Racist Police Response to Ferguson Protests

[Irvine511]

Originally Posted by AEON

There are more than a few outspoken leaders in the black community that essentially say the same thing, that it this point in America - personal responsibility is your most important asset.

The Atlantic article on Reparations has been referenced before, but i think the opening section is worth posting here:

I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”

Clyde Ross was born in 1923, the seventh of 13 children, near Clarksdale, Mississippi, the home of the blues. Ross’s parents owned and farmed a 40-acre tract of land, flush with cows, hogs, and mules. Ross’s mother would drive to Clarksdale to do her shopping in a horse and buggy, in which she invested all the pride one might place in a Cadillac. The family owned another horse, with a red coat, which they gave to Clyde. The Ross family wanted for little, save that which all black families in the Deep South then desperately desired—the protection of the law.

In the 1920s, Jim Crow Mississippi was, in all facets of society, a kleptocracy. The majority of the people in the state were perpetually robbed of the vote—a hijacking engineered through the trickery of the poll tax and the muscle of the lynch mob. Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in Mississippi than in any other state. “You and I know what’s the best way to keep the nigger from voting,” blustered Theodore Bilbo, a Mississippi senator and a proud Klansman. “You do it the night before the election.”

The state’s regime partnered robbery of the franchise with robbery of the purse. Many of Mississippi’s black farmers lived in debt peonage, under the sway of cotton kings who were at once their landlords, their employers, and their primary merchants. Tools and necessities were advanced against the return on the crop, which was determined by the employer. When farmers were deemed to be in debt—and they often were—the negative balance was then carried over to the next season. A man or woman who protested this arrangement did so at the risk of grave injury or death. Refusing to work meant arrest under vagrancy laws and forced labor under the state’s penal system.

Well into the 20th century, black people spoke of their flight from Mississippi in much the same manner as their runagate ancestors had. In her 2010 book, The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson tells the story of Eddie Earvin, a spinach picker who fled Mississippi in 1963, after being made to work at gunpoint. “You didn’t talk about it or tell nobody,” Earvin said. “You had to sneak away.”

When Clyde Ross was still a child, Mississippi authorities claimed his father owed $3,000 in back taxes. The elder Ross could not read. He did not have a lawyer. He did not know anyone at the local courthouse. He could not expect the police to be impartial. Effectively, the Ross family had no way to contest the claim and no protection under the law. The authorities seized the land. They seized the buggy. They took the cows, hogs, and mules. And so for the upkeep of separate but equal, the entire Ross family was reduced to sharecropping.

This was hardly unusual. In 2001, the Associated Press published a three-part investigation into the theft of black-owned land stretching back to the antebellum period. The series documented some 406 victims and 24,000 acres of land valued at tens of millions of dollars. The land was taken through means ranging from legal chicanery to terrorism. “Some of the land taken from black families has become a country club in Virginia,” the AP reported, as well as “oil fields in Mississippi” and “a baseball spring training facility in Florida.”

Clyde Ross was a smart child. His teacher thought he should attend a more challenging school. There was very little support for educating black people in Mississippi. But Julius Rosenwald, a part owner of Sears, Roebuck, had begun an ambitious effort to build schools for black children throughout the South. Ross’s teacher believed he should attend the local Rosenwald school. It was too far for Ross to walk and get back in time to work in the fields. Local white children had a school bus. Clyde Ross did not, and thus lost the chance to better his education.

Then, when Ross was 10 years old, a group of white men demanded his only childhood possession—the horse with the red coat. “You can’t have this horse. We want it,” one of the white men said. They gave Ross’s father $17.

“I did everything for that horse,” Ross told me. “Everything. And they took him. Put him on the racetrack. I never did know what happened to him after that, but I know they didn’t bring him back. So that’s just one of my losses.”

The losses mounted. As sharecroppers, the Ross family saw their wages treated as the landlord’s slush fund. Landowners were supposed to split the profits from the cotton fields with sharecroppers. But bales would often disappear during the count, or the split might be altered on a whim. If cotton was selling for 50 cents a pound, the Ross family might get 15 cents, or only five. One year Ross’s mother promised to buy him a $7 suit for a summer program at their church. She ordered the suit by mail. But that year Ross’s family was paid only five cents a pound for cotton. The mailman arrived with the suit. The Rosses could not pay. The suit was sent back. Clyde Ross did not go to the church program.

