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KU JOURNALISM MAJOR SHREDS “CASE” AGAINST MIKE BROWN

Shelby Lawson is a student at the University of Kansas, majoring in Journalism and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Lawson posted the following to her Facebook page: 

“Alright y’all. I’d like to clear a few things up. This is a general address to the long list of misconceptions and inconsistencies and abuses of power that exist surrounding the killing of Mike Brown. I have researched these points and provided sources in case you wish to do some reading of your own.

-The most common misconception I’m hearing is that Mike Brown was significantly larger than Officer Wilson. This is incorrect. On page 198 of the official grand jury transcript, you can see that Officer Wilson testifies he is 6 ft 4 and weighs 210 lbs,the same size as Mike Brown.

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-Mike Brown was NOT stopped because he was a suspect in crime. He and his friend Dorian Johnson were stopped for jaywalking, as Darren Wilson testifies to on page 208 of his grand jury testimony.

-Mike Brown WAS fleeing from Officer Wilson when he was fatally shot. Wilson confirms this on page 281 of his grand jury testimony.

-Officer Wilson broke police self-defense protocol, which teaches to disarm and incapacitate rather than kill and teaches officers to go for body shots. Officer Wilson shot Mike Brown twice in the head, after he shot him four times in his arm and torso.

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-Ferguson Police ignored protocol and refused to interview or take a statement from the eyewitness present from Officer Wilson’s initial contact with Mike Brown until his death.

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-The forensic examiner broke protocol by failing to take crime scene photos. On page 95 of the grand jury transcript, she claims that this was because her camera had died, however, she goes on to describe how she immediately followed Wilson to the hospital in order to photograph his “injuries.”

-Forensic investigators broke protocol by failing to test Officer Wilson’s gun for fingerprints, since Wilson claims that Brown grabbed his gun and caused it to misfire. Page 39, grand jury transcript.

-Darren Wilson was then allowed to break protocol by washing the blood off of himself before it could be photographed, making it impossible to analyze blood spatter patterns and determine what position Mike Brown was in when Wilson first shot him. Wilson recounts this on page 10 of his official police interview.

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-While Officer Wilson’s story of what happened that day has changed at least three times, six separate eyewitnesses, four of whom have never met each other, all have identical accounts of what happened. They were never interviewed by police.

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-These eyewitnesses all agree that Darren Wilson was the aggressor and that Mike Brown was shot while surrendering, with his hands in the air and that his last words were “I don’t have a gun. Stop shooting.”

-This is backed up by Mike Brown’s autopsy, which suggests that Mike Brown would have had to be in the hands-up position for the bullets to enter his hand and arm the way they did.

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-Furthermore, in a press conference, the coroner who performed Mike Brown’s autopsy relays that there was no trace of gun shot residue anywhere on his body, proving that Wilson’s claim that Mike Brown grabbed his gun, causing it to misfire, is impossible and untrue.

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-Ferguson Police lied about the distance Mike Brown was from Officer Wilson when he was killed. They reported it was 35 ft. but it was in fact 148 ft.

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-Owner of Ferguson Market states that he did not call police to report a theft of cigars, that the theft had nothing to do with Mike Brown, and that the man on the security footage is not Mike Brown.

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-The prosecuting attorney for the case against Darren Wilson has helped raise $600,000 in donations for Darren Wilson, creating a clear conflict of interest.

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-The police department that Officer Wilson worked for prior to coming to Ferguson was disbanded after multiple instances of racial profiling.”

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Will you say something about the songs you have composed for the film?

Grieve AND organize.

Good article by David Hunter on how to survive the Trump presidency, both on the personal and on the political plane.

Waging Nonviolence

There is hope — 10 ways to be prepared and grounded for another Trump presidency

The key to taking effective action if Trump wins is to avoid perpetuating his goals of fear, isolation, exhaustion and disorientation.

It's very endearing to me how many people are willing to keep an eye on a video feed so they can push a button and let a fish in the Netherlands get to the other side of a dam.

If you aren’t totally quaking in your boots at the news of millions of bees dead, yet again, you’re nuts.

Yesterday was the circassian day of mourning where we adyghe people remember our ancestors that were killed during a genocide that began in the 1840s, with deportations going on until the 1870s.

Our tribes lost many members during that time, with survivors being forced to leave our homelands, leaving almost no one behind. An estimated 70-90% of our people disappeared from our mountains, either dead or displaced.

I'd like to stress that us being muslim and indigenous was an important factor in all this.

I don't want to go into the details and would like to link to the wikipedia article instead, however it might be important to share at least a single story: since survivors of the first killings were forced across the Black Sea and then died on the way plenty of those that made it to the coast never ate fish again. They feared that those fish may have fed on their loved ones. To this day fish is not common in our cuisine and many still refuse to eat it.

Back then the Ottoman Empire offered us refuge (although to make it clear, circassian warriors and circassian women were popular and thus sometimes made to serve in certain roles), and so today most of us can be found in Turkey, Syria, Jordan, and many former Ottoman territories but also in Germany and even the US. Thankfully we still exist in Kavkazye, but that's a minority.

I took a break from social media a bit, but now that I post this I also want to extend my respects to the communities that still face genocide, the palestinian and the uyghur people in particular.

Finally I'd like to remind everyone of this crucial thing:

Genocides do not start when the killings begin.

Genocides do not stop when the killings end.

Activism is not cold-calling.

Activism is not cold-calling, and this is critically important to understand.

I'm seeing a lot of posts on here about 'building bridges' and 'finding community,' and then (extremely valid) response posts saying "BUT HOW??" And I'm going to explain something that can be very counter-intuitive: there is strategy involved in community.

As a longtime volunteer labour organizer, I’ve taken and taught many trainings on the strategy of talking. Something that surprises a lot of people is the very first thing you do in a union campaign. You sit down with your organizing committee, take out pen and paper, and literally map it out. You draw a physical map of the workplace: where are the entrances, exits, break rooms, supervisor offices. Essentially, ‘where is it safe to have a union conversation.’ Then you draw another physical chart of your coworkers. You sort out who is union-friendly, openly hostile to unions, or somewhere in the middle, and then you plan out very deliberately and carefully who talks to whom and in what order.

Consider: If Vocally Leftist Jane walks up to Conservative David and says "hey what do you think about unions," David is going to shut down immediately. He's not inclined to listen to Jane. But if Jane talks to Moderate Jason and brings him into the fold, then Jason is a far more effective strategic choice to talk to David, and David may actually hear him out without an instant reaction.

IMPORTANT CAVEAT: If Conservative David turns out to be Alt-Right David, and could be dangerous to follow organizers, we write him off. We are not trying to reach Alt-Right David. We are trying to reach Conservative David, who may actually be persuaded to find solidarity with other employees as fellow workers. Jason is a safe scout to find out which one he is. It does no one any good if Leftist Jane (or even Moderate Jane who is a visible minority) talks to Alt-Right David and puts herself on his radar. Not only has she done nothing to convince Alt-Right David to join a union - she's probably actively turned him against the idea - but now she's also in danger and the entire campaign is at risk. NOBODY WANTS THIS. Jane was NOT a hero for doing this. The organizing committee was foolish and enacted a terrible strategy to everyone's detriment.

Where you can make a difference is with people who will listen to you. You having a conversation with your well-meaning but clueless Centrist Democrat Auntie, and maybe gently helping her understand some things the media has been glossing over, is way more strategically useful than you marching up to MAGA Neighbour You've Met Once and trying to "build community" or "understand" them. They don't care. They're impervious, dangerous, and cruel. But maybe your beloved auntie will think about what you said, and then talk to her friend Anna who IDs as "fiscally conservative" but didn't vote because she can't bring herself to get on board with Trump. Then perhaps Anna talks to her brother Nic who has MAGA leanings but isn't all the way there yet. Proto-MAGA Nic would not have listened to you, nor would he have listened to Centrist Democrat Auntie, but he might absorb some of what his sister is saying.

This is not a cop-out or an echo chamber. This is you spending your time and energy strategically and safely. You are not a useful activist to anyone if you’re dead. Anyone who is telling you to hurl yourself directly at MAGA assholes like cannon fodder has no understanding of the strategy behind community building, and you should feel comfortable writing them off.

Last point: If you are tired, emotionally devastated, and/or in danger: take a break. This post is for people who would feel better jumping into action, not for people who are too overwhelmed to even think about it right now. You are worth so much even if you’re not actively Doing Activism, and your rest is worth more than “a break period so you can recharge and Do More Activism.” We all deserve the individual dignity of being worthy of comfort, rest & safety just on the basis of being human, outside of whatever we're doing for others' benefit. To deny ourselves that dignity is to devalue ourselves, and that’s the absolute last thing any of us should be doing right now.