American "justice" hates blacks

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Care to clarify "animals"  ?

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Has Northern California ever had a race riot?

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Has Northern California ever had a race riot?

I dunno but at least a third of the crowd is non-black so a race riot would be interesting. 

What crowd? 

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Oh right, I bet Zachary Running Wolf and those "protest/flavor of the week" types are all down there being silly.

Has Northern California ever had a race riot?

I dunno but at least a third of the crowd is non-black so a race riot would be interesting.  

What crowd?  

About a thousand people gathered in downtown. There is continuous coverage of it on TV here. I don't think this crowd will get violent but you never know what will happen at night.

Thousand people?  That could turn rowdy.  I  lived in the East Bay when this incident happened, so I'm very fascinated by that story.

Does anyone know about how large the typical crowd needs to be to start a full-on riot?  I mean, about 3k people were injured and 4k people arrested in the Watt's riots.  There's generally probably a threshold that gets crossed at some point.

I've always felt a lot more racial tension in the air in the Bay Area than my limited experiences in other parts of the country -- but that could just be because I lived in Berkeley, where the rich white people live in the hills and elect white politicians who care more about spending $500k on a useless lawsuit to save 13 trees than spending that money on social service programs or even fixing potholes.

What are they doing?  Holding candles, shouting anger, etcetc?

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Has Northern California ever had a race riot?

There was an interesting riot in response to Dan White's manslaughter [as opposed to murder] charge.  But that manslaughter verdict was far more ridiculous -- a plotted assassination -- and the victim was a political icon for the gay rights movement.

Glancing at this list, I don't see any Northern California race riots:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Race_riots_in_the_United_States

Even Tacoma, Washington has had a race riot, am I missing anything?

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How's the weather in Oakland tonight?  Hot, mild, etc.?

http://tinyurl.com/293ys2f

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    My mother was outraged that he was not acquitted.

Reading the story makes the whole thing more complicated than black and white -- but how could he be acquitted?  He was trained how and when to use his gun.  Yet he killed an unarmed man.


If this were some yokel, then the "I didn't mean to fire my gun" excuse would hold more water.  Although he was only a BART cop, either he ignored his extensive training protocol or his training protocol was severely lacking -- in either case, some heads has got to roll.  

Police officers are given the gun not just for giggles but rather as part of their service contract with society.  They can't just fire their guns as flippantly as a drunken guy in a bar uses his fists.  You can't just fire off shots at an unarmed guy's chest or head unless he's threatening serious bodily harm.  

The best conclusion from this trial is that police officers who carry guns, even those who are never expected to fire them like BART police officers, need to have extensive training in the use of their arms.  If they are going to carry guns, they can't be treated like rent-a-cops.  I'm not sure what the status quo is here in that regard, but I'd hope that the training is more extensive and more frequent than it was before this incident.

As it seems that the murderer in this case had such a training, he should be held to a higher standard than someone who had no training in executing lethal weapons.
 
I don't need this guy to go down, but if you're going to give BART policemen lethal force abilities, then they either need to be just as well trained in lethal measures as a major city's police department, or they need to cease using lethal weapons.

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White guy shoots black guy, the Justice Department can't resist.

White cop shoots unarmed, restrained black guy in the back for no legitimate reason, and gets off with a verdict less than murder...

I'm not sure what they are "review[ing]" here though.

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White guy shoots black guy, the Justice Department can't resist.

White cop shoots unarmed, restrained black guy in the back for no legitimate reason, and gets off with a verdict less than murder...

I'm not sure what they are "review[ing]" here though.

     Do you think that it is obvious from the video that Mehserle intended to kill Grant? Is it not a reasonable doubt that he really thought he had drawn his taser?

Well, his story changed to the taser story, he's had six hours of training with the taser, taser's weigh half as much, are shaped differently, have a different color, and was on the completely other side of his body as his gun.

And, it should be said, that he shouldn't have used his taser here either!

I'm not outraged by the verdict, I think it's a conclusion that reasonable people could reach, but given Oakland's history of police racism, it's a stark reminder of the days when police could shoot black victims and get off with a slap on the wrist (although Mehserle certainly didn't get a slap on the wrist).

Anyway, I was just protesting Gramp's intentional oversimplification -- many people view what the police officer did here as tantamount to an execution, it's more than just an issue of white cop and black victim imo.

Shrugz

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    Well didn't he holster his taser on the wrong side? Not to mention that he was under a great deal of stress (even experts have made the mistake under stress) & his reaction afterwards suggested that he was shocked by his action. He shouldn't have used the taser, but the issue has to do whether he had intent to kill. The reckless use of a taser (which turned out to be a gun), seems to gel with the facts required to convict him of manslaughter.

