Faith kills » « Congratulations to Danielle Muscato

Later this morning in America

People still want to discuss the ongoing ghastliness in Ferguson, MO, but the thread dedicated to that in Good Morning, America is getting old…and as a spam defensive measure, commenting on posts older than three months is automatically shut down. No exceptions allowed.

So here’s a fresh new post to accumulate comments!

Faith kills » « Congratulations to Danielle Muscato

Comments

  5. says

    The Ferguson cops seem to have the worst attitude I’ve ever seen. I can only assume they’re going ape-shit because people are actually standing up to them…

  7. rq says

    (Yes, before I continue, thank you, PZ! Panic nearly ensued a few moments ago. :) )

    More on the die-in: Protesters Stage A “Die-In” To Mark 100 Days Since Michael Brown’s Death In Ferguson (Buzzfeed), and Ferguson Protests a “Mass Die In” (youtube video of livestream, it’s long – about an hour!).

    Okay, I’ve been debating whether to put this up, but I’m going to – it’s an audio recording of (suppsoedly) Chief Belmar calling the KKK all kinds of names. *shrug* Just putting it out there.
    Speaking of the KKK, KKK Threatens ‘Lethal Force’ Against Ferguson Protesters And Appears on TV To Explain Why. More or less a recap of the links in previous thread.

    Following Ancona’s appearance on All In, Hayes reportedly received criticism from viewers who spoke out against the host for allowing Ancona a platform to share his controversial views.

    The constant and critical responses of the segment prompted Hayes to address viewer concerns in a separate video following the close of the show.

    “I still think it was the right call, in fact I may even feel that *more* strongly than I did last night. That said, I 100% understand why some people don’t see it that way. We debated and wrestled with whether or not to do it and weighed the pros and cons and ultimately decided there was real news/journalistic value in putting him on,” Hayes said.

    “We wouldn’t have booked him to give us “his take” or “weigh in” on what’s going in Ferguson or some other story. We interviewed him because he was actually the person distributing those fliers.”

    Via ABC News, video: Ferguson Back on the Brink?

    As anticipation swirls in Ferguson, MO over whether a grand jury will indict officer Darren Wilson, ABC News’ Pierre Thomas and St. Louis Alderman Antonio French discuss wider trends

    Navy Veteran Fired from Drury Plaza Hotel for Posting Photos of Homeland Security Vehicles on Facebook

    On Friday, shortly after arriving to work at the Drury Plaza Hotel, Mark stated that he was called to the office of Jeff Baker, the General Manager. Upon arriving Mr. Baker advised Mark that he needed to remove the photos and video from Facebook. Mark immediately complied and removed the post. Mark then continued and finished his shift.

    Saturday, Mark stated after being at work no more than 30 minutes, he was again called to the General Manager’s office. Waiting for him was Jim Bohnert, Director of Security for Drury Hotels Company, LLC. Mark told ASN that Mr. Bohnert advised him that his Facebook posts almost cost the company a $150,000 contract with the Department of Homeland Security and because of this he was being terminated.

    Pretty soon, the police will also be suing and having people fired for taking pictures of their vehicles, militarized or not.

  10. rq says

    K.R.
    It’s not a verdict. It’s a possible indictment – or, more specifically, a recommendation to indict. Not even close to a verdict, as that just means he’d be charged under the law and going to trial. Either way, nobody’s particularly hopeful.

    +++

    Two more on the die-in:
    Via Popular Resistance, Michael Brown Protesters Stage ‘Die-In’ In St. Louis and CBS, ‘Die In’ Protest Held on Delmar Loop.

    Re: the hopelessness of an indictment, Ferguson braces for prospect of no indictment in Michael Brown shooting case (+video):

    At long last, virtually all Ferguson residents – black and white, young and old, rich and poor – have come to agree on something: Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown this August, will not be indicted.

    That consensus – remarkable in a town that was split on whether it even had any racial tension — can be seen in preparations that seem better suited for an impending war: boarded-up stores, daily non-violent training sessions across town, law enforcement agencies stockpiling riot gear and tear gas, and a governor who has said the National Guard will be on standby. […]

    “It’s going to be chaos,” said Mike Jacob, a clerk at Sam’s Meat Market and More on West Florissant Avenue, a major thoroughfare where protests took place nightly and several stores were looted in the weeks after Brown’s death. At Sam’s, they earned their skepticism the hard way: The store was ransacked twice during riots in August. […]

    “Sales are off the charts,” said Steven King, a white owner of Metro Shooting Supplies in Bridgeton, a mostly white suburb about 10 miles from Ferguson. He held up a stack of about 100 new applications for the federal background check needed to buy a weapon. “People are in fear of their lives. They’re just scared to death. The rumors are that every single area is a threat.” […]

    In any case, as I warned in the weeks after the Brown shooting when the protests were still very much in the news, the probability of an indictment, much less a conviction if charges are brought, is far from a slam dunk. Now that the day when we’ll learn whether there will even be charges against Officer Wilson seems to be very close, how the authorities handle any such announcement, and how the public reacts to that announcement, will be very interesting to watch unfold.

    And more on the same, from the NY Times, In Ferguson, Tactics Set for Grand Jury Decision in Michael Brown Case:

    Since August, a disparate array of demonstrators — some from longstanding organizations, others from new groups with names like Hands Up United and Lost Voices — has been drawn here to protest not just the shooting of Mr. Brown, but also the broader issues of racial profiling and police conduct.

    Now, with the grand jury’s decision expected in the coming days, the groups are preparing with intricate precision to protest the no-indictment vote most consider inevitable. Organizers are outlining “rules of engagement” for dealing with the police, circulating long lists of equipment, including bandages and shatterproof goggles, and establishing “safe spaces” where protesters can escape the cold — or the tear gas. […]

    Montague Simmons, a leader of the Organization for Black Struggle, said there was a growing circle of demonstrators with “a clear message about what we are about and what kind of behavior we are looking for.” Yet beyond their carefully orchestrated plans for a series of shows of protest and civil disobedience, leaders here acknowledge that there are disagreements about what form of response is fitting and whether militant acts might spill over into violence.

    At least one group has said on Twitter that it was offering a reward for information on the whereabouts of the officer, Darren Wilson, and, at another point, that it was “restocking on 7.62 & 9 mm ammo.” Law enforcement authorities said they would not discuss individual groups, but that they were “constantly looking,” at several groups, according to Brian Schellman of the St. Louis County Police, “trying to separate the rhetoric from the actual threats.” […]

    In dozens of training meetings like the one held at the church here on Thursday, demonstrators have been given lists of items to keep at the ready for when a decision is announced: gloves, maps, protest team names and phone numbers, medical supplies and a “jail support number,” in case of arrest, to be written in permanent marker on a protester’s arm. Leaders have shared text alert numbers to keep in constant contact.

    They have announced safe spaces in area churches where leaders say protesters can warm up and stay clear of the police, as well as “hot spots,” locations around Ferguson where demonstrations seem likely. In another indication of the level of planning going on, some leaders say they intend to carry out their acts of protest even if the grand jury brings charges against Officer Wilson to show that the issues raised by this case reach beyond a single shooting. One more sign of the elaborate organizing: the group Hands Up United has produced its own polished video. […]

    Organizers declined to provide details of their new plans, but they pointed to the “Weekend of Resistance” in October as a model. The acts of civil disobedience throughout the region that weekend included protesters stepping into a police line to be arrested outside the Ferguson police station and unfurling banners inside St. Louis City Hall. In another hint at what may be ahead, protesters on Sunday held a “die-in” that stopped traffic on a local street while they lay in the snowy road as their bodies were outlined in chalk. [..]

    But leaders say that is the nature of a movement that has taken place, in part, on social media and that does not match an earlier-era protest structure where a single, outspoken leader might have led the way. “This is not your momma’s civil rights movement,” said Ashley Yates, a leader of Millennial Activists United. “This is a movement where you have several different voices, different people. The person in charge is really — the people. But the message from everyone is the same: Stop killing us.” […]

    “It must be changing how police and citizens relate to one another,” said Michael T. McPhearson, the co-chairman of the Don’t Shoot Coalition. “We’re calling for police accountability, police transparency, changing how the police do their work. If there’s an indictment or if there’s not an indictment, we still have that work to do.”

    And even if no indictment, Beyond the Indictments: Black and Brown Deaths at the Hands of Police Are a Crisis Boiling Over:

    Without accountability, there can be no rule of law. If Wilson is not indicted, or is under-indicted, the clear message is that it is open season on people of color, that St. Louis has declared that Darren Wilson is not a criminal but that the people who live under the thumbs of the Darren Wilsons of this country are. It would say to the cry that “Black lives matter” that, no, in fact, they do not.

    But even if Wilson is indicted on a serious charge, then tried, and convicted (a lot of ifs — who remembers Rodney King?), accountability for this crime is but a first step in addressing the problems Brown’s killing highlighted. And that is because, as many others have pointed out already, the problem is structural, systemic, institutionalized racism. It is not one rogue cop; or one rogue police department, even if it took an order from the U.S. Justice Department to bar Ferguson police from wearing “I am Darren Wilson” bracelets.

    The problem is that police violence against people of color isn’t an aberration. Nationally, the data confirm what every person of color in America knows: Black teenagers are 21 times more likely to be shot dead by police than white. The methods of killing are broadening, from chokeholds to Tasers, and the apparatus of violence is widening, too — think of Troy Davis and Trayvon Martin, in addition to those killed by uniformed agents of the law. The national police killing epidemic rests comfortably on a pedestal of racially discriminatory police practices, including stop-and-frisk and “broken windows” tactics by local cops that traumatize millions of young men and sweep hundreds of thousands of them into the criminal justice system for offenses no more serious than having a loose joint. Bias in sentencing treats white offenders more leniently than people of color. The result is the mass incarceration of African Americans, and the legalized forms of discrimination that follow, from the denial of the right to vote, housing discrimination, ineligibility for government benefits and more. Last, the militarization of local police forces is also a systemic problem; it encourages law enforcement to act like storm troopers, not public servants, and contributes to both violence and violations of constitutional rights.

    To address these problems we need more than one indictment of one police officer. We need a visionary shift in the way we think about police and black and brown communities. We must de-naturalize the police practices that criminalize entire communities at the same time that we recognize that police officers can and do commit criminal acts that are widely considered to be “just doing their jobs.” Above all, in order to address systemic racism and make lasting change, we need empowered communities of color. Communities who can demand transparency and accountability from police forces and elected officials. Communities who can fight for community-based policing and who have the resources — as we did in New York City — to sue police departments for racially discriminatory practices. Communities who have a real voice in city halls, state capitals and Washington to demand an end to everything from minimum sentencing laws to military hardware yard sales that allow local cops to play dress-up while deploying ever more lethal weapons and militarizing our rights out of existence. In a word, communities of color need the democratic right to participate in government.

    More in a moment.

  13. rq says

    K.R.
    No worries, but that’s the thing with this whole thing: it’s not even a verdict, it’s just a decision whether to even charge Darren Wilson at all – whether to call him responsible for the death of Michael Brown, in other words.
    Sick.

    +++

    Okay, seriously, more later, but this just can’t wait: Ferguson police officer raped woman in jail, lawsuit alleges. The Ferguson PD has a whole. list. of. issues that need to be resolved before anything else can move forward. Meanwhile, all otehr PDs in the country should look to themselves. Anyway,

    A pregnant woman says she was raped in jail by a Ferguson police officer last year, according to a federal lawsuit filed Friday against the city and the officer, Jaris Hayden.

    Hayden now faces four felony charges, including sexual contact with a prisoner and acceding to corruption by a public servant.

    TW for the article, for explicit description of rape.

  14. rq says

    Mmkay, other stuff, and I’ll finish up with some more photos of today’s protesting in Clayton.

    Five ugly and uncanny parallels between lynchings and police killings in America:

    1. The universal agreement is that the number of lynchings and police murders have both been seriously underreported.
    […]
    2. The excuses given to justify lynchings and police killings are tragically bad.
    […]

    3. The lynchings and police killings of African Americans are outrageously brutal and excessive.
    […]

    4. Few instances in history exist where people are held truly liable for lynchings or police killings.
    […]

    5. The character of the men and women who were lynched by mobs or killed by police is assassinated as a sick form of justification for the killing.

    Lots of detailed info beneath each point in the article, please read.

    On August 9, Darren Wilson goes to hospital and comes back (youtube video). See if you can spot any injuries.

    Police misconduct, though, ain’t just a Ferguson problem: Lollie Sues Cops, City For St. Paul Skyway Arrest.

    Lollie was being questioned, and then confronted, by three St. Paul police officers in a downtown St. Paul skyway when things went from bad to worse.

    “It’s stressful, but I’m glad there’s a light being shined on the situation,” said Lollie from his attorney’s law office.

    Lollie was waiting to meet his children at a nearby daycare in what he thought was a public area of the First National Bank building.

    Security officers there asked him to leave and Lollie, who is African-American, refused when he spotted other non-minorities in the same area. […]

    Lollie’s attorney, Paul Applebaum, said, “The situation went downhill from there as other officers were called in to respond.”

    Those other two officers, Michael Johnson and Bruce Schmidt, arrived and pushed Lollie up against a skyway wall.

    While Lollie complied with officers, he continued to exclaim he had done nothing wrong.

    Soon after, he was struck with the electric probes of an officer’s Taser gun.

    According to his civil lawsuit, Lollie suffered “bruising, burns and lacerations and has endured humiliation and emotional distress.”

    Applebaum, his attorney, said Lollie was doing nothing wrong, and didn’t resist police.

    “You can’t stop citizens who aren’t breaking the law and doing nothing suspicious and ask them to explain themselves,” he said. You can’t “ask for their identification and ask where they came from and where they are going.”

    Lollie said the experience has left his children fearful of police.

    Cleveland woman with mental illness died after police used takedown move, brother says:

    The official police account of what happened next is at odds with what several members of Tanesha Anderson’s family said they witnessed.

    “As the officers escorted Anderson to the police vehicle, she began actively resisting the officers,” police spokesman Sgt. Ali Pillow said in a press release.

    Officers placed her in handcuffs and she began to resist officers’ attempts to put her in a squad car, Pillow said.

    “The woman began to kick at officers,” he said. “A short time later the woman stopped struggling and appeared to go limp. Officers found a faint pulse on the victim and immediately called EMS.”

    Joell Anderson gave a different account.

    “She was more of a danger to herself than others,” he said.

    Two male officers escorted Tanesha Anderson, who was prescribed medication for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, to the police cruiser. She sat herself in the backseat but became nervous about the confined space and tried to get out, Anderson said.

    Police struggled to keep her in the car and an officer eventually drew a Taser. Joell Anderson said he begged the officer not to use the weapon on his sister.

    Tanesha Anderson called out for her brother and mother while an officer repeatedly pressed down on her head to get her into the backseat. After several attempts, the officer used a takedown move to force her to the pavement, Joell Anderson said.

    The officer placed his knee on Tanesha Anderson’s back and handcuffed her. She never opened her eyes or spoke another word, her brother said.

    Joell Anderson asked officers to help his unconscious sister. They refused to touch the East High School graduate until a female officer called to the scene arrived, Joell Anderson said.

    His sister’s sundress was lifted above her waist when the officer took her down. Joell Anderson used his jacket to cover her naked lower body.

    The Anderson family watched Tanesha Anderson lie on the ground for about 20 minutes until an ambulance arrived, Joell Anderson said. The medical examiner has not determined what killed the woman.

  15. rq says

    #STL City Aldermanic Black Caucus urges Mayor Slay and Chief Dotson to support proposed rules of engagement:, twitter hpoto of document within.

    Ah, and in case we were wondering, There’s No Conspiracy in Ferguson’s Secret Jury. Doesn’t need to be a conspiracy to have systemic racism rear its ugly, ugly head, though.

    Those who claim a problem with the grand jury process can squarely place the blame on George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and the other Founders responsible for placing it in the Bill of Rights. In fact, it was one of the least controversial parts of the Constitution garnering virtually unanimous support at the Constitutional Convention. All agreed that panels of ordinary citizens should investigate and screen all serious federal criminal cases as a protection against overly aggressive prosecutors. Eventually, all 50 American states would embrace some form of the federal grand jury concept though employing the panels less frequently than the feds.

    The grand jury’s strict secrecy rules were designed to encourage all witnesses with knowledge to testify openly and honestly without fear of ridicule or community scorn. The proceeding is not intended to be a public spectacle or even a much-needed forum to expose the often unfair treatment of black youth by the police. Court cases are flawed devices to sort out and solve such important social problems. The grand jury’s only duty is to sift the evidence to find the truth about the tragic encounter between Officer Darren Wilson and Michael Brown. If the evidence provides reasonable cause to believe a crime was committed, the grand jurors’ oath requires a vote to indict.

