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"I Gotta Go and Hunt Criminals." On the Road With Ohio Highway Patrol.

by XUHKrystyn Posted on April 9, 2017

Mother Jones

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We’re sitting in the middle of the highway looking for drug mules. Specifically, we’re at mile marker 174 of Interstate 80, which I learn is the interstate with the third most drug traffic in the country, and I’m in a highway patrol car next to a garrulous sergeant who has a square face and close-cropped blond hair and alternates between wads of chewing tobacco and sips of an energy drink. His eyes dart from car to car—sedans and SUVs and big rigs—looking for what, exactly, is hard to tell.

Beyond the shallow embankment on either side of the road are forests and farms and vineyards of northeast Ohio, and beyond that, the drug hubs of Detroit and Cleveland and Buffalo and New York City. “As I tell my guys, there’s bulk loads going by us multiple times a shift every day,” the sergeant says, eyes still on the cars. “Our job is to interdict drugs before they get to our community.” Or, as he puts it later: “I gotta go and hunt criminals.”

Ohio has one of the most robust highway drug seizure programs in the country, with 13,300 drug-related arrests last year—or about one every 90 minutes. In 2016, troopers seized 167 pounds of heroin—the equivalent to about 2 million doses on the streets—and 64,708 opiate pills. “Our approach is to stop a lot of cars,” says Lieutenant Robert Sellers, the public affairs commander for the highway patrol. “What we don’t want our troopers to do is walk away. We want to make sure that whatever they thought wasn’t right is right.”

The sergeant’s job is, in the split second that cars pass by, to look for telltale signs of drug couriers. It’s typical for people to see the car, slow down, and then speed back up once they’ve passed him—those are the people he’s not interested in. He’s not interested in people speeding, or the drivers who look confident and relaxed. He is interested in rental cars, overly cautious drivers who stay below the speed limit, people who look in their rearview mirrors at him as they pass by, cars with tinted windows, drivers who look like they’re scrambling to move or adjust something as they pass, cars with recent fingerprints on the trunk. Cars that move into the right lane or that are closely tailing another are also red flags—they’re trying to distance themselves from the patrol car and blend into their surroundings, says the sergeant. Ultimately, a lot of the job is based on gut instinct: After years of watching thousands of cars go by, “your intuition will tell you when something’s wrong,” says Sellers.

Comments like this make me uneasy: The operation seems like a perfect recipe for profiling. The sergeant makes clear that race is not something that goes into his calculation of red flags—as he says later, “If you do this job based on stopping a certain race or age group or gender, you’re not gonna succeed.” But I cringe a little when, as we pull over the one car that we’ll pull over that afternoon—a sedan that had been closely tailing another car, in the far right lane, with recent fingerprints on an otherwise dirty trunk—the window opens to reveal a black man. (The sergeant lets him go with a warning.)

“Our professional operations policy forbids bias-based policing,” said Sellers. The troopers go through annual implicit bias training as part of their continuing education, he added, and each month, supervisors check the arrest data of their troopers to gauge for abnormally high arrest rates by race. According to highway patrol data online, 14.4 percent of drivers during all Ohio highway patrol stops were black. African Americans make up 12.7 percent of the state’s population.

Highway patrol drug arrests so far in 2017 Ohio State Highway Patrol

If a car catches the sergeant’s eye, he’ll turn onto the road and floor it so he can get a better view. Are the people moving around in the back just toddlers? Did the car speed up after all? If, after this, he’s still interested, then he pulls them over, typically for a minor violation like going over the lane marker or tailing another car. He maintains his friendly demeanor as he talks to drivers through their windows, but he’s also looking for clues: Nervous, sweaty drivers, pill bottles—especially in a different name than the driver’s—the scent of marijuana, recent receipts from a different place than the driver says he or she has been. And if anything looks suspicious, a German shepherd hops out of a squad car to sniff around. The dogs, who live with their handlers when they’re not on duty, are trained to look at or scratch around the area where they smell drugs. The sergeant tells me the story of a recent seizure, when a driver insisted there weren’t drugs in the car, and yet the dog kept calmly staring at the rooftop carrier—where the troopers later found 14 pounds of marijuana.

The day I’m there, troopers in the area use the tactic to find a car with a bucket full of marijuana, and another with two quarts of marijuana Kool-Aid, which I didn’t know was a thing, even as a Californian. The day before, there was a couple in a 2016 Nissan Ultima with more than 200 OxyCodone pills. The state highway patrol website features a strangely captivating running tab of the seizures, complete with photos of drugs in trunks or duct tape packages. There’s also a regularly updated map of drug busts, with a web of tiny blue dots for each seizure.

