Recap:
In the previous blog, I took the time to focus on the timeline of the politicians and the death of the Missouri Auditor.
Since then, more and more people have stepped down, have successfully attempted suicide (according to police officer accounts), or attempted to do so:
March 11, 2015
According to The Guardian, Ferguson Missouri's Mayor, James Knowles said, once the former police chief steps down,"Jackson would receive a year’s salary in severance pay. The chief was paid $95,512 (£64,000) a year, according to figures previously released by the city. Knowles also said the city manager, John Shaw, whose departure was announced on Tuesday, would receive his full $120,000 salary as severance."
June 27, 2015
Enter the former Missouri House Member Rep. Genise Montecillo, who had attempted suicide according to officers of the St. Louis County Police Department. She had been found in her apartment in south St. Louis County at 9:51am. She served her third term and had been on the House Budget Committee. She had been raising funds for her 2016 reelection after serving her third term, and she taught in the Special School District for 24 years, according to the St. Louis Post Dispatch. No further details regarding her suicide attempt had been released at that moment in time.
Former Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson stepped down, and is still angry over it. According to the STL Today, "To keep his mind off of Ferguson, he said he has done private security consulting for a Colorado-based company. Otherwise, he tries to fly his plane, a Cessna 175, and ride his motorcycle.
"I'm still really down," he said. "I have a lot of anger over all of this, and I don't get angry."
According to the DOJ Report, Jackson was the one that reported the following revenue increases for the years 2011-2013:
Jackson was able to afford a Cessna 175 and maintain a pilot's license on the same salary mentioned in the previous Guardian article. (archived)
August 08, 2015
August 10,2015
Darren Wilson surfaces and shows the country what kind of man he really is.
That being said, a lot of what he says stands all the way out in this New York Times article and will be commented on in bold print:
"In 2009, Wilson got a job in Jennings, a town on Ferguson’s southeastern border, where ninety per cent of the residents are black and a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line. “I’d never been in an area where there was that much poverty,” Wilson said. Interacting with residents, he felt intimidated and unprepared.
A field-training officer named Mike McCarthy, who had been a cop for ten years, displayed no such discomfort. McCarthy, a thirty-nine-year-old Irish-American with short brown hair and a square chin, is a third-generation policeman who grew up in North County. Most of his childhood friends were African-American. “If you just talk to him on the phone, you’d think you’re talking to a black guy,” Wilson said. “He was able to relate to everyone up there.”
Wilson said that he approached McCarthy for help: “Mike, I don’t know what I’m doing. This is a culture shock. Would you help me? Because you obviously have that connection, and you can relate to them. You may be white, but they still respect you. So why can they respect you and not me?”
McCarthy had never heard another officer make such an honest admission of his own limitations. At the same time, he sensed a fierce determination: “Darren was probably the best officer that I’ve ever trained—just by his willingness to learn.”
McCarthy wasn’t surprised that Wilson had difficulty interacting with residents. Police officers are rigorously trained in firing weapons and apprehending suspects but not in establishing common ground with people who have had different experiences. “If you go to an academy, how much is on that?” he asked me. “Basically, nothing.” A recent survey by the Police Executive Research Forum revealed that cadets usually receive fifty-eight hours of training in firearms, forty-nine in defensive tactics, ten in communication skills, and eight in de-escalation tactics."
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So Wilson didn't know how to talk to or act around Black people, so he trained with a guy that was described as having the ability to speak in a Black vernacular over the phone, and "relate to everyone up there"?
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For several months, McCarthy taught Wilson how to walk the beat—coaching him to loosen up, joke, and curse occasionally. He should avoid “sounding like a Webster’s Dictionary,” never condescend, and never expect people to rat. At first, Wilson says, residents laughed at him, but he followed McCarthy’s advice to “just keep going.” By the end of the training, Wilson said, he “was more comfortable” on the streets. McCarthy told me, “There is so much distrust in the African-American community toward the police.” The only way to overcome it was by establishing bonds with people. McCarthy, who is gay, said that he understood what it meant to be marginalized. “In the United States, where everybody is supposed to be equal, I’m not. So that’s a major thing.”