    On the other hand, if Officer Wilson is found to have acted lawfully in his use of deadly force, then he deserves a dismissal and the right to salvage whatever scraps of a normal life will be left for him when the case is over. Only the facts of this case are relevant. The grand jury is not charged with resolving the issue of police brutality or even sending a message about it. [ummm I would argue with that last point, actually]

    Though the grand jury is an imperfect forum for resolving social issues, it works very well in finding truth. Having presented many cases to the grand jury myself, I know that testing the claimed observations of a witness under oath often results in a very different and more accurate recitation of facts than statements made in public in the heated aftermath of a serious crime.

    In a high-profile matter like the Brown case, the prospect of a witness getting his or her name and image in the newspaper or on TV by embellishing the story is for some an irresistible temptation. Repeating an embellished story before a grand jury while under oath is an entirely different matter. The grand jury inquiry affords opportunity to test accuracy of witness accounts. If the witness did in fact witness such a terrible crime, the testimony will survive in the crucible of cross-examination. If true, it will have a discernable consistency with the forensic evidence. [right now, I have suspicions about the author’s competency to write on this subject]

    Had the St. Louis prosecutor proceeded by summary arrest and a probable cause hearing before a single judge, the resulting judicial decision, whether ordering dismissal or a murder trial, would undoubtedly have been subjected to criticism based upon the race or reputation of the judge. The necessarily streamlined presentation of evidence at a probable cause hearing would leave the public dissatisfied with the fairness of the process.

    In this case, the Founders had the right idea. A panel of citizens will decide the fate of Officer Wilson rather than law-enforcement professionals or a lone judge. The citizenry authorize police officers to strap on a weapon every working day and travel in harm’s way to protect the public and enforce the law. When it’s time to indict an officer for abuse of this sacred trust, the citizens of the grand jury should make this sensitive decision. Ethical prosecutors maintain a neutral stance in such important cases making sure that the grand jury gets the evidence and law it requires to do justice. The public should keep faith in a system that isn’t perfect but seems to work better than any other. [bolding mine]

    Oh ye gods, I was right. This person does not understand the concept of systemic racism and how that can influence the minds of ordinary citizens, how it can colour opinion and decisions, and… Wow. Just trust the system, youse guyse, it’s totally trustworthy because it’s humands running the show and we all know humands are completley unfallingable.

    TW for graphic images of lynching. Also, Anonymous isn’t just taking over KKK twitter accounts, it is also Anonymous is doxing KKK members (and I’m OK with it) [that last bit is the headline, not my opinion necessarily]:

    But Anonymous didn’t stop there. The nebulous organization also released personally identifying information, including addresses and phone numbers, of prominent members of the Traditionalist American Knights of the Klu Klux Klan, based in Missouri. The “cyberwarfare” threatened by Anonymous rapidly unfolded in real time. Coordinated attacks targeted content uploaded by the Traditionalist American Knights and its members, while various KKK supporters in turn threatened Anonymous.

    On vimeo, Ferguson Speaks: A Communique From Ferguson:

    #FergusonSpeaks

    As law enforcement officials and national media gear up for a St Louis County Grand Jury’s announcement as to whether it will levy charges against Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson for the August 9th shooting of Michael Brown Jr., activists have issued a 9 minute video communiqué providing an intimate look at the climate on the ground.

    The video communiqué displays a cross section of the myriad groups activated in the region and includes exclusive footage of Vonderrit Meyers Sr., Ferguson Mayor James Knowles III, celebrated artist and HandsUpUnited.org cofounder Tef Poe, Taurean Russell, Lost Voices organizer Low Key, Millennial Activists United co-creator Ashley Yates, activist and Grey’s Anatomy star Jesse Williams, Damon Davis — a volunteer with The Don’t Shoot Coalition, Canfield Watchmen founder David Whitt, as well as local Ferguson business managers.

    Viewers are encouraged to tweet, share, and embed the video using the accompanying hashtag #FergusonSpeaks —extended raw clips of each of the video’s subjects are available upon request.

    handsupunited.org

    Oh, missed this one on misbehaving cops: Is Texas Getting Ready to Kill An Innocent Man? It’s about as bad as it sounds. Woman gets into fight with her fiance, police arrive, take her fiance away, and then promise to take her to him, as she is upset and crying.

    But that’s not where they went. Instead, Fennell pulled into a well-lit public recreation area. They got out, and Fennell slammed Lear up against the back of his squad car and held her down. He took off his duty belt and laid it on the trunk, calmly pointing out each of the weapons and tools he carried with him. “Then he took his gun, removed it…[and] laid it on the trunk against my head,” she said. “And he raped me.”

    When he was finished, Fennell made a threat: if she ever dared to report what happened, and if he ever went to prison for it, when he got out he would hunt her down and kill her. He then drove Lear back to the apartment complex where he gave her his business card and said he would be back to see her again — the next evening, in fact, after his kid’s soccer game. […]

    Despite his attempt to cover up his crime, Fennell was eventually arrested and ultimately pleaded guilty to kidnapping and improper sexual contact with a person in custody. He received a ten-year sentence and is currently slated for release in September 2018. Lear also filed a civil suit against Fennell and the City of Georgetown, which was settled for $100,000. But for her, the story doesn’t end there. Fennell’s arrest prompted several other women to come forward alleging similar threats and assaults, including one additional rape. These episodes had either never been reported or else were swept under the rug by local law enforcement. Together these incidents revealed a portrait of Fennell as a dangerous man who abused his police credentials with impunity. […]

    Eleven years before he raped and threatened to kill Lear, Fennell’s own fiancee, 19-year-old Stacy Stites, was found brutally murdered along a country road in Bastrop, Texas. That crime eventually sent a man to death row. His name is Rodney Reed—and he is scheduled to die in January. Lear, like many people who have followed the case in Texas —believe that Reed is innocent. And they believe that the real killer is Jimmy Fennell.

    Connie Lear is not alone in coming forward now that an execution date has been set. Nearly a dozen people related to Stites, many of whom have had doubts about the case for years, are breaking their own silence, calling for Reed’s life to be spared. One is Stites’ cousin, Judy Mitchell, who is convinced Fennell is the real killer. “I just know he did [it],” she told The Intercept. “We’ve got to do something to stop this execution.” […]

    Fennell could not prove his whereabouts in the early morning hours of April 23. Detectives administered two separate polygraph tests and Fennell’s responses were shown to be deceptive in both — including when asked directly if he had strangled Stites. Yet the investigators— including detectives from a department neighboring his own — ultimately dismissed their fellow cop as a suspect and the crime went unsolved for almost a year.

    But their attention eventually turned to a 29-year-old black man named Rodney Reed. Reed had been accused of a number of sexual assaults; he was tried in one case but ultimately acquitted. On a hunch, in April 1997, police compared DNA from semen found inside Stites with DNA collected from an unrelated case in which Reed had been accused of assaulting a woman. It was a match. [… and of course, DNA is an infallible method of linking not just people to people, but specific people to a specific crime!!]

    Save for the bartender and a Reed family friend, none of Reed’s witnesses were called to testify for the defense. One of his court-appointed lawyers later said that was done deliberately, in order to avoid tough cross-examinations that might bring out their bias or other complications — like individual run-ins with the law.

    Among those who were willing to testify was a cousin of Reed’s named Chris Aldridge. Not only had Aldridge seen Reed and Stites together, he also provided Reed with an alibi for the early morning hours of April 23. The pair was hanging outside in a lot next door to Reed’s family’s house until almost 5 a.m. that day, Aldridge said in a 2000 affidavit, and later walked to work together. Aldridge also said that Jimmy Fennell had discovered the affair between Reed and his fiancee. In another affidavit from 1999, he recounted an occasion early in 1996 when he and Reed were stopped by a Bastrop County Sheriff’s Office patrol car while walking down the street. Inside the car were two men, one of whom was a plain-clothed Fennell. “[O]fficer Fennel[l] told Rodney that he knew about him and Sticys [sic] and that Rodney was going to pay,” Aldridge recalled. That account was corroborated by another man, James Robertson, who said in a 2000 affidavit that he ran into Aldridge and Reed that same day and that they related details of the encounter to him. “Jimmy Fennell…had stopped with another officer and threatened Rodney,” Robertson recalled, “stateing [sic] that he knew of Rodney’s and Stacey’s relationship, and that Rodney would, in some way, pay.” At trial, Fennell denied knowing Reed prior to Stites’ murder. […]

    That Reed’s defense attorneys would fail to mount a robust challenge to the state’s case should have come as no surprise. His court-appointed lawyers had repeatedly told the trial judge that they were not ready for trial by the time jury selection began in late March 1998. Indeed, billing records reflect that neither of Reed’s attorneys spent more than 40 hours working on the case until roughly a week before jury selection began. Nonetheless, the judge denied their requests for continuance.

    After a two-week trial, the jury, which included no black members, convicted Reed.

    And he got the death penalty, while the officer shows himself to be no angel (wording used deliberately):

    Investigators have countered that it was simply implausible for Fennell to have traveled the roughly 22 miles from Giddings to the site where Stites’ body was dumped, then driven another 10 miles to the Bastrop High School where the truck was abandoned — it was first spotted around 5:30 a.m. by a Bastrop cop who had already driven by the parking lot earlier in the morning as part of his routine patrol of the area — and then walked 30 miles back to Giddings in time to answer the 6:45 a.m. call from Carol reporting that Stites was missing. “Logistically speaking,” lead police investigator Lynn “Rocky” Wardlow concluded, “it was not possible.”

    For the last 18 years,
    Reed has maintained his innocence.

    But it was Wardlow who made the decision not to search for evidence at the home of Fennell and Stites, despite the fact that it was the last place she was supposedly seen alive. This was just one questionable decision amid myriad other problems with the investigation he led. Indeed, Reed’s defenders have long questioned the state’s processing of the crime scene, charging not only that analysts mishandled and potentially contaminated evidence, but also that the state withheld scientific evidence that did not support its theory of the crime.

    In particular, two empty beer cans that were recovered near Stites’ body and examined for DNA revealed a potential match on one to Giddings Police Officer David Hall—a colleague, good friend, and neighbor of Fennell’s. But that information, contained in a Texas Department of Public Safety report dated May 13, 1998—in the middle of Reed’s trial—was never disclosed to Reed’s defense. (At a 2001 hearing regarding the beer can evidence, Hall denied having anything to do with Stites’ death.)

    For years, Reed’s defenders pointed to the beer cans as evidence that other officers were complicit in or else helped cover up the real story behind Stites’ murder. Police and court records reviewed by The Intercept reveal that Fennell has a long history of alleged sexual misconduct and violence while on the job, and that the behavior was at times aided by other officers—either directly, as in the case of Connie Lear, or by omission, with complaints seemingly ignored or summarily dismissed. At least three alleged incidents of misconduct occurred before Reed was even tried. In one case, a woman named Wendy Wallace alleged that she had been followed around Giddings by Fennell and later received a bizarre late-night request from a police dispatcher that she step outside of her home to meet with Fennell’s friend and colleague, Hall.

    And there’s more at the article. And graphic images, so TW for the violence. Nasty piece of work, Fennell.

    Okay, and for something mildly more cheerful, protestors are protesting with a ‘freak show of injustice’ protest in Clayton right now, complete with costumes and crazy signs: photo 1, photo 2, photo 3. More…

  16. rq says

    Argh, previous in moderation for too many links, plus a borkquote, so here it is in pieces:
    #STL City Aldermanic Black Caucus urges Mayor Slay and Chief Dotson to support proposed rules of engagement:, twitter hpoto of document within.

    Ah, and in case we were wondering, There’s No Conspiracy in Ferguson’s Secret Jury. Doesn’t need to be a conspiracy to have systemic racism rear its ugly, ugly head, though.

    Those who claim a problem with the grand jury process can squarely place the blame on George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and the other Founders responsible for placing it in the Bill of Rights. In fact, it was one of the least controversial parts of the Constitution garnering virtually unanimous support at the Constitutional Convention. All agreed that panels of ordinary citizens should investigate and screen all serious federal criminal cases as a protection against overly aggressive prosecutors. Eventually, all 50 American states would embrace some form of the federal grand jury concept though employing the panels less frequently than the feds.

    The grand jury’s strict secrecy rules were designed to encourage all witnesses with knowledge to testify openly and honestly without fear of ridicule or community scorn. The proceeding is not intended to be a public spectacle or even a much-needed forum to expose the often unfair treatment of black youth by the police. Court cases are flawed devices to sort out and solve such important social problems. The grand jury’s only duty is to sift the evidence to find the truth about the tragic encounter between Officer Darren Wilson and Michael Brown. If the evidence provides reasonable cause to believe a crime was committed, the grand jurors’ oath requires a vote to indict.

    On the other hand, if Officer Wilson is found to have acted lawfully in his use of deadly force, then he deserves a dismissal and the right to salvage whatever scraps of a normal life will be left for him when the case is over. Only the facts of this case are relevant. The grand jury is not charged with resolving the issue of police brutality or even sending a message about it. [ummm I would argue with that last point, actually]

    Though the grand jury is an imperfect forum for resolving social issues, it works very well in finding truth. Having presented many cases to the grand jury myself, I know that testing the claimed observations of a witness under oath often results in a very different and more accurate recitation of facts than statements made in public in the heated aftermath of a serious crime.

    In a high-profile matter like the Brown case, the prospect of a witness getting his or her name and image in the newspaper or on TV by embellishing the story is for some an irresistible temptation. Repeating an embellished story before a grand jury while under oath is an entirely different matter. The grand jury inquiry affords opportunity to test accuracy of witness accounts. If the witness did in fact witness such a terrible crime, the testimony will survive in the crucible of cross-examination. If true, it will have a discernable consistency with the forensic evidence. [right now, I have suspicions about the author’s competency to write on this subject]

    Had the St. Louis prosecutor proceeded by summary arrest and a probable cause hearing before a single judge, the resulting judicial decision, whether ordering dismissal or a murder trial, would undoubtedly have been subjected to criticism based upon the race or reputation of the judge. The necessarily streamlined presentation of evidence at a probable cause hearing would leave the public dissatisfied with the fairness of the process.

    In this case, the Founders had the right idea. A panel of citizens will decide the fate of Officer Wilson rather than law-enforcement professionals or a lone judge. The citizenry authorize police officers to strap on a weapon every working day and travel in harm’s way to protect the public and enforce the law. When it’s time to indict an officer for abuse of this sacred trust, the citizens of the grand jury should make this sensitive decision. Ethical prosecutors maintain a neutral stance in such important cases making sure that the grand jury gets the evidence and law it requires to do justice. The public should keep faith in a system that isn’t perfect but seems to work better than any other. [bolding mine]

    Oh ye gods, I was right. This person does not understand the concept of systemic racism and how that can influence the minds of ordinary citizens, how it can colour opinion and decisions, and… Wow. Just trust the system, youse guyse, it’s totally trustworthy because it’s humands running the show and we all know humands are completley unfallingable.

    TW for graphic images of lynching. Also, Anonymous isn’t just taking over KKK twitter accounts, it is also Anonymous is doxing KKK members (and I’m OK with it) [that last bit is the headline, not my opinion necessarily]:

    But Anonymous didn’t stop there. The nebulous organization also released personally identifying information, including addresses and phone numbers, of prominent members of the Traditionalist American Knights of the Klu Klux Klan, based in Missouri. The “cyberwarfare” threatened by Anonymous rapidly unfolded in real time. Coordinated attacks targeted content uploaded by the Traditionalist American Knights and its members, while various KKK supporters in turn threatened Anonymous.

    On vimeo, Ferguson Speaks: A Communique From Ferguson:

    #FergusonSpeaks

    As law enforcement officials and national media gear up for a St Louis County Grand Jury’s announcement as to whether it will levy charges against Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson for the August 9th shooting of Michael Brown Jr., activists have issued a 9 minute video communiqué providing an intimate look at the climate on the ground.

    The video communiqué displays a cross section of the myriad groups activated in the region and includes exclusive footage of Vonderrit Meyers Sr., Ferguson Mayor James Knowles III, celebrated artist and HandsUpUnited.org cofounder Tef Poe, Taurean Russell, Lost Voices organizer Low Key, Millennial Activists United co-creator Ashley Yates, activist and Grey’s Anatomy star Jesse Williams, Damon Davis — a volunteer with The Don’t Shoot Coalition, Canfield Watchmen founder David Whitt, as well as local Ferguson business managers.

    Viewers are encouraged to tweet, share, and embed the video using the accompanying hashtag #FergusonSpeaks —extended raw clips of each of the video’s subjects are available upon request.

    handsupunited.org

    Oh, missed this one on misbehaving cops: Is Texas Getting Ready to Kill An Innocent Man? It’s about as bad as it sounds. Woman gets into fight with her fiance, police arrive, take her fiance away, and then promise to take her to him, as she is upset and crying.

    But that’s not where they went. Instead, Fennell pulled into a well-lit public recreation area. They got out, and Fennell slammed Lear up against the back of his squad car and held her down. He took off his duty belt and laid it on the trunk, calmly pointing out each of the weapons and tools he carried with him. “Then he took his gun, removed it…[and] laid it on the trunk against my head,” she said. “And he raped me.”

