Review: 1491: The Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann

1491 is a book trying to give an overview of current thinking about what America was like before Columbus arrived. In particular, what the people, cultures and human ways of living were like (though animals and nature get a bit of a mention, too). It's also a book that tends to have unimpressive covers, both in the US and the UK editions. All I can say is I'm glad I eventually looked past the naff cover...

Pre-Columbus America is often described as "prehistoric" - because historians rely on written records, and, for the most part, such records were not generated by Indians / people who lived in the Western hemisphere. There are notable exceptions: the Maya, the Aztecs, and, perhaps, the Inka, though their khipus have not yet been decoded. However, these cultures cover only small regions and brief glimpses into time. As such, the story of human life in the Americas before the conquest is largely unknown. And where something is unknown, some people will see "mystery", or worse, a blank canvas to project their own theories and biases onto... unsurprisingly, many did.

1491 tries to give a reasonably balanced account of what is known, what is theorised (by credible experts), and what is contentious and why. The book ignores the quacks, fraudsters and fantasists, but even the experts evidently have frequently been wrong in the past.

Academics in the humanities and social sciences seem to spend half their professional lives forming loose tribes and having spats with each other. Fortunately, the reader gets only the rough brush strokes picture of the essence of those spats and is spared the petty detail. The danger of a book that tries to cover a topic where much is still under contention is that it might end up on "the wrong side of history" - not the evil side, but simply the side that comes to incorrect conclusions. 1491 spends a lot of pages describing how knowledge and theories evolved. Often, there seemed to be a consensus in the past, only for it to be overturned by later theories. Outliers sometimes gathered momentum, became mainstream, replaced an old consensus with a new one. 1491 presents current knowledge, current consensus, current thinking. 20 years from now, more will be known. 100 years from now, perhaps many of the current consensus theories will have been replaced by others. As such, 1491 is a book that probably has an inbuilt "Best Before Date". Then again, what human theory does not?

The author is not without bias - he makes it clear which theories and perspectives he finds more convincing. However, he does not shy away from presenting the counter-arguments. The result is a text that is surprisingly readable and frequently surprising.

Surprising, because its central thesis - and the current thinking of many archaeologists, historians, researchers and scientists - paints a picture of human life in America that is very different from the picture the general public have been taught (in school or by pop culture). It's a non-fiction book, but even so, SPOILER ALERT, I'm going to talk about the big picture, something which the entire book slowly creates.

The central thesis is that both American continents were quite densely populated by a plethora of human cultures. Much of the landscape was managed and shaped by humans, both in North America and South America, including the Amazon region. Indian farming took many forms - sometimes, intense farming of a style not alien to Europeans. Terraced farms, irrigated fields, fertilised soils, domesticated crops. However, many Indian cultures used other methods - methods which were not recognised by explorers or settlers or academics for centuries. In particular, they used fire to control the landscape, they planted desirable trees (which provided food or other useful resources) and removed less useful ones, and they adjusted the environment to suit their needs. In North America, this created a landscape alternating between fruit and nut bearing trees, fields, and grasslands, like an enormous park landscape. Indians were not just hunter gatherers, but responsible for consciously creating an environment rich in resources they could gather, with ample habitat for animals they preferred to hunt.

In the Amazon region, they found ways to create fertile soils (terra preta) and managed the forest around their villages to create incredibly diverse, edible gardens. There were some hunter-gatherer societies, but for the most part, humans on the American continents lived in cultures that farmed and altered the landscape to suit their needs. The Americas were not a wilderness, but a human curated, human created landscape. (However, having learnt over many generations how to manage their territories, Indians by and large used more sustainable methods than the Europeans who replaced them. )

Then came Columbus. On his third voyage, his crew was sick, beset with a plethora of diseases. When they met Indians, they passed on infections. Even as Columbus returned to Europe, the diseases went like a wild fire through the human population of the continents. Because Indians had not domesticated many animals (only dogs, llamas, alpacas, guinea pigs and muscovy ducks), they had not lived in close enough proximity to catch many diseases from their beasts. Europeans, Asians and Africans, on the other hand, had. Measles, smallpox, flu, and others had made the jump from cows, horses, pigs and birds to humans. When those diseases reached the Americas, the population there had never encountered them before. Worse, for reasons that are not fully understood yet, Indians' immune systems were less able to cope with viruses and bacteria, so the infections did not just catch the immune systems by surprise, but they wreaked more havoc in every person they infected. Within a few years, Indians were decimated by disease. Over the course of the next hundred years, between 90-95% of Indians died because of European diseases. It was a holocaust of unprecedented, and never-yet-repeated scope and tragedy.