Marijuana and marijuana Kool-Aid seized by Ohio Highway Patrol in March Ohio State Highway Patrol

Unlike so many tight-lipped cops that make the news, the sergeant is eager to show me his work, and rattles on about recent busts, complete with details of the weight and the type of drug and where in the car it was. He’s seen what drugs can do to families—he was adopted because of his mother’s substance abuse—and he gushes about his daughters, 15 and 20. A few years ago, he says, “I decided I needed a hobby—all I did was eat, sleep, and breathe drugs.” When I ask him what the hobby is, a sheepish grin crosses his face as he mumbles, “fish.” I assumed this meant he liked fishing, but no—he has 16 aquariums with all sorts of exotic fish at his house. After a long day, he’ll sit in the aquarium room—where it’s quiet and things move slowly and there is no addiction or violence—and just watch.

I like the sergeant, yet I can’t stifle the questions that keep popping up in my head as we’re sitting there, looking for criminals. In addition to the profiling concern, there’s the question of efficacy: Are the troopers finding drugs just because they’re making so many stops and drugs are so prevalent, or are they finding drugs because they’re focusing on the right cars? Which is to say, is this even working?

The sergeant says he doesn’t think much about that higher-level question—as he put it, “I’ve got one goal in mind: If they’ve got drugs, to get their drugs.” Sellers admits that efficacy is hard to prove, but he says, “We do know we’ve had an impact.” He notes the heroin seized last year: “That’s 2 million doses of heroin that we took off Ohio roads that were destined for Ohio communities.“

And finally, there’s the concern about the casual nature with which troopers arrest and imprison. When he describes a trooper with a particularly high seizure rate whom we’re about to visit, the sergeant simply says, “He’ll probably have someone in handcuffs by the time we get there. He’s that good.” Indeed, he does—when we arrive a half hour later, the trooper has pulled over the car with four pounds of marijuana in a bucket. The troopers playfully compete with each other—as we’re leaving, the sergeant says, “Now we have to find five.” The sergeant routinely calls the drug couriers “bad guys,” as in “the bad guy is in the sergeant’s car.”

I press him on this “bad guys” thing—aren’t some of these folks just desperate people in desperate situations? His face softens and he begins to tell me about an arrest a few weeks ago—a man and young pregnant woman, who voluntarily produced a bag of marijuana and 10 Xanax pills. But watching the video of the couple in the back of the patrol car, the troopers noticed that the woman kept sticking her hands down her pants, adjusting something. When confronted about it, she tearfully reached into her vagina and pulled out a condom full of hundreds of pills. The sergeant shakes his head recalling this. “I would love to see her show up for court looking good, have her act together. But unfortunately, those kinds of endings don’t happen that often.”

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"I Gotta Go and Hunt Criminals." On the Road With Ohio Highway Patrol.

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Leonardo DiCaprio’s new climate change film is now streaming.

by RussellGoe3035 Posted on October 31, 2016

Non-white or non-male riders, however, may have a harder time. That’s the conclusion of a new study in which researchers had students in Seattle and Boston request rides on specific routes from Uber, Lyft, and taxi-hailing app Flywheel.

Here’s how it works: When you request an Uber, the driver can only see your location and star rating. After that driver accepts, they get your name and picture, too — and may cancel if they don’t like what they see. Researchers zeroed in on cancellations to measure discrimination, says Don MacKenzie, one of the study’s coauthors.

For the Boston study, riders used preset identities with names like Keisha, Rasheed, Allison, and Todd. The male riders who used stereotypically black names saw a cancellation rate of 11.2 percent, compared to the 4.5 percent cancellation rate of those using white names. Female riders using white names had a cancellation rate of 5.4 percent, while female riders with black names experienced a cancellation rate of 8.4 percent, nearly double the cancellation rate for white male riders (MacKenzie points out that difference is not statistically significant).

Finally, women were sometimes subjected to unnecessarily long rides from talkative drivers — resulting in lost time and money for those riders.

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Leonardo DiCaprio’s new climate change film is now streaming.

