St Louis Police Issues - throw down weapons, victim buying sandwich

[IdaBriggs]

I have been asked by another DU'er to post the following questions/information. I have to admit to being curious if me posting the information will influence the perceptions, as opposed to someone who has been more vocal in their passionate opinions on these topics.

(I have a great deal of respect for the other DU'er, as well as those more heavily involved in social justice issues; I remain appalled at what the citizens of Fergusan are going through at the moment.)

First, a link to a story about St Louis police blackmailing someone into providing a name to be used as a scape goat, while admitting they have a "throw down gun" to plant; the blackmail victim recorded them plotting the crime.

Next, pictures of 18 year old Vonderrit Myers Jr. - NOT A THUG.

https://twitter.com/Follow4Ferguson/status/520242665682505729

And pictures of the three teenagers buying sandwiches before the victim was gunned down:

:large

And lastly, three different stories floated by the police - two of them "official" -

Official #1: Myers turned and shot at cop during chase then was struck by return fire.

Official #2: Myers was stopped for "routine Pedestrian Check" and fired on cop.

Non-Official #3: There was a physical altercation, cop pulled off Myers' hoodie, Myers fired.

ALL witnesses say Myers was unarmed. Apparently they are all deaf, because every single witness reports hearing the gun shots that killed Myers, but NO ONE reports the "silent three gun shots" from the "sandwich gun" that "magically" appeared.

Regardless of truth or lies (and I have opinions about who should be given the benefit of the doubt), the "law enforcement" in St Louis has lost the confidence and trust of the people they are paid to serve and protect. I believe responsive civil government should do a top-to-bottom house cleaning, and permanent black marks preventing future law enforcement careers should be entered into the records of the people who have literally destroyed the credibility of officers all over the state.

My opinions. Your mileage may vary.

[bravenak]

1. I can't see anything that looks like a gun.

The feds need to take over. And we will be needing a second autopsy.

[sheshe2]

4. It's being called for bravenak.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025643776

Let's hope it happens.

And no, I don't see a gun either.

[bravenak]

42. I don't know about you....

But I don't assume everybody with a firearm got it illegally until it is proven. And I think that since it' okay for young white dudes o open carry guns, it should be perfectly acceptable if every young black man open carries a rifle, handgun, shot gun, or semi-auto weapon. If I were a young black man, I might have to open carry all three and wear body armor to protect myself from white racist cops.

Since when were cops able to know for fact when a gun is illegal? And th cops sid he saw the gun, no problem, if he was wearing the gun o that it was visible to the cop, then it should have been visible in the well lit store. Otherwise, how did the cop know he even had a gun? Unless the cop was stop and frisking young black men in violation of their civil rights and put his hands on the young man, but Then I would want to know what was his probable cause for initiating the stop. Can't be a traffic violation, he wasn't driving. And even if he had contact with the young man before, that doesn't give him the okay to harass the man on sight for the rest of his life.

Funny how cops routinely stop black men and search them for contraband but rarely search white people. And funny how there are always sone lame ass white people who think that it's aok to harass and profile black men, but would be livid and ready to sue if they got stopped and frisked continuously. I don't believe jack shit a cops says. I have had a cop lie on me. Lucky for me the judge had dealt with his lying ass before and stopped that shit in it's tracks. But I know damn well, that if I 'talked black' I would have a felony record from that lying asshole racist piece of shit.

Living in America has taught me how racist and blind the majority can be. They have been since the founding of this nation and continue to treat black people like slaves on a plantation, denying the freedom of movement without unlawful search and seizure in order to make themselves feel better about what has been done to us and wha the are still doing to us. They need to prove to themselves that we are bad. So they go out of their way to find something. And if they don't find anything, they invent it.

[Comrade Grumpy]

44. You're full of it. Here is stop-and-frisk data from New York City:

Year after year, more than 80% of stop-and-frisks turned up nothing. And they were aimed overwhelmingly at non-white people.

http://www.nyclu.org/content/stop-and-frisk-data

And even though cops targeted minorities, whites were more likely to be carrying dope or guns.