So, when the first settlers and conquistadors arrived, they unwittingly arrived in the middle of an apocalypse (the conquistadors), or in a postapocalyptic continent (North American settlers). They arrived in a place where 30% or 50% of people had just died, and where more were continuing to die. They arrived in societies that were collapsing, or that had collapsed. The conquistadors managed to destroy two empires (Aztec and Inka) because those empires had just lost huge chunks of their armies and their leaders, and because the ensuing chaos and power vacuum destroyed their ability to defend themselves effectively against ruthless invaders. Even with all that chaos, the conquistadors had help from Indians who wanted to see those empires fall, and who wanted to use the conquistadors as a tool to bring about this change. Without having Indian allies, the conquests would probably have failed. Without the epidemics that preceded them, they would definitely have failed.

After the conquest, a huge myth slowly evolved: the myth of the Indians who lived, passively, in a Garden Eden, picking fruit, hunting, gathering, and not creating anything worthwhile. Or the myth of the noble savage, attuned to nature, living as human animal in The Wild. The myth of America as pristeen, pure, natural continent, until Europeans came to be enterprising and make good use of it / ravage it (depending on your political leanings). It's a myth that arose because most Europeans only ever saw the postapocalyptic continent, where forests were growing, human habitat was slowly being reclaimed by plants and animals that had been managed and kept in check for millennia, but which were now free to take up the suddenly vacant space.

It's not mentioned in the book, but recently, climate scientists have theorised that the so-called Little Ice Age / Medieval global cooling event was partially the result of the CO2 captured by forests that grew on previously cultivated land after Indian populations had collapsed.

1491 is an excellent book, well worth reading. It gives a sense of what was lost in terms of human heritage (even if no book could ever capture the scope of human tragedy involved). It suggests glimpses of what human heritage gained from Indians - not just fruit and vegetables and a healthier, more varied, tastier diet, but a more democratic, anti-authoritarian spirit, and a more free way of life.It's a fascinating read, and well worth your time.

Rating: 5/5

The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner

I've read The Sheep Look Up once before, at University, on a module about Science and Science Fiction. I loved it then, and I've been meaning to re-read it for years.

Well, it did not disappoint. In fact, it hit me a lot harder this time around.

The Sheep Look up is an ensemble piece, featuring dozens of characters, in a near-future imagined in the 1960s, full of environmental troubles and broiling tensions. It is an ecological disaster novel, except that the disaster has been working at glacial speeds for decades, and is continuing to glacially move forward during the year that this novel covers. There is a continuous build-up of tensions and horror as the novel progresses, each month being a worse gut-punch than the last.

At first, I struggled with the re-read: had I not remembered how highly I'd thought of the book as a student, I might not have persevered. The snippety, scattershot approach to scenes and mood setting texts was a bit offputting at the start. Once things got moving, the book became compulsive, unputdownable, terrifying.

What makes it so scary is that, aside from not having foreseen the internet, it feels as if John Brunner has foreseen our times, and seen through it all, encapsulating the dystopia and the disastrous nature of our policies and our collective willful ignorance. Every horror that happens in the book is rooted in news stories and trends that fit right into our world. The president in this book, Prexy, might as well be called Trump, as he sounds exactly like Trump. (I'd read the book in George W Bush's times, and it felt authentic even then)

How about a list of things that Brunner has correctly predicted?

