Licensed to carry black man shot by police

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All media sources are slanted. It's the reader's or viewer's responsibility to disregard the slant and focus on the facts. The only thing they "made up" was the claim that the barely-visible gun looked like the one used in the robbery, which is silly.



Some LEOs are bigots or trigger-happy and ought to be weeded out. Most are not. Tarring them all with the same brush is as wrong as, oh, racism.

Where is your evidence that this shooting was racially motivated?



Nobody's said that "he had it coming" – that's a straw man. But there's no need to make anything up in order to see that the officer's actions may have been justified. Available information very strongly suggests that Castile reached for his gun and wouldn't stop when instructed by a cop. That's a poor life choice for anybody regardless of skin color.

At least in this thread, the debate has been between 'We don't need any more facts, evil cop murdered a good man in cold blood because racism' on one side, and 'Actually, this shooting may have been justified, for these reasons, but let's hope we get more information' on the other. If I'm ever accused of a serious crime, I know which group I'd rather have in the jury box.

Hi Campin_Cat YOU SAID:

"First-of-all, the robbery happened FOUR DAYS EARLIER!!
Second-of-all, I was shocked outta my mind at the amount of SMALL CHILDREN who were running-alongside their parents as they looted, here in Baltimore, last year, during the unrest!! One little boy had a bag full of stuff, bigger than HE was. Another live shot showed people pulling up to a mall, getting out of the car, leaving their little girl in the backseat, in her car-seat, and running, with the rest of the looters, into the mall. I doubt, very much, that Baltimore is the only place, this happens!"

Many people have been shocked at seemingly un-explainable actions. Let me tell you what I learned in Chicago.

During most of the '60s and half of the '70s I worked in and around Chicago, doing manual labor. The people I worked with most of the time were black guys that lived on the terrible terrible West side of Chicago.

If you haven't spent time in these neighborhoods and only view them while passing through you don't get the true sense of what these neighborhoods are like. If I were to try to describe the total poverty, despair and crime that suffuses these streets you'd grow tired and think I was making things up. But this is where black families live every single day of their lives. These neighborhoods destroy proper notions of conduct.

I hope you get some inkling of the depths of despair these people and their families live with.

AND THEN SUDDENLY IT'S CHRISTMAS MORNING...you can get more food than you can eat. Your children and yourself can have new cloths, a TV....it's like your most precious dream has come true. All those dreams created when you see the large white people's stores filled with good and groceries, are fulfilled. It may be hard to understand but this is what living in such abject poverty does to people.

Perhaps not be as harsh with these truly downtrodden people? And be happy you never have to "walk a mile" in their shoes?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm a terrible person and all that (as if I'm not entitled to my opinion). If you hadn't noticed, you and I are probably on the same side in this thread. Now, I gotta go to church.

ZenDen: I've sat and read many posts like these, of yours, and have not responded, because I'm a fan of yours----but, I can no longer do that.....

Edit: Forgot to write something.

"I've sat and read many posts like these, of yours, and have not responded, because I'm a fan of yours----but, I can no longer do that..." Well thanks CC, I've been a fan of your reasoned dialog as well.

You seem intelligent and level headed...let me ask you how you were raised...not specifics, but who raised you. Was it in the ghetto you learned right from wrong, or were you the 6th kid in a family of 10 living on welfare...as your parents and grandparents, etc. were raised? Who taught you/how did you learn morals? If there's nowhere to learn them you may grow up and not have them.

I don't doubt you don't join the riots. But as you say many others in your neighborhood do not as well. You seem to paint everyone with the same brush. And some black people do survive well, but they are exceptionally talented, rich, or have gotten some other "break."

I defer to your personal experiences in Baltimore...perhaps there you have no ghettos as there are in Chicago. But my direct experience comes from knowing people living in these ghettos. My close association was about 15 years...at the end of which my best friend was killed by police...do they do that frequently in Baltimore as well?

