Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown (from Ferguson), Eric Garner, Ahmaud Arbery, and now George Floyd. Just what will it take for the cops to comprehend?
Martin is a sad case, but a proper case of stand your ground. A lot of people do not know the facts. Martin was straddling Zimmerman, hitting him and pounding his head into a rock. Also, not a police issue.
Michael Brown assaulted an officer, tried to take his gone, and charged at him. It was a justified shooting.
Garner is similar to Floyd, although less callous. Neither man should be dead.
Arbery isn’t police brutality, but his was another killing people should be outraged about. Grabbing water at a construction site and jogging got a man killed.
But, there a certainly other incidents of police shootings that should disgust us all. Tamir Rice, Laquan McDonald, Walter Scott, Philando Castile, Justine Damond.
Three of these cases took place in or around Minneapolis. Is that a coincidence, or a sign of poor training and oversight.
Choosing to see these as individual cases is part of the reason why this never gets solved. People can explain away sole perpetrators as outliers to law and order, prosecute, and then go to bed "happy and satisfied that they did their bit to appear not racist and tell their friends how law and order served the day". Then as one person gets put away, another takes that person's place because the system continues to churn out people that see all black people as violent offenders regardless of the situation. This perception affects economic outcomes. It affects employment outcomes. It affects health outcomes and legal outcomes. Not a lot has changed in 150 years. We just have cameras on our phones so we can film it now when it happens.
I hadn’t heard anything about Hobbs bolder description of the Martin attack, so I did a little digging.
Maybe this was claimed but “ Sanford Police Department's homicide detective Christopher Serino recommends Zimmerman be charged with manslaughter. Zimmerman "failed to identify himself" as a concerned citizen or neighborhood watch member on two occasions that night. Serino reports that he thought Zimmerman's head injuries were "marginally consistent with a life-threatening episode, as described by him, during which neither a deadly weapon nor deadly force were deployed by Trayvon Martin."
https://www.cnn.com/2013/06/05/us/trayvon-martin-shooting-fast-facts/index.html
This kind of assertion needs to be backed up.
I’d like to see the source.
You realize they had a trial?
Show me where Zimmerman proved he was attacked with a rock.
He may have asserted it, but he did not prove it, in fact, he declined to be transported to a hospital to have his injuries evaluated.
If I got hit in the head by a rock, I’d want to have it checked out.
With out corroboration, it’s just a matter of who the jury believes.
As we have already discussed, the criminal justice system is weighted against black people, so it’s no surprise to me that Zimmerman got away with it.