• Prexy in the book is very, very similar to  Bush and Trump
• Puritan is a brand in the book which foreshadows The Honest Company, Fairtrade and Organic. Brunner correctly foresaw that these are designed to be brands above all, with limited regard for authenticity. Their purpose is to be a plaster, products for slacktivists to buy and feel superior about. The only thing he did not foresee is just how many 'ethical' and 'natural' fads and brands there would be: walk down the high street, and you'll spot one branch of Lush, Holland & Barrett, Bodyshop etc after the other, 
• The everyday-ness of sex, in fashion styles, but also sex equality (several women are as sexual as men, and as unembarrassed / unburdened by self-repression, regrets and shame in the book).
• The mass market for home water filtration devices like Britta and Sodastream
• Pseudo-environmental cars like the Prius and other hybrids - except even Brunner assumed they'd have moved on from fossil fuels by now. In the book, they are powered by steam. It's left a bit open as to how that steam is generated.
• Increasingly poison-resistant pests
• Increasingly medicine resistant germs
• Proliferation of allergies, auto-immune diseases and general sickliness, especially among children
• Children growing up in ever-more protective bubbles, raised by ever-more-fearful parents
• Ashley Madison.... well, the normalisation of extra-marital affairs, at least!
• Climate Change
• Airport security nightmares and constantly growing inconvenience due to an ever present terror threat

And many, many more...

In some cases, he did draw a future marginally bleaker than our present, but it is terrifying how often his descriptions echo our world.

All I can say is that this book is a pessimistic masterpiece, full of believable characters in an authentic-seeming world, struggling with everyday problems while things get worse and worse around them. Everyone should read it. Once you get used to the snippetiness, it's magnificent. (And every little scene is relevant, things happen in the background of scenes which relate to other scenes in the book...)

Rating: 5/5 - Excelent. Superb. A literary masterpiece.

Postscript:
If I were HBO, I'd buy the rights to The Sheep Look Up, to Random Acts of Senseless Violence (a novel about economic crisis leading to a mental health crisis and ultimately bringing society to its knees) and to The Water Knife (another eco-dystopia), and plan an epic, gritty multi-season TV series combining the three. The three books, by different authors and unrelated, show futures that are eminently compatible with each other, and utterly convincing, utterly engrossing, utterly terrifying.

The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi

The Water Knife is a novel set in a not too distant future USA struggling to deal with environmental changes. In particular, it's set in Arizona, where the city of Phoenix has become a zone of refugee camps, Red Cross water pumps, middle class people counting the gallons in their water cistern every day, but also self-contained biodomes (arcologies) and ultra-rich people live in luxury.

Angel is a contractor / mercenary working on behalf of a water company - the so-called Water Knife of the title. Lucy is an investigative reporter. Maria is a young refugee trying to get by in a mob-run brutal and ruthless area of town.

The domino that starts the chain reaction that will intertwine their stories is the vicious torture and murder of two men over a document that may or may not exist - a document of legally binding water rights.

At the start of the novel, the world building feels a little preachy. Several times, characters discuss the wilful blindness of their ancestors in driving their environment over a cliff and building cities in unsustainable places. This blunt and explicit approach is not quite as subtle as Paolo Bacigalupi's novels usually are. Basically, we're being told off and our noses are being rubbed in it. It's a little offputting. It won't convince anyone who's in denial.

It also did not entirely convince me. Not the environmental calamities: those seem all too imaginable. In fact, there are regions of the world where water rights are the source of fierce and bitter conflicts right now. Arguably, Israel is comparable to the Las Vegas and California of The Waterknife's world, while the West Bank is comparable to Phoenix (with the caveat that Israel cares nothing for laws and legal process, while in the novel everyone is involved in lengthy legal proceedings before deploying their water knives to enforce rulings). The problem is that I don't quite believe Americans will split by state lines. Israel and Palestine both contain Muslims and Christians, Arabs and Bedouins, but over time, the conflict has become essentially one of Jews and Muslims. Christians, Druze and other people are sidelined in both regions. So, in an ever-more divided America, I don't see the State lines as being credible dividers. I could imagine it being religion, or race, or even politics: I can more easily imagine a Democrat vs Republican conflict turning into mass migrations and then regional divisions. I just can't see it happening based purely on whether someone is Texan or Nevadan or Arizonan.