You've heard about Chicago police but have you ever heard of Chicago firemen? In these neighborhoods in Chicago, if someone reports a fire the firemen make sure they go through the entire building and steal whatever they can get away with. I had another friend, Eddie Hosley, who thought hiding their money in a coffee can and hiding it under the refrigerator would be safe...but when they were allowed back in the refrigerator was overturned and the money gone. That plus the police (newspaper words can't describe it) is the world these people live in on the West side of Chicago.

You may not agree with what I say CC, and I'm sure for very good reasons of your own...but 15 years of close experience tells me I'm right. [b]I do NOT say all these people turn into crooks....Eddie or his family would have rather died, but the majority of those poor people without a job or hope think differently.[/b]

For them it's not stealing, it's a windfall (a Christmas if you will) that will never happen again for the rest of their lives. I hope this hasn't made you a permanent racist.

"I've walked many, MANY miles in their shoes, and I've never killed anybody, sold / taken street drugs, pulled a knife on somebody----I can't deny I haven't thought about it, but....."

You've been forced to actually "think" of doing these things....so how can you condemn a weaker/more battered(?) person for giving in? I don't understand.

I see this argument going on between some of you guys and I'm a little confused. I'm a person who grew up in extreme poverty, so the kind of person that ZenDen here is talking about. I think people like to believe that some people are so poor that they lose their dignity and humanity, and so are in truly desperate straits. I can tell you, as someone who has grown up in third-world style conditions here in the US, you are always still a human being.

It's funny because before I even got on WrongPlanet today I woke up thinking about this story that they used to tell us in church as a requirement of receiving church welfare. You'd have to stay for special "charity" themed sermons that only you and the other poor people had to listen to. There was this one about a boy who was 11 or 12 and he had a pair of female nurse's shoes that he had donated to him. They were the only shoes he had and it was this long detailed story about how grateful he was for them, even though they were women's nurses shoes. It always struck me as incredible, insulting BS. I'll even type that out. It was BS. Poor people are human beings and we always have dignity, even if we are desperate and have to swallow our pride and pretend we have no dignity.

So no, being poor is not an excuse to do something wrong, neither is being an oppressed minority. And yes, there is always something in your mind telling you that a wrong thing in wrong. Whether or not you choose to listen to that and act is up to you.

I'm talking about our policies, the practices we use, what we teach our officers, the implicit biases that exist in most of us. I'm not painting all officers with the same brush. There is a difference.

Until you learn that, then further discussion is useless.

Now they'll say you had it coming if an officer gets scared and shoots you.

Hi SocOfAutism:

I propose understanding. If you truly understand how these people live and think then it's hard not to have compassion for them. The further you stand from the problem the less you understand and the more threatening it seems.

I'm guessing that you and Campin_Cat and many others in this forum are easily in the top 15% I.Q. wise. But the people on the streets in these ghettos are not, so my or your reasoning ability can not be theirs.

And as for dignity? In their black ghetto, in poverty, with the police on them all the time, the most downtrodden in our culture, how would these people gain dignity?

At church, Castile's fiancee says that these things are done to them, and that is why she live-streamed video:

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/fia ... re-n606726

What policies, exactly? What training practices and what biases? Listing undefined and unsupported generalities isn't taking part in a discussion at all. It is pointless virtue signaling.

Nothing you have posted suggests that you are entitled to patronize me or anybody else here.

I'll ask again: what evidence do you have that this specific incident was racially motivated?

I tend to act patronizing to people who make crap up and refuse to back down when called on it. It's because I have a hard time respecting such them.

Zen, I CAN see your point. I truly do see what you're trying to say. What I am seeing here is an educated argument (yours) against points of view from people who have been on the ground, so to speak.