    When he was finished, Fennell made a threat: if she ever dared to report what happened, and if he ever went to prison for it, when he got out he would hunt her down and kill her. He then drove Lear back to the apartment complex where he gave her his business card and said he would be back to see her again — the next evening, in fact, after his kid’s soccer game. […]

    Despite his attempt to cover up his crime, Fennell was eventually arrested and ultimately pleaded guilty to kidnapping and improper sexual contact with a person in custody. He received a ten-year sentence and is currently slated for release in September 2018. Lear also filed a civil suit against Fennell and the City of Georgetown, which was settled for $100,000. But for her, the story doesn’t end there. Fennell’s arrest prompted several other women to come forward alleging similar threats and assaults, including one additional rape. These episodes had either never been reported or else were swept under the rug by local law enforcement. Together these incidents revealed a portrait of Fennell as a dangerous man who abused his police credentials with impunity. […]

    Eleven years before he raped and threatened to kill Lear, Fennell’s own fiancee, 19-year-old Stacy Stites, was found brutally murdered along a country road in Bastrop, Texas. That crime eventually sent a man to death row. His name is Rodney Reed—and he is scheduled to die in January. Lear, like many people who have followed the case in Texas —believe that Reed is innocent. And they believe that the real killer is Jimmy Fennell.

    Connie Lear is not alone in coming forward now that an execution date has been set. Nearly a dozen people related to Stites, many of whom have had doubts about the case for years, are breaking their own silence, calling for Reed’s life to be spared. One is Stites’ cousin, Judy Mitchell, who is convinced Fennell is the real killer. “I just know he did [it],” she told The Intercept. “We’ve got to do something to stop this execution.” […]

    Fennell could not prove his whereabouts in the early morning hours of April 23. Detectives administered two separate polygraph tests and Fennell’s responses were shown to be deceptive in both — including when asked directly if he had strangled Stites. Yet the investigators— including detectives from a department neighboring his own — ultimately dismissed their fellow cop as a suspect and the crime went unsolved for almost a year.

    But their attention eventually turned to a 29-year-old black man named Rodney Reed. Reed had been accused of a number of sexual assaults; he was tried in one case but ultimately acquitted. On a hunch, in April 1997, police compared DNA from semen found inside Stites with DNA collected from an unrelated case in which Reed had been accused of assaulting a woman. It was a match. [… and of course, DNA is an infallible method of linking not just people to people, but specific people to a specific crime!!]

    Save for the bartender and a Reed family friend, none of Reed’s witnesses were called to testify for the defense. One of his court-appointed lawyers later said that was done deliberately, in order to avoid tough cross-examinations that might bring out their bias or other complications — like individual run-ins with the law.

    Among those who were willing to testify was a cousin of Reed’s named Chris Aldridge. Not only had Aldridge seen Reed and Stites together, he also provided Reed with an alibi for the early morning hours of April 23. The pair was hanging outside in a lot next door to Reed’s family’s house until almost 5 a.m. that day, Aldridge said in a 2000 affidavit, and later walked to work together. Aldridge also said that Jimmy Fennell had discovered the affair between Reed and his fiancee. In another affidavit from 1999, he recounted an occasion early in 1996 when he and Reed were stopped by a Bastrop County Sheriff’s Office patrol car while walking down the street. Inside the car were two men, one of whom was a plain-clothed Fennell. “[O]fficer Fennel[l] told Rodney that he knew about him and Sticys [sic] and that Rodney was going to pay,” Aldridge recalled. That account was corroborated by another man, James Robertson, who said in a 2000 affidavit that he ran into Aldridge and Reed that same day and that they related details of the encounter to him. “Jimmy Fennell…had stopped with another officer and threatened Rodney,” Robertson recalled, “stateing [sic] that he knew of Rodney’s and Stacey’s relationship, and that Rodney would, in some way, pay.” At trial, Fennell denied knowing Reed prior to Stites’ murder. […]

    That Reed’s defense attorneys would fail to mount a robust challenge to the state’s case should have come as no surprise. His court-appointed lawyers had repeatedly told the trial judge that they were not ready for trial by the time jury selection began in late March 1998. Indeed, billing records reflect that neither of Reed’s attorneys spent more than 40 hours working on the case until roughly a week before jury selection began. Nonetheless, the judge denied their requests for continuance.

    After a two-week trial, the jury, which included no black members, convicted Reed.

    And he got the death penalty, while the officer shows himself to be no angel (wording used deliberately):

    Investigators have countered that it was simply implausible for Fennell to have traveled the roughly 22 miles from Giddings to the site where Stites’ body was dumped, then driven another 10 miles to the Bastrop High School where the truck was abandoned — it was first spotted around 5:30 a.m. by a Bastrop cop who had already driven by the parking lot earlier in the morning as part of his routine patrol of the area — and then walked 30 miles back to Giddings in time to answer the 6:45 a.m. call from Carol reporting that Stites was missing. “Logistically speaking,” lead police investigator Lynn “Rocky” Wardlow concluded, “it was not possible.”

    For the last 18 years,
    Reed has maintained his innocence.

    But it was Wardlow who made the decision not to search for evidence at the home of Fennell and Stites, despite the fact that it was the last place she was supposedly seen alive. This was just one questionable decision amid myriad other problems with the investigation he led. Indeed, Reed’s defenders have long questioned the state’s processing of the crime scene, charging not only that analysts mishandled and potentially contaminated evidence, but also that the state withheld scientific evidence that did not support its theory of the crime.

    In particular, two empty beer cans that were recovered near Stites’ body and examined for DNA revealed a potential match on one to Giddings Police Officer David Hall—a colleague, good friend, and neighbor of Fennell’s. But that information, contained in a Texas Department of Public Safety report dated May 13, 1998—in the middle of Reed’s trial—was never disclosed to Reed’s defense. (At a 2001 hearing regarding the beer can evidence, Hall denied having anything to do with Stites’ death.)

    For years, Reed’s defenders pointed to the beer cans as evidence that other officers were complicit in or else helped cover up the real story behind Stites’ murder. Police and court records reviewed by The Intercept reveal that Fennell has a long history of alleged sexual misconduct and violence while on the job, and that the behavior was at times aided by other officers—either directly, as in the case of Connie Lear, or by omission, with complaints seemingly ignored or summarily dismissed. At least three alleged incidents of misconduct occurred before Reed was even tried. In one case, a woman named Wendy Wallace alleged that she had been followed around Giddings by Fennell and later received a bizarre late-night request from a police dispatcher that she step outside of her home to meet with Fennell’s friend and colleague, Hall.

    And there’s more at the article. And graphic images, so TW for the violence. Nasty piece of work, Fennell.

  19. rq says

    State of Emergency declared in Ferguson by Nixon just now, via carlie.

    Executive Order 14-14

    WHEREAS, the City of Ferguson and the St. Louis region have experienced periods of unrest over the past three months; and

    WHEREAS, the United States Department of Justice and St. Louis County authorities are conducting separate criminal investigations into the facts surrounding the death of Michael Brown; and

    WHEREAS, the United States Department of Justice and St. Louis County authorities could soon announce the findings of their independent criminal investigations; and

    WHEREAS, regardless of the outcomes of the federal and state criminal investigations, there is the possibility of expanded unrest; and

    WHEREAS, the State of Missouri will be prepared to appropriately respond to any reaction to these announcements; and

    WHEREAS, our citizens have the right to peacefully assemble and protest and the State of Missouri is committed to protecting those rights; and

    WHEREAS, our citizens and businesses must be protected from violence and damage; and

    WHEREAS, an invocation of the provisions of Sections 44.010 through 44.130, RSMo, is appropriate to ensure the safety and welfare of our citizens.

    NOW, THEREFORE, I, JEREMIAH W. (JAY) NIXON, GOVERNOR OF THE STATE OF MISSOURI, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and Laws of the State of Missouri, including Sections 44.010 through 44.130, RSMo, do hereby declare a State of Emergency exists in the State of Missouri.

    I further direct the Missouri State Highway Patrol together with the St. Louis County Police Department and the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department to operate as a Unified Command to protect civil rights and ensure public safety in the City of Ferguson and the St. Louis region.

    I further order that the St. Louis County Police Department shall have command and operational control over security in the City of Ferguson relating to areas of protests, acts of civil disobedience and conduct otherwise arising from such activities.

    I further order that the Unified Command may exercise operational authority in such other jurisdictions it deems necessary to protect civil rights and ensure public safety and that other law enforcement agencies shall assist the Unified Command when so requested and shall cooperate with operational directives of the Unified Command.

    I further order, pursuant to Section 41.480, RSMo, the Adjutant General of the State of Missouri, or his designee, to forthwith call and order into active service such portions of the organized militia as he deems necessary to protect life and property and assist civilian authorities and it is further directed that the Adjutant General or his designee, and through him, the commanding officer of any unit or other organization of such organized militia so called into active service take such action and employ such equipment as may be necessary to carry out requests processed through the Missouri State Highway Patrol and ordered by the Governor of the state to protect life and property and support civilian authorities.

    This Order shall expire in thirty days unless extended in whole or in part by subsequent Executive Order.

    IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand and caused to be affixed the Great Seal of the State of Missouri, in the City of Jefferson, on this 17th day of November, 2014.

    Shit’s going down.

  20. rq says

    Meanwhile: [FERGUSON FORWARD] 101 Days Without Justice for Mike Brown,

    As someone who helped organized the first protest at the Ferguson Police Department on August 9th and many of the actions after that, I field many questions about accountability and work to ensure that every protestor is stays peaceful. However, I never hear those questions presented to officers or police captains or chiefs who willing took a oath to protect and serve. All I ever hear from Chief Belmar, Chief Dotson, and Captain Johnson is that ‘’violence will not be tolerated” but nothing about the violence that law enforcements officers inflicted on peaceful protestors—let alone the violent act committed against Mike Brown. Re-watch the press conferences and speeches that have given and you will hear nothing about measures to respectfully and peacefully to reengage the protest community, just statements about hours of police trainings and how many officers (1000 to be exact) they have on stand-by, and how they are equipped with almost a quarter of million dollars of weaponry to face US citizens. How do you think this fear-mongering has impacted the views of the mostly peaceful protestors in the minds of people across the world? […]

    One hundred and one days later, it doesn’t seem like we are any closer to justice. The movement is sustainable. The people are committed. But the fight has only just begun, because our government and our police officials have made it quite clear that they are not yet willing to listen to the cries of the people.

    Also, STL Today on that cop raping women in prison upthread: Ferguson correctional officer faces sex charges, rape lawsuit.

    And Why the FBI’s Suicide Note to MLK Still Matters:

    Though it was sent 50 long years ago, the FBI’s so-called suicide letter to Martin Luther King, Jr. is very much of a piece with today’s America, where fear of and anger toward the government casts a shadow over everything from web-surfing to starting a business. Historian Beverly Gage and The New York Times have just published an unredacted version of the anonymous November, 1964 letter almost certainly sent by the FBI to Martin Luther King, Jr. a few weeks before the civil rights leader was set to accept the Nobel Peace Prize.

    The typo-laden note pretends to be from a black American repulsed by King’s “psychotic” sexuality and warns that he will be unmasked as a “filthy, abnormal animal” unless he kills himself. “King you are done,” reads the letter, drawing on surveillance and wiretaps approved by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and President Lyndon Johnson. “There is but one way out for you,” the note continues. “You better take it before your filthy fraudulent self is bared to the nation.” [..]

    But today’s lack of trust and confidence in the government doesn’t seem all that angry. It’s more like we’re resigned to the fact that our rulers think little of us—that is, when they think of us at all. In gaining new knowledge about how people in power almost always behave, we are wiser and sadder and, one hopes, much less likely to put up with bullshit from the left, right, or center.

    There’s a real opportunity to the politicians, the parties, and the causes that dare to embrace real transparency —about how legislation is being crafted, about our surveillance programs at home and abroad—as a core value and something other than a throwaway slogan. But as an unbroken thread of mendacity and mischief binds the present to the past, a future in which government can be trusted seems farther off than ever.

    It’s less about racism and Ferguson as it is about general complacency and government putting their noses where it don’t belong, but it’s a good read.

  21. rq says

    Media reports on state of emergency.
    St Louis Public Radio: With Grand Jury Decision Looming, Nixon Declares State Of Emergency

    The executive order issued Monday formally codifies the unified command, in which the St. Louis County and St. Louis Metropolitan police departments, along with the Missouri State Highway Patrol, will be in charge of the law enforcement response to any protests that might erupt. It also keeps the St. Louis County police in charge of policing any protests in Ferguson.

    The declaration is not a surprise. Nixon said at a news conference last week that the National Guard had been helping the three agencies develop their plans. He said the guard would be supporting law enforcement in the event of a decision by the grand jury not to charge Ferguson officer Darren Wilson with a crime. But the timing of Monday’s declaration is likely to ramp up speculation that such an announcement is near.

    DailyKos: Missouri governor declares state of emergency ahead of grand jury decision in Ferguson shooting, basically just a restatement of the order itself.

    Live press conference here, unfortunately I am unable to listen in at this time.

  24. Alverant says

    I want to voice my concern that what happened in Ferguson was 3 months ago and the grand jury hasn’t rendered a verdict yet. That’s messed up.

  26. rq says

    Not “verdict”, people – “indictment”. Which means a recommendation to arrest and put to trial. Not even close to a verdict – if this goes to court, I can’t even imagine how long it would take, and chances are Darren Wilson would not be found guilty, but it would at least be a trial. As wiki says,

    A grand jury is a legal body that is empowered to conduct official proceedings to investigate potential criminal conduct and to determine whether criminal charges should be brought.

    Which is why it’s an announcement, not a verdict.

  27. rq says

    So a lot of this will be repeat information, as various news pick up on the National Guard announcement.
    The Guardian: Missouri governor declares state of emergency as national guard called in to Ferguson

    Jay Nixon signed an executive order on Monday activating the national guard to support police “during any period of unrest that might occur following the grand jury’s decision concerning the investigation into the death of Michael Brown”.

    Nixon had previously said he was ready to order national guard troops back into the St Louis suburb whenever necessary. In August, the national guard protected a makeshift police base at a shopping mall during nights of clashes between officers and protesters following Brown’s death in a residential side-street.

    The governor said in a statement on Monday that the soldiers would help “maintain peace and protect those exercising their right to free speech” in the event of demonstrations following the grand jury’s announcement, which is expected in the coming days.

    “The national guard is well suited to provide security at command posts, fire stations and other locations as well as perform other functions that will free up law enforcement officers to remain focused on community policing and protecting constitutional rights,” he said.

    From the Revised Missouri Statutes, take a closer look at the powers Nixon has just given himself. Not all of it is sunshine and roses, a lot of power centred on one person in dubious circumstances (remember, he’s a supporter of Roorda).
    It was mentioned (on twitter) that he has now also given himself the power to provide a special prosecutor and to leave McCullogh out of the equation, also to by-pass the GJ completely. Any takers on whether that iwll happen?

    The Washington PosT: Gov. Jay Nixon activates Missouri National Guard in advance of Ferguson grand jury decision

    “As part of our ongoing efforts to plan and be prepared for any contingency, it is necessary to have these resources in place in advance of any announcement of the grand jury’s decision,” Nixon said in a statement posted on his Web site Monday afternoon.

    “All people in the St. Louis region deserve to feel safe in their communities and to make their voices heard without fear of violence or intimidation,” Nixon said in Monday’s statement. “Public safety demands that we are fully prepared for any contingency, regardless of what the St. Louis County grand jury or the U.S. Department of Justice decides.”

    Nixon said in the order he directed the Missouri State Highway Patrol, St. Louis County Police Department, and St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department to “operate as a Unified Command to protect civil rights” and put the St. Louis County Police Department in charge of security in Ferguson related to protest areas and demonstrations. […]

    Protesters have spent weeks planning acts of civil disobedience to take place if Wilson is not indicted — which the outcome widely expected.

    Monday’s action was a march that featured stagecraft. Protesters organized a troupe of “scared white people” who lead the way screaming theatrically “oh no, hide! The protesters are coming!”

    Following behind them were dozens who held signs and chanted, often pausing to shut down major intersections during the lunch hour. […]

    At one point, the marchers were met by a single Darren Wilson supporter, who held a green sign on a nearby street corner that proclaimed:

    “My family and friends support Officer Darren Wilson and the police.”

    The woman, Patty Canter, of Clayton, briefly got in a yelling match with some of the protesters – insisting that “all lives matter” in response to their chants of “black lives matter.”

    Yes, all lives matter. But in a moment of racism? It’s like yelling ‘WHAT ABOUT THE MENZ?’ in a discussion about women’s rights.