McCarthy helped Wilson, in part, by letting him make mistakes. One night, they were patrolling a neighborhood where burglary was common. Wilson saw a car idling on the side of the street, and McCarthy didn’t object when Wilson pulled over and asked the driver to show I.D. Wilson ran a check on the man’s name; nothing came up, so he let him go. Later, McCarthy asked, “What would’ve happened if you’d found a gun?” Wilson said that he would have arrested the man. McCarthy asked him what his case for probable cause would have been, and Wilson couldn’t answer. “You’d be screwed,” McCarthy said.
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So the mistake was letting the man go after running his ID and finding nothing? It sounds like McCarthy told Wilson to escalate situations based on "probable cause". Now what would that probable cause be?
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"Wilson recalls hearing “old-timers” talk about racism in Jennings’s past, but their stories didn’t make a vivid impression on him. McCarthy, however, said that in the seventies and eighties the Jennings police “did not play.” He added, “Basically, they’d beat you.” During that period, many blacks from St. Louis moved to North County. Numerous towns there went from being majority white to being majority black. The police forces remained almost completely white.
McCarthy showed me several police logs from those decades, and many entries documented bigotry on the part of Jennings authorities. In April, 1973, a lieutenant described a holdup that had occurred near the police station. The suspects were two black males. At the bottom of the entry, someone had written, “Men, you better leave your wallets at home. Niggers are going to come in the police station next and rob us.” An entry from December, 1979, described an eighteen-year-old black male who was believed to have been involved in the shooting of a police officer but was then released, “due to his lack of mental capacity.” Below this, someone had scrawled, “Kill the Fucker.”
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That was in the Jennings Police department's records. Apparently they thought it was okay to include racism in the records, as well as threaten to kill people. That being said, how many people have officers actually killed after the people get released?
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McCarthy said that police officers resist discussing racism, past or present. “If an officer speaks out, they are ostracized,” he said. “They don’t want anything negative to be out there. But we’re humans—there’s gonna be negative. Be honest about it. If you acknowledge it, that’s the first step.”
Wilson strongly disagreed with McCarthy about this. He granted that, in North County, the overt racism of past decades affected “elders” who lived through that time. “People who experienced that, and were mistreated, have a legitimate claim,” he told me. “Other people don’t.” I asked him if he thought that young people in North County and elsewhere used this legacy as an excuse. “I think so,” he replied.
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So after reading a sample of the records in Jennings that read "Kill The Fucker" after releasing person who was deemed mentally unable to commit said crime, Wilson STILL eschewed past racism and called the legacy an "excuse" for the young people in North County and anywhere else to feel the way they currently feel regarding police? ? Hmmm.
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“I am really simple in the way that I look at life,” Wilson said. “What happened to my great-grandfather is not happening to me. I can’t base my actions off what happened to him.” Wilson said that police officers didn’t have the luxury of dwelling on the past. “We can’t fix in thirty minutes what happened thirty years ago,” he said. “We have to fix what’s happening now. That’s my job as a police officer. I’m not going to delve into people’s life-long history and figure out why they’re feeling a certain way, in a certain moment.” He added, “I’m not a psychologist.”
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So an officer has to remove themselves from the people they serve in order to do a "good job"? Hmm.
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Wilson said that, despite what he’d said about experiencing “culture shock,” race hadn’t affected the way he did police work: “I never looked at it like ‘I’m the only white guy here.’ I just looked at it as ‘This isn’t where I grew up.’ ” He said, “When a cop shows up, it’s, like, ‘The cops are here!’ There’s no ‘Oh, shit, the white cops are here!’ ” He added, “If you live in a high-crime area, with a lot of poverty, there’s going to be a large police presence. You’re going to piss people off. If police show up, it’s because it’s something bad, and whoever’s involved can’t figure out the problem for themselves.”
