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The sad part is that a lot of those business that were looted may have to close or move and those were the places that provided jobs for some of the folks living in that community. Some of those businesses have been there for years. Now some will probaly flee.
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My Looh, I'm 100% in agreement with everything that you posted.I agree, Michael Brown acted like a thug, Maybe that was a one-off theft and threatining act and he was actually a great kid, we don't know. No matter, NO ONE deserved to be shot down and left in the road like a dog.
As horrific an act that the murder of Michael Brown was, the way the police have handled it has been worse. The police officer involved has not yet been arrested and the family of Michael Brown MUST be given an explanation as to why that is and at what point an arrest will come.
The lesson learned so far by everyone is "be affraid of the police, be very affraid!"
The police are out of control in this country. They have forgotten that they are civil servants. They are paid to serve and protect, not harass and kill the public they have sworn to serve.Last edited by lonewolf; 08-18-2014, 08:58 AM.Comment
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One of the differences between Aurora CO and Ferguson MO is adequate training of those in law enforcement. Necessary police officer training involves more than target shooting.Comment
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Originally posted by My Looh View Post
diss mekk mii laff
yuh more cancern widd da bizz dan da injustice aff blakk man being killed aftah puttinn imm ads inna da air an shoutinn doan shootComment
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Family say Michael Brown was 'executed' after star pathologist claims he could have survived first five bullets - before sixth 'kill shot' to the head. Then county reveals he had pot in his system
Family released independent autopsy results on Sunday which revealed Michael Brown, 18, was shot at least six times by officer Darren Wilson
Brown was shot four times in the arm, once through his right eye and a 'kill shot' to the apex of his head
Former NYC Chief Medical Examiner Dr Michael Baden conducted the autopsy for Brown's family who did not trust St Louis police autopsy
Dr Baden said autopsy results could have been released on day one of the investigation
Following family press conference on Monday, St Louis medical examiner released report saying Brown suffered six to eight shots from the front
A source revealed the teen had marijuana in his system when he died
Michael Brown died from a 'kill shot' to the top of the head, a renowned medical examiner revealed today - but could have survived his five other bullet wounds.
Dr Michael Baden, who was asked by the family to perform an independent autopsy, told a press conference in Ferguson, Missouri on Monday he reassured the teen's mother, Lesley McSpadden, that her son had not suffered.
The family's autopsy, which was released on Sunday, revealed the unarmed 18-year-old had been shot at least six times by police officer Darren Wilson in the St Louis suburb on August 9.
Family lawyer Benjamin Crump described the teen's death as an 'execution in broad daylight'. He said it was important for the family to have their own autopsy results as they did not trust the work of the local police.
Ms McSpadden had just one question for her lawyers and medical examiners: 'What else do we need to get them to arrest the killer of my child?'
Dr Baden said the number of shots Michael Brown had suffered could have been revealed on day one of the investigation as withholding the information causes the family more pain.
The doctor, a former chief medical examiner for New York City, said: 'We can answer those questions on day one... telling the family on day one, can be helpful in a trying time.'
Attorney Daryl Parks said that the shot which killed Michael supported eye-witness reports that his head was in the downward position, trying to surrender to the officer.
Shawn Parcells, a forensic pathologist who assisted Dr Baden, used an anatomical diagram to explain each of the six shots they found.
The 18-year-old was shot twice in the head and four times on the arm.
One bullet entered and exited Brown several times. That shot struck the teen above the right eyeball, went through his face, left through his jaw and re-entered his collarbone.
It is believed that five of the shots hit Brown on the front of his body.
However Parcells said that the gunshot wound to Brown's forearm appeared to be consistent with someone walking away or putting their arms up in a surrender or defensive manner before adding, 'but we don't know'.
Following the family's press conference on Monday, St Louis County medical examiner Mary Case said Brown had suffered between six and eight gunshot wounds and was shot from the front.
The teenager also had marijuana in his system when he died, a source told The Washington Post
Family attorney Benjamin Crump said during a TV interview on Monday morning that the family had ordered an independent autopsy because they did not trust local law enforcement.
He said: 'They did not want to rely on the autopsy from St Louis law enforcement officials who they believe executed their son in broad daylight.
'Our clients understood that relying on the police autopsy was not a good thing.'