    Wonkette weighs in, too: Missouri Gov. Nixon Declares State Of Emergency Just Because Why Not

    In case your eyes glazed over at the governor’s justification for calling up all the troops to preemptively implement Operation Bust Some Heads, we’ll sum that up for you:

    WHEREAS the grand jury’s decision about whether to indict Officer Darren Wilson for killing unarmed teenager Michael Brown is due any second now, and we’re expecting the residents of Ferguson to be mighty damned ticked off if the grand jury decides to let that cop get away with killing a kid, you should all sit down and shut up and stay inside with the curtains drawn, starting right now, OR ELSE.

    Seems like it was just last week the governor held a press conference instructing everyone to remain calm and assuring the citizens of his state that their right to peacefully assemble and protest would be protected. Oh, that’s because it was! What’s changed since then? Hmmm, nothing at all whatsoever? But that’s Nixonian leadership for you, it seems — deciding the hypothetical possibility of people assembling and protesting and expressing their disappointment is a real enough EMERGENCY that you might as well start threatening them now.

    Nixon has further ordered a number of other precautionary steps “to protect civil rights and ensure public safety,” including mobilizing the Missouri State Highway Patrol, St. Louis County Police Department, and St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department “to operate as a Unified Command.” That Unified Command has the authority — right now, today, because it is an EMERGENCY — to “exercise operational authority” throughout the state. What could possibly go wrong? It’s not like letting police do whatever the hell they deem necessary has been a problem in Missouri before.

    If this is how Gov. Nixon is managing his state before the grand jury reaches its decision, we really cannot imagine what he’ll do should any of his hypothetical concerns actually happen. Bomb Cambodia, we guess.

    These Nixons are really giving Nixons a bad name, hm?

    Oh, look, Al-Jazeera, too: Cautious Missouri declares state of emergency (I like that, ‘cautious Missouri’, because one can never be too cautious when those black folk get angry!!!!) No new information, for archival purposes included here.

  28. carlie says

    rq’s been amazing at this, just wanted to consolidate some sources if you want to follow the news:

    KMOV.com is one of the StL news channels, in August had better coverage than the other one did

    KSDK.com is the other main channel, didn’t have as much, but had some.

    STLTODAY.com is the St. louis newspaper website

    RiverfrontTimes.com is an indie paper, mostly cultural stuff, but news too

    fox2now.com is the fox channel (obv), did have some surprisingly not right-wing coverage at times

    To follow on twitter:
    @elonjames Elon James White
    @antoniofrench Antonio French

  29. rq says

    As Ferguson Awaits Grand Jury Decision on Killer Cop, Cop Killer Charged with “Terrorism”

    Eric Frein, the “survivalist” who killed one cop and critically injured another, went missing after his ambush on Pennsylvania state police barracks in September. After the initial shooting, the story fell by the wayside and people lost interest. Nevertheless, the police manhunt that ensued cost 11 million dollars and saw encroachments on civil liberties. To be sure, murder and violence are never preferable options (though police demand exemption). But one specific element turned Frein’s charges from homocide–already a capital felony because he killed an officer–into terrorism.

    It is one thing to kill a cop in for the sake of killing a cop. It is entirely another, according to the state, to do it as an indictment of institutions. It is this particular element of Frein’s attack on police that has warranted claims of terrorism. […]

    Should the grand jury in Ferguson choose not to indict Darren Wilson, it is nearly guaranteed that the protests and resistance that follow will invoke further terrorist attacks against peaceful protesters by a government opposed to dissent.

    Regardless of whether or not Wilson is held accountable, the problem of police and government violence will continue. As seen with Eric Frein’s capture and charges, those who dare to commit violence against them will be cast away as terrorists while the state glorifies terrorism on its own behalf.

    An oldie but a goodie – The Ferguson Riots Are Not a Shift Away From Peace, They’re a Challenge to Violence (uhhh… the Ferguson riots? oh right, this is August 13 we’re talking about…)

    At face value, this version of events blames police intervention in Sunday’s vigil for a shift from peace to violence. This is an important recognition of the cops as violent instigators; not for the first time are we watching how excessively forceful policing stokes rightful rage in a crowd. But a misleading framework is established by a narrative that sees a peaceful situation made violent by police aggression. Condemning the police here (which we must, whole-heartedly) should not come at the cost of dismissing these riots as merely an angry reaction to an isolated incident. The predominantly young, predominantly black people of Ferguson who took to the streets and stores had ample cause to riot beyond one night of confrontation with militarized cops.

    There’s no mistake in blaming police for provoking more rage in Ferguson following Brown’s death. But rather the error lies in asserting that a peaceful situation existed in the first place. Sunday night’s rally may have begun calmly, but a context in which yet another young, unarmed black teen has been shot dead by police, and riot cops stand stationed to shutdown even a shadow of dissent, is not a context of peace. State violence prevails and sits heavily over Ferguson this week. Mourning residents have limited options: endure this savage status quo with quiet resignation, or, acknowledging that there is already a state of violence, they can fight back.

    The Root on Nixon’s call to the National Guard, in short: BREAKING: Mo. Gov. Jay Nixon Activates National Guard and Announces 30-Day State of Emergency

    USA Today’s Yamiche Alcindor reports that the governor’s “order, in effect for 30 days, puts the St. Louis County Police Department in command of the Missouri State Highway Patrol, and the St. Louis Metro Police in a unified command should unrest develop in the St. Louis suburb and surrounding areas.”

    According to Nick Pistor’s Political Fix blog in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay said that National Guard troops will be stationed throughout St. Louis and “will serve as a backup” to the city’s civilian police. The Post-Dispatch reports that potentially, troops “will be stationed throughout the city at shopping centers and business districts.”

    “We do not want people to feel like they have to panic or be afraid,” Slay said.

    Here’s an idea, if you don’t want people to be afraid (and by ‘people’ I’m sure you mean all people, not just, say, white people?), stand down with the military games and let some justice be done (and by ‘justice’ I don’t mean violence, but perhaps an indictment or several).

    Returning for a moment to that Ferguson officer prone to rape, Ferguson officer arrested for raping a woman in the jail. Read the legal filing here. Document at the link. Trigger warning, obviously.

    Via carlie, The real reason Ferguson is boarding up its storefronts

    It is debatable whether the August violence, limited in damage and scope, could be classified as a riot. [FINALLY someone in the press bothers to say it!!] The police response, which included tear gassing residents on their property, was more pervasively destructive than the actions of protesters on the ground. For over 90 days, protests continued with minimal property damage. Ferguson remains a suburb of unassuming homes and faltering businesses, much as it was before. Its scars run deep, but they are largely emotional, not physical. […]

    It is easy to find other parts of St. Louis that resemble the aftermath of riots. Shattered windows, roofless dwellings, boarded buildings, and stately homes whose bricks were stolen by the poor are all part of St. Louis’s landscape. Blighted suburbs like Wellston, Pagedale, Berkeley, and Kinloch bear the burden of decades of white flight, municipal corruption, and resource denial. Drive down the once thriving Page Boulevard, now a thoroughfare between crumbling majority black suburbs, and you will find sites like a forsaken VCR repair shop with shattered windows, a sign affixed to the front advertising a Democratic electoral candidate. The election was in 2010.

    This is not the legacy of riots. This is the legacy of apathy and abandonment, which has harmed St. Louis more than looting ever has. […]

    Ferguson’s boarded storefronts are symbolic of an economic vulnerability in place long before the August violence. The small businesses of Ferguson struggle in a devastated landscape typical of post-recession America. The new Main Street, USA is a strip mall of dollar stores, pawn shops, check cashing centers and payday loan outlets, and Ferguson exemplifies this trend. Small businesses are barely hanging on, and owners usually lack the savings or insurance to make repairs or endure extended closure.

    Most of all, small business owners have witnessed St. Louis’s history of abandonment of black communities. Their modest wares stand surrounded by the shells of enterprises left behind. Drive further down West Florissant Avenue, away from the protest site, and you will find a giant shopping plaza with almost no stores left, a casualty of the 2008 recession from which this part of St. Louis never recovered. As I drove through the area on a Saturday afternoon, I saw two people holding signs—one saying “Arrest Darren Wilson,” and one advertising a 50% off sale at the local K-Mart, which was now going out of business as well.

    Nothing is safe in St. Louis. But the culprit is not protest—it is the lack of investment in and support for black communities, a pattern that has replicated itself in the region for decades. Protests did not destroy Ferguson. Destruction—social, economic, and political—created the protests. In St. Louis, one can drive from neighborhoods boarded up out of fear to neighborhoods boarded up due to abandonment. Unless systemic racism and economic discrimination are addressed, Ferguson may transition from the former to the latter.

    Nice. Truly.

  30. rq says

    Also on Twitter, I recommend following Deray McKessen (@deray) and the Millenial Activists United, who also tweet individually as @Nettaaaaaaaa, @bdoulaoblongata and a couple more. Less official-sounding, but they get the news, too, plus a lot of outrage in general. It’s good. A human face on the whole process.
    Also, I have found fox2now to be reasonably reliable for news, surprisingly. The big pieces coming from the Washington Post or the NY Times are sometimes pro-white-privilege slanted, and it shows.

    Also, in the previous week’s press conference of police chiefs, their (the chiefs’) opinion was that ‘only local news was following events in Ferguson’. Well, I beg to differ, as this and that hasn’t been all that local (not global, maybe, so define ‘local’, huh?). Plus, this thread. Not a news agency, but paying attention.

    Also via carlie, 10 Illegal Police Actions to Watch for in Ferguson:

    Here is what they are may do; watch for each of these illegal actions when the crowds start to grow.

    1. Try to stop people from protesting. […]
    2. Provocateurs. Police have likely already planted dozens of officers, black and white, male and female, inside the various protests groups. […]
    3. Snatch Squads.[…]
    4. False Arrests.[…]
    5. Intimidation.[…]
    6. Kettling or Encircling. The police will surround a group and pen them in and not let them move. […]
    7. Raids on supportive churches, organizations or homes. [..]
    8. Pain Noise Trucks. Police will also use LRAD noise trucks (Long Range Acoustic Device). […]
    9. Arrest reporters. […]
    10. Chemical and other weapons.

    (That’s in short. More details at the link.)

    Okay, good night for now. Updates tomorrow!

  33. robro says

    My favorite for today is this story in the Guardian in which Chief Belmar claims the police only targeted criminals with teargas, etc. Must be some of that new military technology they’re getting that only harms bad guys, never “legitimate” demonstrators.

  34. HappyNat says

    Thanks PZ and rq for the updates I’ve been reading on the other thread. What’s going on in #ferguson in fascinating in the worst sense of the word. There are a lot of wonderful people doing amazing things, but authoritarianism and systemic racism causes the people for getting hit by rubber bullets(and worse) to be the ones to blame.

  36. rq says

    America’s Logic: Cliven Bundy protecting his land makes him a Patriot. Ferguson protesters protesting peacefully makes them thugs. #Ferguson.

    Repost because updated: city-by-city Ferguson response for after the announcement (and let’s be honest, mostly prep for a non-indictment).

    Audio of Nixon on the National Guard announcement, first comment at the link:

    what you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

    I’ll be honest, I laughed at that.
    Huffington Post on this interview: Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon Won’t Say Whether The Buck Stops With Him In Ferguson Protests –

    St. Louis County has 90 municipalities, and none seemed accountable for the police response to often turbulent protests that followed Brown’s shooting in August. As the grand jury nears a decision and activists prepare for new protests, Nixon on Monday ordered a state of emergency and activated the National Guard — but didn’t put state law enforcement in charge.

    Missouri’s most famous politician — former President Harry Truman — popularized the phrase, “The buck stops here.” But in a conference call on Monday, Nixon fumbled when asked whether the buck stops with him on policing a new round of protests.

    “Well I mean, we’re, um, it, uh, it, uh, you know — our goal here is to, is to, is to — you know, keep the peace and allow folks’ voices to be heard,” Nixon said on the call. “I don’t spend a tremendous amount of time personalizing this vis-a-vis me.

    “I’d prefer not to be a commentator on it,” he added. [… – bolding mine]

    Nixon’s order provides that St. Louis County police — much-criticized for a heavy-handed response to the initial protests — will have “command and operational control” over security in the city of Ferguson itself. But Nixon didn’t give a clear answer on which agency or official was at the top of the chain of command for protests across the area.

    “We’ve worked hard to establish unified command, to outline the responsibilities,” Nixon said. “And now with the additional assets provided by my order today of the Missouri National Guard, we’ve worked through a number of operational issues the folks have.”

    I’d prefere not to be a commentator on it!!! You called the National Guard, dumbass!!! Comment away, it’s your comment that’s most needed here! If only for us to laugh at and despise.

    Anderson Cooper posts pictures of Homeland Security vehicles. No arrests that I’ve heard of.

    Senator McCaskill on MSNBC (video) weighs in, McCaskill: Executive order not the best way

    Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., joins Morning Joe to discuss a state of emergency in Missouri, immigration reform and Keystone XL.

  37. rq says

    Ferguson Response Network: Protesters Launch Nationwide Engagement Campaign:

    Protests in Ferguson remain salient through both the intense mobilization efforts on the ground in Missouri and the virtual connection cultivated with activists and watchers across the nation. By utilizing direct contact online, activists control their own narrative and cleanse their message of misleading media framing, proving that 21st-century civil-rights movements need not rely heavily on traditional methods of communication with the public.

    Most recently Ferguson protesters launched a text-message-alert system through MailChimp. The system allows people to sign up to receive a text of the Darren Wilson indictment announcement as soon as it is made available to Ferguson protesters. This proactive alert model is a stark contrast to the memories of waiting in front of the television or radio for the George Zimmerman and Michael Dunn verdicts.

    Ferguson protesters continue to hone in on this national network of activists, concerned citizens, and allies across the country through establishing the Ferguson National Response Network. […]

    Given the well-executed mobilization efforts thrusting the continued unrest in Fergson onto the international stage, it is safe to say that activists across the nation are sufficiently prepared to continue protesting into the the cold weather as we vehemently fight for the recognition of black humanity.

    The article notes November 17 as a likely date for the announcement – well, it was a different sort of announcement. Anyway, it’s much like with the end of the world: always predicted, never arriving (though this decision isl ikely to be made eventually). We’ve passed November 10, now November 17 – I saw guesses tossed about for November 23. We’ll see, I guess.

    I like this one, not that they’ll be heard: Veterans’ appeal to National Guard: “Stand with Ferguson protesters, not the police!”, full text –

    To our brothers and sisters in the Missouri National Guard:

    We are writing to you as active-duty U.S. service members and veterans, most of us having served in the Iraq war.

    You have a choice you can make right now.

    The whole world is watching the Ferguson police with disgust. They killed an unarmed, college-bound Black youth in broad daylight, and subsequently responded to peaceful, constitutionally-protected protests with extreme violence and repression.

    Countless constitutional and human rights violations by these police have been documented over the course of the Ferguson protests; from attacking and threatening journalists, to using tear gas against peaceful protesters, including children.

    Now, Governor Nixon has again activated the National Guard to “support law enforcement.” But you don’t have to follow their orders—you can stand with the protesters instead.

    Our true duty

    When we signed up, we swore an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States.

    The police in Ferguson are violating that Constitution.

    The First Amendment guarantees the right to free speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of the press.

    These laws are, as we are taught our entire lives, our most cherished Constitutional rights—the whole basis for the “freedom” we are told makes us the greatest country on Earth.

    It is undeniable that the Ferguson police has used extreme violence against peaceful protesters, suppressing the right of the people to free speech and the freedom to assemble. They have attacked crowds, with children in them, with rubber bullets, sound cannons and tear gas. People have been mass arrested for simply being at the protest.

    Freedom of the press has also been severely infringed upon by Ferguson police. Journalists have been arrested; photo evidence shows riot police firing tear gas directly at reporters and tearing down their camera equipment; Ferguson police have been caught on video threatening journalists with violence if they don’t leave, and declaring that they are not allowed in the protest area.

    With such important and dramatic events unfolding, the right of the people in the United States to have the truth covered by the press is essential to any so-called democratic society.

    The people have the right to protest. If we were truly honoring our oath, we would be in Ferguson to protect the protesters against the repression of their rights by the police.

    We don’t just have a legal obligation, but a moral one

    Clearly, we would be within our legal rights to refuse to help the Ferguson police unconstitutionally suppress these protests. But beyond the constitutional case, we have a moral obligation to refuse to participate.

    The Ferguson police are treating this like a war. And we know that not all wars are just.

    These protests have done something very important in our society: they have raised the deep issues we face of inequality, poverty, racism and police misconduct onto a national stage. It has turned public consciousness to these real problems that plague our society.

    Do you really want to be part of suppressing those civilians raising all these important issues on the national stage?

    Racist police brutality is a real issue in America

    The autopsy of Michael Brown confirms at least five eye-witness accounts that the young man—who was not even suspected by Darren Wilson of any crime—was shot while he had his hands in the air.

