Musk Tweets Defense of Cop Who Killed Unarmed Black Man in Ferguson

Elon Musk tweeted a protection of the police officer who shot 18-year-old Michael Brown—an unarmed Black man in Ferguson, Missouri again in 2014—early Wednesday earlier than deleting the incendiary publish. Musk stated the police officer was “exonerated” and that the narrative across the capturing was a “fiction.”

Musk’s tweet was apparently prompted by the invention of some Twitter t-shirts on the firm’s San Francisco headquarters that learn “Stay Woke,” printed within the aftermath of the Ferguson rebellion. Musk clearly tweeted the shirts to ridicule them, although his buddy, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, as soon as wore the shirt to the Code Conference in 2016 throughout a panel discussing the Black Lives Matter motion.

“#StayWoke shirts stem from the Ferguson protests. Obama’s own DOJ proved this & exonerated the cop. ‘Hands up don’t shoot’ was made up. The whole thing was a fiction,” Musk tweeted early Wednesday.

The tweet included a hyperlink to the Department of Justice report issued in 2015 on the killing of Michael Brown. Musk deleted his tweet with commentary early Wednesday, however reposted the DOJ report, this time with out his editorializing.

The killing of Brown and refusal of native authorities to cost the police officer who shot him, Darren Wilson, set off heated protests in the summertime of 2014 and helped shine a nationwide highlight on the epidemic of police killing unarmed Black folks. The militarized crackdown on protest that summer time was ruthless, to say the least. And none of these details have been fiction.

But one of many rallying cries from the motion, “hands up don’t shoot,” was picked aside incessantly by right-wing pundits who sought to exonerate the police officer, very like Musk remains to be doing at the moment. Witnesses to the capturing claimed Brown had his arms up, although the U.S. Department of Justice investigators didn’t discover this credible. Wilson, who shot Brown a minimum of six occasions, claimed that Brown had charged at him and the capturing was in self-defense.

Gizmodo isn’t going to relitigate what occurred in 2014. But we do discover it notable that Musk desires to reopen the injuries of that summer time, both to stoke extra controversy on his social media platform with the hopes that it generates consideration for a website that’s hemorrhaging advertisers, or just because Musk desires to sign to his right-wing followers that he’s effectively and actually one in all them. Whatever his aim, Musk succeeded at proving he desperately desires approval from absolutely the worst folks on the planet.

For the file, the Department of Justice issued two reviews in 2015 concerning the police in Ferguson, Missouri. Musk tweeted the one concerning the killing of Michael Brown however didn’t hassle tweeting the report from the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division which discovered the Ferguson Police Department had a systemic downside with recurrently focusing on Black folks for essentially the most minor of “crimes.” While Ferguson’s inhabitants was 67% Black within the early 2010s, police knowledge confirmed that Black folks accounted for 85% of auto stops, 90% of citations, and 93% of arrests within the metropolis from 2010 to 2012.

Musk is making it excruciating clear who’s welcome on the brand new Twitter. And it’s individuals who look and speak like Musk.