The Department of Justice is currently conducting a third autopsy on Michael Brown.
Brown's mother wept today as she spoke out following the devastating autopsy results which were released on Sunday.
Lesley McSpadden appeared on GMA on Monday along with attorney Benjamin Crump who said the family were deeply troubled by the independent autopsy results.
Mr Crump said: 'The witnesses were telling the truth. Michael Brown Jr was shot multiple times and most troubling was the head shot.'
Ms McSpadden had asked that autopsy questions not be directed to her.
She wept as she said: 'We want justice... being fair.'
When asked by GMA anchor Robin Roberts what would bring justice for the family, Ms McSpadden replied: 'Arresting this man and making him accountable for his actions.'
The autopsy was conducted by Dr Michael M Baden, the former chief medical examiner for New York City. Baden has testified in several high-profile cases, including the O.J. Simpson murder trial.
While Dr Baden did not comment on the heated debate surrounding Wilson's actions, he did say the sheer amount of gun shots was out of the ordinary.
'In my capacity as the forensic examiner for the New York State Police, I would say, "You’re not supposed to shoot so many times,"' Dr Baden told the New York Times. 'Right now there is too little information to forensically reconstruct the shooting.'
The newspaper said the bullets did not appear to have come from very close range because there was no gunpowder on his body.
St Louis County Police released preliminary results of their autopsy, KSDK reported. The report concluded that the teen died of gunshot wounds but would not specify how many bullets had hit the teenager.
The autopsy, which was conducted the day after the teen died, is preliminary. No further details about Brown's death will be released by police until toxicology results become available in the next four weeks.
The results of the post-mortem examination emerged as Missouri's governor ordered the state National Guard into Ferguson after it was convulsed by yet another night of clashes between police and protesters.
Governor Jay Nixon said the National Guard would help 'in restoring peace and order' to Ferguson, where protests continued last night.
Police said they fired tear gas and rubber bullets in response to gunfire, looting, vandalism and protesters who hurled Molotov cocktails.
'These violent acts are a disservice to the family of Michael Brown and his memory and to the people of this community who yearn for justice to be served and to feel safe in their own homes,' Nixon said in a statement.
The National Guard is a reserve military force, and its deployment marks a serious escalation of the crackdown on dissent in Ferguson, which has a majority African-American population.
Dr Baden's post-mortem examination found Brown was shot a total of six times, with four bullet wounds in his right arm and two in his head.
The final shot appears to have entered Brown's head at the top of the skull suggesting his head was bowed down at the time.
'This one here looks like his head was bent downward,' he said of the wound at the top of Brown's skull. 'It can be because he’s giving up, or because he’s charging forward at the officer.'
Dr Baden, 80, is one of only 400 board-certified forensic pathologists in the country and he has reviewed autopsies for both President John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
He has performed 20,000 autopsies and hosted the HBO show Autopsy.
He criticized authorities in St Louis county for keeping details of Brown's death concealed - which has only made the community more enraged.
'People have been asking: How many times was he shot? This information could have been released on Day One,' Dr. Baden said.
'They don’t do that, even as feelings built up among the citizenry that there was a cover-up. We are hoping to alleviate that.'
Considering the sensitivity around Brown's death, Dr Baden decided to waive his usual $10,000 fee.
The Brown family's attorney, Benjam L Crump, paid to fly Dr Baden out on Sunday to perform the autopsy at Austin A Layne Mortuary.
He says the autopsy results prove that Wilson's actions were unjustified.
'The sheer number of bullets and the way they were scattered all over his body showed this police officer had a brazen disregard for the very people he was supposed to protect in that community,' Mr. Crump said.
'We want to make sure people understand what this case is about: This case is about a police officer executing a young unarmed man in broad daylight.'
Following Brown's death, Ferguson has become a hot-bed of protest, and the Rev Jesse Jackson thinks the latest autopsy results will only lead to more outrage.
'This is bound to escalate tensions,' Rev Jackson told CNN. 'This is a very provocative report.'
Dr Baden consulted with the St Louis County Medical Examiner before performing his autopsy.
Brown's body is expected to undergo a total of three autopsies, with U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder scheduling a rare extra examination by the Justice Department.
The Ferguson Police Department has not commented on the latest autopsy results.