Once the story gets moving, it's a good thriller, with various parties chasing after macguffins, information or fortune, and being chased by murderers, conspiracies and the occasional deadly riot. There's tension and cliffhangers aplenty. Violence, too: some of the characters suffer pretty permanent consequences.

The Water Knife is unusual in that it is neither a post-apocalyptic novel nor a pre-apocalyptic one. This is a novel of collapse in progress. #Phoenixdownthetubes. It reminded me a little of the (more literary, subtle and hugely accomplished) Random Acts of Senseless Violence, only this time the driving force of collapse is environmental rather than economical. There are not many novels telling stories set during a gradual fall of our civilisation.

As things race towards the end, the book becomes utterly gripping. Every plot development feels authentic, even when things twist to and fro: every twist comes from within characters rather than feeling imposed by the needs of story pacing. It really grows on you (as do all the characters).

If you can get past the slightly clumsy beginning and bear with it, you'll be richly rewarded: the finale is masterfully done, and the pacing is good throughout.

Rating: 4/5

A brief interruption for some current affairs pondering

A brief interruption for some current affairs pondering

I started this blog by copying lots of the reviews I write on Goodreads into blogger. I wanted it to be a book blog, with minimal or no other things. Reviews, reviews and nothing but reviews. 

But if I'm publishing a blog anyway, sometimes the need to think aloud, or even rant, might be too hard to resist. So I guess be warned: it could happen in future.

It's happening today.

Unarmed black people being killed by police in the USA (and the police getting away with it) has been a very unhappy theme this week. It's horrible. Race has become a big issue again, and it is absolutely right that people talk and think about race, and justice.

It's also right that not everyone will have the same opinions and thoughts about everything, and I decided to do some thinking below.

The Shooting of Michael Brown

I tend to get most of my news from the BBC, so here's a summary of the testimonies and different narratives about the shooting which I read: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-30189966

Of course, the testimonies don't agree about every aspect, but there are some things that seem to be fairly incontrovertible:

1. Michael Brown stole something from a convenience store, became physical with the shop owner, and left with a friend.
2. The police officer drove past the two young men and told them off for walking in the street.
3. Shortly thereafter, the convenience store theft was reported on the police radio, and the police officer drove back to confront the teenagers.
4. A physical confrontation occurred: the police officer inside the car, Michael Brown outside, the window open. 
5. Accounts vary: The door was either aggressively slammed into Michael Brown or Michael Brown intentionally tried to block it from opening. There was some pulling and pushing through the open window. 
6. The police officer shot Michael Brown several times through the window.
7. Michael Brown and his friend ran away.
8. The police officer, gun drawn, pursued them.
9. Michael Brown turned to face the officer.
10. Here, accounts vary: he either raised his hands in surrender or started to run at the police officer.
11. He was then shot several more times and died.

Protesters see a martyr in Michael Brown because they choose to believe the version of the story which claims he raised his hands and shouted "Don't shoot" and "I don't have a gun". They raise their hands and see this incident as a clear cut murder, an execution of an unarmed teenager for being black or for having dared to resist a police officer (whilst being black).

Maybe that is what happened; maybe it isn't. I don't think any trial jury would ever have come to that conclusion "beyond reasonable doubt". I certainly wouldn't come to that conclusion at that level of certainty.

But, after all, it wasn't a trial jury, but a Grand Jury that decided not to charge the police officer.

The Grand Jury

This is where this BBC story becomes useful: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-30042638

"The grand jury was deciding whether Officer Wilson should be charged with any one of four possible crimes: 

• first-degree murder (any intentional murder that is willful and premeditated with malice aforethought according to Wikipedia)
• second-degree murder (an intentional murder with malice aforethought, but is not premeditated or planned in advance according to Wikipedia) 
• voluntary manslaughter (any intentional killing that involved no prior intent to kill, and which was committed under such circumstances that would "cause a reasonable person to become emotionally or mentally disturbed". Both this and second-degree murder are committed on the spot, but the two differ in the magnitude of the circumstances surrounding the crime. For example, a bar fight that results in death would ordinarily constitute second-degree murder. If that same bar fight stemmed from a discovery of infidelity, however, it may be mitigated to voluntary manslaughter. according to Wikipedia)
• or involuntary manslaughter (stems from a lack of intention to cause death but involving an intentional, or negligent, act leading to death. A drunk driving-related death is typically involuntary manslaughter according to Wikipedia)

It also had the option of charging the policeman with armed criminal action, if it could prove he was carrying a loaded firearm with the intent to commit a felony. 

