Man shot to death by cops on his wedding day

Was he acting suspiciously? Did he have a gun? What was he doing? Getting blown to bits on your wedding day would probably count as having a bad day.

I heard that the car that he was in crashed into a police vehicle, but since when do we shoot people for crashing cars? This is why I’m kinda glad that here in England, beat cops still don’t carry guns. Gun crime is rife enough, but I know that the minute regular cops start carrying guns, the problem would treble in no time.

Mistakes do happen, but when a life is taken so recklessly, (did they really need 50 bullets for three unarmed men?) questions have to be asked. And answered.

I’m hoping for the sake of peace in the city that the men were real threats to people in the immediate vicinity. If it’s proven that they weren’t doing anything that warranted those cops to shoot them, there will be hell to pay. And rightly so.

Most black people will wonder if he was shot because his face was too dark. That was the first thought that popped into my head when I heard about this case. I guess that’s just a black person’s way of thinking. Anybody would think we had a persecution complex.

I just read the most recent post at Baghdad Burning. She’s talking about the Saddam Hussain verdict and the coincidence, timing wise, between that, and the congressional elections in the US, amongst other things.

This paragraph especially, caught my eye:

“A final note. I just read somewhere that some of the families of dead American soldiers are visiting the Iraqi north to see ‘what their sons and daughters died for’. If that’s the goal of the visit, then, “Ladies and gentlemen- to your right is the Iraqi Ministry of Oil, to your left is the Dawry refinery… Each of you get this, a gift bag containing a 3 by 3 color poster of Al Sayid Muqtada Al Sadr (Long May He Live And Prosper), an Ayatollah Sistani t-shirt and a map of Iran, to scale, redrawn with the Islamic Republic of South Iraq. Also… Hey you! You- the female in the back- is that a lock of hair I see? Cover it up or stay home.”

And that is what they died for.”

She talks a lot of sense, although I’m as glad as the next person that Saddam is going to hang, if only for his truly criminal facial hair.