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originally posted by: truthseeker84
Did Michael Brown really assault the officer?
I mean, I see his injury on his face and neck, I'm just wondering if it really went down.
Because from all the media frenzy, they seem to always depict it as M. Brown as an innocent kid who threw his hands up in the air but got murdered in cold blood.
But clearly, as the evidence rolls out, that's not entirely the case.
So if the officer was assault, shot back in retaliation, then... why all the riots?
originally posted by: Skadi_the_Evil_Elf
For me, the issue isn't race, so your questions here are pretty moot.
My issue is the continued excessive use of force by police, regardless of race, because police brutality is the issue for me here. And police brutality is committed across the spectrum of race, age, and gender.
Michael Brown's race does not even come into my concerns. I've heard people use the straw man argument that white people don't riot when the roles are reversed. But that's probably because more white people tend to blindly trust authority and accept actions from authorities that they wouldn't from others.
The question for me was not that Wilson shot Brown because he was black, but the question being of whether or not Wilson was justified in shooting him in the first place. And so far, the evidence presented has been questionable and mixed, and the investigation was pretty shoddy.
originally posted by: Skadi_the_Evil_Elf
a reply to: Domo1
Link
For starters.
Now I'm not disputing the op just adding to it in order to get a greater perspective on the situation
The FBI does not release annual data on how many Americans are killed by law enforcement officers — information that activists who mobilized after the Ferguson shooting in August have demanded of the Obama administration.
Although Al Jazeera identified 12 incidents of deadly police force over the span of seven days, the number of actual incidents may be higher. Killed By Police, a Facebook page that posts links to news reports of homicides by law enforcement, found 23 incidents during the same timeframe.
But even that number seems low, says D. Brian Burghart, editor of Reno News & Review, who founded Fatal Encounters, a project compiling comprehensive and searchable national data of people killed by law enforcement officials.
The Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), official national crime data complied annually by the FBI, indicates that there were 461 total deaths at the hands of law enforcement in 2013, the most recently published year. But Burghart told Al Jazeera that after scanning local government agencies and media reports the number of police-related fatalities was “closer to about 1,400 a year,” with at least 9,000 from 2000 to 2014.
america.aljazeera.com...
Over 18,000 law enforcement agencies — including city, county, state and federal law enforcement departments — voluntarily participate in sharing crime data with the FBI. However, only 750 of those agencies contribute to UCR’s data on law enforcement-related incidents, leaving a gap in the fatalities reported by UCR versus the actual number of incidents.
originally posted by: Willtell
Now I'm not disputing the op just adding to it in order to get a greater perspective on the situation
The FBI reports that in 2011, cops in America killed 404 suspects in acts of "justifiable homicide." Astonishingly, though, as FiveThirtyEight reports, this number likely doesn't include every civilian fatality that year since it relies on voluntary reporting and doesn't include police homicides that aren't justifiable.
Still, 404 is a large number. By comparison,
just six people were killed by police in Australia over the same period.
Police in England and Wales killed only two people,
and German police killed six.
Last year, police in England did not record a single shooting fatality,
with officers across the country only firing weapons on three occasions.