defaultprophet

@defaultprophet: Well yes if you try and overpower a cop and take his gun I do believe the cop is within his rights to shoot, and shoot to kill in the context of that altercation. And that would happen to be at point blank by nature of the conflict. But all of this that you said? No.

"Then continue to shoot them as they are surrendering 35 feet from the police car where the altercation took place? With the gun he didn't wrestle away from the cop, if that's even what he was doing?"

Never did I say I supported the cop shooting somebody surrendering. You are assuming the eye witness account is being 100% truthful, which is not an assumption that is safe to make. If his account can be substantiated by the autopsy then yeah the cop straight up murdered the guy.

This. There was 1 witness, the guy's friend. Of course he's probably Black as well, and if he didn't hate the police before, he does now after seeing his friend get killed by them (regardless of wheather he deserved it).

1 witness shouldn't be enough for a verdict. They'll need lots of other evidence.

@defaultprophet: Um, no? Is that really the way you read what I was saying?

It goes by pretty quickly on the video, but it was a thrown object, no matter if it was glass or plastic.

But a plastic bottle did not cause this to happen.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-28781440

This isn't a plastic bottle either.

It's not unheard of for witnesses to lie, especially if they want to get the cops in trouble. All we as the general public have right now as evidence are two sides saying different things, right? The autopsy will reveal a lot of information so there is no need to rely on heresy and speculation. I'm a big opponent of police brutality, but if somebody is on the verge of overpowering a police officer and attempting to take their gun I expect that police officer to shoot that individual as a matter of protecting themselves and the public. That doesn't have anything to do with execution. Now if the police officer fills their body full of bullets that is excessive for sure, and should be treated as such.

@defaultprophet: Racial composition? It seems like during the G20 and Occupy protests everybody of every race was pissed off equally. I don't see how you could compare the two.

Both of the protests you mentioned had nothing to do with race or civil rights at all. Both were about poverty, income inequality and anti-capitalism. Hardly comparable to the shooting of a black teenager.

However, I will argue that not everything the police are doing is WRONG.

For example, in this video, you can clearly see that the police allowed a peaceful demonstration to take place for hours, even into the night, until someone happened to throw a molotov cocktail. As far as the appropriateness of their response after that violent act, that is certainly up for debate.

I'm not doing that at all. But I am calling it for what it is - a race related riot. Right or wrong, black guy got shot and then sympathetic (mostly black) members in the local community started rioting, very similar to what happened in LA in 1992. That's not lambasting the black community, that's calling out the jerks who thought it was okay to strat rioting and looting. If the same thing happened to a white person and white people started rioting and looting, I'd be saying the exact same thing I am now. Not to say the other races aren't rioting and looting as well during this because everyone is pretty pissed off, but it seems by and large that what's happening in Furgeson right now is predominantly a black issue.