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Long Haul Truck Drivers Are Scarily Close to Being Put Out of Business

by UnitedCashLoans Posted on October 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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Last week, a self-driving truck delivered 50,000 cans of Budweiser from Loveland to Colorado Springs. This was obviously meant as a big FU to Coors, since the route “coincidentally” took all this frosty Bud right past Coors headquarters in Golden, Colorado. Most people, however, are interpreting this event as merely technological: it represents the dawn of the era of self-driving trucks. Tim Lee comments:

According to Otto’s blog post on the trip, “our professional driver was out of the driver’s seat for the entire 120-mile journey down I-25, monitoring the self-driving system from the sleeper berth in the back.”

But this doesn’t mean the nation’s truck drivers need to start working on their résumés. Technology like this may eventually displace human truck drivers, but the tech is several years away from causing mass unemployment. The key reason is that Otto’s self-driving technology is initially limited to highways. When the truck reaches ordinary city streets, it hands control over to a human driver to handle tricky traffic situations. This means that even after a truck is outfitted with Otto’s self-driving technology, it will still need a human driver in the truck.

Hmmm. “Several years” sounds ominously near-term, so truck drivers might want to start worrying about their jobs right now. Beyond that, there’s a way this could put truckers out of business well before that. Here’s how.

Pick a route that has a lot of truck traffic. Let’s say, Chicago to Cleveland. Outside of each city, you build a big truck depot and dispatch center. In Chicago, teamsters drive the trucks from the city out to the depot. Autopilots drive the trucks to the Cleveland depot, where a driver gets in and takes the truck to its destination. Rinse and repeat. The job of a truck driver is to drive back and forth from destinations in the city out to the depot, which they can do five or six times a day. Trucking firms save a ton of money even though the autopilot is designed for highway driving only.

Building the depots would be cheap and easy, since you don’t really need much there. It’s basically just a dispatch center. You could pretty easily have hundreds of them dotted across the country near all of our biggest cities. The only thing that would stop this from happening is the knowledge that they’ll only last a few years before they’re put out of business by fully automated trucks that can go from dock to dock with no human intervention. Either way, truck drivers are in big trouble.

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Long Haul Truck Drivers Are Scarily Close to Being Put Out of Business

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Harry Potter implicated in first driverless car death

by LeaMichalski Posted on July 1, 2016

Harry Potter implicated in first driverless car death

By on Jul 1, 2016Share

A man died in a car crash while his Tesla sedan was in autopilot mode, the company announced on Thursday. It was the first known fatality involving a self-driving vehicle.

The accident, which occurred in on a Florida highway in May, killed Joshua Brown, 40, a former Navy SEAL from Ohio. Traffic safety regulators opened an investigation into the collision. Tesla described the accident on its website:

What we know is that the vehicle was on a divided highway with Autopilot engaged when a tractor trailer drove across the highway perpendicular to the Model S. Neither Autopilot nor the driver noticed the white side of the tractor trailer against a brightly lit sky, so the brake was not applied. The high ride height of the trailer combined with its positioning across the road and the extremely rare circumstances of the impact caused the Model S to pass under the trailer, with the bottom of the trailer impacting the windshield of the Model S.

Brown was an advocate for self-driving technology and maintained a YouTube page with videos of his Tesla Model S driving on autopilot. One video, now viewed more than 2 million times, shows his Tesla — which he called “Tessy” — narrowly avoiding a collision. “Tessy did great,” Brown wrote in a caption under the video. “I have done a lot of testing with the sensors in the car and the software capabilities. I have always been impressed with the car, but I had not tested the car’s side collision avoidance. I am VERY impressed.”

While Tesla recommends that drivers keep their hands on the wheel at all times, even while autopilot is engaged, Brown, according to the driver of the tractor trailer, was watching a Harry Potter film at the time of the accident. “It was still playing when he died and snapped a telephone pole a quarter mile down the road,” driver Frank Baressi said in an interview with the Associated Press. A portable DVD player was found in the car after the accident.

While self-driving vehicles have been heralded by some technologists as safer and more efficient than standard vehicles, others argue that the technology could have major negative impacts on transportation systems — including by putting more cars on the road. One study found that automated technology could increase vehicle miles traveled by as much as 60 percent. As Roland Hwang, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s transportation program, put it, “There’s a utopian vision of what this looks like, but there’s also a dystopian vision.”

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Harry Potter implicated in first driverless car death

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Nobody knows if climate change sunk these islands or not

by WillisBrenner1 Posted on May 10, 2016

Nobody knows if climate change sunk these islands or not

By on May 10, 2016Share

If you’ve been paying attention to environmental news over the past 24 hours — and you’ve ended up on Grist, so we have to assume that’s the case — you’ll have noticed that five Pacific islands have apparently disappeared into the sea.

