Never forget
Richard, f--king, Jewell, another overzealous safety officer who was wrongfully accused, tried, and convicted in the court of public opinion after saving many from the 1996 bombing during the Olympics at Continental Olympic Park in Atlanta.
When the obvious question of why the PD felt justified in letting him go came up, others just jumped to the conclusion that they weren't justified and, thus, got outraged based on their own assumption. I thought "That's odd. There must be a reason. I wonder why they aren't yelling it from the roof-tops? Oh well. It will come out eventually and I will decide whether to be outraged or not then." My mind was blown at how long it took. If the PD deserves a vote of no confidence, it's because they created this PR sh_t storm when they only gave enough details to enrage the public instead of heading it off at the pass with full disclosure. Ridiculous. Now I see people using witness assumptions who, like us, did not see the attack, to remain enraged. A witness who heard screaming and then saw Treyvon dead and believes that Treyvon was the one being attacked has no more weight than anyone else making the same assumption from the same data, witness or no. Nothing they heard or saw contradicts Zimmerman nor the PD's accounting and yet people keep pointing me to one of the 911 transcripts. Are they incapable of logic and reason? The ONLY 911 witness accounting of the attack being observed BEFORE the shot describes Zimmerman on the ground and Treyvon attacking from above. Only the audio helps in the other recordings and that, too, supports Zimmerman's story (Treyvon's own father said they were not his son's screams). He would know more about who made those screams than any of the witnesses who didn't know him, so their assumptions have no merit what-so-ever and are pretty much expected to assume that when they see who is on the ground in the end.
I remember being the only one calling BS when that Prius had "unintended acceleration" in San Diego, the same city where the Toyota (a Lexus, actually) that tragically started the whole inquiry happened and, thus, where the general populace was more aware. I knew that the Prius was not susceptible to ANY of the multiple discovered or theorized unintended acceleration events and, thus, the guy was likely faking it due public opinion turning on Toyota and aiding any claims he may have. Sure enough, every news report I saw, heard, or read stated his claims as fact for several days, even on Anandtech's DailyTech newswire service. A few days later, in came out that he was behind on loans, bills, etc and had several hardships and faked it as a way out of his car loan and so that he could try to sue Toyota. That is EXACTLY what I thought. Yeah, I had no evidence, but neither did the news media so readily repeating his claims without labeling them as such.
STOP MAKING THIS MISTAKE! You should be ashamed to be so easily manipulated if you ever, for even one second, thought that Zimmerman and the police "must" be racist or cold-blooded murders
even before the details were known. I immediately started thinking that Treyvon would have confronted his follower because
that's what I would have done. From there, I could imagine a million scenarios where things could have escalated from what was originally a tragic misunderstanding and now a tragic case of justified self defense. To deny this is possible is willfully and shamefully ignorant because your only reason would be to assume racism and justify your misplaced outrage.