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/05/22/2046451/white-people-stopped-by-new-york-police-are-more-likely-to-have-guns-or-drugs-than-minorities/

[bravenak]

45. So I should be perfectly cool with cops stopping black people because they think they are more

likely to carry contraband. Except that white people are actually more likely to carry contraband or weapons. Stop and frisk and racial profiling is illegal. By stopping blacks because they are black and a cop thinks they are more likely to carry contraband is a civil rights violation.

You missed the point. The cops have no right to profile people based on race. And if they keep doing what they are doing, they are putting themselves and the rest of us in danger. After 400 years of profiling black men, I think it may be time to cut that racist shit the fuck out.

And why the fuck did you sign up just to spout racist ass takling points to me? Profiled me right?
Whiny black men my ass!! Black men are strong and never in the history of our country have they needed to own other people to do their work for them, while they sat around whining about their 'burdens'. Seems like the punk ass racists are the real whiners.

[Louisiana1976]

2. I don't see a gun either. That officer had to have seen the kid's sandwich.

[surrealAmerican]

3. I can't see a gun or a hoodie in this picture.

Which kid in this picture is Myers?

[Travelman]

6. Me, either

I'd like to know the source for this picture.

[JimDandy]

72. Read somewhere that he was pulling up his pants

at some point in the interaction with the security guard in police uniform. So he is possibly the teen with the very saggy pants.

To trigger-happy police, hiking up saggy pants often equals "reaching in his waistband for something" when they start to justify having shot a young male.

[linuxman]

5. Jesus

They have already recovered the three fired bullets from the gun, the gun itself, and on top of all that, the man had a history of gun-crime, which he was on probation for.

I wasn't aware that possessing a gun and a sandwich were mutually exclusive.

Walk, talks, and looks suspiciously like a duck.

[1StrongBlackMan]

7. And is law enforcement ...

that is willing to plant a "throw-down" gun (see film clip above), incapable of firing the bullets recovered?

on top of all that, the man had a history of gun-crime, which he was on probation for.

So a "history of gun-crime" equals firing the shots?

Know if, and this is a big if, the off-duty cop/security guard saw and had identified the guy shot, AND knew of this guy's crime record ... then, I might accept that the off-duty cop/security guard might have had a reason to be more on alert.

Walk, talks, and looks suspiciously like a duck.

Yes ... I couldn't say it better.

[scarystuffyo]

8. But for all that to happen it would have to be done in seconds with witnesses pretty close by

I could see if there were multiple dirty cops involved in a questionable shooting
inside a home where they had time to plan but this just doesn't seem like the case.


Sometimes things are as they appear.

He fired at the cop and the cop fired back

[arthritisR_US]

14. The cops could easily have gone to a vacant lot

shot off three bullets and retrieved them into a zip lock bag, do the same with the gun so that when they planted it in his hand the gun shot residue would transfer. Then all they need to do is place the casings where they want.

[scarystuffyo]

17. There were people all around right after the shooting

Remember there were protests going on all through the town.
That's not plausible

I'm not saying there aren't dirty cops but this case seems so far to be a justifiable shooting

[FlatStanley]

9. Hoping they fired said throw down while holding it in the hands of the victim.

Otherwise there won't be gun residue. Or am I missing something regarding gun residue and firing guns?

[arthritisR_US]

16. The residue stays on the him and the hand so

if you fire it with latex gloves on there won't be any on you. Put the gun and gloves in a zip lock and you have it preserved for transfer.

[linuxman]

10. Wow, what an impressive cop.

Managed to fire three shots into the area behind him, retrieve a drop gun, and plant it on the dead guy. The flash would be envious. Oh, also nobody in the witness pool is indicating any of the above happened. Surely someone would have noticed following all that one-sided gunfire, right?

A history of gun crime means he has a history of illegally carrying guns, on top of having just generally shit decision making skills. I'm not using his crime history as a justification for his shooting. I'm simply saying that it validates the assertion that he was armed. Not that shooting at a cop isn't justification enough for the cop to return fire, but whatever.

