7 things to watch: Rams at Redskins

By Jim Thomas

http://www.stltoday.com/sports/football/professional/things-to-watch-rams-at-redskins/article_0d64d0f9-5f48-5d2b-8674-864258d0fc35.html%5B/quote%5D

COLT IS IN CHARGE IN WASHINGTON

After washing out in Cleveland, then holding a clipboard for a year in San Francisco, Colt McCoy has another chance to show he can be a starting quarterback in the NFL. Sunday marks his third start this season for Washington, and the second since Robert Griffin III was benched by coach Jay Gruden. McCoy has good mobility and pretty good accuracy. He doesn’t have the greatest arm strength. There are times when he gets the ball out quickly, but also times when he waits too long reading the field and gets pulled down by the pass rush. It’s a common mistake for young quarterbacks. McCoy was sacked six times last week against the Colts, one of which resulted in a fumble that was recovered by Indy and returned for a touchdown. “He’s done a pretty good job,” Rams defensive coordinator Gregg Williams said. “I see a lot of progress in his game since the last time I’ve gone against him a few years ago when he was in Cleveland.”

IN THE BACKFIELD

He hasn’t come close to matching his franchise record 1,613 rushing yards as a rookie in 2012, but Alfred Morris is on course for a third consecutive 1,000-yard rushing year. He’s among NFL leaders in rushing yards (893) and rushing TDs (seven). At 5 feet 10, 224 pounds, Morris has excellent lower-body strength. “He’s got our attention on how he’s able to press the hole,” Williams said. “He’s been a great one-cut runner. He’s more explosive than people give him credit for.”

HELU, TOO

The one thing Morris doesn’t do is catch many passes. Those chores usually fall to former University of Nebraska star Roy Helu Jr. The Rams haven’t always been attentive to running backs leaking out of the backfield to catch passes; doing the same against Washington would be a big mistake. The speedy Helu is third among NFL running backs in reception yards (436), and leads all NFL pass-catchers — be they backs, wideouts, or tight ends — in yards after the catch (12.7).

THE RECEIVERS

The Rams will catch a break if DeSean Jackson (shin) can’t play. He’s listed as questionable, which might be an optimistic assessment because he didn’t practice all week. If he’s out there, Jackson has big-play potential as evidenced by his career average of 17.5 yards per catch. Don’t sleep on Pierre Garcon, who has more catches (162) since the start of last season than anyone in the NFC. Jordan Reed is an emerging tight end who had nine catches for 123 yards last week.

SHORTHANDED SECONDARY

Washington has been without veteran cornerbacks DeAngelo Hall and Tracy Porter for most of the season. Both are on IR. And it looks as if starting strong safety Brandon Meriweather and backup cornerback E.J. Biggers will be out because of injuries Sunday. CB Chase Minnifield (concussion), who started last week, already has been ruled out. After giving up four TD passes of 30-plus yards, including two of 70-plus yards against Indy, the secondary appears very vulnerable.

KERRIGAN and QUINN

The 2011 draft was a banner year for pass rushers, featuring Von Miller, Aldon Smith, J.J. Watt, the Rams’ Robert Quinn and Washington’s Ryan Kerrigan. Washington traded down, from No. 10 overall to No. 16, to take Kerrigan and in essence pass on Quinn, who went at No. 14. Kerrigan has a career-high 9½ sacks this season and has 34 in his career. After a slow start this season, Quinn has been on fire lately. He’s credited with nine sacks in 2014 and has 43½ in his career.

TURNOVER BATTLE

The winning formula for the Rams isn’t all that complicated in 2014. They are 3-0 in games where they don’t commit a turnover. Washington had three takeaways last week but still lost to the Colts 49-27, and has been anything but a turnover machine this season — with 15. Only five teams in the NFL have fewer. The Rams, meanwhile, are coming off a season-high five takeaways registered in last week’s 52-0 route of Oakland and have 21 takeaways this season.

wv wrote:

Well, some of the ‘running qbs’ have
had a bad year, but a ‘running qb’
still quarterbacked the team that won
the Ring last year.

And yes i know about Seattle’s
D and running game. But ask
any seattle-watcher what they think
of R.Wilson. He’s clutch.

w
v

But the key there is “clutch,” not “running.”

Wilson is a very good qb. They take advantage of his running without getting him slaughtered. But when he has to make a clutch throw, he does.

Not every starting qb with run-first ability is Wilson. Just as not every pocket passer is Brees or Warner.

What to Watch For: Rams vs. Redskins/ Wagoner

By Nick Wagoner

http://espn.go.com/blog/st-louis-rams/post/_/id/14302/w2w4-st-louis-rams-17

EARTH CITY, Mo. — The St. Louis Rams and the Washington Redskins kick off Week 14 on Sunday at FedEx Field. Kickoff is set for 1 p.m. ET on Fox regional coverage.

Here are three things to watch from the Rams’ perspective:

1. Keep it simple: Winning the turnover battle is an unavoidable formula for winning games in the NFL. Yes, it’s simple and obvious but it’s also as close as you can find to a predictor in figuring out wins and losses in a given week. The Rams have been a perfect example of that this season. In games where they have committed zero turnovers, they are 3-0 and they haven’t lost a game in which they’ve been on the positive side of the turnover ledger. Conversely, they’ve lost any time they’ve been on the negative side. Games where they’ve broken even have been a coin toss. The Redskins don’t give it away as much as last week’s opponent, the Oakland Raiders, but they are pretty generous. They are 27th in the league in turnover margin at minus-7 and their 22 giveaways are 24th in the league. The Rams, meanwhile, have 21 takeaways, which is the eighth most in the league.

2. Pass rush production: The population of sack city has increased tremendously over the past seven or so weeks. After setting a league record for futility in that statistic the first six weeks, the Rams have become the pass rushing team that had set out to be at the beginning of the year. Since Week 7, the Rams have 27 sacks, which is the second most in the league in that time frame. End Robert Quinn is up to nine on the season and coming off a three-sack effort last week while defensive tackle Aaron Donald is leading all rookies in sacks with six of his own. The Redskins have yielded 39 sacks this season, the second most in the NFL. This is a dangerous mix for Washington heading into this week.

3. Penalty prone: Both teams enter this matchup among the most penalized teams in the league. That should be no surprise to fans of either team as they’ve likely grown annoyed by the persistent flags. Washington is 28th in the league in penalties with 93 while the Rams aren’t far behind at 90. And both teams aren’t just getting penalties but they’re getting costly ones. The Rams’ 851 penalty yards is second most in the league and Washington’s 828 are fourth most. So don’t be surprised if this game takes a while. The team that can control itself best will be doing itself a great service in improving its chances for a win.

joemad wrote:

I heard Young talk about this on his weekly segment on local SF radio. Sid Gillman tied Young’s legs with a rope to avoid Young from scrambling.

SY: Well, I was throwing the ball a lot (at BYU), so I had some concepts that were taught to me by (quarterbacks coach) Mike Holmgren in college. But I also ran around like crazy. Ironically, it was in the USFL with (Hall-of-Fame coach) Sid Gillman. People don’t remember that Sid Gillman was my coach. He was an old crotchety guy, but he was the first one to basically say, ‘You can’t just run around.’ … I remember, he literally tied my feet up. He got a rope and said ‘OK, you can’t go anywhere. What are you going to do? You can’t move. What’s your next plan?’ So that got me thinking about that.

I think tying Young up and leaving him out there facing the D was a good idea. I mean I don’t know about the qb mechanics part of it, I just know he deserved it. Then, of course, they screwed up and untied him.

from off the net

==

Billy_T

a prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, if he or she wants to. In 2010, there were 16,000 grand juries, and only 11 of them failed to indict. McCullough has a long history of protecting police, and it’s a rather incestuous relationship between local prosecutors and the police in the first place. They’re colleagues. It shouldn’t be in the hands of a local prosecutor to begin with. There is an obvious conflict of interest.

Some relevant articles:

It’s Incredibly Rare For A Grand Jury To Do What Ferguson’s Just Did
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/ferguson-michael-brown-indictment-darren-wilson/

What America’s police departments don’t want you to know
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/eugene-robinson-its-a-crime-that-we-dont-know-how-many-people-police-shoot-to-death/2014/12/01/adedcb00-7998-11e4-b821-503cc7efed9e_story.html?tid=pm_opinions_pop

Officer Darren Wilson’s story is unbelievable. Literally.
http://www.vox.com/2014/11/25/7281165/darren-wilsons-story-side

Amid Conflicting Accounts, Trusting Darren Wilson
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/26/us/ferguson-grand-jury-weighed-mass-of-evidence-much-of-it-conflicting.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=b-lede-package-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=2

more from

Mackeyser

(Responding to a concern that it would be hard to believe that the DA had a remotely prosecutable case, but just decided to shelve it) Well, yeah, that’s pretty much what happened. Justice Scalia in 1992 laid out very clearly the role of the Grand Jury and the presentation of evidence.

“It is the grand jury’s function not ‘to enquire … upon what foundation [the charge may be] denied,’ or otherwise to try the suspect’s defenses, but only to examine ‘upon what foundation [the charge] is made’ by the prosecutor. Respublica v. Shaffer, 1 Dall. 236 (O. T. Phila. 1788); see also F. Wharton, Criminal Pleading and Practice § 360, pp. 248-249 (8th ed. 1880). As a consequence, neither in this country nor in England has the suspect under investigation by the grand jury ever been thought to have a right to testify or to have exculpatory evidence presented.”

I’m quoting from an article on Alternet, but there are several good articles out there on this very topic. The article goes on:

The passage was first highlighted by attorney Ian Samuel, a former clerk to Justice Scalia.

McCulloch allowed Wilson to testify for hours and made sure the grand jury was aware of every possible piece of evidence that could exculpate the cop. In his rambling press conference Monday night, McCulloch explained that the refusal to indict resulted from the combination of contradictory eyewitness testimony and other exculpatory evidence. But it was immediately obvious to legal experts that the way the prosecutor presented the evidence virtually guaranteed that there would be no indictment, and therefore no trial. As the cliche goes, a prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. But, it should be added, the prosecutor has to want the ham sandwich to be indicted. (emphasis mine)

There was so much wrong with how this went down that books will be written about it. McCulloch should have recused. He didn’t. He should have actually presented the charges to the Grand Jury. He didn’t. Not in the same manner as every OTHER Grand Jury. Normally a DA will actually present the charges and then essentially make his Prima Facie (or first facts) case as to WHY the Grand Jury should indict. It’s the whole point. His office functioned as de facto defense attorneys in the Grand Jury for Officer Wilson, a breach of the duties of his office before the Grand Jury. Other than giving the Grand Jury a list of charges, the Assistant DAs, NOT the DA himself, did NOT make any case for the return of any of the charges. As the Grand Jury was not sequestered, they KNEW they were in on the biggest case in the country and for the DA to not be presenting the case for indictment sent a STRONG signal to them that he didn’t expect an indictment. DAs are political animals and you will NEVER see a DA pass up a chance to get an indictment on a high profile case before the Grand Jury because if it goes to trial, he will want to ensure that everything before the Grand Jury is perfect. As an example, if this were going to trial, there’s NO WAY Wilson goes before the Grand Jury because the DA would want to tear into his inconsistent testimony on cross examination. Why the different distances? Why was his testimony from that day so different from the subsequent testimony a week later? How does he reconcile the testimony of the other person with Michael Brown who says Officer Wilson actually opened his car door and slammed it into Brown, which also puts everyone and the DNA in the right place, but puts Wilson on the aggressive and totally contradicts his account? NO ONE has put Wilson on a stand and cross-examined him. EVER. And now, it can’t happen. Which…was pretty much the plan all along. It had to be. There are just simply too many affirmative actions (no pun intended) taken to come to any other conclusion.

The shocking part isn’t that Officer Wilson wasn’t indicted. It was that it went to the Grand Jury at all and that they went to all the trouble of trying to cover for Officer Wilson when the outcome was predetermined. There is NO WAY after the release of that information that a discerning person can say that the DA sought justice or even the unvarnished truth.

The DAs office’s intent was to ensure that Officer Brown was NOT indicted. And they ensured that successfully.

I totally agree that any looting and burning is sad, unnecessary, counterproductive and wrong. What I appreciated were folks in the crowd wearing black hoodies with “Peacekeeper” on it in white letters and phone cameras and rather than videoing the cops, they were taking footage of the people. And whenever a crowd gathered, you’d see folks get there and try to start talking to people. Didn’t always work, but there were and are a lot of people who want to see this turn into positive change. MOST (easily 99+% of the people there throughout the months of protests) are looking to see positive changes… like community policing, body cams on police and a host of other things to make their community a better place.

One thing DA McCulloch DID say that is very true. If we want different outcomes, change the laws. Don’t burn things down. Now, with gerrymandering and all the political shenanigans all over the place, that’s a tough row to hoe, but if we as a people can deal with all we’ve changed from only white landowners participating in the political process to where we are today, we can certainly move even farther toward our founding ideals where we state that all men are created equal (and thus are treated equally under the law).
****

DA McCulloch misused the Grand Jury. Plain and simple.

As Justice Scalia points out, the Grand Jury is NOT the venue for exculpatory evidence. Moreover, Officer Wilson’s testimony was RIDDLED with inconsistencies that should have been subject to cross-examination at trial.

The purpose of the Grand Jury is NOT to convict. It’s to INDICT. And there was enough to indict. There just was.

Now… especially because Officer Wilson is a Police Officer, because the eyewitness testimony was inconclusive and because the forensics were also inconclusive and there was no video evidence, it’s pretty unlikely Officer Wilson would be convicted. At least of a higher crime like murder. Depending on what happened at trial, a REALLY good prosecutor might get him on a lower charge of a lesser manslaughter if he were able to establish better about the distances because Officer Wilson’s testimony didn’t match the forensic evidence…EITHER. That part gets glossed over by his defenders.

I’m not arguing that Officer Wilson is guilty…or innocent.

I’m not arguing that Michael Brown is guilty of anything since he’s not on trial (and he shouldn’t be PUT on trial in some BS equivocation nonsense).

I’m arguing that the Grand Jury process was subverted and, thus that justice was denied.

You don’t seem to argue that fact, but seem to rationalize it.

I wholeheartedly, to the marrow of my bones, respectfully disagree. The law is the law and we should follow it for all.

Officer Wilson was denied his day in court by this and thus was denied justice as well. Not to the degree that the Brown family was, obviously, as they lost a son. My point is that in subverting the Grand Jury process for a political outcome, justice was DENIED to all involved.

And anyone pointing to the Grand Jury process in this case as a vindicatory process simply doesn’t understand what happened.
****

(regarding the contention that the evidence dump was rigging the process)
the accusation that giving the jury all the evidence is the VERY DEFINITION of rigging it.

I’m sorry if you don’t understand that.

It is NOT, absolutely NOT the job of the Grand Jury to adjudicate the merits of guilt or innocence or to exonerate a person.

I’ve posted probably half a dozen times the standard articulated by Justice Scalia. That is NOT what McCulloch did. Moreover, what McCulloch did isn’t just kinda, sorta outside the norm. It’s SO UNUSUAL that it borders on the “unheard of” and people struggled to find precedent for it…anywhere.

Further, your statement that “it means there was no evidence of a crime” is just not correct. We don’t know that because the DA never ASKED the Grand Jury for an indictment. They put the Grand Jury in a very difficult position, a position that no trial jury is in because evidence there has the benefit of scrutiny by opposing counsel. They were asked to “figure it out” when the DA essentially created reasonable doubt by presenting all of the exculpatory evidence.

And let me be clear here. The ONLY evidence the DA SHOULD have presented was that evidence necessary to obtain an indictment. The DA before the Grand Jury functions in a prosecutorial role. Many veteran prosecutors have come forward (and they tend to lean pretty conservative) and said that they’ve never seen or heard of a DA or their office NOT presenting a case, only presenting the evidence AND presenting exculpatory evidence before the Grand Jury.

So, the only evidence the Grand Jury should have seen were those pieces of evidence that supported the charges AND THAT’S IT.

That’s the function of the Grand Jury. They perform a preliminary function in the judicial process.

It’s not exactly basic civics, but we can’t conflate juries.

And what DA McCulloch did sets a potentially disastrous precedent for DAs around the country to pawn off cases where they don’t want to indict onto the Grand Jury and then subvert the Grand Jury with these tactics.

It’s just really, really bad from a process standpoint. The Grand Jury is really important for a lot of reasons and its misuse by prosecutors should be heavily scrutinized and sanctioned.
****
I wanna say one thing.

The Grand Jury not indicting Officer Wilson does NOT mean he was innocent or guilty.

The Grand Jury not indicting Officer Wilson also does NOT mean that Michael Brown was guilty of anything (he was never on trial. Remember… he was the victim and he’s a dead human being).

What it means is that the Grand Jury returned No True bills on the charges presented.

I’ve read several people post things like “the evidence exonerates Officer Wilson” and stuff like that.

Well, no, it doesn’t. While there was a LOT of evidence, much of it including Officer Wilson’s testimony was NOT subject to Cross Examination nor secondary examination AND much of it was contradictory. All the more reason it should have gone to trial, really.

My point is that there was still a lot of work left to do and that SHOULD have been done at trial. Just the fact that Officer Wilson’s testimony was so grossly inconsistent from his initial statements to his later statements and how the distances didn’t match should have been enough to indict considering that enough distance would have put his other testimony in question.

But, basically, that’s it. The Grand Jury coming back didn’t “acquit” or “exonerate” Officer Wilson.

It may have exposed a very flawed, biased system and it certainly exposed a misuse of the Grand Jury by DA McCulluch (as defined by Justice Scalia), but all the Grand Jury finding did is say that the process wouldn’t continue. It didn’t express innocence or a lack of guilt.

Of anyone.

==

while I’m HARDLY a Scalia fan, he’s absolutely RIGHT about the function of the Grand Jury.

It has a function. If you’ve ever seen the movie, My Cousin Vinny (which, like all movies in a legal setting, get aspects of the law incorrect), the inexperienced lawyer Vinny has to appear before the judge at the Arraignment. However, because Vinny understands the law, but not the procedures of the court, he struggles so mightily that he gets himself thrown in jail because he cannot fathom that the arraignment is simply and ONLY the act of entering a plea. That’s it.

Well, the Grand Jury has a specific function.

It is not and never has been about innocence or guilt and that’s why exculpatory evidence is not required.

The Grand Jury is the check on a prosecutor’s power so that a DA can’t just bring ANY charge against ANYONE, ANY time he/she feels like it. So, for major crimes, the DA or AG must go before the Grand Jury and present that prima facie evidence to at least establish that there is at least enough to CHARGE the person. NOT convict. Just to charge.

That is why McCulloch so misused this process. Well, it was two-fold. Firstly, he gave them all the evidence WITHOUT the benefit of rigorous cross examination. Trial juries at least have the adversarial process of the trial in which both sides CONTEST the evidence and THEN they can sort out the evidence. The Grand Jury in the Wilson case didn’t have that. They had the raw evidence and were forced in many cases to accept suspect evidence as is and then make a judgment based on that. If a person receives a proper defense, the trial jury isn’t put through that.

Secondly, DA McCulloch did NOT provide the narrative of WHY the evidence supported the charges. He stated himself that he gave the evidence to the Grand Jury and let them come to their own conclusion and EVEN IN cases where Grand Juries are investigative (like RICO cases), the DA or AG still goes to often great lengths to explain how the evidence supports the charges expressly in order to get indictments.

The very common misunderstanding in this case is that what DA McCulloch did is reasonable.

It not only isn’t reasonable, it’s unconscionable, unethical and sets a potentially disastrous legal precedent for high profile cases. Worse, it preys on the common ignorance of the legal system. DA McCulloch knows full damn well that if Michael Brown had killed Officer Wilson and claimed self-defense, even if there were video directly exonerating him, IT STILL WOULD HAVE GONE TO TRIAL. And the words he would have used were, “it’s important for this to run its course through the legal process”.

Now, if DA McCulloch simply didn’t want to charge Office Wilson, that was always at his discretion. He could have simply refused to charge him. Heck, he could have properly used the Grand Jury, GOT an indictment AND STILL not charged him. That’s happened before, too. Getting an indictment doesn’t automatically mean that the DA must file those charges.

But what DA McCulloch did was wrong on a lot of levels. Unfortunately, because they are procedural, it’s even easier for those who are on Team Wilson (not saying you, just saying those that clearly ARE on Team Wilson) to create tons and tons of obfuscation about how getting it so wrong is OKAY… because the outcome is what they wanted.

Maddy wrote:

Was Randall Cunningham not a refined pocket passer? Was Warren Moon not really that mobile? Seems like there have been guys who were good at both.

I think the way Cosell is defining it, if you can run, cool, but first and foremost you have to pass from the pocket.

Cunningham of course became a better passer with the Vikes, and Moon could always pass the ball at a high level. Young learned to become a pocket passer, etc.

I think if he had his choice, he would take a guy like Luck who can pass but then can run, but if that wasn’t there (and it rarely is) he would be just fine with a pure passer. I think what he doesn’t want is a tweener who has to learn to become a passer…a guy like CK.

joemad wrote:

I don’t think Cusamano likes Sam Bradford……. I think Cosell likes Sam…..

“there’s a reason why Hill is a back up” “we had this same conversation last year about Clemens, and where is he today”

Yeah.

He likes Bailey.

Likes Mason.

Thinks the league is turning back to pocket passers and the running game.

Talks about RG3 and McCoy. RG3 can’t even run the offense.

Kaepernick…same problem, mobile qbs not the answer. You can’t be both–a mobile qb and a refined pocket passer. Luck is a pocket passer who can run, different thing. Guys like CK always start out well, then defenses catch up.

NFL threat has history of lying, protecting crooked cops

Tom Boggioni

01 Dec 2014

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/12/ex-cop-behind-st-louis-police-nfl-threat-has-history-of-lying-protecting-crooked-cops/

St. Louis Police Officer Association Business Manager Jeff Roorda (YouTube)
St. Louis Police Officer Association Business Manager Jeff Roorda (YouTube)
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The former police officer demanding the NFL discipline five St. Louis Rams players over their display of “hand up, don’t shoot” before a game on Sunday has a history of controversy, including being disciplined for lying in police reports as well as sponsoring legislation that would shield the names of police officers from public scrutiny unless charged with a crime.

Sunday night, St. Louis Police Officers Association Business Manager Jeff Roorda was quoted in a statement from the association calling for the five players, Stedman Bailey, Tavon Austin, Jared Cook, Chris Givens, and Kenny Britt, to be disciplined and for the Rams and the NFL to make a public apology.

The SLPOA described the gesture as “tasteless, offensive and inflammatory.”

In the statement, Roorda claimed, “Our officers have been working 12 hour shifts for over a week, they had days off including Thanksgiving cancelled so that they could defend this community from those on the streets that perpetuate this myth that Michael Brown was executed by a brother police officer and then, as the players and their fans sit safely in their dome under the watchful protection of hundreds of St. Louis’s finest, they take to the turf to call a now-exonerated officer a murderer, that is way out-of-bounds, to put it in football parlance.”

Roorda, a Democrat who most recently served in the Missouri House of Representatives before running for a seat in the state Senate and losing, was fired from the Arnold, Missouri police department in 2001 for misconduct after having been previously warned in another case where he was found to have lied in a police report.

According to court documents, in 1997 Roorda was reprimanded for attempting “…to try to ‘cover’ for another police officer by filing a report that contained false statements as to what happened during a suspect’s apprehension and arrest. As a result of this false report, all charges against the defendant involved were dropped.” The court notes that Roorda was informed, “If it is ever determined again that you have lied in a police report, you will receive a more severe punishment, up to and including termination.”

Roorda was later terminated for lying about interactions with other police officers after accusing them of threatening and abusing him. Roorda’s charges were disproved by audio tapes of the conversations provided to investigators by Roorda himself.

Following a stint as a police chief of Kimmswick, Roorda was elected to the Missouri House of Representatives where he attempted to amend the state’s Sunshine laws with regard to police activities.

According to MissouriWatchdog.org, Roorda introduced an amendment that would ” prevent the public from obtaining ‘any records and documents pertaining to police shootings … if they contain the name of any officer who did the shooting’.” Under Roorda’s proposal, a police officer’s name would only be entered into the public record if they were charged with a crime. The proposal also extended to the names of police officers who were in involved in a shooting, regardless of whether the officer was on duty.

While simultaneously serving in the Missouri House while employed as the business manager for the SLPOA, Roorda pushed back against equipping police officers and cruisers with dash and body cameras, saying, “Instead of the cameras being there to protect the officers, they get disciplined for petty stuff constantly — for violating the uniform code, or rolling through a stop sign for an urgent call, or for not turning the camera on. That’s one of the hottest issues for my guys. They’re tired of the nitpicking, and that’s what the cameras have been used to do.”

Roorda was also revealed to be behind a major fundraiser for Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson that has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the police officer who resigned over the weekend

wv wrote:

Yeah, the system is absurd. The prosecutor
and the cops work together everyday. They are
allies. The prosecutor is a “cop” and has a badge.
He’s the top-cop, essentially.

Anytime there’s evidence a cop has assaulted
anyone a “special prosecutor” ought to be
appointed by a neutral panel of some sort.
Thats how it would be handled in utopia-world
anyway.

w
v

From another thread:

Dak wrote:

In talking to a cousin who is an attorney, it’s obvious to me that the prosecuting attorney didn’t do his job. His job, if he takes the case to a grand jury, is to do whatever he can to get an indictment. In this case, because Wilson’s a police officer, McCulloch did not do his job … his office basically acted as Wilson’s defense. I have no problem with the grand jury’s decision based on the evidence presented, but in any other type of case (that doesn’t involve a police officer as defendant) his office wouldn’t have presented evidence that helped the defendant. McCulloch went this route to avoid his responsibility and avoid public backlash. If he didn’t think there was enough evidence to charge Wilson, he should have never presented the case to the grand jury. But, that would have meant he would have had to take the heat.

As Mack and WV say, the “accused” usually doesn’t testify in grand jury cases. AND because it was a grand jury, his testimony was not met with cross-examination. Prosecutors, who depend on the police, use this tactic to keep cops from going to trial. They did the same thing in the Eric Garner case.

There’s all sorts of nonsense going on with this whole thing. For example, Cook and the other players were acting, they said, in the name of peaceful protest. That means they were supporting protests of the Ferguson police. They would have no idea when they did that that ALL local police would take that as aimed at them all. In fact, in a better world, all other local police ought to be hands off, neutral, or in support of a legal means of discovering the truth.

The other thing is that Ferguson has a long, bad history with its police and local courts. There’s real research on this, too. It’s documented. It’s in the same thread I just linked. So the Ferguson community doesn’t trust its police. Well. Then why would they believe Wilson now. So the gesture to them ultimately means–the police here have a bad record, fix it. Change things. Whether or not Brown was a petty thief should have nothing to do with it. You don’t go around shooting those. And the only basis for believing he was a threat was Wilson, who again did not even get cross-examined. Ferguson does not believe Wilson. But then it’s the local police and courts that set up a world where they are not trusted…for damm good reasons.