Rightwing attempting to astroturf Mike Brown Killing

[Ms. Toad]

44. That comment was the author's summary of events,

I have not seen any comment one way or the other by the store owner - other than he didn't call it in. (But I will note that the moosepoop indicates that the police took the report from the store owner - since the police report is public and the owner are reported to fear retaliation - if he (or an employee) didn't give the report to the police officers, I would have expected them to immediately and loudly announce that Brown stole nothing - in order to minimize the risk of retaliation.)

The second link - how many clocks have you seen that are out of sync by way more than 2 minutes? You have a 1:02 duration for the robbery, and 3:00 minutes between the call reporting a robbery in progress and police arrival.

There are discrepancies between the visual of what was taken - and what is written down. I've seen enough police reports to know that witnesses sometimes get it wrong - and sometimes police transcribe a correct description incorrectly. I doubt they watched the video to confirm what was taken. If anything, the discrepancies actually makes me slightly less suspicious. If they were making it up out of whole cloth, they would be a lot more likely to make their report spotless - as they imagine a report written immediately would be. (A sophisticated cover-up would be more likely to introduce calculated errors so its perfection didn't stand out like a sore thumb against the reams of imperfect reports - but nothing I have seen indicates these are sophisticated enough to think enough steps ahead to introduce deliberate errors so that their fake report looked more real because it was imperfect.) Bottom line - I'd call the police reports a wash, in terms of their impact on whether I believe Brown took cigarillos from the store or not.

The factors that are most decisive for me are that

(1) someone called it in - I have not seen anyone dispute that. So what was going on in the store looked like a robbery to the eyewitness customer who called it in - likely the most impartial witness in the whole first stage of that day. That is why excited utterances are admissible as evidence, even when other out of court statements aren't - they are presumed reliable because the words pop out before your brain filter has time to modify what is coming out.

(2) The video which has Brown in full view of the camera with pretty decent lighting from a point when both hands are clearly empty behind his back to the point he is heading to the door after leaving the counter. I can't find any movement by Brown that would have put money into his empty hands in order to give it to the clerk. He doesn't ever (that I can find) put either hand into a pocket in pants or shirt, in his sock, his underwear, under his ballcap, or anywhere else I can imagine that he might be carrying money. If he had no money in his hand to start with, he never leaves the camera view, and he doesn't reach to a place where he might be carrying money, how does money get in his hand to pay the clerk? Despite repeated requests, no one else has been willing or able to point that moment out to me. (I notice that you have not ether - so I assume that means you can't find it since you are clearly motivated to establish his innocence, and demonstrating directly that he at least had the opportunity to pay for them because at some point he was apparently fishing for money would go a long way toward raising strong doubt - in a way that none of the second or third hand characterizations of what the store clerk - who isn't speaking much - said.)

(3) Johnson admitted, through his attorney, that Brown took the cigarillos. The video clearly shows them in his hand just before he leaves the store (wiping out the suggestion someone else made in this thread that he didn't walk out with them at all) - and if he didn't pay for them (see #2), he stole them.

And - again - just so it is clear that I am am not excusing the police actions: Even taking the police report of the robbery as the gospel truth, it was a reprehensible act to release it in an attempt to smear Brown's reputation - and nothing in what happened in the store (again - assuming gospel truth) justifies killing a fleeing unarmed man.