It was in these early years that Ross began to understand himself as an American—he did not live under the blind decree of justice, but under the heel of a regime that elevated armed robbery to a governing principle. He thought about fighting. “Just be quiet,” his father told him. “Because they’ll come and kill us all.”

Clyde Ross grew. He was drafted into the Army. The draft officials offered him an exemption if he stayed home and worked. He preferred to take his chances with war. He was stationed in California. He found that he could go into stores without being bothered. He could walk the streets without being harassed. He could go into a restaurant and receive service.

Ross was shipped off to Guam. He fought in World War II to save the world from tyranny. But when he returned to Clarksdale, he found that tyranny had followed him home. This was 1947, eight years before Mississippi lynched Emmett Till and tossed his broken body into the Tallahatchie River. The Great Migration, a mass exodus of 6 million African Americans that spanned most of the 20th century, was now in its second wave. The black pilgrims did not journey north simply seeking better wages and work, or bright lights and big adventures. They were fleeing the acquisitive warlords of the South. They were seeking the protection of the law.

Clyde Ross was among them. He came to Chicago in 1947 and took a job as a taster at Campbell’s Soup. He made a stable wage. He married. He had children. His paycheck was his own. No Klansmen stripped him of the vote. When he walked down the street, he did not have to move because a white man was walking past. He did not have to take off his hat or avert his gaze. His journey from peonage to full citizenship seemed near-complete. Only one item was missing—a home, that final badge of entry into the sacred order of the American middle class of the Eisenhower years.

In 1961, Ross and his wife bought a house in North Lawndale, a bustling community on Chicago’s West Side. North Lawndale had long been a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, but a handful of middle-class African Americans had lived there starting in the ’40s. The community was anchored by the sprawling Sears, Roebuck headquarters. North Lawndale’s Jewish People’s Institute actively encouraged blacks to move into the neighborhood, seeking to make it a “pilot community for interracial living.” In the battle for integration then being fought around the country, North Lawndale seemed to offer promising terrain. But out in the tall grass, highwaymen, nefarious as any Clarksdale kleptocrat, were lying in wait.

Three months after Clyde Ross moved into his house, the boiler blew out. This would normally be a homeowner’s responsibility, but in fact, Ross was not really a homeowner. His payments were made to the seller, not the bank. And Ross had not signed a normal mortgage. He’d bought “on contract”: a predatory agreement that combined all the responsibilities of homeownership with all the disadvantages of renting—while offering the benefits of neither. Ross had bought his house for $27,500. The seller, not the previous homeowner but a new kind of middleman, had bought it for only $12,000 six months before selling it to Ross. In a contract sale, the seller kept the deed until the contract was paid in full—and, unlike with a normal mortgage, Ross would acquire no equity in the meantime. If he missed a single payment, he would immediately forfeit his $1,000 down payment, all his monthly payments, and the property itself.

The men who peddled contracts in North Lawndale would sell homes at inflated prices and then evict families who could not pay—taking their down payment and their monthly installments as profit. Then they’d bring in another black family, rinse, and repeat. “He loads them up with payments they can’t meet,” an office secretary told The Chicago Daily News of her boss, the speculator Lou Fushanis, in 1963. “Then he takes the property away from them. He’s sold some of the buildings three or four times.”

Ross had tried to get a legitimate mortgage in another neighborhood, but was told by a loan officer that there was no financing available. The truth was that there was no financing for people like Clyde Ross. From the 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market through means both legal and extralegal. Chicago whites employed every measure, from “restrictive covenants” to bombings, to keep their neighborhoods segregated.

Their efforts were buttressed by the federal government. In 1934, Congress created the Federal Housing Administration. The FHA insured private mortgages, causing a drop in interest rates and a decline in the size of the down payment required to buy a house. But an insured mortgage was not a possibility for Clyde Ross. The FHA had adopted a system of maps that rated neighborhoods according to their perceived stability. On the maps, green areas, rated “A,” indicated “in demand” neighborhoods that, as one appraiser put it, lacked “a single foreigner or Negro.” These neighborhoods were considered excellent prospects for insurance. Neighborhoods where black people lived were rated “D” and were usually considered ineligible for FHA backing. They were colored in red. Neither the percentage of black people living there nor their social class mattered. Black people were viewed as a contagion. Redlining went beyond FHA-backed loans and spread to the entire mortgage industry, which was already rife with racism, excluding black people from most legitimate means of obtaining a mortgage.

