Ferguson: too much or not enough?

[Mister Agenda]

I feel like you're confusing a taser with a taser gun. The metal thingys (excuse my lack of vocabulary) hook into your body and you can continue electrocuting the person until they're down and/or electrocute them again if they try to get back up. I've seen it done to some rather large highschoolers. Even then guys usually peed their pants and were down within seconds.

Those are the ones I'm talking about. You can't apply the subsequent shots unless both darts successfully attach on the first shot. I'd lay odds those big high school kids weren't moving targets, or under the kind of stress that lets someone keep coming at you even though they're being shot (according to the officer's account).

The best way of handling this wouldn't have resulted in any news story at all: The cop asking the kids to go to the sidewalk in such a way that they complied without violence. If that was possible in this case, the cop bears some responsibility for not handling the encounter better. But, it could be the case that the only way for there not to be an altercation was for the cop not to tell the kids to get out of the street...but then he's not doing his job. The only single person who definitely had the power to keep this from escalating was Brown, in pretty much every version of what happened.

And I kind of hate to be the one to point this out, because police brutality is a problem, and too many people of every race get shot by cops acting like a paramilitary force, especially from the practice of taking SWAT teams to drug busts. ALL police interactions with civilians should be monitored. It's good for us, it's good for liberty, and I believe it's good for the police, too.

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That Brown actually had his hands up in the air is in question. A lot hinges on that. In this day and age, cops should be being filmed whenever they interact with the public.

Yeah - the witnesses who have come forward agree that his hands were up and the cop? Well, the cop hasn't been heard from, has he?

In fact, all we've heard from are a bunch of racist twats who think that if a black kid spits on the sidewalk any time in his life he should be gunned down by a cop at any opportunity.

Reportedly, his story is that Brown 'bum-rushed' him. I'm not under the delusion that I already have more facts on the matter than investigators will have by the time they make the determination on whether Wilson needs to go to trial.

The Ferguson police responded to protesters with tear gas and a tank while carrying rifles and detained reporters. There's more than enough to condemn, no speculation necessary.