The godawful frustration of trying to address police police brutality is dealing with people who refuse under any circumstances to believe that brutality is a problem.
I generally agree in waiting for the results of a well-conducted investigation before coming to a final conclusion about events described in the newspaper. That means there has to be an investigation. That means the investigation has to be competent and impartial. It looks like we'll have an investigation in this case, but I question how competent and impartial it will be, when the agency conducting the investigation is the some one being examined. A couple particular points: > Regarding the urination on the person. Did someone see a cop do it? Is > it really likely? Could the person have urinated on himself, or could a > drinking companion have done it back where the police picked the person > up? These are possible, maybe even more likely, explanations. According to http://www.kare11.com/news/news-article.asp?NEWS_ID=41510 "He had been urinated on," Bellecourt says. "He was steaming from it. It was on his face and in his hair." There are a few people who are flexible enough to urinate on their own face and hair. Most of them are teaching yoga or in the Peking Circus. And if it's accurate that the urine was "steaming" when others found the man, it seems unlikely that the man's drinking companions did the urinating _before_ police picked him up. > And was it "subfreezing" or 0 temperatures. I walk outside without a > coat sometimes when it is 25 degrees. I'm assuming the person was > wearing winter clothes. And I leave lots of people outside their > doors--esp. if they don't seem to want any further assistance from me. This is disingenuous. The temperature is about 25 degrees right now. The mail carrier and the people I met in the coffee shop this morning were all talking about how happy they were that it had gotten *warm*. The temperature Friday and Saturday night was not 25 degrees, it was *cold*. I've walked outside when it was -25 degrees and enjoyed doing it. But I was wearing very carefully assembled winter clothes, I was moving quickly, I was sober, and I had the ability to find an open business if I found that I'd wrongly estimated my ability to take the cold. This person was on the ground. He was unconscious and he was injured. He was also wet, and heat is lost from wet skin faster than from dry skin. It's quite likely that he would have died if people hadn't come to help him. Rosalind Nelson Bancroft neighborhood TEMPORARY REMINDER: 1. Send all posts in plain-text format. 2. Cut as much of the post you're responding to as possible. ________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
