Black People Should Know Not To Wear Hoodies

Based on statements from the police report, it was a cold and rainy night. My understanding, again based on statements made, is that Martin was not walking on the sidewalks and was walking in between the townhouses of the neighborhood.

I don't know how many of you live in Florida but in general, most people stick to the sidewalks. You can draw your own conclusions as to how it appears for an individual who acts as neighborhood watch to witness someone wearing a hood, staying off the marked paths (where the streetlights are), walking close to the windows of the homes in the neighborhoods after dark.

 

The pictures and videos floating around are ridiculously biased. In many of the early stories, each news outlet would provide side-by-side pictures of the shooter and the victim. Clearly, the editors were trying to show bias. One version would have young Trayvon from several years ago pasted next to Zimmerman's mug shot. Another would have Zimmerman in a suit next to a more recent Trayvon flipping double birds at the camera, shirtless with his pants worn low.

I am assuming you keep saying "clearly" because you have watched video of that. But, there's also video supposedly showing Zimmerman with a head wound of some kind. I can't tell shit "clearly" from either of those videos. The bigger question to me would be not why or why wasn't he immediately arrested, but rather if the crux of justifying the shooter is whether or not he's had a bloody nose and a cut head, why AREN'T there clear photos of that? Would that be important to document at the time?

If you, the public, think you are going to somehow get the actual facts of this case by keeping up with the news, you're kidding yourself.

FYI

On the ”Today Show,” NBC News reported that Zimmerman said this on the 911 call:
Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.

The unedited audio actually went like this:
Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. Or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.
Dispatcher: OK, and this guy — is he black, white or Hispanic?
Zimmerman: He looks black.

I think it's a safe assumption that Zimmerman has some issues, and it's probably safe to assume that Martin was not a perfect angel. If we're pointing out facts, it's probably worth noting that the reason Zimmerman was patroling, there were a number of burglaries and a shooting in the previous year. But, none of that gives Zimmerman the right to shoot and kill Martin. No matter how long the trial takes, we will probably never know exactly what happened. The most likely scenario is probably some version of a sequence of poor judgements by both Zimmerman and Martin, followed by a tragic accident.

 

Many years ago there was a shooting across the street from my brother's house. It was a long time ago and I can't remember the facts exactly, but there were no injuries and my brother said he heard one or two shots. No big deal. The next day the story we read in the paper was totally blown out of proportion and did not resemble what actually happened at all. It was a complete fiction and eye opening to say the least. I can guarantee that whatever happened, the media has it completely wrong, and willfully so. The only thing I know for sure from this story is that someone shot someone else. Other than that everything is speculation and pointless.

 

Not that I really want to pimp BL1Y's website, but they have some analysis up that is of interest.

http://www.constitutionaldaily.com/...ayvon-martin-shooting&catid=42:news&Itemid=71

 

Yeah, the last part, in bold, seems very off to me. The reason being that there have been multiple news stories, eyewitness testimony, testimony from BOTH COPS AT THE SCENE, and enhanced video footage to prove that it's bullshit. I don't know all the facts of the case, but one thing that seems certain was that Trayvon beat up Zimmerman pretty bad.

He slammed his head against the concrete and punched him in the mouth repeatedly, according to actual EYEWITNESSES.

Look, Jimmy James and Rush-O-Matic have largely covered it, but this is another example of "trial by media", much like the Duke lacrosse case. I remember when the Duke lacrosse case first came out, everyone hurled invective at the three innocent students, the Tucker Max Message Board included. (As did Tucker himself)

On the "character" front, Trayvon was suspended for 10 days for taking pot to class at the time, had a Facebook profile boasting of being a hardcore, badass thug, had punched a bus driver in the head a few days before the incident, etc. Hardly an innocent angel.

All that being said, was shooting a guy who was on top of you slamming your head against the ground the right way to go? Not necessarily.

But it sure as fuck is a different story then the "evil Neighborhood Watch racist shoots innocent black teenage angel", now isn't it?

 

The "court of public opinion" has brought one thing screaming to light - not that the media broadcasts too much, not that people can't get a fair trial, not that race has shit all to do with anything - it has made it crystal clear that people will believe what they see on the news without question. People are fucking sheep. "Because I saw it on tv, it must be true". Whatever happened to skepticism? To the benefit of the doubt? To "innocent until proven guilty"?

People have formed opinions based on what they've been shown, which has bias, and based on what they've been told about what's been shown, which has bias, and have taken all that bias, some of which is based on fact, but a lot of which is based on personal interpretation and opinion, and they have formed concrete thoughts about someone's guilt or innocence. And that, my friends, is fucking terrifying.

Please don't stand on your soap boxes and proclaim "I know the facts of this case, and I know that...". You don't. None of us do. Let the guy get his trial, let the families get their closure.

 

IF Zimmerman is found anything less than 100% guilty - There will be no closure.
It won't matter what evidence is given to support the not guilty verdict (I can't say innocence, really, because Martin IS dead at Zimmerman's hand...it's the circumstance under which Martin died that makes this whole thing so sensational), it won't matter how many eyewitnesses are interviewed, it won't matter...anything. The media has taken the bit in its teeth and ran with this story.
It's divisive, it's going to get uglier, and truth be told, I'm sick of fucking hearing about it.

