Here's the thing: the 911 call was from a shop owner who stated that there was a light skinned african american with a black coat and a green hoodie who was loitering outside of his shop in what he perceived to be an intimidating way. If you look at the cop's video, the man being stopped IS a light skinned african american with a black coat and a green hoodie.

Stopping someone for hanging around a store a while ago and not even asking what they were doing there, is only marginally better than stopping them for having their hands in their pockets. Still doesn't make the cops explanation less absurd sounding though.

Yeah. I'm not defending the cop, per se, but that's what you do when you're a cop and you see someone who meets the general description of the dispatch. I've been stopped and questioned by police too, because they were looking for a thin white male about 6 feet tall with a black hoodie that robbed a convenience store. When I first saw this I sort of assumed it was just a scared ol' white lady or something who called 911 because there was a black man in the neighborhood.

The real people to blame are the shopkeepers and the dispatchers. I've worked in enough stores to know that police don't respond to loiter complaints unless it gets violent outside, or the person then comes into the store in a threatening manner. The 911 call boils down to "there's a black guy outside of my store, and I feel threatened."

The really stupid thing about continuing to mention skittles is that in Treyvon's case, he was an addict of the drug Lean and the report leaves out the fact he also had on him the other 2 ingredients to make the drug. A drug known for making people aggressive. Is Zimmerman a fucking moron? Yes. Did he follow Treyvon? Most likely. Did being an mma-obsessed, "fire-ass-lean" making youth contribute to his aggression and possibly Zimmerman's cowardly decision to shoot him?

What I don't understand is this is the issue you all started crying "HERP DERP GMORK GUNS" about. I've always made it a point to state both individuals have the potential to be at blame for what happened. Not because Treyvon was out stealing - I don't believe that at all. The confrontation was indeed because of Zimmerman's profiling.

It's possible for both of them to have handled it poorly. It's sad to see you guys throw objective thinking out the window.

If Zimmerman was following treyvon, and treyvon noticed and decided to try and hide and jump zimmerman when he came close (one theory I keep hearing repeated) then the decision to not continue moving AWAY from zimmerman, but rather to engage his stupid conceal-and-carry ass, was a mistake.

Being overly aggressive because of an established drug habit (martin posted on facebook how to make "fire-ass lean", instructing people on making the drug of which skittles just happens to be a chemical ingredient.

Treyvon was not carrying just skittles. He was carrying skittles, robitussin DM, and arizona tea. The exact ingredients to make lean.

The Skittles and Arizona Watermelon Fruit Juice Cocktail drink he carried that night are ingredients that, when mixed with dextromethorphan (DXM) cough syrup, create “Lean”, a concocted high which can cause psychosis and aggression over the longer term.

According to the autopsy report, Martin’s liver showed damage consistent with DXM abuse.

But yeah, despite the fact I seem to be the only colorblind person when it comes to this issue, go ahead and scream whatever incorrect labels you want to apply to me. Racist? Republican? Gun owner?

Three strikes. Yet you guys keep swinging.

"But yeah, despite the fact I seem to be the only colorblind person when it comes to this issue"

Wow.

Trayvon deserved to die because he might have, in the future, made a drug that if he took it, might have made him aggressive.
Got it.

"Treyvon was not carrying just skittles. He was carrying skittles, robitussin DM, and arizona tea. "

Whatever website you get your news from was wrong. The only active or potentially active drug ingredient you mentioned is Robitussin, and he wasn't carrying that. Skittles and iced tea are not essential drug ingredients for anything, they just get mixed with medicine and alcohol in general to make it taste sweeter, like all candies and sodas.

It's an amazing train of logic. Shooting kids is wrong, but shooting kids who have candy is more okay because they could mix candy with an intoxicant to make it sweeter, which could in rare cases in the long term make it more likely for them to do something provocative which could have made shooting them slightly more understandable, if still totally unjustified.

Is reason a color? Because if so, I agree you are colorblind.

Gmork: Yes, all drug addicts need to be rounded up and shot because of the things they might end up doing in the future. Say, wasn't Rush Limbaugh hooked on painkillers?