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Blu you are a real jinnal. Where did I say I was more concerned about bizniz than the shooting of Michael Brown?Originally posted by blugiant View Post
You are a smart man Blu, I know you can make your points without having to put words in other peoples mouths. Come betta den dat man.
I was only talking about the looters. So you think if you are not looting, you don't care about wha appen?
You waan tell dat to the poor peeps who nuh cyan work now cause dem workplace mash up?Comment
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The real looting of Ferguson: its black citizens never had a chance to get by
The National Guard rolled in to protect a status quo. But racism set a status quo of inequality long before Michael Brown died
The symptoms of structural racism stain America everywhere, but its execution is particularly perverse in places like Ferguson. It’s not just that black drivers are stopped more often for alleged crimes than white drivers, despite the Missouri attorney general’s report that white people break the law more often. It’s not that Ferguson’s police force is 94% white in a town that’s two-thirds black. It’s not even, as Jeff Smith wrote in Monday’s New York Times, that black people – many unemployed – “do more to fund local government than relatively affluent whites” by way of those stops and the subsequent fines.
The real perversion of justice by way of modern American racism is that black people in Ferguson – like black people in the greater St Louis metropolitan area and nationally – are marginalized economically and physically from day one. That is the real looting of Ferguson.
We are consistently twice as likely to be unemployed – and in and near St Louis, “47 percent of the metro area’s African-American men between ages 16 and 24 are unemployed”. Our men are more likely to be convicted and our women are more likely to be evicted. We are more likely to be victims of predatory loans. Our children are twice as likely to have asthma (even before you teargas them). Our babies are twice as likely to die before the age of one – and their mothers are three or four times more likely to die as a result of bearing them.
In America, as Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in the Atlantic,“White flight was a triumph of social engineering, orchestrated by the shared racist presumptions of America’s public and private sectors.” But that engineering was perfected in St Louis, which Al Jazeera reported “has spent enormous sums of public money to spatially reinforce human segregation patterns”.
In Ferguson this weekend, after echoing other politicians’ calls for residents to stop looting, Rev Jesse Jackson told me:
The real looting is legal looting. People don’t have their fair share of police jobs, fire jobs, accounting work, legal work. That’s looting. The looting by night – should not take place, but neither should the accepted level of legal looting. And that must stop.
The National Guard rolled in to town on Monday, and its presence will essentially protect that legal looting of black people – much as it was protected when Missouri became the last slave state admitted to the union.
But when I hear the founder of the Rainbow Coalition and the first black president of the United States call for a stop to illegal looting that “undermines ... justice”, I wonder: Why do they care? Why should any black person care about the storefronts of Ferguson? Or care about the business life of a community where almost half of young men are locked out of the workforce – and where, if they get a criminal record while unemployed, they will effectively be locked out from employment forever?
It’s not like the “best” stores of Ferguson – the McDonald’s or the Walgreen’s, for instance – provide much more than minimum wage jobs, barely helpful for subsistence living. The dollar stores pedaling cheap goods and unhealthy food that no one needs aren’t much better. And it’s undeniable that the worst of Ferguson’s businesses – the many legal loan sharks who blight its streets – are actively strangling the last breaths from Ferguson’s black residents who are already on the margins.
Will looting solve any of this? No. But will bringing in the National Guard to protect the very loan sharks and fast food restaurants who are exploiting us? Hell no! And let’s face it: fear of these businesses getting destroyed is what’s bringing the troops in, not big-picture concerns about the legal looting of human lives. Racism, looting Missouri since crackers owned slaves, lit Ferguson on fire – not some looter with a firecracker.
Too often, a call for non-violence becomes a blanket excuse to do nothing and maintain the status quo. The National Guard is coming in to maintain the status quo and that is unacceptable – because black Missourians, like most African Americans, were already drowning in the status quo when Mike Brown was still alive.
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sellout varsian
Angela West: Am I “acting white” by asking why black people are looting their own neighborhood?
Written by Angela Graham-West
Would I be “acting white” if I asked why in God’s name are black people looting and destroying their own neighborhood in St. Louis? Would I be a sell-out if I asked why stealing all the tennis shoes from a sporting goods store would make a point for justice for a young man who was killed allegedly by a cop?
