Summations Only

No, the problem is that we don't know if the cop was at fault because the grand jury process prevented us from getting a trial.

What I'm talking about is one step before the grand jury, the investigation itself. It makes no sense to have the police policing the police. Every police shooting should be investigated by an outside agency (preferably a civilian agency). The officer should not be allowed to carry a weapon during the investigation. The results of that investigation should determine whether the shooter is prosecuted, the same as it would for a civilian shooter.

There is another investigation going on as oohchild reported so there may be more to come. From the Department of Justice. Perhaps they will agree with the grand jury. Then what?My conclusion is the same. Despite the problems, the grand jury rightly found there was not enough evidence to bring Darren Wilson to trial, that there was sufficient exculpatory evidence. I'll predict that if there is a trial, which I hope there could still be just because of all the distrust of the grand jury, that Wilson would be exonerated.

But as I understand it, that's not the sort of thing a grand jury should do. If the witnesses have conflicting stories, if some make him out to be innocent and some guilty, then weighing that evidence is exactly the job of an actual jury, and so it should be passed on to one. Again, this is just as I understand it, and anyone who knows better should feel free to correct me.

Generally speaking the grand jury is a prosecution tool. There is no right for the defense to put on evidence, and the prosecutor is usually the only lawyer in attendance.The object is to determine if there is sufficient evidence to show that a crime was probably committed. The defense does not present a case.I would expect that a grand jury would have to consider the credibility of any witnesses they interview, but generally the witnesses the grand jury hears are the ones the prosecutor puts forth.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

A grand jury is not the universally used system. Some states always use it, but many (and perhaps most) states use a preliminary hearing. The Fifth Amendment does not require that a grand jury be used in every homicide case.I'm not sure anyone else in the world still uses a grand jury.

There was also physical evidence, the direction of the bullets that hit Michael Brown and the pattern of blood spatters on the ground. Although they are subject to some interpretation, these generally support Wilson's story about what happened.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Black guy from Baltimore to New York City with the intention of killing some cops in revenge for Brown and Garner. He killed two, then himself. "They take one of ours, we take one of theirs." Never mind that the cops were probably not to blame in either case, and certainly no racism was involved as implied in the man's stated motive. Nevertheless, the impression has been created that they were to blame.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Probably not racism as much as a misguided hatred toward police, as the police seem to have been asian and hispanic.Amazing how you do not attribute any police action to racism but assume this is racist action.

As the guy HIMSELF said, or wrote on the internet somewhere, it was REVENGE for what he understood to be the racism-motivated killings of Brown and Garner. "They kill ours, we kill theirs" is what he said.I wondered if he even noticed that the cops were Asian and Hispanic since he acted so fast, and if that might have made a difference if he had.And I'll attribute racism to police action when I see a reason to. These cases recently in the news show no evidence whatever of having any relation to racism. AS I'VE SHOWN OVER AND OVER AGAIN. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

No you have not.Your hypocrisy is still astounding.

Faith,Do you think that this may have something to do with police shooting young black men more than young white men? Super Predators (April 1, 1999):

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The arrests became top-of-the-broadcast news and sent a shivers across the country. Here were the stone-cold predators that Princeton political scientist John DiIulio Jr. had warned about human harbingers from the coming generation of the young and the ruthless, in the phrase of Northeastern University criminologist James Fox. These were the morally bereft members of the youngest, biggest and baddest generation any society has ever known, that DiIulio, moralist William Bennett and crime expert John P. Walters wrote about in their 1996 book, Body Count.

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Last summer, America seemed to have found its super-predator prototypes.

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The discovery began in Chicago with the killing of an 11-year-old girl, Ryan Harris. Found in an alley on July 27, she had been bludgeoned to death and molested. Her bike was stolen.

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The case drew little national notice just another kid killed in a big city until Aug. 10, when police announced that they had confessions from the killers: two black boys, ages seven and eight, from the South Side of Chicago, each about four feet tall and 60 pounds.

