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Michael Brown Tag

Hate crime hoaxes have been a frequent topic here dating back to the early days of Legal Insurrection. We have over 200 posts involving various fake hate crimes. A hoax can be a complete fabrication (e.g. Jussie Smollett) or a real incident that falsely is spun...

One of the two posts of mine that sent some alumni, faculty, and students at Cornell Law School into a rage regarded the "Hands Up, Don't Shoot" slogan which has become synonymous with the Black Lives Matter Movement.

The Black Lives Matter movement was born of the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri. While the BLM founders started their organizing after the prior Trayvon Martin case, it was Brown and Ferguson which launched the BLM movement into the public spotlight through the protests and riots in Ferguson. Nothing was more associated with the BLM movement than the chant "hands up, don't shoot," based on the narrative that Brown had his hands raised and said 'don't shoot' when shot. That same chant drives protesters and rioters ripping up cities after the George Floyd killing.

Five years ago, on August 9, 2014, Michael Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson, Missouri, by police officer Darren Wilson. The death, and the claim that Brown was shot with his hands up asking not to shoot, sparked riots and launched the Black Lives Matter Movement to national prominence. But the narrative was based on a lie. Brown was shot because he attacked and attempted to take Wilson's pistol. His hands weren't up, and he didn't ask not to shoot, as an Obama-Holder Justice Department investigation later proved.

On August 9, 2014, Ferguson, MO, Police Officer Darren Wilson shot dead Michael Brown. Our first post about it was on August 11, 2014, as rioting broke out. We kept the coverage non-evaluative. We learned from prior cases, such as Trayvon Martin, not to accept at face value racial and other narratives being spun. We also learned from events such as the Boston Marathon and Newtown shootings that initial facts reported by the media often are wrong. We embedded this news reports of the looting: Within days, various supposed eyewitnesses would claim Brown was a passive victim -- an account we now know to be untrue -- as summarized in this MSNBC report we posted on August 13, 2014:

Facts don't matter in the Black Lives Matter movement. Trayvon Martin's shooting planted the seeds for the movement. Contrary to popular myth, Trayvon was not unlawfully shot and killed by George Zimmerman. The trial evidence was overwhelming that Trayvon attacked Zimmerman with a punch to the nose and when shot was on top of Zimmerman beating him Mixed Martial Arts style, having smashed his head into concrete. Moreover, the racial narrative was false, a perception caused by a deceptive NBC audio edit and false interpretation of audio in which Zimmerman supposedly uttered a racial slur, and amplified by activists and family lawyers. Michael Brown's death directly launched the movement and took it national. Brown, however, wasn't shot "hands up, don't shoot" but because he sucker punched a cop sitting in his vehicle and tried to steal the cop's gun. [Ferguson PO Darren Wilson injuries caused when Michael Brown sucker punched him while trying to grab gun] [Ferguson PO Darren Wilson injuries caused when Michael Brown sucker punched him while trying to grab gun] These seminal events of the Black Lives Matter narrative were lies.

Here's an excellent article on the plight of the unarmed perpetrator, by John Hinderaker. Here's an excerpt:
This is the point I really want to make: the constant emphasis on police shootings of *unarmed* men that we see in the press is, for the most part, crazy. If you are a perp, or a suspect, or an inoffensive person walking down the street, you may be unarmed, but the police officer is not. Nor, in most cases, will he have any immediate way to know whether you are armed or not. If you attack him, what do you expect him to do? Challenge you to an arm-wrestling match? He is entitled to use deadly force to defend himself. Attacking a police officer rarely ends well. Likewise with fleeing a police officer who is ordering you to stop. If there is a problem here, it does not demand a thorough revamping of American police practices. Rather, it suggests that those who have influence with a small demographic group–6% of the population, according to the Post–impress upon them that they should not attack police officers under any circumstances, and if told to stop, they should stop. If they put their hands up, they are not going to get shot.
This makes the point that should be obvious to all but has somehow gotten obscured by all the post-Brown propagandist verbiage, which is that a police officer can't tell whether a belligerent aggressive suspect is armed or not unless he/she is brandishing the weapon in full sight.

Last weekend a cop shot of a fleeing unarmed black man in Charleston, SC.   Not all the facts are in, but the video (apparently captured by a cell phone) is damning; it shows the cop firing at the fleeing black man several times, finally bringing him to the ground.  There seems little indication that the fleeing man represented an imminent threat to anyone, much less the police officer. It also appears that the cop planted his Taser beside the man's body.
ABC Breaking US News | US News Videos The NY Times reports:
A white police officer in North Charleston, S.C., was charged with murder on Tuesday after a video surfaced showing him shooting in the back and killing an apparently unarmed black man while the man ran away. The officer, Michael T. Slager, 33, said he had feared for his life because the man had taken his stun gun in a scuffle after a traffic stop on Saturday. A video, however, shows the officer firing eight times as the man, Walter L. Scott, 50, fled. The North Charleston mayor announced the state charges at a news conference Tuesday evening.
Here's the full video: