Hey. At least you didn't add a gun to that equation.

I have cousins in South Africa. When they say "gated" they mean "fortified and garrisoned".....

Video of Zimmerman at the Police station:

http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?secti ... id=8600368

Whatever may have occurred, this is not someone who just had their nose broken. The new eyewitness account also casts doubt on Zimmerman's story.

My personal feeling is that if Zimmerman's story were correct, this would have been released on the day of or shortly after the shooting. His version has always seemed contrived, as if it is a response to other people's reactions rather than a factual account of the shooting.

It's pointless to guess what has happened. I have no sympathies for guys like Zimmermann, but as long as there is no certain proof for his guilt, he has to be treated as innocent. In my opinion he got no legitimation to control someone, so if he forced Trayvon Martin to talk with him he committed a crime. But thats's duress, not murder. To proofe that he is a murderer in the sence of the law, the prosecutor has to proofe that Trayvon Martin didn't attack Zimmermann at first, or that Zimmerman was the assailant and Trayvon just defended himself. To avoid cases like that, it should be clear that just authorized staff is allowed to control the people and free citizens are allowed to ignore everybody else.

I agree, one of the things that troubles me about this case is that the 911 call center didn't explicitly instruct Zimmerman to leave the police to the policing. When Zimmerman told 911 that he was following Martin, 911 said something like "you don't need to do that." This is very different from saying not to confront Martin and to me sounds like it is saying "you don't need to do that... but it helps."



The G word seems to have slowly worked its way into the public commentary here anyway. A few days ago there was an interesting to the editor type piece run by an Ohio newspaper talking about the way society sees people based on how they dress. In it a woman was talking about how black parents have to give their sons lectures on how to dress so that they don't look like a threat when in public, which some how trigger an obligatory tangent about goth clothes and how that's more of a white kids thing. You can read it here. That same day the Huffington Post ran this cringe worthy story on profiling in NYC's stop & frisk policy. Ignoring the author's attempting to use "Goth" and "Hipster" as polysemes : I can only guess the G word was drawn into the conversation to try to make the case that this isn't just a race problem, but this seems to fly in the face of anything factual mentioned in the article [i.e. where these stop & frisks happen the most often, and what demographics are most effected by them]. There are a lot of Martin stories about hoodies in the last week or so that have attracted a lot of comments mentioning Goth clothes, and I'm not sure why. But those don't really count since comments sections are full of jibberish as a rule.

Just as well I re-read your post, Arq... I first read it as "a teenaged prank of tea-bagging"... I really must read things more carefully in future


I hope that Zimmerman is charged with the crime he has committed... Skittles may not be the healthiest snack available, but they certainly don't deserve to be shot and killed for. Neither does the fact Trayvon was black. We have some amazing thugs over here (as the riots last year proved)... and the race percentage of black to white amongst those causing chaos was fairly evenly split from the cctv footage I saw!

The fact that Zimmerman is white proves the point even more... Trayvon was black and innocent, Zimmerman is white and guilty of murder. Had Trayvon been breaking into his house or waving a gun about in the street I could have understood the action Zimmerman took... as it stands today, his actions are reprehensible and he should face the whole weight of the law. Justice is not blind, but it should be colour blind.

My thoughts and prayers are with Trayvon's family

Yeah, America still has a lot of old, messy race-issues that were just resolved (and still not completely) less than fifty years ago. Because a lot of issues about race were only recently resolved, a lot of older generations still hold tensions. People my age (teenagers-kids in their early 20s) are not as racist (although it all depends on how you were raised, but that's a different issue all together), but someone my moms age who is black (50-60. Maybe even 40s) is still very sensitive to racism in general because they probably experienced it more than a few times in their life. I know my mom did.

50/50? But aren't whites a much larger demographic over there? I would only expect 50/50 if the demographics were evenly split.

For example over here blacks make up something like 13 per-cent of the population, yet they make up nearly 40 per-cent of our prison inmates. Which means far more of them as a demographic get into trouble then should be. They also represent nearly half of the victims who report crimes to the police, which is odd considering how small their demographic is.

The confusing part of these stats is how to count hispanics [that's what Zimmerman would be considered, he is as white as President Obama is with his white mother] since that is a ethnicity not a "race." Hispanics is a catch all term to talk about people whose families come from south of the boarder so that term is going to include people who are white, black, native, or some combination of the three. Hispanics are a different minority group so they distinguish them from blacks in demographic stats by using terms like "nonhispanic black" to refer to people whose families are of a more direct african descendence.

But then they throw the whole catch all group of hispanics in the "white European" catagory and try to use footnotes to explain that the "80 per-cent of Americans who are white also includes the ~15% who are hispanic." That's all hispanics, not just the blonde blue eyed ones that are more popular in Mexican soap operas. Interestingly hispanics seem to be the only group whose proportionate presence in our prisons is similar to their proportionate presence in the populous. Meanwhile less than 45 per-cent of our inmates are white, nonhispanic.

London has a large multi-racial percentage... and sadly it seems that a lot of young people of colour are involved in the ever increasing gang culture we have here now. When you factor in the lack of employment and facilities that offer youth something to do in the evenings (around me there is nothing for youth to do at all and the nearest youth club is three miles away and difficult to find unless you know where it is) it's not surprising that gangs offering a community of their own seem so attractive to those on the outside (the dangers only becoming apparent once it's too late to leave).

There seem to be "lost generations" among the youth here... young people that think is ok to go out and loot shops and businesses to get something for nothing. Some of the kids doing it were as young as 12 (if memory serves me correctly) and it really makes me sad to think that their lives have been ruined by greed and the ever increasing need to have the latest must-have rubbish. Anything for a quick buck

Someone made a very apt point about this tragedy - It was on Up with Chris Hayes Saturday morning, albeit I can't remember who made the remark. The gist of it was that had the tables been turned and Trayvon shot Zimmerman claiming that he felt Zimmerman meant him serious harm, Trayvon would have been put in jail. Take into account that in this case Trayvon is a 17 year old kid weighing in at around 140lbs while Zimmerman is a grown-ass-man who weighs in at 250lbs - you tell me who would have had the upper hand in a fist fight.

Also, asserting that Trayvon was wearing a hoodie and thus looked like he was up to no good is akin to claiming that a woman deserves to be raped for wearing a revealing blouse. We don't need attire restrictions, we need GUN restrictions.

~spidey

They need to let this go and pay more attention to more important things, like helping the economy and keeping it from collapsing completely.

When they come to shoot you, next, trust me, you won't be thinking about the economy.

-- Nephele

No they don't. They should focus on the economy, yes, but this really needs to stay in the public eye. I live right outside Detroit, which has a huge african-american population that lives in poverty. Things like this happen all the time to black people, and rarely do the police give a shit. It takes (no exaggeration) almost two hours sometimes for police to respond to calls in Detroit (trust me, I've been there). And a lot of times black people are treated like criminals before they have even been accused of doing anything. Some police stop black people in suburbs for just driving a nice car (I have been in this situation, as has my father, mother, and a lot of my family). The nickname for this is "Driving While Black" or DWB.

A lot of times the police screw over African-Americans, and no one talks about it or reports it. Also, the news media rarely reports crimes done to African-americans (as individuals this time, not as an enitre race) in general. How many missing black children or teens do you see in national news? Very, very few, if any.

So my point in saying all this is to let you know that it is very important that this stays in the media because this is the first time (to my limited, teenage memory) that a racist killing like this has gotten so much media attention, and the media holds the black person in a positive light instead of a negative one.

There is so much wrong with this I'm not even going to explain all the ways.

Actually I will since it's in bad shape and many people are struggling, please don't assume you know how I think.

-- Tue Apr 03, 2012 6:40 am --



That's just your opinion.

-- Tue Apr 03, 2012 6:46 am --



Hmm, I guess you have a point(s) there.