[IdaBriggs]

11. You assume facts not in evidence.

You assume the people with motivation to lie are telling the truth.

You believe the police "found" evidence. The people on the scene tell a different story, and they shared that story in real time. We have threads on DU where information was shared.

Yet you don't believe the witnesses. Why would they lie? Do you believe they want to PROTECT CRIMINALS?

Credibility has been lost. Trust has been lost. Accusations of laughing at the scene of a killing and other inappropriate behavior has created a situation where the police are viewed as the enemy in a war on minorities.

The profession is not trusted by the people paying their salaries. They need to be fired.

ON EDIT: And the killer was on "administrative leave" -- any idea what decisions he had made that caused that to happen? I haven't heard yet.

[Travelman]

34. Just exactly which "witnesses" are we talking about here?

I've read news reports on this all day long, and I have yet to hear of a single witness to this event.

Who exactly are we talking about as a "witness?"

[IdaBriggs]

36. Witnesses were all over the place in last night's threads, but

(per them) the police weren't interviewing them. This thread was the first I saw yesterday: http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=5641546

There was neatly a riot, but kindly note YOU can't find "witness reports" or anything other than "official reports" in mainstream media.

Kindly note I am not making an accusation against you, but pointing out how the media is played. The live feeds and other SOCIAL MEDIA were on it; how accurate the reporting is remains to be seen.

Regardless, I stand by my "have lost the trust of the community/need to be fired in a top down clean up" statement.

[Travelman]

38. Well, OK.

That sounds a whole lot more like lots of people who claimed to be witnesses, but when the details started coming out, it turned out that they weren't witnesses at all.


Back when I was in grade school, kids used to play a game that we called "rumors." Basically, a group of kids would sit in a circle and one would start off with a story of some event (written down), and then whisper it to the next kid, who would then whisper it to the next kid, and so on. Then, once it gets back to the beginning of the circle, the final "story" would be compared to the original to see how far away from the original the story had drifted.

As kids, we would intentionally embellish the story ludicrously because in the end, it would be a huge laugh to see how much it had changed. Some random guy who was out walking his dog when it started raining turned into someone whose dog was stolen by space aliens riding unicorns during a hailstorm of gumdrops. Funny stuff.

But in the real world, there have been tons of studies on this exact same phenomenon, and it's exceptionally common for people to have claimed to have personally witnessed some event, when in fact they didn't actually see it at all. This is particularly true with especially emotional events. We all saw HUGE amounts of this back in the heyday of Occupy: there are more stories out there than can be counted of some anti-Occupy whoever who claimed to have seen an Occupier do some horrible, awful thing, and the stories just got ratcheted higher and higher. In no time at all, someone from Occupy who was peacefully marching with a paper coffee cup and got their arm jostled and dropped the cup turned into some masked crusader who was hurling Molotov cocktails through a shop window. And everyone who claimed this also claimed "I was there! I saw it with my own two eyes!" But in the end, it turned out that they weren't even in the same state when this alleged event occurred. They didn't actually witness anything, but they claimed that they did, swore up and down that they did, usually because claiming that one was a direct witness to the events seems to lend credibility to an otherwise incredible story in the mind of the person telling the story.


The MSM has their derelictions. Absolutely no doubt about that. But every single local outlet, with multiple reporters on the ground, in the area, and not a single one manages to come across an actual witness? The Post-Dispatch sure is spending a whole lot of resources on this to intentionally bury the story of all these witnesses, along with every local TV channel, and, so far as I can tell, any and all alternative media in the area. I guarantee you that every one of those outlets is dying to have the big, breaking headline of an exclusive with witness X who saw every single thing that happened. And maybe they still will. But so far, there's pretty much nothing credible from any "witness" at all.


Just because some guy claimed on Vimeo or whatever to have been a witness doesn't really make it so.