His taser was on the left side of his body, I'm not sure if that's the right side or wrong side.  Typically that's the side, I think, that is used for the quickest draw for right-handed folks, I'm not sure whether he was right-handed or left-handed.

The fact that he shouldn't have even been using his taser here, imo, is a fairly relevant fact.  I mean, if I attack a guy in an alleyway and beat him to death, I'd probably be charged for murder, right?  Even if I can legitimately claim "No, I only meant to severely injure him in an unjust fashion, I didn't want to kill him!"

I mean, people DO die from tasers, and the cop in question has taken a six hours of training before he was given his taser, so I assume that he's familiar that tasers are not to be used flippantly on unarmed, restrained subjects?  I'm not super familiar with police code, or tasers in general, so I'm not speaking from a point of authority here.

You know, I don't know what the "right" verdict here is.   The cop shot an unarmed, restrained man in the back, and acted surprised, but his original story wasn't the "I thought my gun was a taser" story:

http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_15002927

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A substantial part of me wonders how much of this incident is due to the cop in question being a BART police officer rather than a police officer who actually, y'know, has to deal with homicides, cartels, gangs, etc. like the Oakland Police.  If that turns out to be the raw source of the police officer not knowing what his gun even looks like when confronted with a vaguely stressful situation -- and, in response to your point about him being under duress, I would say that this situation was FAR less stressful than like what many cops face, as this was only an incident with an individual who was not unarmed and constrained in a train station with nowhere to go -- then BART police need to either receive more training or just be given instead of guns or something, as this is COMPLETELY inexcusable.  Police Officers should not be given a free pass to not know what their own gun looks and feels like just because there's an unarmed guy being restrained who's yelling obscenities or whatevsky.  


I don't think the murderer in question was necessarily a bad guy, but it does seem to me, as someone with zero actual knowledge of the law, that as a police officer he should be held to a higher standard than the average bear when it comes to things like appropriate force, taser protocol, somewhat stressful situations, and what a gun looks and feels like as you flip the safety off and shoot an unarmed dude in the back.

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PiT I think we're about on the same page regarding this issue.

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    I would agree. I think our main point of contention was what exactly would constitute murder on Mehserle's part as opposed to manslaughter.

I don't really hold an exact opinion on this convoluted issue, I think I'm just mostly expressing skepticism.  I'm not intricately familiar with either the case or the exact definition of murder in California State.  Obviously Mehserele committed an unjust crime that resulted in someone's death, and that crime exists somewhere in between the world of manslaughter and murder, with lots of evidence that good lawyers can bat about for days.

He's a police officer with fairly extensive training in what his gun and taser do, I think he should be held to a higher standard, and that this circumstance does not qualify as stressful enough to grant him an exception to a major lapse of duty, but I really don't know whether or not the evidence exists to convict him of murder.  The jury decided that it did not, and that's the system we work with.  Sometimes juries make wrong decisions, but that's inevitable

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Who said the jury didn't hold him to a higher standard?

I just said we should hold him to a higher standard, I haven't been following the trial

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Someone charging a police officer, or a bystander in front of a police officer, with any kind of sword or knife  or lethal object could and should expect maximum force to be used to halt a potential homicide.  

Some peoples' silliness doesn't really relate to the case at hand though?  Maybe it relates to the protests.  That's just an example of how some people always are against the police, which is not a position I think I'm representing.

I'm not familiar with the NYPD either, I just moved here.  The police department I've regularly interacted with as part of my career for four years as a security guard was UCPD, and to a lesser extent, BPD [Berkely].  I could ramble a bit about some of the cases I've dealt with them, and I think I've reported some fairly serious criminals from time to time, but that'd just be rambling, as you know, I never ramble.

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Just saw the police chief on the local news. Out of 72 arrests last night only 19 were from Oakland and 12 were from OUT OF STATE. The rest were from the rest of the bay area and other parts of the state. So much for the "animals" (read n***er) in Oakland rioting. The anarchists from SF are mostly to blame.

...so... the actual animals? Ahem.

Well, it's possible that another moderator coined the term "animals" here without explanation, despite a request for such

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    I guess that what I was talking about was that I feel that taking a fair attitude towards the police is a rather fine line between arbitrarily being for them & arbitrarily being against them.

Why?

And why does your definition for taking a "fair attitude" preclude being "against them" ?

I don't see any fine line at all here.  I see a messy line between a possible murder and a possible manslaughter, but that's not an uncommon thing in the courts.