    Those of us in the military—especially with combat experience—knows that this flies in the face of any Rules of Engagement, and we know that it is completely ridiculous to believe that Darren Wilson feared for his life in anyway whatsoever.

    Increasingly, the issue of rampant police brutality in America—most frequently by white officers against people of color, with an African American killed every 28 hours by police—is garnering more and more attention on a national and international scale.

    Outrage by the community against the state’s refusal to hold Darren Wilson accountable is entirely justified; the movement, led by Black youth, is a just movement.

    History is unfolding, with the whole world watching. You have a decision to make on which side of history to be on.

    You will make history, one way or the other

    If you take part in the suppression of the protests for Michael Brown, we will be enshrined in history just as the National Guard soldiers who followed their orders to attack and repress civil rights actions, union pickets and anti-war protests. History has not looked kindly on them.

    But you have the chance to make a different kind of history.

    Imagine the powerful impact it would have if you abandoned your posts and marched with the protesters.

    That single action could have the biggest possible effect on the crisis in Ferguson and the larger issues it represents in the entire country. It could be a major turning point in the fight against racism, inequality and police abuse.

    You wouldn’t be alone. There is a whole community of service members, veterans and civilian supporters who would defend your right to do so. And now, in this critical moment, we are urging you to exercise that right.

    Justice for Mike Brown! Arrest Darren Wilson!

    This appeal is signed by:

    Post-911 veterans:
    Kourtney Mitchell, US Army, 2011-present
    Sara Beining, US Army, 2004-present (Iraq war veteran)
    Kelsa Pellettiere, US Army, 2009-present
    Anonymous Air Force Technical Sergeant, 2000-present (Afghanistan war veteran)
    Jhassier Laurentes, US Navy, 2013-present
    Monique Salhab, US Army, 1997-2007 (Iraq war veteran)
    Mike Prysner, US Army, 2001-2005 (Iraq war veteran)
    Margaret Stevens, US Army, 1997-2004
    William Felton, US Army, 2005-2012 (Iraq war veteran)
    Kevin Benderman, US Army, 1987-1991 & 2000-2008 (Iraq war veteran)
    Alynn McLellan, US Army, 2008-2012 (Iraq war veteran)
    Adam Fuentes, US Navy, 2007-2012
    Ryan Endicott, US Marines, 2004-2008 (Iraq war veteran)
    William Griffin, US Army, 2004-2010 (Iraq war veteran)
    Jason Cardenas, US Army, 2002-2007 (Iraq war veteran)
    Hart Viges, US Army, 2001-2004 (Iraq war veteran)
    Ross Caputi, US Marines, 2003-2006 (Iraq war veteran)
    Camillo Mejia, US Army, 1995-2010 (Iraq war veteran)
    James Circello, US Army, 2001-2008 (Iraq war veteran)
    Jayel Aheram, US Marines, 2006-2010 (Iraq war veteran)
    Miguel Colon, US Marines, 2001-2006 (Iraq war veteran)
    Wendy Barranco, US Army, 2003-2006 (Iraq war veteran)
    Michael Sullivan, US Army, 2005-2007 (Iraq war veteran)
    Kristen Walston, US Navy, 1996-2003
    Vincent Emanuele, US Marines, 2002-2006 (Iraq war veteran)
    Jeremy Berggren, US Marines, 1998-2004
    Ken Braley, US Army, 2002-2005
    Jessie Ryan, US Army, 2000-2006 (Iraq war veteran)
    Nick Kallio, US Army, 2007-2013 (Iraq war veteran)
    Joe Soel, US Army, 2006-2014 (Iraq war veteran)
    Jami King, US Army, 2004-2005
    Richard Stroder, US Marines, 2004-2009 (Iraq war veteran)
    Anonymous, US Army, 2005-2010 (Iraq war veteran)
    Jonathan Engle, US Army, 2007-2013 (Iraq war veteran)
    Amber Royster, US Navy, 2000-2006
    Michael Downs, US Army, 1985-2009
    Zollie Goodman, US Navy, 2002-2006 (Iraq war veteran)
    Kasey Keck, US Army, 6 years (Iraq war veteran)
    Curtis Sirmans, US Army, 2006-2012 (Iraq war veteran)
    Michael Nelson Hanes, US Marines, 1994-2004 (Iraq war veteran)
    Clifton Hicks, US Army, 2003-2005 (Iraq war veteran)
    Aaron Myracle, US Army, 2002-2010 (Iraq war veteran)
    Kelvin Rodeo, US Navy, 2007-2011
    Sean McCrea, US Marines, 2005-2012 (Iraq war veteran)
    Danilo Deocampo, US Navy, 1997 – 2003
    Danny Birmingham, US Army, 2009-2012 (Iraq war veteran)

    Pre-911 veterans:
    Daniel Craig, US Army (Gulf war veteran)
    Gerry Werhan, US Marines, 1971-1994 (Gulf war veteran)
    Forrest Schmidt, US Army, 1994-2000
    John Fortier, US Air Force, 1952-1955 (Korean war veteran)
    Bill Perry, US Army, 1967-1968 (Vietnam war veteran)
    Matt Dubuc, US Army, 1994-1997 (Bosnia veteran)
    Sanfod Kelson, US Army, 1963-1966
    Alexis Fectaeu, US Airforce, 22 years
    Benny Harris, US Navy, 1973-1993
    Eric Meyer, US Navy, 1967-1971 (Vietnam war veteran)
    Victoria Marx, US Navy, 1969-1976 (Vietnam war veteran)
    Charles SHelton, US Coast Guard, 1969-1972
    Annzala Pitt, US Army, 9 years
    Leonard Vernon, US Army, 1964-1966
    Tom Adams, US Army, 1971-1973
    Paul Appell, US Army, 1968-1971 (Vietnam war veteran)
    Derrick Wilson, US Army, 6 years
    Danny McGregor, US Navy, 21 years
    Douglas Ryder, US Navy, 1964-1967 (Vietnam war veteran)
    Arlene Edwards, US Army Nurse Corps, 1966-1970 (Vietnam war veteran)
    Tommy Griffin, US Army, 1976-1999
    Gary Lail, US Navy, 1964-1968
    Selena Vincin, US Army, 1995-1997
    Danny Fry, US Army, 1970 (Vietnam war veteran)
    Albert Sargis, US Marines, 1956-1962
    Dave Logsdon, US Navy, 1966-1970
    Ken Ashe, US Army, 1969-1971 (Vietnam war veteran)
    Sven Pihl, US Navy, 1986-1990
    William Holcomb, US Navy, 1946-1949
    Daveed Williams, US Navy, 1987-1990
    Nick Velvet, US Army, 1967-1969 (Vietnam war veteran)
    Harold Donle, US Marines (Vietnam war veteran)
    Paul Turner, US Air Force, 1981-1988
    Jamie St. Clair, US Navy, 4 years
    Allie Thorpe, US Navy, 4 years
    Bill Graffam, US Navy (Korean war veteran)
    Mike Madden, US Air Force, 1973-1979
    Ron Arm, US Army, 1966-1971
    Tarak Kauff, US Army, 1959-1962
    Tom Palumbo, US Army, 1978-1993
    Patrick McCann, US Air Force, 1970-1972
    Mark Foreman, US Navy, 1966-1968 (Vietnam war veteran)
    Gerry Condon, US Army, 1967-1975
    Ron Arm, US Army, 1966-1971 (Vietnam war veteran)
    Mike Budd, US Army, 1968-1971 (Vietnam war veteran)
    Amos Sunshine, US Army, 1952-1955
    Glenn Wright, US Air Force, 1962-1974
    James Domenico, US Navy, 1973-1976

    But let us not worry, the FBI is on it: FBI Warns Ferguson Decision ‘Will Likely’ Lead to Violence By Extremists Protesters

    Peaceful protesters could be caught in the middle, and electrical facilities or water treatment plants could also become targets. In addition, so-called “hacktivists” like the group “Anonymous” could try to launch cyber-attacks against authorities.

    “The announcement of the grand jury’s decision … will likely be exploited by some individuals to justify threats and attacks against law enforcement and critical infrastructure,” the FBI says in an intelligence bulletin issued in recent days. “This also poses a threat to those civilians engaged in lawful or otherwise constitutionally protected activities.”

    “Those infiltrating and exploiting otherwise legitimate public demonstrations with the intent to incite and engage in violence could be armed…”

    The FBI bulletin expresses concern only over those who would exploit peaceful protests, not the masses of demonstrators who will want to legitimately, lawfully and collectively express their views on the grand jury’s decision.

    I’m just wondering, though, in the crowd and the heat of the moment, how will they discern who is legitimately protesting and who is merely inciting violence?

    A word from history, The FBI COINTELPRO Program and the Fred Hampton Assassination: an interesting, historically potentially-relevant read.

    For a change of pace, here’s a fine example of some white privilege: A word you shouldn’t use in any sentence. So much valid stuff he could have said, but he comeso ut with the wounded-ally voice.

    The N-word is filth; it’s disrespectful, confusing and uplifts no one. I know of no other minority in the world co-opting a dehumanizing, racial slur used by its oppressor.

    Yet I’m told, “You don’t get it; you’re white.”

    No. That doesn’t work for me. I deserve a seat at this table. This is about the world my 3-year-old is going to live in. […]

    When I am told, “This isn’t about you,” I feel like I’m being judged by the color of my skin and not the content of my character.

    I understand many black people in this country, including several close friends, feel territorial in having a license to use the word as they see fit. For them, that means diluting its power and origin, the fact that the word was often the last thing a black man heard before he was lynched. I understand most of them mean no malice and actually use it as a term of affection. I’ve even heard it in locker rooms often the past 25 years covering sports.

    I still don’t get why it’s okay — on any level.

    When I asked Wilbon to explain his position to me over the phone this past weekend, he said, “Just know it’s so complex. It’s like Aloha: It can mean 1,000 different things. My father called me that every day of my life. Every day. To my face. ‘Come here, my little [N-word].’ ” […]

    But Wilbon also acknowledged, “Now there’s a whole new generation of white people using it. I can see how that can be dangerous.”

    I think it’s more than dangerous; I think the casual, callous acceptance of the word by any racial group is downright frightening.

    Worse, it leads ill-intentioned whites to care even less about people who don’t look like them. When that word is deemed acceptable in any situation, here’s who gets empowered: those who mock the NFL rule guaranteeing a minority candidate at least be interviewed before a head coaching job is filled, the ones who think affirmative action was always a ruse just to get unqualified minorities jobs, the warped souls who still believe to their core that black activists and white guilt elected President Obama. […]

    Black people rightly ask white people to examine our prejudices, racism and bigotry, take a hard look at things inside us and around us that we subconsciously might not even recognize. It’s an ongoing, everyday effort to meet that challenge, but I’ve gladly accepted it for my son’s future and my own betterment.

    Now I’m asking all my brothers and sisters of every complexion to do something: Take this confusion off the table.

    We still live in a very segregated society. Keeping this word around divides us more. Don’t write my kid off. Don’t make it harder on him just because you have special admission to a club with a sign above it that reads, “N-words Only.”

    Yes, because black people using the N-word is exactly like white people pushing black people out of pretty much every aspect of society. Right. Right? Am I not getting something?

  38. rq says

    Some photoage via Twitter: A UCity police officer reflects on chalk outlines from yesterday’s “die-in.” Photo credit to Whitney Curtis.;
    “pull your pants up and you won’t be harassed/killed” … oh. (from the annals of history, that one…);
    The folks at @FergusonBurgers are trying to put together 150 holiday baskets for kids. Help if you can. (information within the twitter picture);
    Talking safety of our region, protection of property & constitutional rights w/ Bill O’Reilly on the @oreillyfactor. (yes, he announced the state of emergency and then went on to talk to Bill O’Reilly – in some eyes, not a good move).

  39. Crimson Clupeidae says

    Thanks for keeping this updated, rq, but some of the comments on twitter are just…arrrggggghhhh.

    On the other hand, there are a lot of sympathetic, and helpful comments, too.

  40. carlie says

    I wonder how much it’s costing Missouri to have the National Guard just sitting around Ferguson waiting for a verdict.

  41. rq says

    Video from an artist, Molly Crabapple: How Ferguson showed us the truth about police. Features some wicked art a la drawing hand.

    Gov. Nixon announces members of the Ferguson Commission (remember the Ferguson Commission?), full text:

    November 18, 2014
    Governor charges independent, empowered and diverse group with leading the hard work of change through unflinching study and actionable recommendations
    St. Louis, MO

    At a ceremony at the Missouri History Museum today, Gov. Jay Nixon swore in the sixteen members of the Ferguson Commission and charged them with studying the underlying issues raised by events in Ferguson and issuing a report with specific policy recommendations no later than September 15, 2015. The Governor announced that the Commission would be led by co-chairs Rev. Starsky Wilson and Rich McClure.

    “These sixteen men and women bring to the table a rich diversity of life experience and points of view –business owners and not-for-profit leaders; teachers and lawyers; police officers and activists; pastors and public servants,” said Gov. Nixon. “But while they are clearly a diverse group, they are united by their shared passion to promote understanding, to hasten healing, to ensure equal opportunities in education and employment, and to safeguard the civil rights of all our citizens.”

    The Governor appointed the following St. Louis-area residents to serve on the Ferguson Commission out of more than 300 applications and nominations that were received:

    Rev. Starsky Wilson, CEO of the Deaconess Foundation;
    Rich McClure, former president and COO of Unigroup;
    Reverend Traci Blackmon, Pastor of Christ the King United Church of Christ;
    Dan Isom II, Director of the Missouri Department of Public Safety;
    Scott Negwer, President of Negwer Materials in Ferguson;
    Bethany Johnson-Javois, CEO of the St. Louis Integrated Health Network;
    Gabriel E. Gore, attorney and partner at the law firm of Dowd Bennett LLC;
    Brittany Packnett, Executive Director of Teach For America;
    Rose Windmiller, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Government & Community Relations at Washington University.
    Rasheen Aldridge, Jr., community organizer and Director of Young Activists United;
    Grayling Tobias, Superintendent of the Hazelwood School District;
    Becky James-Hatter, President and CEO, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Eastern Missouri;
    Felicia Pulliam, Director of Development for FOCUS St. Louis and Ferguson resident;
    Kevin Ahlbrand, Detective Sergeant with the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department and President of the Missouri State Fraternal Order of Police;
    Patrick Sly, Executive Vice-President, Emerson;
    T.R. Carr, Jr., Professor of Public Administration at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville;

    “The members of the Ferguson Commission are tough, they are smart, they are empowered, and they are independent,” said Gov. Nixon. “Their most important work will not be what is written on sheets of paper or on a website. Their most important work will be the changes we see in our institutions and our work places, in our communities and in our interactions with one another. Change of this magnitude is hard; but maintaining the status quo is simply not acceptable.”

    Under the Governor’s executive order, the Ferguson Commission will be responsible for issuing a report with policy recommendations in the following areas: citizen-law enforcement interaction and relations; racial and ethnic relations; municipal government organization and the municipal court system; and disparities in areas including education, economic opportunity, housing, transportation, health care, child care, business ownership, and family and community stability.

    “I am called and have been blessed to serve children and youth of our region through engagement at the grass tops and grassroots of civic leadership,” said Ferguson Commission Co-Chair Rev. Starsky Wilson. Effective investigation, assessment and response to the multiple structural challenges that led to and have been exposed by the August 9th shooting and its aftermath will require the perspective and credibility of both worlds. The work of this commission aligns with the work of Deaconess Foundation, which I lead, to advance the health of the region and its people through effective alignment of philanthropic, social service and governmental resources and policies. We envision a region that values the health and well-being of all children and prioritizes the most vulnerable.”

    “I am deeply committed to making St. Louis a stronger and fairer place for all, and am honored to be asked to serve on the Ferguson Commission as co-chair with Starsky Wilson,” said Ferguson Commission Co-Chair Richard McClure. “The significant challenges we face as a region have been vividly exposed by events in Ferguson. Committed and thoughtful citizens must identify necessary actions to take and polices that have to change. Then, our state and our region must pursue their implementation vigorously. I am passionate about addressing these very complex and serious issues, working with a diverse and committed Commission.”

    The Commission has until September 15, 2015 to issue its report, but the Governor made clear that he would welcome any interim recommendations for positive steps that can be taken prior to the completion of its final report.

    Today, the Missouri Development Finance Board approved $100,000 to support the Commission’s operating costs, research and other expenses. Additional funding is being identified from private sources to ensure the Commission has the resources necessary to carry out its charge. Ferguson Commission will operate out of space provided by Washington University.

    I recognize two names on that list from being mentioned by various sources during the protesting that has been going on, both good choices. I cannot speak for the rest. Good luck and no bureaucracy!

  42. says

    Hm. 8 rich/powerful types (chief officers, presidents, vice presidents and chancellors, heads of large corporate-style charities), two cops, and only two, maybe three, who’ve lived at the sharp end. Not going to expect much from this. Kudos to the local activists who snagged a couple of seats, but that looks like a salmon run to me.