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The arrests became top-of-the-broadcast news and sent a shivers across the country. Here were the stone-cold predators that Princeton political scientist John DiIulio Jr. had warned about human harbingers from the
coming generation of the young and the ruthless, in the phrase of Northeastern University criminologist James Fox. These were the morally bereft members of the youngest, biggest and baddest generation any society has ever known, that DiIulio, moralist William Bennett and crime expert John P. Walters wrote about in their 1996 book, Body Count.

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The case appeared to confirm Americans’ worst fears about kids. More and more, we are seeing child-play replaced with predatory behavior, said a Chicago Sun-Times editorial.

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There was one catch: DNA evidence showed the boys didn’t do it. Far from super-predators, they were victims of exploitive behavior by cops who talked them into a confession.

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The case was an embarrassing, unwarranted and diabolical rush to judgment by the police, prosecutors, the media and the public, says R. Eugene Pincham, a retired judge from Chicago’s South Side. It exploited the public’s anxieties about juvenile violence, and it reinforced this demonization of our children in black communities, this belief that they can and will do anything.

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To one degree or another, a dozen criminologists and youth advocates recently interviewed peg that demonization to a single term: super-predator. A Justice Department administrator and Fox himself say the word focused needed attention on a growing juvenile crime problem. But most others have little good to say about the headline-making term that sprang into the national crime lexicon three years ago.

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The phrase has nettled crime experts, titillated journalists, inspired politicians, frightened citizens and apparently humbled its creator. Numerous experts call the super-predator scenario junk sociology, but the fingerprints of the word can be found all over national justice policy.

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We’re living with John DiIulio’s legacy, says Vincent Schiraldi, executive director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice in Washington, D.C.

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We’re going to be living with the results of the super-predator thing for a very long time, says Jerome K. Skolnick, co-director of the Center for Research in Crime and Justice at the New York University School of Law.

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How did an idea that has been so discredited get so big?

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Lineage of a Soundbite

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DiIulio apparently first used the phrase in a Nov. 27, 1995, commentary in the conservative Weekly Standard under the headline, The Coming of the Super-Predators. But its genesis goes back to a study of delinquency among boys born in 1945 in Philadelphia. The study, published in 1972, reported that six percent of the boys had accumulated five or more police contacts before their 18th birthday. The conclusion: a small percentage of chronic delinquents is responsible for a high proportion of delinquency incidents.

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Enter James Q. Wilson, a prominent conservative criminologist at UCLA (and DiIulio mentor) who has written about morality and crime for years. In 1995 Wilson predicted a crime spike in 2010, when the U.S. would have a half-million more adolescent males. Based on the six percent figure from the Philadelphia study, he predicted 30,000 more muggers, killers and thieves.

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DiIulio has said the Wilson projection confirmed his sense that young inmates today show hardly a flicker of human emotion. That fit with a conversation he’d had with an inmate at New York’s Rikers Island jail complex, who described juveniles there as stone-cold predators. DiIulio ratcheted up Wilson’s prediction by coining super-predator in the Weekly Standard.

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The phrase was introduced to a national audience in the Jan. 15, 1996, issue of Time under the headline, Now For the Bad News: A Teenage Time Bomb. The story, which quoted (James) Fox and DiIulio, began, They are just four, five and six years old right now, but already they are making criminologists nervous.

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The Juvenile Superpredator Myth

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A professor of politics and public affairs on the political science faculty at Princeton University, John DiIulio, created and popularized the super-predator concept. He coined the term superpredator (1995b) to call public attention to what he characterized as a new breed of offenders, kids that have absolutely no respect for human life and no sense of the future. . . . These are stone-cold predators! (p. 23). Elsewhere, DiIulio and co-authors have described these young people as fatherless, Godless, and jobless and as radically impulsive, brutally remorseless youngsters, including ever more teenage boys, who murder, assault, rob, burglarize, deal deadly drugs, join gun-toting gangs, and create serious [linked] disorders (Bennett, DiIulio, & Walters, 1996, p. 27).

