself at the expense of its citizens, through a byzantine system of fines and regulations with which to fine them. The citizens of Ferguson, along with those of many of the other municipalities in the surrounding, receive little to no benefit from their local government, but at considerable cost that is disproportionately born out by the lower classes. Basically, these cities were gangster states operating as kleptocracies, and I think that's someone that everyone, regardless of ideology, should be against.