Quartz: “Five Pacific islands have been drowned by climate change, and more are sinking fast”

Gizmodo: “Because of climate change, five Pacific islands have vanished”

The Guardian: “Five Pacific islands lost to rising seas as climate change hits”

You get the picture. But here’s one more, also from The Guardian: “Headlines ‘exaggerated’ climate link to sinking of Pacific islands.” Ruh-roh.

According to The Guardian’s Karl Mathiesen, some writers didn’t bother to check in with the study’s authors to make sure their reporting accurately captured the research. The headlines in particular went overboard. When Mathiesen contacted lead author Simon Albert, he said he’d have preferred “slightly more moderate titles that focus on sea-level rise being the driver rather than simply ‘climate change.’”

“The major misunderstanding stems from the conflation of sea-level rise with climate change,” writes Mathiesen. “As a scientifically robust and potentially destructive articulation of climate change, sea-level rise has become almost synonymous with the warming of the planet.”

The focus on climate change could be confusing to readers, since sea-level rise has been a factor for the islands in question because of a shift in trade winds. Global warming is indeed a cause of rising seas. But for these islands, trade wind changes can also be attributed to natural climate cycles, and more research is needed to understand the relative contributions of each factor.

The flub demonstrates the importance of accurate environmental reporting. When journalists get it wrong, it’s only more fuel for science deniers’ favorite accusation that climate-change rhetoric is alarmist.

Climate Feedback, a climate journalism watchdog, recently launched a crowdfunding campaign with the aim of beefing up their fact-checking capacity. With any luck, efforts like these will help ensure reporters get the nuances right.

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Nobody knows if climate change sunk these islands or not

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I’m a Transgender Man in North Carolina. Here’s What the Bathroom Law Means For Me.

by KitStringfield Posted on April 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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Charlie Comero, a 35-year-old transgender man in Charlotte, North Carolina, was nervous about having to use women’s bathrooms after his state enacted HB2, a sweeping anti-LGBT law that says you can only use public facilities that match the sex on your birth certificate. So he decided to prepare: He printed cards (see photo below) to hand out to the women he met inside. We asked him to share his story below, in his own words, edited for length and clarity.

I grew up in Michigan, on a farm in a small town, and I moved to Charlotte almost four years ago to teach for a local high school. I was very nervous about moving to North Carolina—it’s technically the “Bible Belt”—but the truth is that Charlotte is amazing, liberal. I fell in love with the city and have stayed ever since.

Charlie Comero

Now, one person’s story is obviously not an example for the entire community. But I identify as a transgender man and as a nonbinary individual, which means I’ve never identified only as a girl or only as a boy—I’ve always identified as both. I wear men’s clothing, though I do have a closet full of five-inch high heels that I absolutely love and will never get rid of.

Growing up I always felt different from other girls and I couldn’t put my finger on why. Maybe it was a lack of representation of trans people in the media. And I didn’t see it growing up in a small town, so being transgender wasn’t an option, as far as I knew.

Not all transgender people decide to transition physically, but I decided to when I was 34 years old. It took me that long, and you know what got me there? The book The Alchemist: This talk of personal legend and embodying that, that’s what woke me up. I got a ton of support from the yoga community—I do yoga every day—and from the LGB and trans communities. Unfortunately my best friend stopped talking to me, and another dear friend changed how she acted toward me.

I probably started going into the men’s room when I was about six months into my physical transition, which is taking testosterone. I made my decision based on how I was being perceived in society. As soon as my voice got low and I was starting to be seen as male, that’s when I started going to the men’s bathroom. I was scared shitless. It was gross in there. It was liberating and scary. I had this fear that they were going to know I have a vagina. It took me a couple of weeks to realize no one in the men’s bathroom cares; there’s no way to know I wasn’t born with a biological penis.

The day HB2 became law, I was there to testify in front of the Senate, and I had my speech prepared. I was sitting there listening to the senators talk about how important this bill is and how it would protect women and children. If they really cared about women and children, Republicans would actually do things to help women and children, rather than making up some story about an imagined bogeyman walking into a women’s bathroom dressed in women’s clothes to rape women and children. It was absurd. I felt like I didn’t exist, like I wasn’t an equal human.

