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| Michael Brown's family at Thanksgiving dinner. |
I just read
Josh Marshall's editorial on the the Grand Jury decision and was struck by how closely his points mirrored my own.
Here are the main points I want to share courtesy of TPM:
I'm going to set aside all the questions about just how far apart Wilson and Brown were when the fatal shooting occurred, the angle of Brown's body, whether his hands were up. Lots of people have parsed the evidence on that a lot more closely. Those points are technical and accounts are conflicting. It's Wilson's description of how the incident began that just does not ring true. To believe Wilson, you have to believe that Brown, an 18 year old, is stopped by a police officer on a street in broad daylight. The police officer is armed. He's in an SUV. And Brown's immediate reaction is to begun screaming and cursing him, physically attacking him and before long literally daring him to shoot him. Here's how Wilson's account unfolds: Wilson passes Brown and his friend Dorian Johnson and tells them to stop walking in the middle of the street. The two friends basically blow Wilson off at first and then when Wilson tells them again, Brown yells "fuck what you have to say." When Brown and Johnson ignore Wilson's request, he backs up his vehicle and turns to the left, slightly cutting them off. As Wilson begins to get out of his car, Brown says "What the fuck are you going to do about it" and slams the door shut on him. After this, Brown and Wilson scuffle with Brown leaning into the car striking Wilson and Wilson, still seated, defending himself. Wilson describes thinking through how to escape from Brown or which weapon to use against him before finally pulling his gun and saying "get back or I'm going to shoot you." At this point, Brown grabs Wilson's gun and says "you are too much of a pussy to shoot me." They scuffle. A shot goes off but neither is injured. Brown comes at Wilson again - another scuffle and another shot which apparently hits Brown in the finger. Brown runs off. It's after this that the fatal shooting takes place, with the various questions about how it happened. We all have our intuitive, experience-based sense of what's credible and what's not. I doubt Michael Brown was going to physically assault an armed police officer in broad daylight, sitting in his SUV, without any apparent provocation or mutually escalation. But what really puts it over the edge are Brown's alleged statements, as recounted by Wilson. None of them ring true from what we know about Brown.After that Marshall goes on to describe the famous
Michael Brown robbery of the convenience store, and the fact that he roughed up a clerk, which in the minds of many was all they had to see to write Brown off as deserving of his fate that day.
I know this because the video was exactly the reason that my brother decided to argue with me during OUR Thanksgiving dinner as to why Michael Brown deserved to be shot.
To our credit we remained fairly calm, but my brother was completely convinced that Brown "was looking for trouble" that day. And his theory was based solely on the video of Brown manhandling that much smaller convenience store clerk.
What I suggested to my brother was that he ignore that footage as it did not factor into Wilson's decision to shoot Brown. Even if Wilson knew of the robbery, which is
still somewhat debatable, he certainly had not seen the footage and would have no visual in his head of how Brown bullied that clerk into letting him walk away with those cigarillos.
Instead I asked my brother if he thought that shooting to death an unarmed man for walking down the street seemed reasonable. At that my brother asked how the officer would know he was unarmed, and I said because when they were supposedly grappling for the officer's gun (Darren Wilson's version of events) Brown did not pull a piece of his own once Wilson shot at him.
My brother also seemed blissfully unaware that Brown had been shot at least six times, twice in the head. (My brother only knew of two shots even though he said that he had watched hours of footage on TV.)
One of my brother's arguments was that Wilson had no choice as Brown was much bigger. In response I reminded him that they were of almost equal height (Brown's 6 ft 5, to Wilson's 6 ft 4.)
"But he charged him," my brother said. I mentioned that such a claim was not consistent
through all of the witness testimony, and that several had said that Brown was staggering toward him, NOT rushing him.
This went back and forth a few times, with me eventually informing my brother that how the Grand Jury decided on the indictment was also essentially unheard of and that it was also cause for concern by those demanding justice.
My brother's a good guy, he really is. However his responses were a real education to me as to how people who were only minimally paying attention could come away firmly convinced of something that was not backed up by the facts.
By the way he got ALL of his information from CNN.
And yes we had a really nice dinner and plenty of reasonable conversation after that exchange.
