City of Baltimore in flames

First topic message reminder :


The City of Baltimore Police arrested Freddie Gray, a black male, one day.  He was put in the back of a police van to be transported to jail.  Funny thing, he arrived with his back broken in three places.  Undaunted, the police refused medical aid for him.  He died a few days later.

The facts are fairly simple: healthy black male > police custody > black male ends up dead.  The police have no answer.  So they take their time, pleading they are studying the question.  Excuse me?  What are you studying?

Perhaps the City of Baltimore needs more time to make up a story.

CNN News wrote:Charred cars and buildings. Hospitalized police officers. Looted and damaged businesses. No school, because it might not be safe for children to go outside.

That was the stark reality Tuesday after a day and night that saw 202 arrests, 144 vehicle fires and 19 structure fires, according to city spokesman Kevin Harris.

"What happened ... destroyed so much of the progress that the people who actually live here have been working for," said Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, calling Monday "a very dark day for our city."

"What happened last night made sure that more people are struggling and that more people have needs, and those needs are going to go unmet because of what was destroyed."

At least 15 officers were wounded in the unrest, six of them seriously, the city's police commissioner said.

The tumult follows a spate of protests across the country over the deaths of black men after encounters with police: Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; Eric Garner in New York; and Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina. Underlying all this unrest is what Baltimore City Council Member Brandon Scott called "a long, long, longstanding issue with young African-Americans."

"We're talking about years and decades of mistrust, of misfortune, of despair that it's just coming out in anger," Scott told CNN. "No, it is not right for them to burn down their own city. But that is what's coming out of these young people."

Laquicha Harper, a 30-year-old Baltimore resident, called the violence and destruction embarrassing and "heartbreaking," saying "we owe it to ourselves to do better." She was among locals who responded Tuesday morning with brooms, not rocks, to clean up the mess left behind.

"I understand that everybody is upset, I understand that tension is brewing ... I'm here, I get it," she said. "But there are better ways that we can handle our frustration. And they can't hear us when we're behaving this way."

So the big story the American media is following is that of the riots.  No one is asking why they are rioting?  It's as if a few kids got up one morning and said: "Hey, I know, let's go burn some cars."

The only way that Freddie Gray's death figures into the story is as Freddie Gray caused all of this!  Sure, let's blame the victim.  Why?  Because the police, as a whole, constitute organized crime around the US, indiscriminately killing whomever and wherever they want...and you wouldn't want to antagonize them, would you?

eddie wrote:Tbh rags, in this case, I think the police made a massive error and shot an unarmed man.
Other resulting riots may have started off rather morally but just became about robbing some trainers from JD Sports and having a laugh

I'm not suggesting that Mark Duggan had the gun in his hand when he was shot, I'm saying that he had the gun in the taxi with him when the police were following him. I think that he threw the gun away a second or two before the taxi stopped - he knew the police were following him.

I think the police officer who shot him believed he was holding the gun, and that's why he shot him. He was mistaken but it was a genuine mistake. Once again, I think this is an example of a person trying to run from the police when he should have sat completely still.

Here rags:

The jury, accompanied by Judge Keith Cutler, in the inquest into the death of Mark Duggan visit the scene of his shooting in Tottenham, north London The jury, accompanied by Judge Keith Cutler, in the inquest into the death of Mark Duggan visit the scene of his shooting in Tottenham, north London Was the shooting necessary?

The police marksman told an inquest that he was 100 per cent convinced that Mark Duggan was carrying a weapon when he emerged from the minicab.

The officer, known only as V53, says that he fired on Mr Duggan in self-defence because he was pointing a gun, hidden in a sock, in his direction.

"The only thing I was focused on was the gun," V53 told the inquest. "The next thing he starts to do is move the gun away from his body. There's a line in the sand now, there's a tipping point… it's now my honestly held belief that he's going to shoot me."

He fired two shots from his Heckler and Koch carbine, hitting him in the chest and arm. One of the shots went through the body of Mr Duggan and embedded in the radio of a fellow firearms officer, W42. The officer said that as Mr Duggan fell backwards, he could no longer see the gun.

More than anything else, it is the whereabouts of the Bruni Olympic pistol at the moment he was shot that was the key to whether Mr Duggan was killed lawfully or not.

The jurors had to pick their way through multiple - and often conflicting - accounts of those confused few moments.

Another person, Witness B, claimed that the weapon was in fact a mobile telephone and that Mr Duggan appeared to be surrendering when he was shot. Just a few seconds before the shooting, Mr Duggan had been speaking with his brother Marlon in an unhurried three-minute phone call, his brother told the inquest.

A text sent just before he was killed read: "Watch out for a Green BMW van. It's Trident (the gang crime unit), they just grabbed me."

