Tag Archives: Ferguson

A Recap Before The Storm

A little over three months ago was the first time we wrote about what would become the biggest story in America over the following days; Ferguson, Missouri and the shooting of Michael Brown by Darren Wilson, a Ferguson police officer. With the grand jury verdict due any day, this last week had more than its share of troubling news about what might happen in the aftermath.

First, the grand jury. In the Wilson case, it’s been more like an in camera trial, and not a grand jury. The person who’s the focus of the charges rarely if ever gets to testify in front of the grand jury; the grand jury’s job is to see if there’s enough evidence to bring the case to trial, and not to decide innocence or guilt. Continue reading →

More Questions Than Answers

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Ferguson protests. Photo by Loavesofbread (own work) via Wikimedia Commons

Yesterday, we wrote about what’s been happening in Ferguson, Missouri. Later during the day (we publish our posts very early in the morning as a rule), Thomas Jackson, Ferguson’s chief of police, had numerous press conferences which we feel raised more questions than they answered.

In the first press conference, Jackson announced the name of the officer who shot Michael Brown; a four year veteran of the force named Darren Wilson. At the same time, he said that Michael Brown was suspected of stealing a box of cigars and assaulting a convenience store clerk. He then produced a surveillance tape that appears to show Brown assaulting the clerk. Seems pretty straight forward, right? Well, no – not really.

When Jackson was asked later why he released the tape at the press conference, he said because he “had to,” based on several formal requests from media organizations. Now, as far as we know from reading and listening to the media over the last few days, the media had no idea that such a tape existed. What we do know is that the media had been requesting the officer who killed Brown’s report on the incident, as well as any dash camera video if any existed. Did Jackson produce either of those things? Of course not. And, of course, Officer Wilson is conveniently out of town “for his own protection.”

At this press conference, it was implied that Officer Wilson had been responding to the convenience store incident when he stopped Brown. However, in a later press conference, Jackson stated that the “initial contact was not related to the robbery,” and that Brown had been stopped for walking down the middle of the street. We have to wonder when jaywalking became a legitimate reason to use deadly force, but we digress as usual.

Captain Ron Johnson. Photo by Loavesofbread (own work) via Wikimedia Commons

Captain Ron Johnson, the Missouri state patrol officer who took command of the various police forces in Ferguson on Thursday, said that he “would have liked to have been consulted” about the simultaneous release of the officer’s name and the information about the alleged robbery. “The information could have been put out in a different way,” Johnson said at a press conference.

Now hold on – isn’t Johnson supposed to be in charge of the police who are dealing with this matter? Why wasn’t he consulted? Jackson’s response was that he had used the same chain of command he’d been using before Governor Jay Nixon had put Johnson in charge; in other words, his Ferguson police and the St. Louis County police’s officer in charge. We have to wonder whether ignoring the governor’s orders is par for the course for the Ferguson police.

In related news, Bob McCulloch wasn’t happy with the governor’s decision to turn control of security over to Johnson, telling the St. Louis Post-Dispatch; “It’s shameful what he did today, he had no legal authority to do that. To denigrate the men and women of the county police department is shameful.” Who is Bob McCulloch and why is this important? He’s the prosecuting attorney for St. Louis County; the very person who would be responsible for bringing any charges against Officer Wilson. We guess he evidently didn’t see any problem with turning Ferguson into a war zone, but we could be wrong.

We feel that yesterday’s disclosures raises more questions than it answered. The first question is if they had this information about Brown and the alleged robbery before, why didn’t they disclose it earlier? We’d think that releasing this information earlier would have helped defuse the anger in the community; the community would have still been angry, but the police could have at least claimed that to be the cause for Wilson’s actions.

Our second question is why wasn’t Officer Wilson’s report released? We find it suspicious that they released the surveillance tapes allegedly of Brown assaulting the convenience store owner when as far as we know, nobody outside the police were aware that they existed, yet fail to release the documentation that everybody’s been asking to see.

Our last question may be the most important of all. Is the Ferguson police department in general and Chief Jackson in particular really this incompetent, or are they covering up something? Our guess would be both.

A Little Respect Goes A Long Way

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On Sunday, we wrote about something which became the biggest story in the country over the last few days; the killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed black man, by the local police.

We heard about the looting and riots that Sunday night. We saw the FAA declare a no-fly zone over Ferguson, and tell reporters to leave the area. We saw the steady ramping up of the police response, with them acting more like a paramilitary force than a civilian law enforcement agency as time went on.

Photo via Facebook

Then, Wednesday night, we and the rest of the world watched in horror as the police in Ferguson proved themselves to be every bit as repressive and thuggish as the police in those countries that we regularly chastise for human rights violations.

The buildup had been going on ever since Sunday’s riots. Though the demonstrations since then had been mostly peaceful, the police became more and more aggressive as the days went past. The smell of tear gas filled the night air; a chemical agent that’s banned in warfare (by an international treaty that we as a country signed) – that is, unless the warfare’s inside our own borders, evidently. But, I digress.

During the day on Wednesday, the tension built. We saw the chief of police make a statement saying that the citizens could protest during the daylight hours. However, he softened his stance when asked by reporters if this meant that a curfew was in place. The tension built more.