I was trying to say that people inherently have dignity. You can't take it away from them from trodding on them. No one can have any idea how conditions are affecting someone else on the inside. Plenty of people are just fine where and how they are and are proud of it. It's messed up to assume that they're in a pitiful state. Poor people have pride like anyone else. Some people's culture may happen to be ripping people off and shooting up. Or turning tricks and laying in filth. Some people like that, and they are WAY SMARTER THAN I AM. I could give you the contact information of just such a person, who gave birth to me. Certainly not all poor people are like this, but some are. People have a right to be who they are, even if it's distasteful to the rest of us. All we can do is help those who want it and avoid those who don't want help.

The black ghetto is also the white ghetto and the brown ghetto. I saw that someone, maybe it was Campin Cat, made that point, but I just wanted to underline that. Black does not equal poor. It's incredibly racist to think that it does. If you're in the ghetto, it really doesn't matter what color you are. Everyone there has a p*ss poor life and is under police suspicion. Usually with good reason.

I really don't have compassion for poor people. I probably have less than regular people do. I imagine it's like that for autistic people when they hear about other autistic people doing regular autistic people things. Why would you feel sorry for your own kind? That's kind of unnatural.

Again, please don't imagine that people in the ghetto are stupid. They absolutely are not. I have run into far stupider graduate students than stupid ghetto jerks or criminals. Not that I have run into ghetto people since I was a teenager. But I ran into enough to be able to compare.

It IS easier to live in general when you have things handed to you and you do not have the compounded social and physical problems that exist with poverty. I will grant that being black while poor gives limitations that do not exist when being black as a regular person. There is a perception that one cannot be a mailman, or a pharmacist, a professor or a person on the Geek Squad. People don't make sure that poor kids are prepared for the future and they typically have terrible role models and are abused in many ways.

I don't know if anyone else watches Game of Thrones, but it's like Rickon Stark being told to simply walk across a field to his brother and he'd be free. Meanwhile the bad guy shoots arrows at him the whole time. Sure, maybe Rickon could have strafed to the right and the left the whole time and gotten out of there, but it would have been challenging. Especially since he had probably been starved and otherwise tortured beforehand. So no, it's not simple. But it's also not as difficult as some people seem to think. With proper thought and work, you CAN simply walk out of poverty. You do not have to be white or in the top percentage of intelligence.

"...dignity. You can't take it away from them from trodding on them...." Hmm-But how about if you poison them? I understand the CIA was found to have been facilitating drug flow into the ghettos; perhaps before your time?. How many black families do you know that have a drug problem? It's a scourge. It effects everything. Many of the looters will sell their loot to buy drugs.

"Some people like that, and they are WAY SMARTER THAN I AM" It's a shame isn't it? The first avocado I ever tasted was given to me by a very smart black, female hooker, junkie. And she's dead. That's what drugs can do to the vulnerable.

"I really don't have compassion for poor people." I've been poor too, but this is different. In my opinion, very different.

"There is a perception that one cannot be a mailman, or a pharmacist, a professor or a person on the Geek Squad. People don't make sure that poor kids are prepared for the future and they typically have terrible role models and are abused in many ways. Yes, you can be these things if you have good role models for neighbors...but what sane black man, making a decent wage, will want to raise a family in the ghetto?
And the schooling , which should be a first step in achieving success, is abysmal, at least in the Chicago ghetto schools.

"I don't know if anyone else watches Game of Thrones..." I've never watched so have no comment.

Thanks.

EDIT to change "by" to "buy."

Several people in this thread have pronounced a final verdict on this incident, declaring that it was a racially-motivated murder despite a lack of evidence proving such. I'm not one of them. Do you own a mirror?



Right back atcha, ma'am. And the rest of the lynch mob too.

Really, there's no way anyone can come to a valid conclusion for this one.

A video after the fact by an eyewitness isn't any better than the police release; jumping either way is showing bias. BLM using it [before facts are known] as evidence of brutality is utterly wrong, and at worst, outright manipulation; at best, utter ignorance.

Something like say, the Sterling case, where you can see much of what happens, gives you a pretty good idea of who's to blame. BLM shouldn't use this one either, but they did.