“A government offering such bounty to builders and lenders could have required compliance with a nondiscrimination policy,” Charles Abrams, the urban-studies expert who helped create the New York City Housing Authority, wrote in 1955. “Instead, the FHA adopted a racial policy that could well have been culled from the Nuremberg laws.”

The devastating effects are cogently outlined by Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro in their 1995 book, Black Wealth/White Wealth:

In Chicago and across the country, whites looking to achieve the American dream could rely on a legitimate credit system backed by the government. Blacks were herded into the sights of unscrupulous lenders who took them for money and for sport. “It was like people who like to go out and shoot lions in Africa. It was the same thrill,” a housing attorney told the historian Beryl Satter in her 2009 book, Family Properties. “The thrill of the chase and the kill.”

The kill was profitable. At the time of his death, Lou Fushanis owned more than 600 properties, many of them in North Lawndale, and his estate was estimated to be worth $3 million. He’d made much of this money by exploiting the frustrated hopes of black migrants like Clyde Ross. During this period, according to one estimate, 85 percent of all black home buyers who bought in Chicago bought on contract. “If anybody who is well established in this business in Chicago doesn’t earn $100,000 a year,” a contract seller told The Saturday Evening Post in 1962, “he is loafing.”

Contract sellers became rich. North Lawndale became a ghetto.

Clyde Ross still lives there. He still owns his home. He is 91, and the emblems of survival are all around him—awards for service in his community, pictures of his children in cap and gown. But when I asked him about his home in North Lawndale, I heard only anarchy.

“We were ashamed. We did not want anyone to know that we were that ignorant,” Ross told me. He was sitting at his dining-room table. His glasses were as thick as his Clarksdale drawl. “I’d come out of Mississippi where there was one mess, and come up here and got in another mess. So how dumb am I? I didn’t want anyone to know how dumb I was.

“When I found myself caught up in it, I said, ‘How? I just left this mess. I just left no laws. And no regard. And then I come here and get cheated wide open.’ I would probably want to do some harm to some people, you know, if I had been violent like some of us. I thought, ‘Man, I got caught up in this stuff. I can’t even take care of my kids.’ I didn’t have enough for my kids. You could fall through the cracks easy fighting these white people. And no law.”

The Case for Reparations - The Atlantic

it's not about getting over slavery. it's about understanding how race has played out ever since.

[DaveC]

As an aside, I must say that I am thankful that in Canada we have the RCMP.

I think that having a national, centralized police service for the majority of the country (the OPP and Surete du Quebec are set up in similar ways to the RCMP) really allows for a standard of policing to be set, so that the "bad eggs" don't infect entire police departments in the way that sometimes happens in city police or county sheriff's departments. There is a lot less in terms of "gift" promotions and nepotism due to its sheer size and ability to strictly control the numbers of promotions. I know there are bad RCMP officers but you don't get the widespread corruption up here that tends to happen in the US, and if so it is usually a town or small city police department.

I know that such a thing could never in a million years be set up in the US, which is a shame that this ship has sailed so far.

[nbelcik]

Originally Posted by AEON

The law is clear - we cannot discriminate. Beyond that, we each have to always examine our own hearts for how we actually feel and act toward any individual.



The only racial hatred you hear anymore is in the anonymous comments on news sites. While unfortunate - at least it shows that it is no longer publicly acceptable to say such things.

Black people are more likely to be poor, more likely to end up in jail, more likely to be pulled over, less likely to be hired for a job, and suffer from many other forms of implicit discrimination. Racism isn't just people saying ethnic slurs, it's the way society as a whole treats minorities. In almost every single indicator, black Americans are doing worse than white Americans. That's racism and is a result of the history of slavery and discrimination in this country. We've got a long way to go before we reduce the effects of structural racism and ending structural racism will require more than "moving on."


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[BVS]

Originally Posted by AEON

The law is clear - we cannot discriminate. Beyond that, we each have to always examine our own hearts for how we actually feel and act toward any individual.



The only racial hatred you hear anymore is in the anonymous comments on news sites. While unfortunate - at least it shows that it is no longer publicly acceptable to say such things.