    “Body cameras cost money, and violate police privacy! Independent review won’t work, because cops can’t trust an outsider who’s not experienced the terrible danger of policing! ” et c, et c. Seen too many of these committees do nothing to have any confidence at all. :/

  44. rq says

    Ichthyic
    Hadn’t seen that one yet.

    +++

    Here’s another, though: Families of victims killed, shot at 137 times by Cleveland Police to get $3 million. Just think about that for a minute. 13 cops. 137 shots. For two people sitting in a car. OVERKILL does not even begin to cover this.

    More white privilege on display: Hold Up: MTV Is Seeking White People That Have Experienced Discrimination For New Documentary

    The mission could be a legit and groundbreaking one, as history has showed white Americans being discriminatory towards white immigrants for example, and then the cloud of the Holocaust remaining a global sore spot, like it is with slavery. This however could be difficult for the producers Punch in the Head, based in Brooklyn, and Pulitzer Prize winner Jose Antonio Vargas but they seem willing to tread on. What they’re attempting to expose is what’s sometimes labelled as “reverse racism,” an often lampooned way describing when white people actually experience prejudice.

    There’s something to be said about the treatment of, say, Polish and eastern European economic migrants in, for example, the UK. But reverse racism? This sounds like a totally awesome project. Not.

    Back in Ferguson: One Ferguson protester’s unlikely mission to save police chief’s job

    For the better part of a month, local, state and federal officials have been involved in meetings to try to develop a plan to force Jackson from his position. There’s even discussion of dissolving the Ferguson Police Department and handing over control of law enforcement in the city to St. Louis County Police.

    The talks have reportedly included Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill and have gone as high as the Obama administration. The Justice Department is conducting a civil rights investigation into Brown’s killing, and Attorney General Eric Holder has called for “wholesale change” in the Ferguson Police Department.

    Gassoway told msnbc he had launched his mission to save Jackson after hearing McCaskill on a local radio show saying she thought the chief should step down. “I think it would be a good thing if we had change of leadership at the Ferguson Police Department, just because I think it’s important we start with a clean slate,” McCaskill told the station.

    Gassoway said Jackson’s fate shouldn’t be decided by politicians. […]

    “They see that trying to throw all the blame on the chief of police and get the attention off of Darren Wilson off the prize and we want Darren Wilson actually prosecuted in jail,” Gassoway said. “They think if they give us the chief of police, it’ll quiet us down some. It’s not enough.”

    Valerie Williams, one of the African-American residents who signed Gassoway’s petition, said she agreed that Jackson doesn’t deserve all the blame.

    “That chief ain’t been here that long, so I’m not going to just criticize him,” Williams said.

    Well, here’s to positive change and second chances.

    Via KMOV.com, National Guard drill at south St. Louis gas station startles some residents:

    Another woman posted photos on Twitter of National Guard trucks and tactical gear, saying it made her rush home, concerned an announcement about the Grand Jury was about to be made.

    New s4 learned it was all just a drill, a drill that had nothing to do with Ferguson or the grand jury decision.

    Mike O’Connell, a spokesperson for the Missouri Department of Public Safety said the 7th Civil Support Team of the Missouri National Guard was conducting an exercise for a hazardous situation. O’Connell said it was planned nine months ago.

    “The people from the exercise were proceeding without thinking what was going on,” said O’Connell.

    The exercise was a part of federal training requirements ordered by the US Army, but O’Connell said the decision on the location was made at a “lower level” and when those higher up at the National Guard heard about the drill they told the civil support team to immediately end the exercise and leave the neighborhood.

    “That’s not fair, it’s unsettling. Take it somewhere else,” said Lear.

    The team packed up after 30 minutes.

    Whatever happened to announcing these things publicly, in order not to upset the community?

    Return of the Ferguson War Zone? Missouri Enacts State of Emergency Ahead of Mike Brown Grand Jury (also as youtube video):

    Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon has declared a state of emergency in advance of the grand jury’s pending decision in the Michael Brown shooting case. On Monday, Nixon issued an executive order to activate the state’s National Guard in response to what he called “the possibility of expanded unrest.” Nixon cited the protests in Ferguson and the St. Louis area since Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was killed by police officer Darren Wilson on August 9. The grand jury has been meeting for nearly three months, and protests are expected to escalate if they choose not to indict. But while state officials say they fear violence, protesters say they fear a return to the militarized crackdown that turned their community into a war zone. As the grand jury nears a decision and all sides prepare for the unknown under a state of emergency, we are joined by two guests: Jeff Smith, a New School professor and former Missouri state senator whose new book is “Ferguson: In Black and White,” and Montague Simmons, chair of the St. Louis-based Organization for Black Struggle and a key organizer in the movement that has emerged since Brown’s killing.

    (The article is a transcript of the video.)

  45. rq says

    This and that on the Ferguson Commission. First, it has been plagued by accusations that some people on it did not even apply: Nearly a third of the #FergusonCommission members did not apply, according to a list of applicants supplied to @stltoday (okay, not plagued, it’s a tweet, but I’d love to compare the lists). However, The only black member appointed without applying to the #Ferguson Commission is Dan Isom. (also a tweet). No word on who the other appointed members are, or how many of them got in without applying. Perhaps someone has an educated guess?

    And a nice portrait-covered flier of the Ferguson Commission, just so y’all can see what they look like. 10 men, 6 women, 9 black, 7 white. Is that representative of Ferguson demographics? (And never mind the economic factor, as Cait pointed out above…)

    Ferguson Commission’s youngest member: ‘A lot of young people are feeling the pain’

    Rasheen Lamont Aldridge is the youngest member of the Ferguson Commission, which was unveiled by Governor Jay Nixon as the St Louis region braces for possible unrest after the announcement of whether Darren Wilson, a white officer, will face charges for shooting Brown, a black 18-year-old.

    While his fellow commissioners wore suits, Aldridge was wearing a T shirt emblazoned with the slogan: “Demilitarize the police”, embodying a demand made by demonstrators since officers responded to their protests earlier this year with armoured vehicles, rubber bullets and teargas.

    “I’m going to make sure my voice is heard, using the loud voice I used out on the street in Ferguson,” said Aldridge, who works as a service agent for Enterprise rent-a-car, but hopes to become an alderman and embark on a career in politics. […]

    But Aldridge, who took to the streets soon after Brown’s death on 9 August, said he would not hesitate to articulate the fury of some young Missourians at the response of Nixon, who on Tuesday declared a state of emergency. “Some decisions he made were not the best decisions,” said Aldridge.

    “I want young people to not have to worry about being a target when they walk outside,” he said following a press conference. “A lot of young people are feeling the pain and taking it personally, because they feel like this could be them.” […]

    After he declined on Monday evening to take personal responsibility for the policing of the protests in Ferguson, Nixon was given a second opportunity to say whether the buck stopped with him. “You’re governor, the buck always stops with you,” he said this time.

    Aldridge said that he was initially hesitant to apply for the commission, which Nixon said attracted more than 300 hopefuls. “But I decided we need youth at the table,” he said. “Eventually you have to take it from the streets into the governor’s office, into the rooms where we can be heard, to change the system.”

    He’s 20. May he go far, if the police don’t shoot him first.

    And just a good graphic. Yes, you have the right to remain silent, underrepresented and poor.

  46. rq says

    Via BET, A Tree Grows for Emmett Till at the U.S. Capitol (remember him (TW! TW!)?). They call it a ‘tragic murder’.

    To honor his memory and in recognition of the state’s “bitter, painful” past, Mississippi’s senators and other congressional lawmakers joined Attorney General Eric Holder and others to plant a sycamore tree on the north side of the capitol.

    Holder, in his remarks, said that although the “unspeakable tragedy” of Till’s death “still feels raw,” it triggered key events in the civil rights movement and sparked bravery in the hearts of people like Rosa Parks, who thought about Till when she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus.

    “So although Emmett Till died senselessly – and far too soon – it can never be said that he died in vain. His tragic murder galvanized millions to action,” the attorney general said. “And today, we commemorate this legacy by planting a tree in his honor – a tree that will become his living memorial, here at the heart of our Republic, in the shadow of the United States Capitol.”

    Yes, an all-white jury acquitted his murderers, and I’m sure his family feels better with a tree planted in his memory, and that his death was not in vain. Just as, I’m sure, Michael Brown’s parents will be endlessly comforted by the fact that the death of their son has had a higher purpose in bringing systemic racism to light once again. How many will it take until these deaths do not occur anymore? (I don’t want to say ‘necessary’ because that would imply some sort of justification for the killing of black boys. And there is none.)

    Because activists come in many forms, Teach for America uses local ties to increase impact:

    But she [Brittany Packnett] also knows this spark is only part of the equation. For Teach for America to be truly successful in helping to transform troubled schools, it must tackle its weaknesses. And that’s what Packnett, a 29-year-old with deep roots in the city, is trying to do.

    Anyone who knows much about Teach for America is familiar with the criticism that surrounds it.

    The program typically attracts young college grads without education degrees who commit two years to teaching in low-income urban and rural schools. Yet most don’t stay beyond that commitment.

    They arrive filled with energy and idealism. Yet most are white and from affluent backgrounds, and have little in common culturally with most of their students, who are African-American and low-income.

    “People look at it like it’s a club for them to get their loans paid,” said Ray Cummings, vice president of American Federation of Teachers St. Louis. He was referring to the additional cash that corps members get for college loans. Then he lobbed another criticism at the organization. “Our kids need stability,” he said. “The lack of diversity doesn’t look too good in our district.”

    On the latter two issues, Packnett couldn’t agree more.

    An effort is underway to increase the number of minorities in the corps, as well as the number of members who come from a low-income background. A campaign started in November to keep corps members beyond their two years. There’s also an effort to enlist those with strong city ties.

    In many ways, Rucker, an African-American who grew up in poverty near St. Louis Place Park, is the embodiment of those efforts. She’d already been working at Hamilton Elementary for years. She knows what it’s like to walk in her students’ shoes. Her eyes well up when she talks about her passion.

    “I came from this,” she said, as her students read quietly one afternoon. “I came from poverty. I came from a community where the buildings were boarded up. I understand what they’re going through every day when they walk to the bus stop past broken windows.” […]

    Teach for America arrived in St. Louis at a time when city public schools were suffering from a shortage of qualified teachers in special education, math and science. Mayor Francis Slay and St. Louis Public Schools teamed up to to raise $730,000 in private donations and set aside $50,000 in city money to jump-start the program.

    Today, the organization remains a lightning rod among educators. Many veteran teachers argue that corps members lack training needed to be effective. However, research generally backs up the organization’s success.

    Teach for America teachers outperform other St. Louis Public Schools teachers as a group, according to a study by the district’s Accountability Office.

    Using 2010-11 testing data, the study shows that students taught by corps members experienced more academic growth than those taught by district teachers of all levels of experience. The difference in communications arts was slight, the report says, but in math it was significant.

    But the report also points out that district teachers with less than five years experience held a slight edge in communications arts.

    The same report suggests that a group of the district’s teachers who received intense support as part of the St. Louis Plan mentoring program outperformed Teach for America. […]

    Packnett is leading the St. Louis corps at a moment of intense discussion about the region’s troubled schools. The situation involving 2,200 students who have transferred out of the unaccredited Normandy and Riverview Gardens districts to higher performing schools has local and state educators looking for an array of solutions.

    Packnett sees her organization as a part of the answer. Teach for America is also looking to expand its reach — possibly into East St. Louis, where years of academic failure prompted a state takeover in 2012.

    Packnett agrees that stability is important. But the perception that Teach for America contributes to instability in schools is a myth, she said.

    Of the 400 or so corps members who have worked in area schools, 65 percent are still involved in education. This includes 110 who remain in the classroom. The rest are principals, district administrators and charter school organizers, or they work for nonprofits devoted to education.

    “We want to tap into their talent in multiple ways,” Packnett said.

    So, that KKK dude? Frank Ancona has now threatened to shoot anyone wearing Guy Fawkes mask in response to #HoodsOff #OpKKK . Twitter photo of an editor’s note at the link – where, basically, he says that it’s deer hunting season and it’s easy to mistake the Guy Fawkes mask for the rump of a white-tailed deer.

    thisisthemovement, installment #54 (I feel like I’ve missed a couple):

    A few days [ago], we launched noindictment.org to serve has a hub for information regarding post Grand Jury announcement protestor plans and ways to connect/support.

    Also, click here to sign up to receive a text alert when the Grand Jury decision is announced. Also, click here to check out the national actions planned following the announcement.

    Yes, we will have a FergusonFireside call at 8pm on Wednesday, Nov. 19th. Details are at FergusonFireside.org. We are finalizing the panel now and will only cancel in the event of the GJ announcement.

    Also, here is the easiest link for all of the #Ferguson livestreamers. Bookmark it now.
    […]

    So You Know
    “101 Days and Still No Justice” — We Protest From a steaming hot summer to a freezing early winter, Mike Brown Jr protesters are braving the elements to fight for justice. An action in Clayton, MO brought forward resistance from other residents.

    Fact or Fiction? Refresh your mind on what is or what isn’t happening in the Mike Brown Jr. case by engaging this succinct accounting of the facts surrounding #Ferguson. Must read.

    Ferguson Officer Arrested For Alleged Jail Rape A Ferguson Police Officer was recently arrested due to allegations that he raped a pregnant woman in jail last year. Absolute must read.

    Understanding Ferguson: A Guide to Essays and Journalism The LA Times has compiled a helpful compendium of articles that can help you get up to speed on the events in Ferguson. Check it out.

    Chief Belmar Says Only Criminals Were Teargassed and No Rubber Bullets Used St. Louis County Police Chief Belmar has repeatedly said that only criminals were tear-gassed and that rubber bullets were not used. This article thoughtfully responds to Belmar’s untruths. Important read.

    The National Guard is Back Gov. Jay Nixon has declared a state of emergency in Saint Louis, MO … again. Mayor Slay says “we would not have the guard on the front lines interacting with, dealing with, confronting protesters.” Important read.

    Mike Brown Jr.’s Family Lawyer Reacts “Sometimes you can push people into behaving a certain way just by preparing for that kind of reaction,” said Brown family lawyer Anthony Gray on Gov. Nixon’s announcement of the State of Emergency.

    Understanding The Role of the DW Grand Jury The LA Times has published a quick, and important, refresher on the role of the Grand Jury, with specific focus on the Darren Wilson case. Important quick read.

    The Real Reason Ferguson Is Boarding Its Storefront The recent crop of boarded up businesses in Ferguson, and St. Louis more broadly, is explored in this fascinating article. “Ferguson’s boarded storefronts are symbolic of an economic vulnerability in place long before the August violence,” the author writes. The violence of which she writes must be the killing of Michael Brown. Solid read.

    Homework Packets Sent Home In Case School Is Closed The Ferguson-Florissant and Riverview Gardens school districts have already sent homework packets home with students in the event that school will be closed due to unrest. Important read.

  47. rq says

    Latest open letter from Ferguson activists, Bringing attention to persistent injustice, full text:

    Over the last 103 days, many pundits, outside observers and outright opponents have co-opted our intentions and ignored our purpose, manipulating our cause to fit agendas that are not our own. Now, having been given the unique opportunity to provide clarity, we want to be unequivocally clear about who we are, why we’re here and why we can’t wait.

    WHO WE ARE

    We are Americans, exercising the democratic voice gifted us by birthright. We have not brought unrest as it has been called, but rather have brought attention to persistent injustice — and that attention causes discomfort. The status quo is comfortable for those privileged not to live our reality, making the discomfort of awareness necessary. This is the epitome of the free American democracy that Patrick Henry proclaimed, that Frederick Douglass professed, that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. practiced.

    We are peaceful. We discipline ourselves and remain resolutely confident in the righteousness of our cause, even in the face of weapons of war. We ensure that actions remain peaceful, purposeful, and focused on our message, not on chaos. That we must continually remind and convince the public of our peaceful stance is disheartening. We are so often irresponsibly labeled as thugs by those who would — consciously or not — use our peaceful protests to revive the myth of the violent black savage.

    We are activists, young and old, new and experienced, committed to justice for all people. We believe a change in the culture of law enforcement that leaves unarmed children dead is long overdue. We believe that this is a movement that requires allies from all communities, since all communities should proclaim the humanity of all children.

    WHY WE ARE HERE

    And make no mistake: Our cause is a call for basic human decency. All children deserve to live their lives in a way that allows them to fully achieve their potential. So we protest, we march and we stand because that opportunity was violently taken from Mike.

    We are here to demand that human life has profound value, no matter its trappings, skin color, ZIP code or gender. We are here to focus the spotlight on the unnecessary loss of human life. Stories about assumed chaos after the return of the grand jury’s decision ignore the primary and central fact: an unarmed child was killed far, far too young.

