Tag Archives: ferguson

Thoughts on Ferguson.

Originally appeared on The Final Strawj nix

Let’s go back to Ferguson. As I speak protesters in Ferguson MO await the Grand Jury decision in the case of a police officer who killed Mike Brown, and I really don’t know why. This is the same criminal justice system that has justified the genocide of Black people by White government agents for centuries, the same system that hired this pig, handed him a loaded gun and sent him goose stepping into a predominantly Black community in the first place. So now thousands are poised, insisting that the same system somehow validate the life of Mike Brown by prosecuting the very same killer who killed Mike while on the same payroll.

Why?

Why are people appealing to an obviously racist control system for validation? To me this is an extremely sad scenario. It’s like thousands of abused children, traumatized and neglected by a vicious drunken father and even after they realize what a brutal monster he is, they still seek his approval and validation. I don’t get it.

Why does anyone care what a Grand jury thinks? Or the prosecutor? Or a judge? Mike Brown is dead, and to speak of justice for Mike Brown is ridiculous if you’re talking about some stupid piece of paper with a rubber stamp on it telling us what we already know issued by the same institutions that took his life. Justice for Mike Brown would be giving him his life back, something Grand Juries, prosecutors and judges can’t do. So, in terms of justice all of them are irrelevant. Mike Mike is gone, but there’s plenty that can be done to prevent the next police shooting before it happens. Continue reading →

Ferguson

This originally aired on The Final Straw radio show.

Let’s talk about Ferguson MO. A Black unarmed teen was shot repeatedly by a white officer while Brown had his arms in the air. Since then, an angry community has been protesting, which led to small scale rioting and looting. To talk about the situation in Ferguson honestly though, I think we’d have to talk about it in a broader context. A couple years back I wrote a piece called, “On the Morality of Killing Police” which is still posted at SeanSwain.org. I wrote that in response to a good friend of mine being brutally and unnecessarily assaulted by a St Louis police officer. I argued then that it’s a legitimate question to ask whether defense of human life necessitates the pro-active and pre-emptive killing of police.
The fact that I wrote that for posting two years ago demonstrates that the rampant problem of sadistic and over-aggressive trigger happy cops in the St Louis area is not a new phenomenon. And to revisit my argument from that article, consider: if that cop who committed the most recent shooting had been found dead in his police cruiser after I wrote that article, Michael Brown would still be alive. Continue reading →