Nine out of the 12 members of this jury would have had to vote yes to indict Officer Wilson."

So, how would I have voted?

First-degree murder: No point in charging the officer. The prosecutor would have to prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that the police officer had premeditated the killing – i.e. decided to kill the robber when turning his police car around and driving to him. He'd have to prove that the police officer slammed the door into Michael Brown as an act of aggression, not to get out, but to assault him, and the killing thereafter would have to be a pure execution. I don't think such a version of events would be provable.

Involuntary manslaughter: no point in charging: there was no lack of intention to cause death. A police officer shooting a man in the head twice is clearly intending to kill.

Where things get tricky for me as someone unfamiliar with the legal system is this second degree murder / voluntary manslaughter business. I can understand "intentional killing", but find myself totally uncertain how someone can have "malice aforethought" without it being "premeditated". To my layman's ears, that sounds like a mindboggling contradiction of terms. The notion that a bar fight is somehow less likely to cause a reasonable person to become emotionally disturbed than a declaration of infidelity – that too seems bizarre to me. 

Why is there no crime for "intentional killing without malice aforethought or premeditation"? Why is this system assuming that a person either has "malice aforethought" or is "mad with passion" when killing someone on the spot? ("I'm going to take this criminal off the streets" is not exactly malice aforethought...)

Personally, I would have voted that there is a case to answer for either accusation (can jurors vote for each accusation, or do they have only one vote? If only one vote, second degree murder would narrowly win out over involuntary manslaughter in my book). 

But, to play devil's advocate, could there ever have been a conviction, beyond reasonable doubt, under either? 

Let's have a look at this article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-28861630

There's a lot that didn't happen. Force continuum? Doesn't sound like it. "You would only use that weapon in a situation where you felt your life or the lives of civilians in the area were in danger." – Arguably, neither was the case, so the police officer very very obviously should not have used his firearm.

But later in the article, there are some sentences about the police training that become worth thinking about:

"When law enforcement officials do shoot, they shoot to kill."

In other words, the decision to kill Michael Brown was effectively made during that scuffle at the car door. The next paragraphs explain how "shoot to wound" would be a very bad idea, and all the training is about shooting to kill, partially in order to make it easier to aim ("aim for centre mass"), and partially to minimise gunplay and end the fight as quickly as possible.

If you train police officers that, once they fire at a suspect, they are supposed to kill them, doesn't that make it more likely that some will keep shooting until the suspect is immobile on the ground?

And then comes the corker: After a police officer shoots someone…

"In the large majority of cases, no charges are brought against the officer. That is in part because in a case of reality versus perception, the police officer gets the benefit of the doubt. 

"Maybe he wasn't in danger, but if he reasonably believes he was, he would be justified in shooting," says McCoy (a professor of criminal justice)."

This is where all the testimonies come back in. 

The police officer's version of events emphasises his own perceptions – that he was in danger during the scuffle by the car door, that the teenager was very strong, that the teenager was charging at him after the pursuit. Any reasonable person would argue that shooting and killing an unarmed teenager is a disproportionate response to whatever crime he may have committed, and to the resistance and scuffle that occurred. Any reasonable person would agree that a grievous wrong has been done and a tragedy occurred.

But in the context of differing testimonies, and with the way police in America are trained, and considering the police officer only needed to think he was in danger, rather than actually be in danger… I don't think I'd be able to conclude he was "guilty beyond reasonable doubt". And while that, again, is the trial jury's job, not the Grand Jury's, I can imagine members of a Grand Jury thinking along similar lines.