Would I be an “Uncle Tom” if I asked why burning a gas station, breaking into at least one convenience store, including a check-cashing store, a boutique, a small grocery store, a sporting goods store, a cellphone retailer, a tire store and a Wal-Mart would make things better? Would I be behaving stupidly when I told you that between 20 to 25 Walmart employees took shelter inside their store Sunday night as rioting and looting ran rampant in the area around them?
Would it be wrong to ask why people carted away goods from several of the stores, even as police moved in? These are stores located ] in this area — often at their own peril. These proprietors — small business owners — often live in the area or darn near close to it. Neighbors stealing from neighbors…shamelessly destroying their neighbor’s property as though they were released from bondage in order to pillage and plunder.
Police were having a difficult time catching the looters because crimes were happening at several locations. And it all started with a peaceful protest.
Thirty-two people were arrested, two officers had minor injuries — one injured a knee, another was struck with a brick — one officer was shot at, but not struck, nearly a dozen patrol cars were damaged, and someone in the crowd fired shots at a police helicopter but did not hit it, according to St. Louis County Police. WHY?
According to First Coast News, “earlier Sunday, Chief Jon Belmar of the St. Louis County Police Department said the incident started when a Ferguson officer encountered two men, one who was Michael Brown, on the street near an apartment complex. One pushed the officer him into his police vehicle.”
“The men had a struggle inside the car, Belmar said, and at some point the man — it was unclear whether it was Brown — reached for the officer’s weapon. One shot was fired inside the vehicle. The fight moved outside the squad car and Brown suffered fatal gunshot wounds about 35 feet from the vehicle, Belmar said. The second person has not been arrested, and police are not sure whether he was armed. Brown was not armed.”
The race of the officer involved in the shooting has not been disclosed. He has been placed on paid administrative leave. It will solve NOTHING TO TEAR DOWN YOUR OWN HOME. But for those who consider themselves to be victims of “Da Man” anything calls for a riot. Any reason suffices to tear down the walls of society and decency. And this is not just limited to the young — from the videos and pictures of the event, grandma, grandpa, mama and daddy were making off with whatever they could get their hands on.
Where did this happen? As Aisha Sultan writes for St. Louis Today, Ferguson, Missouri, a community of 21,000, is an inner-ring suburb, a place where it’s easy for the economic recovery to bypass the poor. It’s a city of 6 square miles, about 10 miles north of downtown. About two-thirds of the residents are African-American. The median income is $37,000, roughly $10,000 less than the state average. Nearly a quarter of residents live below the poverty level, compared with 15 percent statewide. But now it seems that some of these businesses are not looking at reopening in Ferguson — was that the intent of the riots? It is certainly the unintended consequence — or maybe intended — regardless, it is difficult to gain and maintain the “moral high ground” when the shooting of Michael Brown is lost in the visual scenes of the rioting and looting.
It’s part of north St. Louis County, where whites left en masse beginning over the past few decades. In the ’60s, they began rapidly leaving north city, creating one of the most extreme cases of “white flight” in the country. But many who remained in power are still white, including much of the law enforcement. A local lawyer said whenever she goes into courthouses in North County, all the defendants are always black.
It’s not surprising that the black community should be angry and tormented by the tragic death of one of its own. But am I “acting white” if I ask why we destroy our own communities in protest?
This is not the first time.
1980: Miami Riot 1980 – following the acquittal of four Miami-Dade Police officers in the death of Arthur McDuffie. McDuffie, an African-American, died from injuries sustained at the hands of four white officers trying to arrest him after a high-speed chase.
1991: Crown Heights Riot – May – between African Americans and the area’s large Hasidic Jewish community, over the accidental killing of a Guyanese immigrant child by an Orthodox Jewish motorist. In its wake, several Jews were seriously injured; one Orthodox Jewish man, Yankel Rosenbaum, was killed; and a non-Jewish man, allegedly mistaken by rioters for a Jew, was killed by a group of African-American men.
1991: Overtown, Miami – In the heavily black section against Cuban Americans, like earlier riots there in 1982 and 1984.
1992: Los Angeles riots – April 29 to May 5 – a series of riots, lootings, arsons and civil disturbance that occurred in Los Angeles County, California in 1992, following the acquittal of police officers on trial regarding the assault of Rodney King.
1992: Harlem, Manhattan in New York City – July – involved Blacks and Puerto Ricans against the New York Police Department, around the time of the 1992 Democratic National Convention being held there.