It's a noble idea, but I think we do ourselves a disservice when we turn a blind eye or deaf ear to reality. Why is a black man handed the highest possible sentence for a first time pot possession more than anyone else? Why are they denied parole more often for the same crime than anyone else?

I still hear racial hatred. Maybe it's where we live? I don't know. We've had full blown racists in here before. One of the last ones went on rants about how no one from Africa can be trusted because they are so use to corrupt governments that lying is part of their culture, that rant later was an umbrella statement about all blacks no matter where they were born. He even took these rants into the tour section and complained about audience members during the last tour. It's still alive.


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[Irvine511]

i found this interesting:

Yet again, America has laid on what is, to British eyes, a horror show. A white policeman goes after a black teenager for jaywalking, and ends up shooting him dead. Protests ensue, attended by his stepfather who carries a sign saying how police “just executed my unarmed son”. As protests grow, Molotov cocktails are thrown and riot police called in – this time armed with automatic guns and mini-tanks supplied by the Pentagon. The streets of Ferguson in St Louis start to look like a battle zone – and one that seems to put on display a brutal world of American inequality.

The riots in London would have looked pretty bad to the Americans: neither picture is a fair representation of a country. But there is a temptation, in Britain, to think that the American poor have it much worse – and the black protesters in Ferguson chanting “no justice, no peace” do indeed have precious little of either. The United States may be a great place to be rich, we like to think, but they treat their deprived appallingly over there. We tend to watch reports from poorer American states with a shudder, thankful that our country is run along different, more compassionate lines.

But if Britain were to somehow leave the European Union and become the 51st state of America, we would actually be one of those poor states. If you take our economic output, adjust for living costs and slot it into the US league table then the United Kingdom emerges as the second-poorest state in the union. We’re poorer than much-maligned Kansas and Alabama and well below Missouri, the scene of all the unrest in recent weeks. Only Mississippi has lower economic output per head than the UK; strip out the South East and Britain would rank bottom. We certainly have our problems; we’re just better at concealing them.

America, being richer, is more unequal than Britain – and has a long list of genuine outrages. A white baby born in America today is likely to live five years longer than a black one, for example. No such racial gap exists in Britain. This is one of a great many statistics that US campaigners have at their disposal to draw attention to inequality. Almost half of black Americans drop out of high school and then tend to earn less. There is much argument about why this is so: racial discrimination and dire education are often cited as causes. “High unemployment and high rates of out-of-wedlock birth leave too many of them without guidance,” according to a piece in the Wall St Journal.

It’s a passionate debate, which has no real counterpart in Britain. We have our share of problems, but they attract less interest. A boy born in Liverpool is expected to live five years less than one born in Westminster – an outrage, but one which we have grown used to. In fact, you only have to walk across Westminster Bridge and life expectancy drops by five years. As our politicians enjoy summer drinks on Parliament’s terrace, they can hear Big Ben echoing from buildings in a part of the city that badly needs their help. But they will have known this for years, and grown inured to it. Our poverty is hiding in plain sight.


We have specialised in building council houses in the middle of cities, and their proximity has created the illusion of social cohesion. In America, rich and poor keep more of a distance, partly because there is more space that allows the rich to move out. Cities like St Louis have been emptying for decades due to “white flight”, where the wealthier workers up sticks to the suburbs. In 1970, the population of Ferguson was 99 per cent white. Now it’s 67 per cent black – but the school boards, police force and judiciary are overwhelmingly white. The ingredients for racial tension are all there.

Eric Holder, America’s Attorney General, visited Ferguson earlier this week, offering his understanding not just as a lawyer, but as a black man. People there told him “about the mistrust they have at a young age”, he said afterwards. If he had sat down with black Brits, he might have heard the same: a poll earlier this year showed that most ethnic minorities think the police are too quick to use force. Theresa May, the Home Secretary, has been worried for some time about the number of blacks stopped and searched in the capital. As she knows, Brits are in no position to preach.

When it comes to inequality of schooling, Britain needs humility more than ever. Much has been made in recent days about the inferior education given to poor blacks in America. Britain is innocent of this charge, but is it really so much better that our poor whites (ie, those on free school meals) get lower exam grades than any other ethnic group? American campaigners are outraged that their most deprived pupils do worse at school than deprived pupils in Estonia and Vietnam. The same is true for deprived Brits, but fewer people make a fuss about it.