Witness B, who was watching from the ninth floor of a housing block on the other side of the road, claimed that he saw Mr Duggan with a Blackberry phone in his hand when he was shot. "It was an execution," he told a journalist. He said the phone was still in Mr Duggan's hand when he went to get his own mobile to record the aftermath of the shooting.

The witness, who said he did not trust the police or investigators, denied changing his story from his initial account that he saw Mr Duggan with a gun.

How did the gun end up 20ft away?

If he was shot with a gun in his hand, how did it end up behind a fence up to 20 feet away inside a sock? But if it was planted - a claim fiercely denied by officers involved in the shooting - why would anyone put it there?

Lawyers for the family allege that a police officer removed a handgun from the minicab after Mr Duggan was shot and planted it in the grass behind a fence.

Sorry the link to that:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/mark-duggan-was-he-really-armed-were-the-police-under-threat-all-the-key-evidence-9046789.html

eddie wrote:Here rags:

The jury, accompanied by Judge Keith Cutler, in the inquest into the death of Mark Duggan visit the scene of his shooting in Tottenham, north London The jury, accompanied by Judge Keith Cutler, in the inquest into the death of Mark Duggan visit the scene of his shooting in Tottenham, north London Was the shooting necessary?

The police marksman told an inquest that he was 100 per cent convinced that Mark Duggan was carrying a weapon when he emerged from the minicab.

The officer, known only as V53, says that he fired on Mr Duggan in self-defence because he was pointing a gun, hidden in a sock, in his direction.

"The only thing I was focused on was the gun," V53 told the inquest. "The next thing he starts to do is move the gun away from his body. There's a line in the sand now, there's a tipping point… it's now my honestly held belief that he's going to shoot me."

He fired two shots from his Heckler and Koch carbine, hitting him in the chest and arm. One of the shots went through the body of Mr Duggan and embedded in the radio of a fellow firearms officer, W42. The officer said that as Mr Duggan fell backwards, he could no longer see the gun.

More than anything else, it is the whereabouts of the Bruni Olympic pistol at the moment he was shot that was the key to whether Mr Duggan was killed lawfully or not.

The jurors had to pick their way through multiple - and often conflicting - accounts of those confused few moments.

Another person, Witness B, claimed that the weapon was in fact a mobile telephone and that Mr Duggan appeared to be surrendering when he was shot. Just a few seconds before the shooting, Mr Duggan had been speaking with his brother Marlon in an unhurried three-minute phone call, his brother told the inquest.

A text sent just before he was killed read: "Watch out for a Green BMW van. It's Trident (the gang crime unit), they just grabbed me."

Witness B, who was watching from the ninth floor of a housing block on the other side of the road, claimed that he saw Mr Duggan with a Blackberry phone in his hand when he was shot. "It was an execution," he told a journalist. He said the phone was still in Mr Duggan's hand when he went to get his own mobile to record the aftermath of the shooting.

The witness, who said he did not trust the police or investigators, denied changing his story from his initial account that he saw Mr Duggan with a gun.

How did the gun end up 20ft away?

If he was shot with a gun in his hand, how did it end up behind a fence up to 20 feet away inside a sock? But if it was planted - a claim fiercely denied by officers involved in the shooting - why would anyone put it there?

Lawyers for the family allege that a police officer removed a handgun from the minicab after Mr Duggan was shot and planted it in the grass behind a fence.

I think it's very likely that Mark Duggan did not have the gun in his hand, as I said. However, the police expected him to have a gun, and the officer may well have thought he saw a gun. He had one second to make a decision.

Do you think that Mark Duggan did not have a gun in the taxi prior to the incident? Do you also think that Mark Duggan should have stayed in the taxi when it was stopped by the police?

Tbh, I think he was probably a right shit and well-known to the police so he died by the life he chose.

But in a court of law.....Not sure that is was right that he was shot.

eddie wrote:Tbh, I think he was probably a right shit and well-known to the police so he died by the life he chose.

But in a court of law.....Not sure that is was right that he was shot.

A court of law said it was lawful, as did the High Court.

eddie wrote:Tbh rags, in this case, I think the police made a massive error and shot an unarmed man.
Other resulting riots may have started off rather morally but just became about robbing some trainers from JD Sports and having a laugh

If you are talking about the Freddie Gray case--the subject of this thread--there was no gun involved. Mr. Gray was arrested with no probable cause (a Constitutional requirement), nor even a crime. He was alive and well when he was arrested, however he had three broken vertebrae when they got him to the station. He died within the week.

The big question is, how can a perfectly healthy man be taken into custody, and end up with a broken back an hour later? Other questions are, why was he arrested when there was no probable cause? And why was he not given medical assistance when they knew (admitted) he was severely injured?

You take a perfectly healthy man, place him in police custody, and he comes out the other end with three broken vertebrae...somebody's got some accounting to do.

No we were talking about Mark Duggan