Here comes the parade -- maybe not?

I was fully expecting that the story out of Madison, in which police shot 19-year-old Tony Robinson after a struggle, was going to go all Ferguson. Maybe it won't, though. While the AP report in the Star Tribune buries the inconvenient truth in the 19th paragraph of their report, and you have to click to page 2 to get to it, the reporting does confirm what we suspected yesterday:

Wisconsin's online courts database shows that Robinson, a 2014 graduate of Sun Prairie High School, pleaded guilty to felony armed robbery in October and was sentenced in December to three years' probation. A police report said he was among four teenagers arrested in a home invasion in which the suspects were seen entering an apartment building with a long gun. They ran with electronics and other property and three of the four were captured. A shotgun and a "facsimile" handgun were recovered, according to the report.

A few thoughts:

• Ordinarily you'd expect someone who committed a felony armed robbery to be in prison, but Wisconsin has a problem there, since it has one of the highest incarceration rates for African-Americans in the country. It's not particularly surprising that a first-time offender might not go to prison. 
• The area where the incident took place, known as Willy Street, is a bit of a hippie enclave, on the south side of the isthmus between Lakes Mendota and Monona. It's known for food co-ops, street fairs and the like. Areas to the east of Willy Street neighborhood, especially when you get closer to Fair Oaks Avenue, are often pretty poor and crime tends to be a problem. As a whole, Madison is a wealthy town but most of the money is on the west side. It's a formula you see all over the country.
• At some point, people will start to realize that Socialist Workers agitators with their bullhorns are essentially as useful to a community as the Westboro Baptists are. So far, Madison isn't taking the bait. Let's see what happens in the coming days, though.