1995: St. Petersburg, Florida riot of 1996, caused by protests against racial profiling and police brutality.
2001: Cincinnati Riots – April – in the African-American section of Over-the-Rhine.
2009: Oakland CA, Oscar Grant Murder Riots
So far the race industry leaders Sharpton and Jackson haven’t appeared on the scene, but send some more news crews and sweeten the money pot a little and who knows where they might pop up, because soon we might hear about whose son the unfortunate young man Michael Brown might look like… if he had a son.Comment
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juss cammentinn pon oww oyinbo use racist media fe blame da blakk victims aff institutionalies racismOriginally posted by My Looh View Post
oww does oyinbo media fan da flames aff racism by chattinn bout ann showinn pitchas aff a few blakks woo allegedelee lootinn? memba katrina same argument oyinbo media pushed fe justeefii racism
so yuh nuh tink awl de argument bout lootinn create da climate dat made itt possible fe justeefii da shootinn aff da unarmed blakk yuth widd imm hands inna da air?
da argument dat blakk peeps mashinn upp wey dem live ann wurk iss weak. oww manee aff da bizz inn blakk neighbarhood owned by peeps aff addar races employ blakks?
wen yuh chatt bout lootinn da bout sterotypinn a few blakks fe justeeffii institutional racismComment
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Missouri's Shockingly Ugly Racist Past and Present: Why Ferguson's Inferno Is No Surprise
The state has long spawned and attracted virulent racists.
The past week's unfolding tragedy in Ferguson, Missouri, with its militarized and overwhelmingly white police force confronting angry and hopeless African-Americans, is not a story unique to that place or this moment. Many cities and towns in this country confront the same problems of poverty, alienation and inequality as metropolitan St. Louis -- or even worse.
But beneath the familiar narrative, there is a deeper history that reflects the unfinished agenda of race relations -- and the persistence of poisonous prejudice that has never been fully cleansed from the American mainstream.
For decades, Missouri has spawned or attracted many of the nation's most virulent racists, including neo-Nazis and the remnants of the once-powerful Ku Klux Klan. Associated with violent criminality and crackpot religious extremism, these fringe groups could never wield much influence in the post-civil rights era. Beyond those marginalized outfits, however, exists another white supremacist group whose leaders have long enjoyed the patronage of right-wing Republican politicians.
The Council of Conservative Citizens, headquartered in St. Louis, is a living legacy of Southern "white resistance" to desegregation, with historical roots in the so-called citizens councils that sprang up during the 1950s as a "respectable" adjunct to the Klan. Its website currently proclaims that the CCC is "the only serious nationwide activist group that sticks up for white rights!" What that means, more specifically, is promoting hatred of blacks, Jews, gays and lesbians, and Latino immigrants while extolling the virtues of the "Southern way of life," the Confederacy and even slavery.
The group's website goes on to brag that the CCC is the only group promoting "white rights" whose meetings regularly feature "numerous elected officials, important authors, talk-show hosts, active pastors, and other important people" as speakers.
Although that boast may be exaggerated, it isn't hollow. Founded in 1985 by the ax handle-wielding Georgia segregationist Lester Maddox and a group of white activists, the CCC remained obscure to most Americans until 1998, when media exposure of its ties to prominent congressional Republicans led to the resignation of Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi as majority leader. Six years later, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit group monitoring racist activity in the United States, reported that the CCC had hosted as many as 38 federal, state and local officials at its meetings (all of them Republicans, except one Democrat) -- despite a warning from the Republican National Committee against associating with the hate group.
Over the years, the CCC's friends in high places included such figures as former Sen. John Ashcroft of Missouri, who shared much of the CCC agenda as governor, when he opposed "forced desegregation" of St. Louis schools -- along with the CCC members who served on the city's school board. When President George W. Bush appointed Ashcroft as U.S. attorney general, the CCC openly celebrated, declaring in its newsletter, "Our Ship Has Come In."
Recently, far fewer Republican officials have been willing to associate in public with the CCC's racist leaders. Then again, however, Ashcroft himself tended to meet secretly with those same bigots while outwardly shunning them. When asked about his connections with the group during his confirmation hearings in 2001, he swore that he had no inkling of its racist and anti-Semitic propaganda -- a very implausible excuse, given the CCC's prominence in St. Louis while he served as governor.