Then came the arrest and assault of two reporters guilty of nothing more than taking pictures of the police as they came into the McDonald’s that the reporters were using as their base. One was from the Washington Post, and the other from the Huffington Post. The ironic thing here is that the Washington Post with all of its reporters around the world had only had one other reporter arrested this year – that was in Tehran. The police then tear gassed and fired rubber bullets at an Al Jazeera America news crew while they were setting up their equipment.

Al Jazeera television crew runs for cover. Photo via Facebook

The pictures coming out of Ferguson Wednesday night looked like a war zone, with clouds of smoke (or in this case, gas) hanging over everything. Fireworks filled the skies as the police used stun grenades and tear gas on the peaceful protesters, and fired rubber bullets at them. The world was watching, and most of us didn’t like what we saw.

The condemnation of the police and shows of solidarity with the people of Ferguson were quick to occur. Yesterday there were Moment of Silence events nationwide paying respect to victims of police brutality. Palestinians living in Gaza took to Twitter to instruct the residents of Ferguson how to deal with tear gas. This was oddly ironic, as the former St. Louis County Police chief Timothy Fitch had taken counterterrorism lessons from the Israeli government back in 2009, and had been in charge of the St. Louis County Police until his retirement earlier this year. Because after all, who knows more about crowd control and tramping on civil rights more than the Israelis do? But, i digress again.

Today, two voices that had been strangely absent from the conversation chimed in. First, President Obama made a statement, deploring both the looting and the police overreach, saying that there was “no excuse” for either. Then, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon removed control of the operation from the St. Louis County and Ferguson forces, and instead put the Missouri State Patrol in charge, naming Captain Ron Johnson as the commander. This move not only put someone who could relate to the community in charge (Johnson’s black and had grown up in Ferguson); it also made one person in charge. Up until then, the decision to fire tear gas, use rubber bullets and the like rotated among the four main police groups there (St. Louis County, St. Louis (the city), Ferguson and the Highway Patrol); hence, no overall accountability.

Captain Johnson made his presence known quickly. Not by massing troops in military garb holding guns on the protesters as had been the rule for the three days before, but by joining them as they marched down the street. The State Troopers were out, but it was obvious that they were there in case something happened, and not as an oppressive, occupying force to be reckoned with.

This doesn’t mean that all the problems are over; far from it. There’s the problem of under representation; Ferguson is almost 70% black, and blacks account for 93% of the arrests made by Ferguson police. The 53 man police force only has three black officers, and the black community’s not represented in the local government and school board either. Then, there’s the fact that the Ferguson police department still hasn’t released the name of the officer that shot Michael Brown, even though they’ve published the names and addresses of nine people who were charged with looting in Sunday’s riots. The two separate sets of rules idea runs deep in Ferguson, as it does in many other cities and towns across the nation, any of which could blow up as Ferguson did this week.

But, hopefully the powers that be learned three very important lessons that need to be applied at a national level. The first, of course, is don’t kill unarmed people. The second lesson is that you can only push people so far. We’ve had four fairly well publicized cases of police killing unarmed black men within the last month alone, and Ferguson isn’t alone in its vast difference between the majority of its population and who calls the shots. Finally, the third lesson, which is just as important, is to treat your citizens with respect. Up until last night, the police treated the people of Ferguson more like animals than as fellow human beings, and acted more out of fear than anything else. Last night, the police treated the protesters as fellow human beings, and respected their right to peacefully assemble; something that the citizens of Ferguson are thankful for.

Time For A New Night Out

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Rodney King beaten by LA police 1991. Original video shot by George Holliday (fair use)

On August 7, 1984, the National Association of Town Watch (NATW) had the first National Night Out. National Night Out was (and is) intended to be an effort to promote involvement in crime prevention activities, police-community partnerships, and neighborhood camaraderie. Since its beginning, National Night Out has grown to include over 37 million people and over 16,000 communities nationwide.

However, what happens when the police aren’t so much protecting as they are terrorizing the community? We’ve been seeing examples of this more and more often; from the militarization of our police departments to the increasing number of excessive force incidents to the racial profiling of our citizens under such programs as stop and frisk to the cold blooded murder of innocent people.

Yesterday, we saw a prime example of the latter in Ferguson, Missouri. Michael Brown, a young man who was supposed to start college tomorrow, was shot multiple times in the back by a Ferguson police officer on Saturday afternoon as he was walking to his grandmother’s house.

Local residents were understandably upset and angry over the shooting, with some of the residents screaming threats to “kill the police.” Confrontation between the police and residents escalated, with 100 police cars from 15 different departments eventually being called to the scene.

Unfortunately, incidents like this are becoming more and more common. Back in April, the U.S. Justice Department released a report criticizing the Albuquerque, New Mexico police department for a longstanding history of police brutality and unnecessary deadly force. And, last month we had the murder of Eric Garner by the NYPD.

Now, we at Occupy World Writes aren’t saying all police are bad; far from it. They do an unfortunately necessary job that we ourselves could never do, and they witness horrors we can only imagine in the darkest corners of our imaginations. However, the number of bad apples who find their way into the police departments across the nation is frightening, to put it mildly.

The original intent of the National Night Out was to foster good police-community relations, and to show that the community stood together to fight crime. But what about the crimes committed by the police? Isn’t it time we stand together as a community and say that such behavior by the people who are supposed to protect us is unacceptable?

We need a new Night Out; one of communities standing united against police overreach and brutality.