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More distancing himself from the community he serves. It's all high crime, poverty and not much else I guess.
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"When Wilson was thirteen, he stopped trusting his mother altogether, because she stole funds that she had helped raise for his Boy Scout troop. He worried that she would steal what little money he made working summer jobs, so he opened two bank accounts. The first, which had almost no money in it, was a decoy. He put his real earnings in the second, secret account. Wilson also tried to preempt his mother’s stealing. Once, he warned a friend’s parents not to let her inside their house, because she would surely find a way to steal their identities and max out their credit cards."
Followed up with this:
Good values, Wilson insisted, needed to be learned at home. He spoke of a black single mother, in Ferguson, who was physically disabled and blind. She had several teen-age children, who “ran wild,” shooting guns, dealing drugs, and breaking into cars.
Several times, Wilson recalled, he responded to calls about gunfire in the woman’s neighborhood and saw “people running either from or to that house.” Wilson would give chase. “It’s midnight, and you’re running through back yards.” If he caught the kids, he checked them for weapons, then questioned them. He recounted a typical exchange: “ ‘Why you running?’ ‘Because I’m afraid of getting caught.’ ‘Well, what are you afraid of getting caught for?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Well, there’s a reason you ran, and there’s a reason you don’t want to get caught. What’s going on?’ ” Wilson said that he rarely got answers—and that any contraband had already been thrown away. Once, he arrested some of the woman’s kids, for damaging property, but usually he let them go. In his telling, there was no reaching the blind woman’s kids: “They ran all over the mom. They didn’t respect her, so why would they respect me?” He added, “They’re so wrapped up in a different culture than—what I’m trying to say is, the right culture, the better one to pick from.”
And this. The interviewer called him out. but check out his reply:
"This sounded like racial code language. I pressed him: what did he mean by “a different culture”? Wilson struggled to respond. He said that he meant “pre-gang culture, where you are just running in the streets—not worried about working in the morning, just worried about your immediate gratification.” He added, “It is the same younger culture that is everywhere in the inner cities.”
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I guess the "right culture" is the one he grew up in. With his non working immediate gratification seeking, gold digging, con artist, mother that he couldn't even trust with his own money.
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"Most of Wilson’s calls were routine—traffic stops, house alarms—but some were deeply distressing. At one crime scene, he discovered the mangled bodies of two dead women. A two-year-old, “covered in blood,” was crawling between them. I asked him if such incidents made it hard to sleep. “No,” he replied. “I’ve never brought my work home.” This was partly a matter of disposition, but Wilson noted that, while he and Barb were on the force, they lived twenty miles outside Ferguson. They needed “that buffer”—a “chance to get out of that element.”"
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So. He could not live in the community he served. He thinks the better community is outside of Ferguson, despite the low crime rate they enjoyed before Mike Brown was killed? Hmm.
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"Wilson’s home life wasn’t entirely peaceful, however. In May, 2013, Barb’s ex-boyfriend John—the father of her younger son, who was then four—assaulted her, and also attacked Wilson. According to court papers, Barb said that John drank, and had beaten her in the past. (Barb asked me to omit John’s surname, to protect her son’s identity.) Barb testified in court that John “pulled my hair,” “choked me,” and “punched me in the face.” "
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So he lived 20 miles outside of Ferguson and was dealing with this kind of stuff? Where's that "buffer" at?
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Now he breaks out the tears because nobody will hire him. Seems legit.
Since the anniversary of Michael Brown's death, and the scores of people who have been killed, teargassed, brutalized, since. I have learned one thing and one thing only:
We can't allow people like these to have control over our lives.
How can we trust a system to serve and protect the same people they despise to the point of rejoicing in their ability to extort, demean, dehumanize and kill. at. will. in order to justify their revenue retrieval disguised under a fraudulent meritocracy narrated by the media under the guise of fairness?
I've been thinking about this for a long time now. And I have a solution.
To be continued...