[Travis_0004]

35. And you assume facts not in evidence

You think that after a shooting 20 cops all just agree to make up info. Fire a few shots on a found gun (without a single witness, pay off the coroner, and nobody says anything.

I dont think the cop was on administrative leave. He was placed there after the shooting which is protocol.

I dont think its a streach to believe that somebody on bail for posesing an illegal gun might have had a gun on him.

[IdaBriggs]

37. Police took the statement of their brother officer at face value.

They did not interview witnesses, per last night's thread.

Yes, I believe corruption happens, and I also believe good cops stay quiet when they should not.

The story will come out. It always does.

[1StrongBlackMan]

33. The question of whether Myers shot at law enforcement ...

is pretty easily answered, since an autopsy has been conducted. Curiously, a quick google has pretty of references of the fatal shots; but none (that I found) that indicated whether Myers had gunpowder residue on his person.

[pkdu]

48. Wow , you assume cops with a throw down don't already have fired shell casings to match.

And as for your racist comments above....nice, well done.

[GGJohn]

51. And just what racist comments did he/r make?

[pkdu]

53. Why don't your read them , 2 week old timer. It's pretty obvious to true democrats. Nt

[GGJohn]

54. I did and I don't see anything racist.

And what does my time here have anything to do with my question?

Let me ask you again, what was racist about the post?

[pkdu]

56. If you have read , and Truely can't tell , then that's all one needs to know. Thanks for playing.

[GGJohn]

57. So I'm guessing that you can't tell me what's racist about the post?

Thanks for playing.
Strange thing is, nobody else is calling it racist.
Are we to assume that you're the only one here who can determine what posts are racist?

[NaturalHigh]

19. A history of gun crime by itself doesn't justify the shooting...

but it certainly makes the allegation that he was carrying a gun and fired it more plausible to an objective observer. If this young man was carrying a gun and fired it at a police officer (or even if he just pulled it out), I don't see how this is not a justified shooting by the police officer. It doesn't change the tragic nature of the case, but it makes all the legal difference in the world.

[dilby]

21. History of Gun Crime? Do you have any evidence of this?

Sounds like you are just making shit up.

[linuxman]

32. Why would you assume I just made it up?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025643283

[dilby]

50. Because it's unlawful use of a weapon. Not GUN.

http://www.moga.mo.gov/statutes/chapters/chap571.htm

[GGJohn]

52. What difference does that make?

He ditched a loaded .380 the night the cops caught him, so he does have a history of illegally carrying a gun.

[FLPanhandle]

46. I agree. Occam's Razor applies here

Although some people just want to be outraged regardless of facts.

[Rex]

12. The gun in question has now magically changed from a Ruger to a Smith & Wesson.

[IdaBriggs]

13. I did not realize cloaking technology had advanced to such a degree!

I learn something new every day!



Because otherwise,

[Rex]

15. I guess the cops cannot tell the difference or really don't care anymore.

The day they hid their names and badges, was the day they proved law doesn't apply to them imo.

[tea and oranges]

22. They hid their names

while wearing "I am Darren Wilson" wrist bands.

The message I get from that makes me tremble.

[Rex]

23. Yes, they are playing PSYOP games with the local populace.

Fucking horrible, but it seems obvious they are NOT there to help civilians. It appears they are there to scam money for the city and harass minorities. The only question is which PD is the most FUBARd...imo.

[Major Hogwash]

47. This is sad.

This situation is as bad as any I have heard about in modern times.

[Rex]

49. I am pro-law enforcement. Always have been.

I'm 43 and I've never been this discouraged about law enforcement. The 'lax' security by the SS also has me shaking my head in total disbelief.

[Marrah_G]

26. Replicators!

[Jenoch]

18. I would like to hear the entire

conversation from inside that squad. I only hear the kid using the word gun. What is heard in this TV story is not clear.

[bravenak]

27. Wasn't the cop on administrative leave?

I wonder if that's true and why. He may have a history of bad acts.

