E-Balla wrote:jbk1234 wrote:You're just arguing with straw men. If you want to address my specific points, you should address them not get into what other people are saying. I know far more about First Amendment law and freedom of expression than you could imagine. He's free to express his opinion, other people are free to express their opinions about what he says and does. That's how it works or it doesn't work at all.
In my opinion he's protesting general outcomes, not specific polices or cases. That's by design. It's easy to protest outcomes but it's not constructive. The person who was shot in Milwaukee was violent felon, he had a gun on him, and he refused to drop it.
He had a whopping zero felonies and owned the gun legally. That story you came up with of how the shooting went is complete conjecture because to this day Milwaukee PD has not released the video most likely because it doesn't match their story.
Michael Brown decided to walk up to police car and start punching an armed police officer in the face. I doubt either community would feel safer if the police just let them go on their way. During the 90s, police refusing to actually do their jobs in high crime neighborhoods was a serious problem. There's at least some anecdotal evidence that we may be headed back there.
The department of justice still did a probe on Ferguson PD and found plenty of egregious cases of racist practices which is why they rioted. Same with Baltimore. Milwaukee is next.
If you want to actually try and make a difference, you've got to do more than decry a handful of shootings that aren't justified. The sale of contraband necessarily involves a certain level of violence because courts don't enforce property rights. So if you aren't prepared to protect your property with force you better be prepared to lose it. Decades of housing and employment discrimination means that people of color are more likely to be on neighborhoods where that contraband is sold. If you want to believe that the root cause of the problem is racist cops targeting people of color, you're free to believe that. But like Kaepernick you doing your own generalizing and that's unhelpful. The problem is more complicated than that.
No one said that's the root cause it's just the most urgent. Focus on getting equal opportunities after they aren't allowed to kill you and say you deserved it because you smoked weed (like Philando Castille).
"Smith had been in trouble with the law dating back at least to 2011, according to arrest records released by the Milwaukee County Sheriff's Office late Sunday. He was arrested or ticketed nine times in that period — for the shooting, a robbery, carrying a concealed weapon, theft, possession of heroin and more. His most recent arrest was July 22 for possession of cocaine, records show.
Last year, Smith was charged with first-degree recklessly endangering safety and with witness intimidation, but the charges were dismissed, court records show.
The charges were dropped even though the prosecutors had recorded jail calls in which Smith asked his girlfriend to pressure the victim to recant, according to court records.
In the witness intimidation case, Smith was accused of pressuring the victim in a shooting to recant a statement identifying him as the suspect, according to the criminal complaint."
http://www.jsonline.com/story/news/crime/2016/08/14/man-shot-milwaukee-police-subject-witness-intimidation-case/88721094/The officer who shot him was an African-American.
You're engaging in revisionist history regarding Ferguson. The crowd rioted because people said that he had his hands up and was surrendering. The riots didn't occur after the DOJ released its findings about policing for profit. DOJ found the officer's account to be accurate.