Afterward I was sitting down with my girlfriend at brunch and I asked her: Where do I go to the bathroom now? It’s literally against the law for me to use the men’s room, and it’s also risky. Even though I’m more than a year on testosterone—I’m getting facial hair, my hair has receded a little—I still don’t always pass as male. Or do I use the women’s room, follow the law, and clearly make people uncomfortable? We started going through the different examples of what would happen, what could happen, and she started crying because it became clear to her that I was at risk for getting hurt.

The first time I went back into a women’s bathroom, I was so nervous. I’m still nervous. I’ve created these cards—I keep them in my wallet. One time I was in a bathroom at a government center in Charlotte, and a woman asked what I was doing there. I tried handing her the card but she didn’t want to take it, she walked away. I saw her later in the hallway, and I said, “I didn’t mean to startle you.” She looked at me and said, “I hope I never make that mistake again.” I have no idea what she meant—I don’t think she knew what it meant to be a transgender man. And then the other day someone gave me a hug after I gave her my card. I don’t know if she recognized it because it’s been viral.

But here’s what I’m most afraid of: When they don’t say anything and just ignore me and leave, I’m afraid to leave the bathroom and to be met by that woman’s boyfriend or husband or an authority figure. Because I could easily be socked.

The senators who wrote this bill made it a lot more difficult for transgender people, because a lot of them have the gender on their driver’s license changed, but not their birth certificate. If I wanted to do that, I’d have to fly back to Michigan. Some of my friends would have to fly out of the country. Some people, depending on the state, have to go in front of judge, and some judges are not going to be cool with allowing a transgender person to make the change.

Last night I reached out to two really close transgender women friends who are people of color, because I’m worried about them, and they are both scared—they feel unsafe. I’m scared, yeah, I’m at risk, yeah, but not as much as them. They were already at risk before this bill, they were already a target, and now it’s multiplied. And that’s the thing that really upsets me—that this bill gives people permission to be bigots.

HB2 isn’t just about bathrooms. It’s stripping away all city ordinances that are in place to protect marginalized folks. Women, including those who aren’t transgender, are starting to realize this affects them, too. It puts all of us at risk unless you’re a white man. And who wrote the bill? White men. Isn’t that interesting?

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I’m a Transgender Man in North Carolina. Here’s What the Bathroom Law Means For Me.

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Justice Is Postponed in the Death of Freddie Gray

by VetaMcgough294 Posted on December 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, Judge Barry G. Williams declared a mistrial in the trial of William Porter, the first of six officers charged in the death of Freddie Gray. Gray died in April from injuries suffered after Baltimore police left him unbuckled but shackled in the back of a police van during a ride to a booking station, sparking turbulent protests throughout the city.

Jurors said on Wednesday that they were deadlocked on all counts. Porter had pleaded not guilty to second-degree assault, involuntary manslaughter, reckless endangerment, and misconduct in office. After deliberating for about a day, jurors had told the court that they were deadlocked; the judge instructed them to continue to try to reach a unanimous verdict. It didn’t happen.

Prosecutors argued that Porter criminally neglected his duties by failing to buckle Gray into a seat, or to get him medical attention when it was clear that he needed it. But Porter’s lawyers said it was the driver’s responsibility to make sure Gray was buckled in, and that Porter fulfilled his responsibility to Gray’s safety when he told his supervisor that Gray needed to go to the hospital.

City officials were again on edge as Baltimore awaited a verdict. Last April, Mayor Stephanie Rawlins-Blake declared a weeklong curfew and called in the National Guard after riots broke out around the city. Rawlins-Blake issued a statement following the judge’s decision on Wednesday calling on protesters to show “respect for our neighborhoods” and saying that the city was “prepared to respond” to any unrest.

The Harford and Howard county school districts canceled all field trips to Baltimore this week in anticipation of possible protests. The CEO of Baltimore schools also sent a letter to parents Monday saying he was “very concerned” about how students might respond. The letter drew criticism from the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland, which said it was wrong to equate students’ desire to demonstrate with potential violence.

Judge Williams is expected to set a date for Porter’s new trial on Thursday. Trials for the other five officers charged in Gray’s death are also expected to begin soon.

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Justice Is Postponed in the Death of Freddie Gray

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Alabama Just Made It Even Harder for Black People to Vote

by Burton6385 Posted on October 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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In Alabama, you need a driver’s license or other form of photo ID to vote. But getting that ID just got a lot harder, especially in the state’s majority-black counties.