[Jenoch]

28. I've read that on DU, but not in news stories.

[bravenak]

29. Probably just a timeline mix up.

[Jenoch]

30. The officer is on administrative leave now.

I think that has some DUers confused.

[bravenak]

31. Yeah, I think you may be right.

[IdaBriggs]

58. I thought he was on administrative leave WHEN the incident occurred?

I read it on the evening it happened, so accuracy might not have been 100% -- ???

[cali]

60. no. that is not factual. He was not on administrative leave.

He is now on administrative leave. He was off duty, moonlighting for a private security company. He was in police uniform.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/09/us/st-louis-officer-shooting/

[IdaBriggs]

65. Ah, a psychic cop whose x-ray vision can see thru people in the dark when they are "running away".

Good to know such folk are on the job.



Looks like the first information (no uniform, on leave at the time) is not accurate?

Some of the data at the links is being updated / changed.

I'm going to stick with "have lost the trust of the community / needs a good house cleaning" when it comes to these people.

Not sure what crime the young were supposed to be involved with when the officer instigated the confrontation.

I am sure that will eventually come out. I can't wait for the "gun shot residue report" to be released.

Interesting that the store owner didn't see a gun, but the police officer was able to --

[Jenoch]

66. Do you have a link?

[IdaBriggs]

68. I posted it elsewhere in the thread - it was based on "livestream" reporting.

And needed to be verified as such (hence my appreciation for the clarification later).

[Jenoch]

70. Yea I think that means he was put on

administrative leave after the shooting which is SOP.

[dixiegrrrrl]

20. looks like all of Missouri needs review.

I worry tho, that the Feds. are not going to do what they should be doing.
The corruption is pretty wide spread.

[Gore1FL]

25. It's a National issue

We have more than our share of it here, but we are a mere sample population of a much larger epidemic.

[Spazito]

24. The DOJ is going to be involved in investigating this...

The Mayor announced this on Chris Hayes show. I am glad they are getting involved.

[cali]

61. good. there needs to be a thorough, outside investigation.

[gordianot]

55. It is going to be hard to decide....

In this case if truth is stranger than fiction or if fiction is stranger than the truth. There is a lot about the story that simply does not make sense. By now the police should have the facts all you get is silence.

[rhett o rick]

59. So let's figure out what the police were up to. This was definitely a conspiracy.

Looks like they wanted to find someone to plant a gun on and then kill. Why? Maybe it would cause a reaction in the community which would dilute the case against Michael Brown's alleged murder.

This wasn't the idea of some beat cop. How high does this conspiracy go?

[cali]

62. it's way too early to conclude that.

just as it's too early to conclude that this was a justified police shooting. and that doesn't work as a motivation- there is no way that murdering another black kid would "dilute" the case against the cop who killed Brown.

Assuming that this is a far reaching conspiracy at this early stage is irresponsible.

[rhett o rick]

63. Do you think we should wait for a couple of years to see what finally comes out?

This police dept has proven that they can not be trusted and are not interested in presenting an honest case. They've already tried to cover up and lie about circumstances related to Michael Brown's murder. While I think it's extremely important to trust the police I also think it's extremely important to investigate when there is a hint of corruption. Something stinks here.

"Assuming that this is a far reaching conspiracy at this early stage is irresponsible." I certainly agree. I am not "assuming" there is a far reaching conspiracy, I am merely suggesting that it should be considered.

[cali]

64. no. why would you think it would take a couple of years?

I do think waiting more than a couple of days makes sense. I think it makes sense to see what the autopsy reveals. If there was no gun powder residue on him, that would be very damning. And as far as I understand it, this is not the same PD as the Ferguson PD. It's the StL PD. I don't trust the police. Never have. And I mean never. The Justice Dept will be investigating. I feel pretty confident in their impartiality.

[JEB]

67. Cops can't be trusted. eom

[uponit7771]

69. +1

[DrewFlorida]

71. The first thought out of my mind was an outraged "unf##king believable"...

Of course it's very believable! It's a sad state in America when the worst criminals are the police themselves!