So the poor in both countries are being failed by an inadequate education system, but only Americans get so angry that they make films about it – like Davis Guggenheim’s Waiting for Superman. It tells a story more compelling, and horrific, than the trouble in Ferguson. The star is Geoffrey Canada, whose Harlem Success Academy managed to reverse the black-white achievement gap in maths (among many other successes). The viewer follows a mother from the Bronx in her desperate attempt to find a place there for her son – one of 792 students applying for 40 places. Admission is decided by a public lottery, to which the parents are invited as numbers are pulled out of a bingo machine. The ending is almost too painful to watch.

Such inequalities are just as bad in England’s education system, of course, but there will be no film about them. Our school lottery is done by letters sent out from councils. British poverty is one of the least glamorous subjects in the country, a cause for which no one will wear a wristband. When Michael Gove was education secretary, he had a Waiting for Superman poster framed on his wall. He wanted to dedicate his time in the job to fighting for the sort of people who tend not to vote, and are – ergo – easily ignored. As he found out, there is precious little political capital in doing so. He was demoted – apparently because he was fighting too hard, too close to an election.

Gove joins the line of reformers, Labour and Tory, who fell after trying to do something about the causes of inequality – making too much fuss over a problem that is, politically, easy to ignore. Managing poverty is easier than trying to tackle it: we would rather build motorways with exits directly into the upmarket parts of town (Glasgow) or erect a gate around new housing developments, cutting the risk of crime (and exposure to the community).

Britain’s welfare state, and the tax that goes with it, is so costly that it feels like we ought to have solved the problem by now. Instead, we have created the most expensive poverty in the world – and managed to hide it in houses that look nicer than America’s ghettoes. The Government’s welfare reforms are tackling this, but it is far from clear that the education reforms will keep going without Gove. It’s understandable to look at Ferguson and wonder how things could go so wrong for a country. But there is plenty to be shocked about at home.

while i think the GDP statistics he mentions are suspect, one thing i do take heart from even in the awfulness of Ferguson is that we do fight these things out over here, people are angry, it is talked about, the arguments are very loud and very public. these are healthy things, even if they look like a total fucking trainwreck whilst happening.

[LJT]

Eh I know the article mentions that race problems in the UK but it kinda suggests they aren't as big as a deal here, compared to general inequality. It should be important to remember the London riots kicked off because of the police shooting and killing a black man.

The one thing that really bugs and has probably already cropped up, is how people keep bringing up black on black shootings in comparison and saying why aren't we up in arms about it. For a start initiatives are being taken on it, they just don't show any interest in it until they can complain about it. Secondly black on black shootings are not comparable to representatives of the state, people that should be held to a higher standard, frequently shooting members of that population.

[nbelcik]

That article was good until it brought up Waiting for Superman. That movie is a sham and the numbers are based on a fraud. Mainly, the school ended up kicking out lower-performing students to boost the school's average test scores.


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[Irvine511]

Originally Posted by LJT

Secondly black on black shootings are not comparable to representatives of the state, people that should be held to a higher standard, frequently shooting members of that population.

right? it boggles the mind.

[gump]

Originally Posted by nbelcik

Black people are more likely to be poor, more likely to end up in jail, more likely to be pulled over, less likely to be hired for a job, and suffer from many other forms of implicit discrimination. Racism isn't just people saying ethnic slurs, it's the way society as a whole treats minorities. In almost every single indicator, black Americans are doing worse than white Americans. That's racism and is a result of the history of slavery and discrimination in this country. We've got a long way to go before we reduce the effects of structural racism and ending structural racism will require more than "moving on."


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Yep. I don't get why it's so hard for people to understand that.

Incidentaly, one of the most telling facts about racism and criminal justice is how the death penalty is more likely to be imposed when the victim is white and/or the defendant is African American.

[Irvine511]

really, at it's core, it's much more about class and socioeconomics especially in a winner-take-all society like ours where there's tremendous competition especially between the lower and the middle-lower classes.

it just so happens that, due to our history, our classes are race-d. certainly class is permeable, to a degree, and i really, truly do think that most people don't want to be racist and most recoil at obvious discrimination. but i don't think the lived-in experience of being a racial minority is grasped by the white majority, nor do i think the white majority is aware of the privileges their whiteness gives them. it's no one's fault, per se, it's just about being aware of who you are and the circumstances under which you live.

i've written quite honestly about where i live -- a rapidly gentrifying section of a minority-majority city with a once-stratospheric crime rate that has plummeted -- and the fact that race enters my day-to-day interactions when i do something as simple as walk my dog. it's simply an aspect of life, and asking people to "get over it" is impossible.