    We implore those that scorn and dismiss our protest to walk in our shoes. In too many communities, unarmed black youth, particularly males, are stripped of life and liberty by police officers. Many, far too many, of those unarmed children. And in our peaceful grief, we were met with weaponry meant only for times of war, and invective accusing Mike and our movement of thuggery that justified the violence.

    The disruption we have therefore intentionally created reflects the disruption of life we will no longer tolerate. So, if we disrupt the status quo now, know that is an intentional choice. We seek to nonviolently mirror this violent, intolerable disruption of life in our communities. If this were your constant reality, we believe you would make the same choice.

    WHY WE CAN’T WAIT

    In the days since Mike was shot dead, Kajieme Powell and VonDerrit Myers Jr. were killed, too. A host of peaceful protesters were unjustly arrested. Life, liberty and voice have continually been stripped away.

    And as we march toward justice for all lives lost, we also potentially march into danger. While we stockpile signs, we are told that others, who are sworn to protect and serve us, instead mean us harm and are stockpiling guns. Already, heavy-handed police responses to peaceful protests make us justifiably worried about what is to come. Though we are peaceful, we fear for our safety. We fear for our lives.

    But while we move toward the unknown, we cannot allow fear to dissolve our movement. We cannot wait for justice, since, too often, delay actually means denial. We must see a sustainable community-oriented shift in the policing of our neighborhoods. We must see the truthful reporting of our cause by responsible institutions. We cannot wait for another life to be lost, for more blood to be shed, for more lines of division to be drawn further and deeper across this city before we change course.

    The night they sang a requiem for our fallen brother, our allies asked us which side we are on.

    We are on the human side. We hope you stand with us.

    Johnetta Elzie, 25, of St. Louis, has been documenting the events in Ferguson on Twitter: @nettaaaaaaaa. She is co-editor of the #Ferguson protester newsletter.

    DeRay McKesson, 29, is senior director of human capital with Minneapolis Public Schools and is a Teach For America alum. He has been documenting the events of Ferguson via Twitter (@deray) and is the founder and co-editor of the protester newsletter.

    Brittany Packnett, 30, is executive director of Teach For America in St. Louis. Five others contributed to this commentary. She has been named to the Ferguson Commission.

    Mayor Slay’s letter to Phyllis Young, Chairwoman of the Public Safety Committee, full text:

    Dear Chairwoman Young and Members of the Board of Aldermen,

    For the last two months, I and my administration, Chief Dotson and his men and women, and our peers in St. Louis County have been planning, preparing, and organizing in anticipation of the reaction to the St. Louis Country Grand Jury. As Public safety Director Richard Gray explained to the Board in the past, we have also begun to address the underlying issues that the shooting death of Michael Brown has brought to the surface.

    We have met many dozens of times with each other, with federal, state and other local officials, with protest leaders and protesters themselves. We have made ourselves clear: our job is to keep everyone safe, protect property, prevent criminal acts, and as important as any of that, to protect the constitutional rights of our citizens to gather, to bring their grievances to their government and to express themselves.

    It is also important for our constituents to know that we are already laying the groundwork for being a different and better St. Louis, city and region, and that change is necessary, inevitable, and irreversible.

    Let me say this as clearly as I can. After two months of planning, I am absolutely convinced that the leaders of the demonstrations and the vast majority of demonstrators themselves are committed to non-violence. I feel the exact same way and just as strongly about our police department and our individual officers. I believe the leaders of the police departments throughout the region have learned a lot of lessons from the early days of the protest movement, and will be much more effective at keeping the peace and protecting the constitutional rights of every St. Louisan.

    I am going to address two specific issues, first, the role of the National Guard; second, the list of 19 rules of engagement put forward by the Hands Up, Don’t Shoot coalition.

    To put the role of the guard in context, let me tell you what are goal is not. It is not our job, it would be illegal, and we will not try to disrupt, minimize, or in anyway impede our constituents’ constitutionally protected right to assemble and speak freely.

    It is also important that you know that our primary missions are to keep people safe, protect property and safeguard constitutional rights in the City of St. Louis. That’s where our focus will be.

    So, we are going to request that 400 members of the guard be deployed in our City, to be split up over two, 12-hour shifts. We will not, unless something happens that we have not foreseen, post them where there are organized protests. Instead, we will use them to prevent random acts of violence, property destruction, looting or other criminal activity away from the demonstrations. We will post guardsmen along with police officers at 45 locations throughout the City. Our goal is to keep all of our citizens and their homes and businesses safe, including those who are in neighbourhoods that are nowhere near where the protests end up being concentrated.

    As many of you know, 50 individual organizations have been meeting under two banners, Hands Up and Don’t Shoot. Two weeks ago, they put forward what they call 19 proposed rules of engagement. I consider that a military term. Because this is not a war, I am calling them the proposed rules of conduct.

    Chief Dotson, St. Louis County Chief Jon Belmar, Captain Ron Johnson, and Missour Public Safety Director Dan Isom have been meeting and are continuing to meet with the coalition to find common ground and areas of agreement. During the first meeting, we agreed to more than half of the 19 proposed rules. In the second meeting, the two sides agreed to create clear lines of communication during the protests to help police keep the protesters safe, to reduce the chances of misunderstandings, and where possible to give leeway to the protesters to occupy spaces to be disruptive, but not violent.

    Some of the proposed rules, like giving the demonstrators 48 hours advanced warning that the decision is coming, are out of our control [but it’s possible to warn the school board in advance, hm? – rq]. Still others will be honored on a case-by-case basis– like allowing the protesters to occupy public spaces, as happened Sunday afternoon in the Delmar Loop and yesterday afternoon in Clayton.

    For others, the answer will be yes with caveats. For instance, we will honor safe houses, and will consider churches to be sanctuaries, except in extremely rare circumstances. We will not use subterfuge such as building inspections to shut them down. In order to ensure open lines of communication, Chief Dotson and I are going to meet with the pastor of the only church identified in the city as a safe house, St. John’s Episcopal Church.

    As for protective gear, we have two very important principles to balance. On the one hand, we do not want to appear to militarize our response to the demonstrations and want to do everything we can to de-escalate. So, our officers will start by wearing their normal uniforms. On theo ther hand, we must keep everyone safe– including police officers. As I said before, I expect the vast majority of demonstrators to be committed to non-violence. But, the FBI has warned that there may be others who intend to use the demonstrations for their own criminal purposes. If our officers put on their personal protective gear, it is not to intimidate peaceful protestors. It is for the sole purpose of keeping everyone safe.

    I do expect that some of the demonstrations will be peaceful and disruptive. I do expect widespread civil disobedience and subsequent arrests for low level municipal violations. I do expect both police and the vast majority of demonstrators will be non violent. I do expect our state, our region and our City to make substantial change going forward. I do expect we will get through this better and stronger.

    We will continue to communicate directly with organizers of the various groups in the coalitions, our constituents, aldermen and other elected officials, and indirectly with everyone in our region through the news media.

    Thank you in advance for everything members of hte Board of Aldermen are doing to promote a sense of calm, non-violence, and a better and stronger St. Louis. Working together, collaboratively, we will make our City and our region a more fair and just place for everyone.

    Sincerely,
    [signature]
    FRANCIS G. SLAY
    Mayor

    So that’s in his own words. A few things to pick apart in there, I only commented on one of them.

  48. rq says

    Also, Anonymous continues its attack on KKK: KKK hit by cyberattack after Ferguson threats, and lists some websites that have been taken down: Down right now for #OpKKK: http://kkk.com http://kkkk.net tightrope.cc http://Freeamericanscommunity.com http://www.traditionalistamericanknights.com .

    “We are not attacking you because of what you believe in, as we fight for freedom of speech. We are attacking you because of your threats to use lethal attacks against us at the Ferguson protests,” Anonymous said.

    I’d prefer if they were attacking them for their beliefs – though tweets have expressed a severe intolerance of racism, a collective proclamation of anti-racism would be awesome.

  49. rq says

    So. The following links span the breadth of feels that are pure tragedy and tragic comedy (or comic tragedy). You’ll see (lookin’ at you, Nickelback fans). But that’s the cliffhanger. Meanwhile, serious stuff:

    Ferguson Protesters Fear Police Crackdown After Grand Jury Decision:

    Stephen Houldsworth, a 50-year-old resident of downtown St. Louis, didn’t actually fear the demonstrators calling for charges against Darren Wilson, the Ferguson police officer who shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown on Aug. 9. He supports their cause and calls the judicial system in St. Louis County “completely out of control.” He also thinks many residents of the St. Louis region have “over-the-top fear” about what will happen once the grand jury seated in Clayton decides whether to indict Wilson in Brown’s death.

    “Have you looked at the comments on any of the newspapers? People think the protesters are here to kill babies and eat virgins and do whatever,” Houldsworth, a Boston native who has been in the St. Louis area for 18 years, said in an interview. […]

    But as the national media once again descend on St. Louis, both protest organizers and top law enforcement officials are worried about overreaction. Both sides want to be prepared for anything to happen.

    Protest organizers are developing plans to try to keep demonstrations under control while discouraging police from enacting collective punishment on groups of peaceful protesters due to the actions of a few, as the police routinely did in August.

    Protests in recent days have been clearly coordinated. On Sunday, dozens of demonstrators staged a “die-in” that temporarily shut down traffic along an upscale street lined with restaurants and theaters in University City, which is about a 20-minute drive from Ferguson and located just outside St. Louis city limits. Individuals playing police officers pointed their index fingers at other demonstrators and yelled “BAM” as they pretended to shoot those protesters, who quickly fell to the ground. Other demonstrators then outlined their bodies in chalk. Soon the group moved down the road, yelling such chants as “Indict that cop!” and “Mike Brown means we got to fight back!”

    Police officers allowed the demonstration to continue, redirecting traffic and escorting protesters as they marched toward the campus of Washington University in St. Louis, where the protest ended as snowfall grew heavier. In Clayton on Monday, the situation was similar: Officers allowed demonstrators to temporarily close down intersections, and no arrests were made. […]

    Organizers want to avoid giving police a reason or an excuse to deploy the aggressive tactics they used against protesters and journalists back in August. The actions of officers in military-style armored vehicles then drew international attention and spawned multiple federal investigations.

    Yet in a series of interviews with television stations, radio programs and newspapers in St. Louis over the past several days, the three top law enforcement officials charged with overseeing the police response to local demonstrations — St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar, St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson and Missouri State Highway Patrol Capt. Ron Johnson — have sent somewhat mixed messages about how much their approach to protests has changed this time around.

    In particular, Belmar, who has been largely defensive about his department’s much-criticized approach in August, has tended to frame the debate over law enforcement’s response as a matter of “optics.”

    “Listen, man, we didn’t do this perfect, and we’re going to try to do a better job next time,” Belmar said in a Sunday interview with radio host and former NFL player Demetrious Johnson on HOT 104.1, a St. Louis hip-hop station. “The fact of the matter is that we were fortunate that we didn’t have a loss of life anywhere.”

    In another interview, Belmar suggested that the new training his officers have received “really doesn’t” mean there was any sort of deficiency in August, even as his own office — as well as the U.S. Justice Department — investigates this past summer’s actions. His comments insisting that no peaceful protesters were teargassed in August have also upset many protest leaders. [read that last little bit, about the tear gas, and then look at the first threads on this topic – …]

    “It feels almost like Y2K to us,” Belmar said in another interview on local station KMOX. “We do want to assure the public this isn’t going to be Armageddon. … We’re not preparing for war. We’re preparing for peaceful assembly.”

    Ummmmmm, yes. Preparing for peaceful assembly with riot gear and military-like vehicles. Sure.

    A little from the other side, As Ferguson braces for grand jury ruling, activists cite ‘fear campaign’.

    “They got the wrong ones if they are worried about the protesters,” said Rasheen Aldridge, 20, a demonstrator from St. Louis who was named as one of the members of the governor’s Ferguson Commission, charged with examining issues of inequality and community divisions raised after the shooting. The 16-member commission was sworn in Tuesday by Gov. Jay Nixon, who declared a state of emergency Monday.

    If Wilson is not indicted by the grand jury, “I don’t think the city’s going to burn down,” said Aldridge, who wore a black T-shirt emblazoned with the words, “De-militarize the Police.”

    The summer shooting led to weeks of protests, hundreds of arrests and violence mainly against property. After the grand jury acts, which could happen any day, officials fear a return to those chaotic weeks that included tear gas, taunting and the tossing of rocks and makeshift gasoline bombs.
    lRelated Michael Brown altercation, shooting unfolded in 90 seconds

    Nation Now
    Michael Brown altercation, shooting unfolded in 90 seconds

    See all related
    8

    “It’s like a fear campaign,” said Johnetta Elzie, 25, an activist who runs a daily newsletter that aggregates Ferguson news stories. She said she worried that government announcements of security and media coverage were creating an atmosphere of panic.

    “Some of these people in mass hysteria have no relationship with black people,” she said. “Why are you stock-loading food? What is going to happen? They’re moving out of fear and uncertainty…. I would be more worried and concerned about the police than the people [who are] protesting.”

    John Gaskin III, the local NAACP representative, agreed on Twitter that the fears were being over-hyped. “Absolutely,” he said. […]

    Peaceful demonstrations have been held in recent days, despite the biting cold. Some local leaders were concerned that Nixon had moved too quickly by activating the National Guard.

    “The National Guard is called in when policing has failed. Military presence in my city will mark a historic failure on the part” of government, Antonio French, a St. Louis alderman who documented the Ferguson protests on social media, said on Twitter. “This is not a war. There is no military solution.”

    But St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay requested that 400 members of the National Guard be posted at 45 locations throughout his city after the grand jury’s decision, according to a letter he sent to the city Board of Alderman’s public safety committee chairman Tuesday. […]

    “The announcement of the grand jury’s decision … will likely be exploited by some individuals to justify threats and attacks against law enforcement and critical infrastructure,” the FBI reportedly said in the bulletin distributed Friday. “This also poses a threat to those civilians engaged in lawful or otherwise constitutionally protected activities.”

    In the bulletin, the FBI looked at the perceived danger of infiltration from outsiders who might be more violent than Ferguson protesters. The threat from outsiders was cited last summer during Ferguson’s demonstrations and has been used by officials to justify use of force in numerous protests since the civil rights and antiwar years. The bulletin is similar to those issued before the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

    On Tuesday, the FBI clarified its position in an email sent to newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times.

    “The FBI is committed to the communities we serve. The safety of those who wish to exercise their First Amendment rights is paramount, along with the safety of those in the law enforcement community who protect these rights. It is standard practice for the FBI to send out bulletins to members of the community to raise awareness to potential threats of violence,” it stated.

    ‘Outrageous’: Ferguson Organizers say State of Emergency Violates Laws, Thwarts Civil Liberties:

    Nixon’s announcement, which came ahead of the grand jury’s decision in the police shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown, is “both premature in its application and presumptuous in [its] intention to the hundreds of peaceful demonstrators who have embraced their Constitutional right to protest,” said NAACP president William Brooks.

    Anthony Gray, one of the lawyers for Brown’s family, told CNN that Nixon was “preparing for war and not necessarily for peace.”

    “Sometimes you can push people into behaving a certain way just by preparing for just that kind of a reaction,” Gray said.

    “Governor Nixon’s decision to declare a state of emergency without evidence of violence or danger only threatens to stir up tensions and denigrate the peaceful efforts of countless non-violent activists,” Brooks said. […]

    Lou Downey, an organizer with Stop Mass Incarceration Network (SMIN), told Common Dreams that Nixon’s “state of emergency—mobilizing the National Guard and authorizing violent suppression of protest—is outrageous, illegitimate, and breaking his own laws.”

    “Nixon offers the public lies about ‘protecting free speech’ and steps to peaceful change, combined with the reality of unleashing National Guards, rubber bullets and toxic gas on protesters,” Downey continued. “Be clear, when Nixon says violence won’t be tolerated, he doesn’t mean violence by authorities against people.”

    Nixon’s declaration on Monday seems to contradict statements he made after lifting a previous state of emergency he ordered during the first round of protests in August.

    “We’ve seen here a situation in which that militarization caused exactly the opposite reaction, in my view, as to what it normally should,” he told MSNBC at the time. “Instead of bringing safety, it brought less safety in this situation because people felt diminished and felt controlled in their own community. I think this is a very clear example of how the proper force strength is important, and I do think we’ve seen a significant trend towards militarization which, if not used correctly with these forces, can have troublesome reactions.” […]

    The preemptive response comes as protesters continue to train in nonviolent civil disobedience and establish safe zones, often in churches, that will provide shelter and medical supplies to activists on the ground and serve as communication hubs for organizers.

    The declared state of emergency, according to SMIN’s Downey, means protesters “need to recognize how determined those in power are to push forward the vicious program of police terror and criminalization of whole generations of Black and Brown youth.”

    “We need to recognize how fearful authorities are of people defiantly standing up to this, exposing the terrible injustice concentrated in Mike Brown’s murder, and exposing this before the eyes of the whole world, and inspiring those who’ve been beaten down and waking up those who have looked the other way,” he added.