Due to budget cuts, Alabama is closing 31 satellite DMVs across the state. The biggest impact will be in rural, largely black counties that voted for President Obama in 2008 and 2012. Alabama Media Group columnist John Archibald put it this way:

Take a look at the 10 Alabama counties with the highest percentage of non-white registered voters. That’s Macon, Greene, Sumter, Lowndes, Bullock, Perry, Wilcox, Dallas, Hale, and Montgomery, according to the Alabama Secretary of State’s office. Alabama, thanks to its budgetary insanity and inanity, just opted to close driver license bureaus in eight of them. All but Dallas and Montgomery will be closed.

Closed. In a state in which driver licenses or special photo IDs are a requirement for voting…

Every single county in which blacks make up more than 75 percent of registered voters will see their driver license office closed. Every one.

Archibald predicted the move would invite a Justice Department investigation, as did his fellow columnist, Kyle Whitmire:

But put these two things together—Voter ID and 29 counties without a place where you can get one—and Voter ID becomes what the Democrats always said it was.

A civil rights lawsuit isn’t a probability. It’s a certainty.

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Alabama Just Made It Even Harder for Black People to Vote

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Mother of Cincinnati Police Shooting Victim Calls for Justice in This Heart-Wrenching Statement

by CharlaEdman Posted on July 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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The grief-stricken family of Samuel DuBose, a 43-year-old black man who was shot and killed by University of Cincinnati police officer Ray Tensing during a July 19 traffic stop, held an emotional press conference Tuesday following the county prosecutor’s announcement that Tensing would be indicted on a murder charge.

DuBose’s sister Tiera Allen said the release of Tensing’s body-cam video helped vindicate her brother and would make sure he wasn’t painted as a “thug in the neighborhood.” The family’s lawyer, Mark O’Mara, spoke of the need for the community to react to the news in a “peaceful and nonaggressive” way. But the most stirring comments came from DuBose’s mother, Audrey DuBose.

“I’m so thankful that everything was uncovered,” she said. “Because I’ve been a servant of the Lord for as long as I’ve been living on Earth. I know the Lord, and I know the wrath of God. Also, I know the love of God. I just thank God everything is being revealed. I knew that he loved my child. I knew that this was going to be uncovered.”

Later, she read from Psalm 93: “The seas have lifted up, Lord, the seas have lifted up their pounding waves. Mightier than the thunder of the great waters, mightier than the breaker of the sea—the Lord on high is mighty,” she recited.

Earlier this month, Tensing pulled over Samuel DuBose for driving without a front license plate. During the stop, DuBose produced a bottle of alcohol and failed to give the officer his driver’s license. The rest of the details of the shooting were somewhat vague until Tensing’s body-cam footage was released today as Hamilton County prosecutor Joe Deters announced Tensing’s indictment.

“I can forgive him,” Audrey DuBose said of Tensing. “I can forgive anybody. God forgave us.”

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Mother of Cincinnati Police Shooting Victim Calls for Justice in This Heart-Wrenching Statement

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16 Interesting Photos From the Ferguson Grand Jury Files

by JeannieHeberlin Posted on November 26, 2014

Mother Jones

After St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch announced Monday that Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson would not be indicted for killing Michael Brown, the county released a collection of documents from the grand jury proceedings. Among them were hundreds of photos from the investigation, depicting everything from the crime scene to Wilson at the hospital after the shooting. Here are just a few (all photos provided by the St. Louis County Prosecutor’s Office):

Wilson’s police SUV after the shooting. Brown’s hat lies next to it.

Brown’s hat.

The inside of the police SUV where the initial encounter between Wilson and Brown took place.

Shots were fired inside the car, and at least one went through the door.

The driver’s side door handle with what appears to be blood on it.

Wilson’s gun

A closer look shows what appears to be blood on the gun.

Blood on the street (presumably Brown’s)

Wilson, according witnesses and his own testimony, missed several times as he fired at Brown. Some of those bullets struck nearby buildings.

Where one of Wilson’s shots entered the wall of a nearby apartment building.

This shot narrowly missed a window.

There has been contention about the distance between Wilson’s car and Brown’s body. This shot shows Brown’s body behind a screen with Wilson’s SUV off further down the street.

Here’s the diagram of the entire crime scene. The New York Times created a color-coded version (see here).

Wilson said in his grand jury testimony that he only went to the hospital because a superior told him to. Here he is during his examination shortly after Brown’s death.

The left side of Wilson’s face.

The right.

A shot of Wilson taken Aug. 21 (according to the photo’s metadata), less than two weeks after the shooting.

Originally posted here: 

16 Interesting Photos From the Ferguson Grand Jury Files

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