“Sometimes the kid dies, sometimes the cop dies” (Usually it’s the kid, though.)
by digby
I wrote a little piece about Ferguson for Salon today. I looked back at the last year of killing, protests and injustice. Here’s an excerpt:
But a backlash formed as well. There was, as usual, the right-wing media’s reflexive rejection of anything that resembles racial justice. And in the wake of the massive Eric Garner protests in New York, the police themselves reacted with petulant immaturity by turning their backs on the mayor because he warned his bi-racial son to be wary of police power.
“There are people who feel that police have too much power, and they don’t like it. There are people who feel police don’t have enough power, and they don’t like it.”
Needless to say, the police are among the latter group. Wilson is in the latter group as well, although it’s hard to see how a person could be given more than the power to kill and unarmed teen-ager with impunity, but perhaps he thinks he was denied the approbation he deserves. Luckily for him, the St Louis Police Association decided to mark the 1st Anniversary of Michael Brown’s death by calling it Darren Wilson Day:
A post on the Columbia Police Officers Association’s Facebook page, which appeared on the one-year anniversary of the fatal shooting of black teenager Michael Brown by white Ferguson police Officer Darren Wilson, called Wilson “an innocent, but persecuted, officer.” The post included a message saying that support for Wilson has nothing to do with race. The author of the post said the police union supports Wilson because of “the fact that he was thoroughly investigated … and found he did NOTHING wrong.”
Last night on CNN, Don Lemon hosted one of the more notorious of the police apologists, a former cop and spokesman for the St Louis Police Association a man by the name of Jeff Roorda. Asked about the anniversary of the Brown shooting, he said:
We’ve blown 365 days of missed opportunities talking about faux police reforms when we ought to be talking about how to make life better for these kids who live in this inner city setting, so hopeless and in such despair that they turn to violence and turn it more and more frequently against cops. Sometimes the kid dies and sometimes the cop dies but either way it’s an unhappy outcome…We ought to be talking about the root issues and not distracting everybody in the country with this big lie. It started with the “hand up, don’t shoot” myth.
Roorda has written a book called “Ferghanistan, The War on Police.” He didn’t seem concerned that comparing Ferguson to Afghanistan or framing the police as being at war with the citizens might not be the best idea under the circumstances. But if it is a war, the police are winning it.