[AEON]

Originally Posted by Irvine511

it's simply an aspect of life, and asking people to "get over it" is impossible.

From a legal perspective, what more can realistically be done? What new laws can be written?

From a moral perspective, I think that it is reasonable to assume that our society - as a whole - teaches that racism is bad, equal opportunity is good.

I guess we could take money away from richest whites and give it to poorest blacks, but I'm sure that 1) that would not be allowed to actually happen before all the wealthy whites fled with their money or hid it, and 2) it would cause another civil war.

It seems the best we can do is open the doors to opportunity - but it is up to each individual to walk through it or not. The legal system can only enforce that the doors remain open, it can't possibly force people through.

[Irvine511]

I have no answers and I think everyone agrees that reparations as a practical matter is basically impossible. And I'm not sure something needs to be "done" so much as "understood."


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[anitram]

Originally Posted by AEON

From a legal perspective, what more can realistically be done? What new laws can be written?

I think this type of question actually reveals a huge problem. That is, at some point, we started treating law and legal systems as vehicles to bring about social change. Laws can establish basic parameters but that's as far as they'll get you.

[BVS]

Originally Posted by AEON

From a legal perspective, what more can realistically be done? What new laws can be written?



From a moral perspective, I think that it is reasonable to assume that our society - as a whole - teaches that racism is bad, equal opportunity is good.



I guess we could take money away from richest whites and give it to poorest blacks, but I'm sure that 1) that would not be allowed to actually happen before all the wealthy whites fled with their money or hid it, and 2) it would cause another civil war.



It seems the best we can do is open the doors to opportunity - but it is up to each individual to walk through it or not. The legal system can only enforce that the doors remain open, it can't possibly force people through.

We can fight against it, not turn a blind eye.


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[AEON]

Originally Posted by anitram

I think this type of question actually reveals a huge problem. That is, at some point, we started treating law and legal systems as vehicles to bring about social change. Laws can establish basic parameters but that's as far as they'll get you.

I agree and disagree.

I agree that we should not require laws to "do the right thing."

However, without laws against something like discrimination, it would be much more rampant today.

[AEON]

Originally Posted by Irvine511

And I'm not sure something needs to be "done" so much as "understood."


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I think that's a fair assessment.

[Vlad n U 2]

Originally Posted by LJT

Eh I know the article mentions that race problems in the UK but it kinda suggests they aren't as big as a deal here, compared to general inequality. It should be important to remember the London riots kicked off because of the police shooting and killing a black man.

The one thing that really bugs and has probably already cropped up, is how people keep bringing up black on black shootings in comparison and saying why aren't we up in arms about it. For a start initiatives are being taken on it, they just don't show any interest in it until they can complain about it. Secondly black on black shootings are not comparable to representatives of the state, people that should be held to a higher standard, frequently shooting members of that population.

I remember reading somewhere that black-on-black violence had decreased in the US over the past 20 or so years, too.

Originally Posted by nbelcik

Mainly, the school ended up kicking out lower-performing students to boost the school's average test scores.


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Reminds me of the Simpsons episode where Skinner locked Bart and the bullies in a store room so that they wouldn't take the test.

[nbelcik]

Originally Posted by Vlad n U 2

I remember reading somewhere that black-on-black violence had decreased in the US over the past 20 or so years, too.

Reminds me of the Simpsons episode where Skinner locked Bart and the bullies in a store room so that they wouldn't take the test.

All violent crime in the US has declined over the last twenty years.

Also: "When are we getting our mountain bikes?"- Nelson



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[DaveC]

Did I Get Away with Felony Drug-Dealing Charges Because I'm White? | VICE Canada

[dyrt10]

Originally Posted by bono_212

I was just wondering about that last night. Is he just sitting at home chilling right now? I thought that they did, at the very least, deem his death to be a homicide. Does the police officer just...walk around free until they file a charge?

Ummmm. Anytime a human kills a human even in self defense it is ruled a homicide.