Martin wasn't an angel. He was a thug. A self proclaimed fucking thug.
That doesn't mean he deserved to die, necessarily, but the picture of a young kid just getting snacks in the middle of the night wandering home through the back of the neighborhood is media and attorney fed bullshit. I just wish people were intelligent enough to see that.

 

What Martin had done in his life before that instant has nothing to do with anything. ANYTHING. You don't have to be intelligent to understand this. Zimmerman didn't know that there may be a twitter post alleging that Martin had "swung at a bus driver" or had once had a bag with "traces of weed".

Martin didn't know that the guy following him at night was a member of the "neighborhood watch". Zimmerman coming after him was a far more threatening action than Martin walking alone chatting on the phone.

All Martin knew was "guy is following me at night". All Zimmerman knew was "guy in the neighborhood I don't recognize"

 

Martin was 6'1, in a hoodie, with objects in his pockets. Zimmerman is 5'9. If an assault did happen, it adds to the sense of panic given the fact that Martin appeared larger (wikipedia says Zimmerman is 190 lbs. and Martin 150.) and could have appeared armed.

When confronted, why did Martin run? The cell phone transcript tells specifically the point when he took off running, but why would he do that?

Also, wikipedia reports that the police have been called to that gated community over 400 times in 13 months, which is around once per day. It stands to reason that Zimmerman took his neighborhood watch job seriously, and likely that he knew some of the police in that area. That could explain why the investigation was handled so poorly, especially considering the fact that Zimmerman was on the phone with dispatch for part of the encounter.

In my personal opinion, this sounds like two wannabes who escalated things beyond their control. Zimmerman is a wannabe cop that forgot many of the most basic rules of firearms. Martin appeared to be a wannabe thug who decided to assault the guy who pissed him off by following him. No one sounded like they were behaving rationally when this went down because rational people are capable of saying "Hey asshole, I live here stop following me." or "Excuse me what are you doing walking down the street in the rain?" without it being a challenge.

This situation has the media to blame for happening in the first place, when you think that any young, black man walking alone at night is considered suspicious. Books don't teach you that, Channel 5 taught you that. Also, you can blame the media for the "Us vs. Them" mentality in law enforcement. Instead of acting as a concerned member of the community, he acted in a way that was confrontational and then said confrontation escalated beyond his control.

 

I don't disagree...
But I still don't like the story as it's being concocted through media outlets.
I still don't like the blatant media bias.
I still don't like the way the media is presenting this story.

 

Neither do I, as I said in my first post in the thread. I thought it should have been looked at as how far can the self defense claim go. Not white hispanic v black. But the rampant speculation, and people trying to act like everything in Martin's past is relevant to what his actions may have been at the time wears a little thin.

The reason I think the incident should have been treated as a test of the extent of stand your ground laws in reference to lethality is the fact that Zimmerman following the guy strikes me as the far more aggressive action in the whole case.

If a bear is minding its own business, and I start following it around screaming and banging sticks (bears hate it when you bang sticks), causing it to have a fight and flight response, and it chooses to turn around and charge me, and I shoot it, sure I was trying to save my life, but maybe I shouldn't have have chased after it, causing it to become fearful. Who was the one standing the ground first?

However:

 

Maybe I'm just paranoid, but when I'm alone at night and some guy tries to confront me in the street the list of probable negative outcomes greatly outweighs the list of positive outcomes for letting the guy confront me as opposed to getting the fuck away from him. Unless the guy in question has a uniform and a badge I don't owe him a second thought.

 

Yes.

But also yes. I don't think that's a totally irrational reaction, and doesn't equate to Martin being guilty of something.

Best part of the thread. This is all I could think of:

 

A clear video is in this link. Check it out when you get home.

Edit- Here's the direct link.

I don't know what actually happened, but from the handful of links posted, there seems to be a reasonable chance that it was Martin who, after being pursued for a while, decided to confront Zimmerman about it;

<a class="postlink" href="http://www.constitutionaldaily.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1615:mapping-the-trayvon-martin-shooting&catid=42:news&Itemid=71" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.constitutionaldaily.com/inde ... &Itemid=71</a>

(Frebis posted this on the last page)

According to that, there were 20 minutes between the phone call and the action shooting; Martin could have been back home in exactly 5 of those minutes.

Look, I don't know the protocol for a member of Neighborhood Watch, especially in that community. Maybe following a suspicious character late at night in a community with a string of robberies and violence was the wrong thing to do. Maybe the "cowardly" choice was the correct one.

And once Martin was on top of him, raining down punches on his face, and slamming his head against the concrete, should Zimmerman have shot him, or just taken the beating? Also a debatable question.

But that's a very different story than the one the media has intentionally misled the public with.

 

I was under the impression that he had already been cleaned up when those images were captured.

The court of public opinion is going to decide this case. The media in this country is a fucking joke, there has been so much misinformation and bias I literally feel sick to my stomach sometimes.

