Well, I agree it says quite a lot about Brown at that particular moment in time, likely including when he had his run-in with Brown. I think though that this has been vastly overplayed. Lots of people have done things which are stupid and even evil when high. The totality of a person is not one afternoon, and while I'm not at all buying the witness' story that Brown was ministering to his soul and merely took a short break to rob a convenience store before returning, neither do I think this necessarily makes Brown a thug. It says something about Brown; it does not say everything about Brown.
Normally I'd agree, but it has been born out time and time again that people don't just do major "thuggish" crime out of the blue like how he did it.
By thuggish, the term of thug is a person that uses physical violence or threat thereof as coercion to get what they want.
Smoking some weed? That's small stuff. Had he simply tried to swipe something at the store when he thought no one was looking is small stuff too.
But he went in there intentionally to use physical violence to take those cigars by force. By rule, no one does that out of the blue. Here are the process steps that will cause a person to do something like that by rule.
1) They have worked up to that level of criminal action by a escalating pattern of criminal activity. Even pure sociopaths have an escalation pattern in testing how far they can push boundaries to see what they can get away with before pushing for more.
2) They are on some hard narcotics that have completely blown away their judgement and inhibition (weed doesn't do this)
3) They had a negative life altering event recently. A death of a loved one would be an example of this or the loss of a job the person had been doing for a long time and loved. Those aren't the only two examples though.
4) They had a psychotic break or snap. Again there would be a pattern leading up that event of psychotic episodes
5) Massive peer pressure where the person was forced by other worse criminals through some level of coercion to do the crime. The person committing the crime because they are forced to do so tends to show in their actions and voice at the time clues that it is something they don't really want to be doing.
That's all proven stuff. Micheal Brown doesn't fit the pattern for anything but number 1 based on the video and what was reported at the time of his robbery. It doesn't look like he's having a psychotic break, or under some the influence of some hard narcotics. He doesn't look to be pressured into doing what he is doing either, which if that was the case the ones pressuring him would have been waiting for him to exit the store. He wouldn't have gone off with just his friend to jaywalk for the hell of it down the middle of the street nearby.
He didn't have any major negative life altering events that would lead to this behavior.
By the video he looked comfortable in his actions and what he was doing. There was no hesitation in his actions. He did everything in full view of cameras as well as witnesses in broad daylight, and knew he was doing so. A person doesn't do those things unless they are confident they will get away with their actions. It wasn't a smash and grab either. He went in, grabbed what he wanted, and strode purposefully out of that store without hesitation nor remorse. That can all be plainly seen in his actions and demeanor.
Again, a person doesn't just do that out of the blue at all. His actions in that store bespoke of a thug that had done similar things before and gotten away with it.