If the video of Michael Brown—the unarmed, black teenager who was shot by police in Ferguson, Missouri—roughing up and robbing a shopkeeper is authentic, Brown was no gentle giant; he was a brutal bully and worse.
The point being made by the entities Fred Reed dubs “talking heads with bargain-basement IQs,” however, is that the Brown captured by surveillance doing what seemed to come so naturally (intimidating and stealing) relates not at all to the Brown who got shot, because the cop who shot Brown knew nothing of the robbery in which the teen had partaken in the hour prior to his death.
This is not to justify the shooting, but to pose a question: Do we know for sure that the outed policeman did not get information over his car radio about a robbery in the vicinity?
The fact that the alleged perp (Michael Brown) knew he had committed a felony might well have changed the dynamics of the situation. If Brown had consciousness of guilt, he might well have acted in an aggressive manner; “done something an innocent person would not do.”
“The story smells,” writes Fred, who worked the cop beat as a journalist:
Reflect: Every white cop short of the orbit of Neptune knows that if he shoots a black, he faces dismemberment in the media, loss of job and pension, probable criminal charges locally by a publicity-seeking prosecutor, a well-funded civil suit that he can’t afford filed by surviving family members, and trumped-up federal civil-rights charges from an attorney general who doesn’t like whites.