 

The stand your ground law may become irrelevant because he inserted himself into the situation once he stepped out of his vehicle. Under the law, you have no duty to retreat but you can't initiate the conflict, pursue, or insert yourself into a situation.

I don't know what to believe in this case, but part of me wonders if the DA is going for murder 2 knowing that there probably won't be a conviction and doing it simply to appease the protestors. It's a giant waste of taxpayer money, but it's a way to save face and say they "did something".

To be justified in using deadly force, the defendant has to assess whether 3 criteria are met: Opportunity, ability, and intent. If the assailant has the opportunity, ability, and intent to inflict serious bodily harm, including death or permanent injury, you are justified in using deadly force.

Again, it will be interesting to see how the lawyers argue this point and the fact that he [reportedly] inserted himself into the situation by getting out of his vehicle.

 

Ironically enough, a lot of the posts in this thread are underscoring the point that a lot of the outrage is trying to bring it up.

Before I go too deeply into this, let me be crystal clear on a few points: The media cycle often only cares about things insofar as they are stories. I don't believe they actually care about Trayvon qua Trayvon, but rather as an outlet to push whatever agenda they might have at the time. I'm not a huge fan of their coverage, in general, and I think George Zimmerman deserves his day in court. None of us really has any way of knowing whether he's a racist or not, and that's not a debate likely to be solved with message board speculation. This is an extremely complicated issue.

But.

When it comes to the larger, systemic issues elucidated by this ordeal, whether Zimmerman is a racist, or hates hoodies, or just despises sugary treats is secondary to the very real fact that black men are coded differently for doing the exact same things as other demographics.

Whose fault is it?

For their part, black men have to do better. As a whole, there are a *lot* of ways that we need to encourage and police ourselves. That encompasses a whole host of issues, from parenthood, to jobs, to the ways we contribute to culture -- everything.

At the same time, if you are something other than a black man, instead of becoming defensive about the race of Zimmerman, or whether he was acting in self-defense, or whether Martin is a thug, why not use this as an opportunity to examine your own unconscious assumptions, and how they play into your everyday life? I know a bunch of girls who used to bring coke to school on a very regular basis, but because they were rich and white, it was never codified as "thug" behavior. Are we really associating pot with being violent now? Not to call them out or anything, but Crown and Pimptress often talk about how much they like weed, and I don't think anybody has ever implied that it made them any more of a thug.

Or rifling through his social media profiles -- I'm not sure how many of you have ever spent significant amount of time growing up in a mostly non-white neighborhood, but implying that he's a bad guy because he posed for a picture with gold teeth, or because he had "nigga" in his twitter handle is obfuscating at best. Again, I could post 500 pictures easily from Facebook profiles, of white and asian dudes twisting their fingers and furrowing their brows, and it would not code as dangerous.

It's impossible to just take one thread out and get a sense of the whole pattern. Why not use this as a chance to step back and observe? Or be compassionate?

 

I think this is generally true.

Where things get weird is that Trayvon's race may have been entirely irrelevant to Zimmerman thinking he looked suspicious. What if it was a white guy wearing a hoodie wandering around the neighborhood at night?


Still looks suspicious to me.

 

You guys saying it's clear that Trayvon was beating the shit out of Zimmerman are deluding yourselves just as much as those who are 100% certain that Zimmerman acted purely out of racism. Eyewitness accounts are spotty at best. Some say Trayvon was on top, some say Zimmerman.

What we can all be sure of is that Zimmerman, his brother and father each claimed that Zimmerman was punched in the nose and it broke. His brother even said that it was still not fully healed a month later. It's not a stretch to say that an injury that takes a month to heal is pretty fucking obvious 30 minutes after it happened, even IF he was cleaned up by doctors (as someone else mentioned, broken noses bleed A LOT). And if all he had was a scratch on the back of his head from getting it repeatedly slammed into concrete, as many of you are claiming is evidence for him "getting the shit beat out of him", then Zimmerman is one frighteningly tough motherfucker.

We can also be sure that this wouldn't have happened if Zimmerman didn't continue following Martin after he was told not to.

Anyone who pathetically tries to use Martin's suspensions/weed traces as, uh, I'm not sure, evidence that he deserved it(?), while not taking into account Zimmerman's history of violence and charge of striking a police officer are...well, you need work on your logic, is the nicest way I can put it.

Another less talked about and, in my opinion, VASTLY more important thing we can all be sure of, is the guarantee that no one would have died if people with a history of violence weren't allowed to carry guns. For whatever reason, I've been defending Americans/the Guv'ment to people I know/meet/work with lately. It's been an odd month or so. One thing I'll never be able to understand, let alone defend, is your national boner for guns. Absurd is the best word I can come up with right now. I mean, doesn't the fact that you only follow some of the most drug-addled, un-educated countries in gun murders, and you dwarf the rest of the modern world by at least 30X, make you wanna have a more serious discussion about your gun laws? A congresswoman gets shot in public, and some people actually argue that having MORE guns would have helped the situation. An unarmed teenager gets shot, eventually, because some wannabe cop thought he looked suspicious and should follow him (what would you do if a non-cop was following you?), and someone on here says he (Zimmerman) "forgot the rules of firearms". Unbelievable.