Butchering Inconvenient People

Last night I watched a real union thug, not the imaginary ones invented by GOP politicians, on MSNBC defend the murder of a twelve year old boy cut down by other thugs for hanging out in a public park and doing things that twelve year old boys do and have done for millenia, going on imaginary adventures.

The 'union thug' was Jeffrey Follmer who is the president of the Cleveland PD's patrolman protective association and himself a low ranking patrol officer for the that city's police department. This is the same Cleveland that the US Department of Justice has strongly criticized as having a policy of deadly force use so terrible that the DOJ wants to have a receiver appointed by the federal courts to run that department. The DOJ inquiry was itself invited by the mayor of Cleveland who himself is horrified by the policies of his own police department. Apparently Follmer has great support within the department.

Thug Follmer's claim to fame is that he was infuriated by the Cleveland NFL franchise and he had demanded an apology for players wearing tee shirts supportive of Tamir Rice and John Crawford, twelve and twenty-two years of age respectively who were gunned down by Ohio “peace officers” who did not even make pro forma attempts to contact Tamir or Crawford before executing them. Their first and only contact with these two was to fire bullets into their bodies. Both were described only by the 'citizen informants' as black males in possession of guns. Apparently those officers knew (or thought they knew) all that was necessary to find them guilty of being scary dangerous people. It is apparently open season on black males in Ohio. Interaction between police in Ohio and black citizens is almost uniformly fatal to black males. So much for Equal Protection of the Law.