At a Grand Jury, no defence attorneys are present. It's just the prosecutor, the judge and the defendant, and the jury can ask questions. It happens behind closed doors in secret. If I sat on a Grand Jury, and found that the prosecutor did not convince me beyond reasonable doubt that the defendant was guilty, then why would I vote to indict? If the prosecutor can't convince a jury while there is no professional defence present, what would be the point of indicting – the following trial would be sure to fail, end in a "not guilty beyond reasonable doubt" verdict, and waste huge amounts of money.

A lot would ultimately rest on that question: how convincing was the prosecutor, behind closed doors? 

It is quite possible that the prosecutor only put in a token effort. [Edited, on 18/12/14: It now looks as if the prosecutor didn't just make a token effort, but went out of his way to present the defendant's case, rather than the prosecuting case, to a point where he included a discredited, white supremacist / fantasist among witnesses. I find myself completely and utterly disgusted and appalled.] It is quite possible that, with nine white jurors and three black ones, inherent racial bias is the reason why they did not indict the police officer. It's even possible that the majority of jurors did vote to indict, but not enough (9/12) to succeed.

Still, without knowing how things played out inside that room, I can imagine scenarios where I would have voted not to indict, even though I absolutely believe that the shooting of Michael Brown was wrong, and not just wrong, but a wrongful act, and very probably a crime, based on the evidence that is in the public domain. I don't believe so beyond reasonable doubt (based on the public domain evidence), and I imagine some of the jurors must be feeling pretty awful about the aftermath. I don't know that they did anything wrong by not indicting that police officer, so I don't feel I can protest about their decision.

(Protesting against police training ideologies and brutality, or for body cameras, however, and I'll happily attend)

The Death of Eric Garner

Compared to the shooting of Michael Brown, the death of Eric Garner has a lot more evidence available, thanks to this video:

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2014/dec/04/i-cant-breathe-eric-garner-chokehold-death-video

Based on the definitions of different crimes earlier in this post, it seems very obvious that what is happening is an involuntary manslaughter.

Of course, the "reasonable doubt" question would arise again – and the fact that Eric Garner was overweight and unhealthy would be exploited by any defence lawyer, and is even being put forward as cause of death by a Republican politician. (Never mind that the coroner ruled it was a homicide: we are conditioned to believe that "fat people die young, of heart attacks", so if a young fat person dies of heart failure, some people will cheerfully disregard the choke hold, the handcuffs, the restraints, and blame the victim's lifestyle exclusively, or at least "reasonably doubt" that the police actions were the cause of death)

Even though I firmly  believe that an involuntary manslaughter occurred, I can imagine a jury coming to a "not guilty" verdict because of "reasonable doubts". Therefore, even in this case, I can imagine reasonable people on a Grand Jury choosing not to indict the police officer (although I find it more galling than in the Michael Brown case). 

Another thing which is going through my mind is that, in the video, Eric Garner is being restrained a surrounded by half a dozen police officers. Yes, one applied a banned choke hold and then pushed his head against a wall, and that is clearly disgusting. But all the police officers kept him restrained, they all ignored his pleading. They all let him die.

Eric Garner was the victim of an involuntary manslaughter, but the perpetrator was not one police officer; it was all of those present. 

(If there's one positive thing about this tragedy that is being revealed about America is that there, citizens can record police actions. In Britain, the guy holding the camera would be arrested immediately and his camera confiscated: they don't let people take photos of, or film, police actions over here)

But was it an avoidable involuntary manslaughter? 

Once, I witnessed someone being arrested against his will in Cardiff. The man resisted. The police applied similar levels of force to those in the video. The man started shouting "I can't breathe". The police ignored him. All the bystanders walked past (including myself), no one recorded it. My overwhelming impression was that the police are used to people shouting "I can't breathe" when being forcibly restrained.

There are several possible reasons. Maybe some people lie and shout this as a final form of resistance, or to induce others to record the arrest with a view to using it in their defence or for lawsuits. That would be the most cynical interpretation. Maybe restraining someone against their will is a highly stressful situation: maybe people being arrested in this way frequently suffer panic attacks in the process. Maybe some of the force during the arrest tends to shock the solar plexus and induce cramps in chest muscles, leading to breathing difficulties. The latter two scenarios don't tend to be lethal for healthy strong people if they happen (though they are very traumatic). Maybe it's a combination of these.

My point is: I suspect that police officers are very very used to ignoring pleas of "I can't breathe". I suspect that many police officers routinely assume that all the people who shout "I can't breathe" are lying (the first of the three scenarios I speculated about). That means that it becomes inevitable that some people die while being restrained – because the police probably always ignore it, and they always ignore it because someone, somewhere decided that they can't ever treat it as a medical emergency, or it would be open to exploitation. So it may have been an unavoidable involuntary manslaughter. It's certainly not the first time a black man has agonisingly choked to death, surrounded by witnesses, while being restrained by security ‘professionals'. (That UK case did not result in any prosecution either)

None of this makes what happened to Eric Garner right, or even remotely acceptable.  But I can understand that even a non-racist jury of reasonable and decent people could come to a "not guilty" verdict, or even a refusal to indict. I find it harder to stomach than in the Michael Brown case, but I can imagine decent people coming to the decisions that both the Grand Juries reached; I cannot know for certain that either jury was made up of decent people, they may have included despicable ones. But I can imagine it, and so I choose not to direct my anger at the juries.

However.

I think the real villain of these cases aren't (necessarily) the jurors, but the systems and policies and practices that are in place in American policing & judiciary.

• Eric Garner clearly posed no danger to anyone. If he has committed an offence (and it is not clear that he has), then nothing about the offence he's accused of warranted a non-consensual, physically violent arrest. 
• I believe (non-consensual) arrests should only happen if there is a threat of serious further crimes, a threat of escape after a serious crime, or at the end of an investigation leading to an arrest warrant. Police should not be allowed to arrest people willy-nilly based on nothing but their own testimony, as the police are no more worthy of the public's trust than civilians.
• Michael Brown did not pose a lethal danger to anyone. He was a criminal, there was a cause for arrest (risk of flight and risk of further serious crimes), but he was unarmed.
• Police training should therefore only be allowed the use of firearms if the suspects have a weapon – a firearm or, if they are closer, a knife or baseball bat etc. 
• The definition of voluntary manslaughter should explicitly include "lethal defence of self or property against a person posing a non-lethal threat". It's simply ridiculous that white people get to shoot unarmed black people, claim "self defence" and too often get a "not guilty" verdict or no indictment. There has to be a proportionality to any claim of "defence", and there have been too many instances of people using lethal violence in instances that do not warrant it. (lethal self defence against rape is OK in my book, but lethal self defence against a petty thief or someone resisting against being arrested against their will… there should be a defined crime for that!). 
• I don't live in America. Those that do, tell me that "race" is still a big issue, that institutionalised racism is still widespread, and I believe that, even if I can't know for certain that it was the deciding factor in either of the cases that have triggered these protests and responses.
• From over here, across the pond, it looks as if one of the biggest reasons for the too-frequent killings of unarmed suspects is that American ideology values (defence of) property over lives. (Police would rather shoot a petty thief than let him escape unpunished, once they have started the chase). Police forces value their need to enforce a decision once made over lives. (It is more important to them to go through with an arrest, once they announced they're arresting someone, than preserving the life of the suspect). If the individual police officers in these cases are not "guilty beyond reasonable doubt" of involuntary manslaughter, then the police forces themselves, their training methods, policies and ideologies are, in my opinion, "guilty beyond reasonable doubt" of fostering a culture that leads to involuntary manslaughters - i.e. the authorities themselves should be prosecuted for corporate manslaughter.
• Grand Juries seem a strange idea. The decision whether to indict or not should be made by a professional, identifiable and accountable person. (A judge, magistrate or whatever). And if a Grand Jury has to be involved, why a 9/12 majority rather than a simple majority? Members of the jury should probably not just include peers of the accused, but also peers of the victim… 
• ideally, grand juries should be abolished.

That's my $0.02 of thoughts on the matter...