IZ is correct. The cop is doing his job; what he's doing may not be "right", but it is what he does, and by cop standards, the way he's doing it could qualify him as a saint.

However, I'd go one further and say that the problem isn't with the dispatchers (who, like the cop, are also just "doing their jobs"), nor even with the shopkeepers (although the shopkeeper who called the police is clearly liable for something, even if it's only "being an asshat"). Rather, the problem is systemic, and the real villains in this exchange are the people who have supported and encouraged the growth of postmodern America's frightened, paranoid, cop-drunk informant-state. Every newsman who said "9/11 changed everything", every paternalist who argued for the need to reform society in the name of safety, every profiteer who made bank off of the unilaterally declared War on Terror - this sort of bullshit, accosting working-class citizens for having their hands in their pockets, is the only logical outcome.

Gmork - would you provide some sources?

IZ -- does a cop have the option of driving past the store and saying, "I don't see any black folks loitering here"? It'd be one thing if the black person had issued threats of some kind, then a policeman could look for him and confront him about that. But loitering is such a passive, transient thing that I don't see any way or any need to retroactively respond to it.

Thank God I'm so colorblind, so far above the rest of you unevolved, hateful scum.

Now let me explain to you why that darkie Trayvon deserved to be murdered. It's because it's possible that he may have taken drugs at some point in the future. Which is technically true of anyone, but still, better to be safe.

I just hope you can all reach my level of post-racial enlightenment someday.

Yeah "loitering" wasn't used in the shopkeeper's message, he just said that some guy keeps coming around and looking in, multiple times, and he felt threatened as the store has been robbed multiple times in the past. Can't say exactly what went down, but usually by the time a shopkeeper's on the phone, most likely staring a suspect down looking for a profile description, the suspect has probably split the scene.

Well it wasn't time for a pudding pop.

Race relations in America need more high fives!

What are you talking about? Cold weather is the prefect time for a pudding pop. You don't want that sucker turning into a sticky mess on your hands.

A cellphone seems like a really easy thing for a cop to lose during the course of his job. If I were a cop, I'd really not want someone getting ahold of all that private information.

Yeah that too. Hadn't even thought of that.

But then how else could he passive-aggressively mock the citizen he is harassing for protecting themselves?

Maybe it's a bricked display phone that he carries specifically to make this little joke whenever he pulls over some drama-queen who is concerned about *whiny voice* 'civil rights'.

United We Stand...unless it's cold.

THE GREAT MACHINE WARS HAVE LEFT THE WORLD A DESOLATE LANDSCAPE, RULED BY DREAD AND HIS BIOTECH EMPIRE.

Yeah. Louis CK nailed it:

"I'm not saying white people are better. I'm saying that it's clearly better to *be* white. Are you kidding me? You could time travel to any point in history anywhere on the planet, and they would have a table waiting for you. Right this way, sir."

Wow, don't know what happened, there.

The link works, though. Just copy/paste and take out the superfluous space between the 1 and 4 in 2014.

How can I post in bold?

I wanna post in Comic Sans.

Yeah, I see what you're saying. In my story above, I fit a pretty loose description and I was blocks away from the robbery. Since I had my headphones on I didn't hear them or think they were stopping to ask me any questions in the first place, so I kept walking until an officer shined a flashlight in my eyes. He recognized me from the neighborhood, but it was also one of the few cheap apartment complexes left in an otherwise gentrified neighborhood, so usually he'd see me and my friends drinking beer in the parking lot, and am pretty sure he knew that weed was being sold out of the place (40 pairs of shoes up on the telephone wire doesn't necessarily scream "this is not where you can buy weed at,") anyway the FIRST thing he did was apologize, not because he recognized me. If anything, given that he knew where I lived, I'd be a prime suspect (except I asked him "why would I want to shit where I eat?" and he laughed) But he had a couple of questions and that was that. I was a little taken aback, almost felt ashamed because my friends saw me talking to a cop, but that was the most important thing: he apologized.