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The superpredator myth gained further popularity when it was linked to forecasts by James Q. Wilson and John DiIulio of increased levels of juvenile violence. Wilson (1995) asserted that by the end of [the past] decade [i.e., by 2000] there will be a million more people between the ages of 14 and 17 than there are now. . . . Six percent of them will become high rate, repeat offendersthirty thousand more young muggers, killers and thieves than we have now. Get ready (p. 507). DiIulio (1995a, p. 15) made the same prediction. Media portrayals of juvenile superpredators have created the impression that juveniles are most likely to be armedheavily armedand to use guns in attacks.

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A year later, DiIulio (1996a) pushed the horizon back 10 years and raised the ante, projecting that by the year 2010, there will be approximately 270,000 more juvenile super-predators on the streets than there were in 1990 (p. 1). DiIulio based his projection of 270,000 on two factors. First, he assumed that the 6% figure that the Philadelphia Birth Cohort Study found in relation to Philadelphia boys who were chronic offenders in the 1960s would remain constant. Second, he factored this figure in with projections of the growth of the juvenile population made by the U.S. Bureau of the Census. According to these projections, the ages 0—17 population group in the United States was expected to grow by 14% (4.5 million) between 1996 and 2010 (Box 1.2)

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DiIulio (1996b) warned that juvenile superpredators would be flooding the nation’s streets, coming at us in waves over the next 20 years. . . . Time is running out (p. 25). He also used inflammatory language, warning, We must therefore be prepared to contain the [‘crime bomb’] explosion’s force and limit its damage (DiIulio, 1995a, p. 15). However, he expressed hopelessness, saying, This crime bomb probably cannot be defused, and asserting that the superpredators would be here within 5 years (i.e., by the year 2000) (p. 15). They never arrived.

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John DiIulio Retreats From His Super-Predator Theory of Black Teenagers

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John DiIulio, until recently the head of the President's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives but who is now back at his former post teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, has changed his view on the behavior of young urban blacks.

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In the early 1990s DiIulio made headlines as a result of his view that America was a demographic time bomb which was about to explode. According to DiIulio's thesis, a large increase in the number of young black male teenagers would lead to an unprecedented crime wave. DiIulio said at the time that many of these children had been raised in "moral poverty surrounded by deviant, delinquent, and criminal adults in abusive, violence-ridden, fatherless, Godless, and jobless settings.

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You have to sign up to go further on that post.In other words young black men were branded as inherently dangerous because of a false theory (recanted by the author) which was used to formulate draconian law enforcement policies that are still in effect.Is this racist? Not directly, but it still distinguishes between young black men and young white men and leads to different treatments -- ie the behaviors we have seen talked about on this thread -- by police and law enforcement.I call it a racial bias, that black youth are inherently perceived as more dangerous than their white cohorts ... don't you?and because of a false theory that still rebounds in law enforcement circles.Enjoy.

and it turns out that the one witness that said this was lying ...http://thinkprogress.org/...t-the-case-against-darren-wilson

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Ferguson prosecutor Bob McCulloch admitted that he presented evidence he knew to be false to the grand jury considering charges against Darren Wilson. In an interview with radio station KTRS on Friday, McCulloch said that he decided to present witnesses that were clearly not telling the truth to the grand jury. Specifically, McCulloch acknowledged he permitted a woman who clearly wasn’t present when this occurred to testify as an eyewitness to the grand jury for several hours. The woman, Sandra McElroy, testified that Michael Brown charged at Wilson like a football player, head down, supporting Wilson’s claim that he killed Brown in self-defense.

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There is also evidence of contradictions in Wilson’s testimony that were not challenged.It will be interesting to see what the federal review will find. The question that keeps getting asked is why it is more likely that a black youth is assumed to be dangerous than a white cohort.Why are black youths seen as dangerous?see Message 327 for part of the answer.If you understand the problem then you are better able to derive a solution.EnjoyEdited by RAZD, : added quote

I don't think you're reading Faith's latest posts right.

I think I am please show where you think I am in error. Why would she bring up the idea if shooter not realizing the races of the cops he shot?
Maybe I am misreading her but don't see how.