Despite the CCC's presence, Missouri is home to many fine and decent people, of course -- but malignant traces of the group and the racial animus it represents have spread far beyond the state's borders. The most obvious example is Rush Limbaugh, the "conservative" cultural phenomenon who grew up south of St. Louis -- in Cape Girardeau, Missouri -- and who has earned a reputation as a racial agitator over many years on talk radio, where he began by doing mocking bits in "black" dialect.
In 1998, the talk jock defended Lott when other conservatives were demanding his resignation over the politician's CCC connection. Today Limbaugh echoes the CCC line on the Michael Brown killing in Ferguson, which suggests coldly that the unarmed teenager deserved his fate because he may have been a suspect in shoplifting or smoked marijuana. Why would a young man's life be worth less than a box of cigars? Back in Rush's home state, the answer is all too obvious.
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Woman Behind Powerful Mike Brown Protest Photo Defies 'Respectability Politics'
France Francois was concerned her sign might be misperceived, but she held it up anyway because she had a right to her anger.
When France Francois (pictured) held up her sign last week at a vigil in Washington, D.C. she had no idea it would resonate with so many people on social media.
Her sign read, "I CANNOT BELIEVE I STILL HAVE TO PROTEST THIS ****!! #toomanynames #ferguson #dontshoot #mikebrown."
So far, one version of the photo has been retweeted more than 3,600 times and has more than 3,500 favors on Twitter.
Francois, 28, told AlterNet she's surprised that her photo resonates with so many people online, but doesn't want it to divert attention from Mike Brown and the reason she attended the National Movement Of Silence 2014 gathering: to mourn the deaths of black people who have died at the hands of law enforcement.
"I'm glad it sparked some conversation because I think, throughout the nation, we're all asking ourselves this question," she said. 'How did we come here again? How did we find ourselves in this very same space?'"
Francois said the sentiment behind the sign comes from her days as a student at Florida State University when she protested the death of Martin Lee Anderson, a 14-year-old who died after being beaten by boot camp personnel. After months of silence from authorities over his death, Francois, along with other students from Tallahassee Community College, Florida A&M University and Florida State University staged a 34-hour sit-in at then-governor Jeb Bush's office in Tallahassee.
She took to Twitter to explain her feelings further: "A feeling of rage and powerlessness gripped us in Tallahassee, and students and citizens marched into the streets, and sat down. We shut down the busiest street in Tallahassee with dozens of students linking hands and forming a circle. The police came and the black police chief soon followed. He said to me, 'I understand how you guys feel. I'm going to LET YOU do this.' He didn't realize we were ready then for whatever they had planned; we'd been preparing for jail, dogs, anything for over a year. He could not have stopped our civil disobedience even if he had tried."
After making her sign, Francois wasn't sure it would be appropriate to take it to the gathering. For one, her sign had a curse word in it and she was concerned it would be perceived as "rage." Unrest was also brewing in Ferguson and she knew the spirit of #NMOS14 was suppose to be a space where people unite in peace; she didn't want her sign to hijack that tone.
But after some thought, Francois felt the sign epitomized her feelings and fit in with the spirit of the gathering.
"For me, it goes back to the idea that we're not allowed to feel these sentiments," she said. "We always have to be stoic. We always have to make certain people comfortable and I really didn't want to make anyone comfortable at that time. I felt angry. I felt fearful for my young brother and my younger cousin. And I currently feel fearful for the son I might have and I wasn't trying to make people feel comfortable because I don't feel like this is a moment where we should feel comfortable. We should be questioning the fact that this continues to happen and I wanted that to be expressed."
While holding her sign in Malcolm X Park, an elderly woman, who said she was a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, approached Francois. The woman told her she has been protesting the same kind of injustice that took Mike Brown's life for 70 years. She vividly remembers police dog attacks and the freedom rides.
"It was both humbling and troubling at the same time," Francois said, "because how far have we come? Really, as a nation, how far have we come?"
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Holder Walks Tightrope in Ferguson; Grand Jury Weighs Indictment
Just as the St. Louis County grand jury begins hearing evidence on whether police officer Darren Wilson should be charged in the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown, Attorney General Eric Holder traveled to Ferguson with the nearly impossible task of assuring local African-Americans that he is on their side—while at the same time presiding over an investigation in which he wants to show that he hasn’t taken sides.
