Derec said:
It's the "man bites dog" effect: "Meth dealer killed after aiming assault rifle at cops" isn't news. "Freshman killed after aiming dildo at cops" would be news.
But Michael Brown was "dog bites man" - a robber attacks police and gets shot. While the Euharlee story was "man bites dog" as the kid who was shot by the police wasn't a criminal and wasn't doing anything threatening.
And the local media went apeshit over it. This would have been a major story if it happened in, say, Atlanta or Marietta or even in Cartersville. But it happened in Euharlee, a bumblefuck town with a population of just over 4,000. That the story got picked up as widely as it did is actually kind of amazing.
The thing is,
local media picks up those kinds of stories all the time. There was a huge uproar around these parts two years ago when officers opened fire on a carload of football players from my high school after mistaking them for gangbangers. NONE of the national stations covered that story, even when it was obvious to everyone involved that the officers had shown up at the wrong address and fired at the wrong car.
OTOH, even your Euharlee story actually got picked up by local media and had a relatively vigorous firestorm on affiliate networks in the aftermath. It fits the pattern of most of the other more widely reported cases, and thousands of other non-reported cases.
But no national coverage. No federal investigation. No Obama.
It DID have national coverage. What it didn't get was national ATTENTION. Mainly because the officer in question claimed she saw a gun and because the media uncritically sides with the police officers' versions of events more often than not. FYI,
same thing happens with black people more often than not.
If Chris Roupe had been killed while holding a Wii remote at, say, Best Buy or in full view of a dozen or so witnesses, it would be a different story. Otherwise, it's just another "cop saw what (s)he thought was a gun and righteously defended herself" story. The only reason the story got any traction at all is because someone let it be known that the Roupe definitely WASN'T armed when he was shot, so the officer's version of events was called into question by the media.
I invite you to consider the possibility that if there was an alarmingly high rate of unarmed WHITE kids being shot and killed by trigger-happy cops, the governors of half the states in the Union would be admonishing their police officers to exercise more restraint.
Race should not matter.
I agree.
And yet it still DOES.
On the other hand, being "unarmed" is not the same as being no threat.
So you are retracting your implication that Chris Roupe was not a threat to the officer that killed him?
How frequent does it have to be before people get outraged?
I don't know of any cases in St. Louis area preceding Michael Brown.
Which, again, is because MOST such cases never get national media coverage. And even the media is only one small part of the LOCAL story anyway.
How much national coverage did we get when it came to light that Chicago police officers had a history of extracting confessions from subjects through torture? How much national coverage did we get when Glenn Evans got caught tasering suspects in the balls and forcing confessions at gunpoint? You seem to be implying that the kind of reaction we're seeing from Ferguson just kinda popped up out of nowhere. That is far from the case.
So apparently it takes only one.
It takes a lot more than that. A
well-earned reputation and a documented history of corruption, for one. The fact that they have been caught
abusing their power with impunity and
even occasionally being caught planting evidence. When you consider that the media only runs those stories when the evidence behind them is pretty reliable, you have to wonder how many hundreds of such cases are circulating word-of-mouth on the streets of Saint Louis that generate not even a yawn from the local stations.
Chris Roupe couldn't even get a honorable mention on CNN without some witnesses to his murder. How do you suppose the people of Ferguson would have gotten the word out?
Former GOP representative Joe Scarborough usually turns my stomach, but he made an excellent point this morning - Al Sharpton, et al, do not just show up at these various places like ambulance chasers. In every case, they are invited in by the families or others involved. And yes, they do have excellent media contacts and we see the results of that.
Morning Joe works for the same outfit that pays the Irrev. Sharpton his millions (that he fails to pay taxes on). But the bigger question is why isn't Sharpton as toxic as white racists?
Because being ACCUSED of being a racist by right wing reactionaries doesn't actually make you one?
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say he needs more.
Maybe we could get Al Sharpton to give a written apology to Chris Roupe's parents, written on the skin of Trayvon's Martin in Tawana Brawley's blood?
