Cover Up from top to bottom On August 10, 2014, St. Louis County Police Chief John Belmar held his first press conference on the murder of Mike Brown by Officer Darren Wilson of the nearby Missouri Ferguson Police Department. His force had been called in to take over the investigation for the much smaller local department. At that time, when the chief said the entire scene was just 35 feet in distance from the car door to the shooting, every observer accepted it as a negligible fact and thought little about it. It turns, out, though, that the distance Mike Brown fled was not 35 feet, as was stated in the press conference and cited in hundreds of articles since. Nor was it 45 feet, or 75 feet, or even 95 feet, but approximately 108 feet away from Darren Wilson’s SUV. What reason would the chief have for so seriously understating the distance by more than 70 feet? Do you remember Kajieme Powell? He was a young man in St. Louis who was shot and killed by police just days after the Mike Brown murder. In that case, later that evening and early the next morning, the police regularly referred to a zone, a physical distance of 20 to 30 feet, in which an officer is expected and trained to use lethal force if someone has a knife or can be expected to cause physical harm to the officer. Anyone who saw the fast murder of Kajieme Powell was horrified by it, but the police insisted that the officers, filmed by the cell phone of an onlooker, were within that imaginary zone in which lethal force was expected to be used. When the police came out the morning after Mike Brown was killed and deliberately included the distance between the SUV and the shooting, it successfully created a very particular narrative. The arc of their initial story, magnified in importance by the absence of even one official report, is that Darren Wilson shot and killed a young man who, in a short distance from the SUV, posed him grave harm. youtu.be/s4osIUmBAWI
Posted on: Wed, 08 Oct 2014 07:25:59 +0000