Along with dispatches on the visit of the nation’s top law enforcement official, media reports have focused on alleged witness accounts that sound closer to Wilson’s version of events—namely, that Brown was more of an aggressor during the conflict than earlier witness accounts related.
Some witnesses say that Brown moved toward Wilson, possibly in a threatening manner, when the officer shot him dead, according to the New York Times. But other witnesses say Brown was immobile, with his hands up.
One of the main witnesses, Brown’s friend Dorian Johnson, was interviewed by the FBI and the St. Louis County police last week for nearly four hours, according to his lawyer, Freeman R. Bosley Jr., who was the first African-American mayor of St. Louis, serving from 1993 to 1997. Bosley said Johnson admitted during the interview that he and Brown had stolen cigarillos from the store, according to the Times.
As for the altercation that led to Brown’s death, Bosley said that after Wilson told the two to get off the street, they told him they lived nearby and got into a verbal dispute with Wilson about whether walking in the street constituted a crime. Bosley said Wilson then reached out of the window with his left hand and grabbed Brown by the throat. When Brown pushed him off, the officer grabbed Brown’s shirt.
“My client sees the officer pull a gun and hears him say, ‘I’ll shoot you’ — then ‘pow!’ there was a shot,” Bosley said, referring to the one that apparently went off in the car. “He did not describe a scuffle. It was more of a scuffle for him to get away.”
Asked if Brown had ever punched Wilson, Bosley said that Johnson “did not observe that.”
It will be up to a grand jury to decide whether the accounts indicate that Wilson should be charged with murder. With such conflicting evidence, a grand jury might be likely to indict Wilson and let his fate be determined through a trial.
In addition to the question of what happened to Brown, the Justice Department might want to open a broader civil rights investigation to look at Ferguson’s police practices—something the Times said Holder has done in nearly two dozen such investigations into police departments. Justice Department data indicates that is more than twice as many as were opened in the previous five years.
Brown’s family has scheduled his funeral for Monday—a service that is bound to draw significant attention and emotion.
In advance of his visit to Ferguson, Holder wrote an open letter to the citizens of St. Louis that was published in the local St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
“At a time when so much may seem uncertain, the people of Ferguson can have confidence that the Justice Department intends to learn — in a fair and thorough manner — exactly what happened,” Holder wrote. “We understand the need for an independent investigation, and we hope that the independence and thoroughness of our investigation will bring some measure of calm to the tensions in Ferguson. In order to begin the healing process, however, we must first see an end to the acts of violence in the streets of Ferguson…Law enforcement has a role to play in reducing tensions, as well. As the brother of a retired law enforcement officer, I know firsthand that our men and women in uniform perform their duties in the face of tremendous threats and significant personal risk. They put their lives on the line every day, and they often have to make split-second decisions.”
“At the same time, good law enforcement requires forging bonds of trust between the police and the public,” he continued. “This trust is all-important, but it is also fragile. It requires that force be used in appropriate ways. Enforcement priorities and arrest patterns must not lead to disparate treatment under the law, even if such treatment is unintended. And police forces should reflect the diversity of the communities they serve.”
Clearly, Holder has put local authorities on notice that the federal government is watching closely and expects better of them than what they have demonstrated.
“It’s a powerful message,” William Yeomans, a law school fellow at American University who worked in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division for more than two decades, told The Associated Press. “He’s the embodiment of law enforcement, and the positive contribution he can make here is to assure the community that the federal government is taking very seriously the quest for justice in this incident.”
“This is my pledge to the people of Ferguson: Our investigation into this matter will be full, it will be fair, and it will be independent,” Holder said at the end of his letter. “And beyond the investigation itself, we will work with the police, civil rights leaders, and members of the public to ensure that this tragedy can give rise to new understanding — and robust action — aimed at bridging persistent gaps between law enforcement officials and the communities we serve. Long after the events of Aug. 9 have receded from the headlines, the Justice Department will continue to stand with this community.
“As we move forward together, I ask for the public’s cooperation and patience. And I urge anyone with information related to the shooting to contact the FBI by dialing 800-CALL-FBI, option 4.”
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