Bit this is how you get thereBackInTex wrote:What interviews? The FBI hasn't posted theirs, as far as I know. Interviews by the media are suspect and if the folks being interviewed are identified, then, well, their public opinions are suspect do to their fears of reprisal or name calling by you name callers.silverscreenselect wrote: Well, if you'll read the interviews with the neighbors, you'll find that they weren't all that keen on having Zimmerman's type of "watching out for them." He creeped them out, the black ones residents more than the others. They didn't like his going around handing out flyers about suspicious people; they didn't like his making a nuisance of himself.
The FBI reported 35 interviews of neighbors and friends showed no racial bias by Zimmerman.
http://www.volokh.com/2013/07/16/a-few- ... ted-notes/VI. Today on a law professor listserv I frequent, one of the members was fulminating about how Zimmerman had once called 911 because he was afraid of a seven-year-old black boy, and this shows how racist Zimmerman is, and so forth and so on. The professor cited to this blog post at breakingbrown.com. The post cites to a Daily Beast post about Zimmarman’s interactions with the police. The first thing that raised my suspicion was the Beast made it clear that the call was to the police non-emergency number, not 911. The Beast reported the call log as:
April 22, 2011 – 7:09 p.m. Type: TEL Subject: Suspicious activity
Report: Juvenile black male “apprx 7–9” years old, four feet tall “skinny build short blk hair” last seen wearing a blue t-shirt and blue shorts.
This presented me with two possibilities: this was either strong evidence that Zimmerman was truly a paranoid racist nutjob, or the “suspicious activity” he reported was something along the lines of an unsupervised child. So I spent less then a minute googling and found the more detailed police description of his call (page 37 of the link), which paraphrased Zimmerman as follows: “Advsd is walking alone & is not supervised on busy street compl concerned for well-being.”
And thus a call from Zimmerman expressing concern for the safety of a young boy walking alone on a busy street gets turned into Zimmerman calling 911 on a seven year African American boy that he feared because of his racist paranoia. Unfortunately, lots of people seem to be only reading websites like BreakingBrown and not bothering to check on what they read so long as it fits the narrative they’ve already adopted. As noted, even law professors, who one would think would try to investigate before spreading libelous rumors, aren’t immune (though I should note based on blogs and social media I’ve seen, most crim law and evidence professors, including most liberal ones, think that the jury came to the correct conclusion based on the evidence presented).