    Related news, due to the date of the announcement (coincidence? hm…): Missouri Governor Launches Ferguson Commission (Video) –

    “The issues raised in Ferguson touch all of our communities,” said Nixon to a jam-packed auditorium of youth, community leaders, activists, local and federal politicians, and the world’s media. “To maintain the status quo is just not acceptable.”

    The 16-member commission is comprised of educators, law enforcement officials, business owners and other community leaders. They will spend the next year on an agenda aimed at implementing, in Nixon’s words, “concrete changes.” Among their goals will be a report by next September to address the issues of racial inequity raised in the aftermath of the shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown by Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson in August. […]

    “The choices we make in troubled times are the true expression of our humanity,” he said.

    Nixon’s appeal for peace and calm came just as St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay sent a letter to the St. Louis Board of Aldermen’s public safety committee Tuesday, saying that 400 National Guard troops will be deployed around the city. They will not be used to interact with protesters, but will instead be put into place to “prevent random acts of violence, property destruction, looting or other criminal activity,” according to the letter. […]

    Community leaders and activists present at the commission launch were thinking in more immediate terms, though.

    One woman affiliated with a local justice coalition who asked not to be identified said she was unhappy with the members of the commission because she hasn’t seen any of them involved in activist work in the past months. […]

    “We are so separated racially and it is possible for people to have different St. Louis experiences,” [Antonio French] said. “The African-American experience in St. Louis is one that is less successful economically, there’s a higher rate of victims of crime, a higher rate of victims of police, and less opportunity.”

    Though French said these inequities “should not be tolerated” he remains optimistic about what lies ahead.

    “I am hopeful. I think for them to hear the message of the protesters is inevitable.”

    The choices we make in troubled times are the true expression of our humanity. Please take a moment to reflect on that statement, and who is saying it at this very moment in Ferguson. And in light of the article to follow.

    And from the Root via carlie, Ferguson: Police Are ‘Preparing for War, and We’re Preparing for Our Safety’:

    The grand jury announcement is expected at any time. And with tension building in Ferguson, some in the community are choosing to prepare for the worst. Beauty supply stores, restaurants, convenience marts and a Sprint store in the area are among those that have placed boards on their windows and entrances in the event of damage or break-ins. To let customers know that they’re open for business, they’ve spray-painted “Open” or “We are open” on the boards or placed printed signs on storefronts or in the grass around their buildings.

    Local businesses, churches, activists and police departments say that they’re hoping to ensure peace and prevent violence while protecting the right to protest, and to provide a safe environment for citizens and their property. Although their stated objectives are similar, there’s a stark difference in their methods.

    “They’re preparing with artillery, armor and guns; and we’re preparing by gathering Band-Aids, food and water,” said Fellows. He added, “They’re preparing for war, and we’re preparing for our safety.”

    According to The Guardian and Associated Press, state and local police departments combined have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, purchasing items such as helmets and sticks along with tear gas, riot gear and additional crowd-control equipment. […]

    Others in the area are purchasing weapons. The Huffington Post’s Amanda Terkel reports that because of fear about the aftermath of the grand jury decision, “there has been about a 700 percent spike in sales” at a gun store near Ferguson.

    Protesters are preparing by attending training sessions that focus on what they should expect in interactions with law enforcement. They have a buddy system and a meeting plan in place. For protection, churches will open their doors as sanctuaries, and safe houses will also be established. Demonstrators have been encouraged to put together and bring emergency kits that include items like granola bars, makeshift gas masks, handkerchiefs and layers of clothing to stay warm. Goggles are another item suggested, along with baby shampoo that demonstrators can use to wash their skin if it comes in contact with chemicals.

    “We are much more prepared and know how to better protect ourselves,” said Lamkin, who is known to many of her parishioners as, simply, Pastor Renita. “The system thought it would break us over time, but we have had time to heal and are so much stronger than we were 103 days ago.”

  50. rq says

    I’ll get to the tragicomic bits in a moment, don’t worry.

    First, people’s expression being muzzled: Hunter Hayes cancels Chaifetz show over ‘state of emergency in Missouri’

    Country star Hunter Hayes’ concert Thursday night at Chaifetz Arena has been called off.

    A statement from the venue reads: “Out of respect for Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon’s declaration declaring a state of emergency in Missouri, Hunter Hayes’ Thursday, November 20 show at Chaifetz Arena in St. Louis has been cancelled. Tickets will be reimbursed at the point of purchase. At this time, all other University related events at Saint Louis University this week are planned to go on as scheduled.

    Hayes assures his fans that he will be back to St. Louis in 2015.”

    Because a state of emergency forbids all country music. Or something.

    Here’s a bit about Mayor Slay’s letter about the 400 NG, St. Louis mayor asks for 400 National Guard troops. I retyped the letter above, so I won’t quote much from the article, but this is significant (see esp. part bolded by me)

    The 400 guard members are in addition those who will be posted in Ferguson, which is several miles away from the city. Slay has said the guard members won’t interact with protesters unless there is an emergency.

    Slay said St. Louis police officers will wear their normal police uniforms to avoid the look of militarization. He said they will switch to protective gear if the protests turn violent or officers’ lives are in danger.

    Meanwhile, St. Louis County Executive Charlie Dooley said he has turned any decisions about stationing National Guard troops in the county over to County Police Chief Jon Belmar. […]

    Stenger backs Nixon’s plan to deploy National Guard troops to provide protection to police and fire stations and other locations that may be vulnerable should disruptions occur following the grand jury decision.

    How many are being sent to Ferguson in the first place? Plus 400? Sounds like a lot. For prepping for peaceful protests.

    Ope, I mentioned Stenger, so here’s a bit about election results from St Louis Public Radio: North St. Louis County Carried Stenger Across The Finish Line –

    The final count gave Stenger a few more votes than reported on election night. The certified tally shows him with an edge of 1,854 votes over Stream.

    Stream said in a statement Tuesday that his campaign has yet to decide whether to seek a recount.

    But the results offer some sobering news for Stenger, and reasons for optimism for Republicans. […]

    Stream also performed well in the county’s central corridor, narrowly carrying Clayton Township. And he benefited from huge margins in west St. Louis County, which also saw some of the county’s highest turnout of voters.

    But Stenger prevailed because of stronger margins in north county townships. In Spanish Lake township, he collected almost 63 percent of the vote. Even in Ferguson Township, torn apart for months by unrest over the police shooting, Stenger received support from 62 percent of the voters.

    Still, that was far below the traditional Democratic performance in north county. Four years ago, Dooley won 81 percent of the vote in Ferguson Township. In Spanish Lake Township, Dooley’s 2010 tally amounted to 79.3 percent of the vote. […]

    By the way, McCulloch – who had no major party opposition — didn’t seem to suffer much at the polls. In Ferguson Township, for example, he collected only 112 fewer votes than Stenger.

    Some nice pictures at the link.

    Another short piece about Anonymous revealing the identities of klanspeople – Anonymous Takes The Hoods Off The KKK After Threats Of ‘Lethal Force’ On Ferguson Protesters. It may or may not be an updated version of an article I have already posted. Didn’t bother to check, sorry!

    Let’s move on to something more cheery, like intersectionality (which has been rearing its head on twitter re: feminism amongst anti-racism activists, as well as sexual orientation, etc.) – Black Freedom Fighters in Ferguson: Some of us are queer:

    TFW: As queer-identified black folk, what challenges and opportunities do you face as builders in this racial justice movement?

    Larry: There are more challenges than opportunities presented to those who identify as queer. I’ve been out to my family and friends since I was fifteen, but I’ve felt like I had to choose between focusing on black issues or gay issues. I identify as a young black gay male who is fighting for social and economic justice. There’s a lot of exclusion and it’s blatant when it comes to having black queer and trans folk in spaces where the work needs to be done. We have to create our own spaces, which has a disadvantage because it feels divisive. We matter and I constantly have to remind myself that. I owe so many that have been on the ground with me, like you Darnell, Kalay’an Mendoza, Daniel Griffin, and my brother Cjay who have given me advice on how to assert myself and demand my place in this movement.

    Ashley: In St. Louis you are either gay or you’re Black. Intersectionality is a word not yet recognized or practiced here. So as a queer person of color doing work that is centered on racial bias, it is difficult to hold space with people who tend to forget that we exist. It has been personally challenging for me to assert that queer people be included in a movement in which so few are visible, but I believe that by simply doing the work and existing as a bisexual Black woman my visibility will show others that there is a place for them. I have also been doing outreach work with some of the black gay groups in town in attempts to bridge the gap between the two very separate communities here.

    TFW: Given the exclusion, What steps must we take to ensure that our fight against anti-blackness, and our politics that foreground the fight, is expansive and inter-sectional enough to include ALL black people?

    Ashley: We must be conscious of our language. We must be willing to examine ourselves and think about the ways we treat people. If gender specific pronouns, like “you guys,” are the only way in which people are referred to in meetings, how is that inclusive? It starts with self-reflection. I think, especially for this area, that conscious effort is a necessity. The Midwest is not an area that is inclusive, so we must make sure that we are pushing beyond the normal comfort zone. I think outreach work is imperative. We cannot expect Black queer folks to feel accepted simply because they are Black because for too long we have been told you must choose one. So we must reshape that narrative of what it means to be Black: by being visible, doing outreach work in the queer community and making sure the space we are offering invitation to is a safe one.

    Larry: We have to educate ourselves and others about our history. Queer and trans folk are part of that history, too. We must also be open-minded when talking about racial and political issues, because we aren’t all going to agree on every point but we can meet on common ground about making a difference.

    TFW: Lastly, as black queer activists working on the ground in St. Louis, what words would you offer to both racial justice and LGBT activists and organizations locally and nationally?

    Larry: To the LGBT orgs and activists that have not stepped up: I’m disappointed you don’t see this as your fight. I’m calling on you to stand with me in this fight, whether it’s advice, support, resources, or your presence. The Ferguson community needs YOU! To the racial justice orgs and activists who exclude those of the LGBTQ community: This is a human issue. You can’t continue to exclude your people. This is everyone’s fight.

    Ashley: Silence is consent. It’s time to step up and realize that not only are there Black queer folks, but Black people, in general, are still fighting for the respect of our basic humanity. Marriage rights are amazing, but it’s incredibly hard for someone to rally around civil rights when the basic right to life is constantly threatened because Black skin makes you a target. Rally as hard for our lives and right to due process and justice as you do around the right to say “I do.” And to racial justice orgs, make sure you are out there fighting for and in such a way that it’s respectful of ALL Black lives, not simply the ones you are most comfortable with and adjusted to protecting.

    That’s kind of most of the article. But it’s a good read, and a reminder that none of us exist along a single axis or on a single spectrum of life, and there are so many things to remember and think about when trying to move one aspect forward – without leaving the rest behind.

  51. rq says

    So, Antonio French, a St Louis alderman, wrote a letter to Gov. Nixon, full text:

    Dear Governor Nixon,

    In light of the events of the past few months in the St. Louis area and the trauma suffered by so many people, including children, it has become painfully apparent that St. Louis urgently needs support for the post-traumatic stress this community is enduring. The citizens of Ferguson and the greater St. Louis metropolitan area have been greatly affected in the past 103 days by constant exposure to a unique and horrific combination of events and disruptions to normal life. As such, I am requesting that you deploy 400 counselors, mental health professioanls, and other trained personnel to provide aid to the people of the St. Louis area as a consequence of the traumas outlined below:
    – Repeated incidents of tear gas deployment on citizens, some in their own homes;
    – Unlawful arrests and detainment of citizens;
    – Presence of military-style weapons and vehicles in residential areas;
    – Pointing of weapons at unarmed citizens;
    – Business closures and the resulting economic impact on families;
    – Tension and anxiety caused by an extended grand jury process;
    – And fear resulting from statements from government officials calling for a “State of Emergency”, suggesting we are at the “precipice of pandemonium”, and urging citizens to stock up on food and water before the grand jury announcement.

    It is necessary that individuals who have been trained in post-traumatic stress management are made available en masse to the people who are experiencing the aforementioned traumas.

    Governor, we do not need more guns deployed to this area. We need love, compassion, empathy, understanding, and action reflecting those things. Dispatching these 400 counselors and mental health professionals would go a long way to counteract the fear and trauma being suffered by this community at this time.

    Respectfully,
    [signature]
    Alderman Antonio French
    City of St. Louis

    Tpyos mine.

    Keep forgetting this one: constantly updated site of police misconduct. All kinds of gems to be found there.

    Something to watch later on? #BEFOREANDAFTER watch @CBSEveningNews on one Officer’s journey in the #aftermath of #Ferguson #MichaelBrown shooting . Here’s hoping there will be video.

    I promised comitragedy, and here it is, and yes, it involves Nickelback: Nickelback Writes Song Inspired By Ferguson Unrest, Finally. I mean, FINALLY!!!, right? :D

    In an interview with extremely relevant site Yahoo! Music from earlier this month, the extremely relevant Chad Kroeger, Nickelback frontman, discussed the track “Edge of a Revolution” from the band’s latest album, No Fixed Address, released last week on Republic Records. Within the Live Nation-sponsored blog post, between questions about Kroeger’s wife Avril Lavigne and Judas Priest’s Rob Halford, music journalist Jon Wiederhorn asked about the track. The exchange went as follows:

    Wiederhorn: Another new thing on No Fixed Address is you’ve written what might be your most poignant political song, “Edge of a Revolution.” What motivated you to go that route?

    Kroeger: I don’t know if North America is on the edge of a revolution, but I wanted it to feel that way in the song, since it feels that way in so many other parts of the world. You turn on CNN and it’s like, “Wow!” We’d have it on for 15 minutes and we’d have to shut it off because it was so depressing. The state of affairs in the world these days is so dismal. And I think that’s where the song definitely came from. While we were working, the [shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri] was a major story and there was rioting like crazy. So it definitely felt like the seeds of revolution were being planted.

    Turning on CNN is like “Wow!” Mr. Kroeger. Very astute political analysis. Surely the song itself is of similar depth.

    There follows a literary and musical analysis of the track, and yes, please listen at the link. As the article says, “Continue to page two for the high intellectualism that is Nickelback political commentary.”

    “Edge Of A Revolution”

    Head high, protest line
    “Freedom” scribbled on your sign
    Headline, New York Times
    Standing on the edge of a revolution

    Hey, hey, just obey.
    Your secret’s safe with the NSA
    In God we trust or the CIA?
    Standing on the edge of a revolution

    Yeah, we’re standing on the edge of a revolution
    Revolution, revolution, revolution

    No, we won’t give up, we won’t go away
    ‘Cause we’re not about to live in this mass delusion
    No, we don’t wanna hear another word you say
    ‘Cause we know they’re all depending on mass confusion
    No, we can’t turn back, we can’t turn away
    ‘Cause it’s time we all relied on the last solution
    No, we won’t lay down and accept this fate
    ‘Cause we’re standing on the edge of a revolution

    Wall Street, common thief
    When they get caught they all go free
    A brand-new yacht and a finder’s fee
    Standing on the edge of a revolution

    Same shit, different day
    Can’t keep fed if I can’t get paid
    We’ll all be dead if the shit don’t change
    Standing on the edge of a revolution

    Yeah, we’re standing on the edge of a revolution
    Revolution, revolution, revolution

    No, we won’t give up, we won’t go away
    ‘Cause we’re not about to live in this mass delusion
    No, we don’t wanna hear another word you say
    ‘Cause we know they’re all depending on mass confusion
    No, we can’t turn back, we can’t turn away
    ‘Cause it’s time we all relied on the last solution
    No, we won’t lay down and accept this fate
    ‘Cause we’re standing on the edge of a revolution

    We’ll all be dead if this shit don’t change
    Hey hey hey hey

    What do we want? We want the change
    And how’re we gonna get there? Revolution
    What do we want? We want the change
    Standing on the edge of a revolution

    What do we want? We want the change
    And how’re we gonna get there? Revolution
    What do we want? We want the change
    Standing on the edge of a revolution

    No, we won’t give up, we won’t go away
    ‘Cause we’re not about to live in this mass delusion
    No, we don’t wanna hear another word you say
    ‘Cause we know they’re all depending on mass confusion
    No, we can’t turn back, we can’t turn away
    ‘Cause it’s time we all relied on the last solution
    No, we won’t lay down and accept this fate
    ‘Cause we’re standing on the edge of a revolution

    What do we want? We want the change
    And how’re we gonna get there? Revolution
    What do we want? We want the change
    Standing on the edge of a revolution

    What do we want? We want the change
    And how’re we gonna get there? Revolution
    What do we want? We want the change
    Standing on the edge of a revolution

    So, what you’re saying is, uh…is that, uh….Wall Street…and, uh, the CIA…and….

    Hmmmm.

    Well, hell, this shit is clearly over my head — this is why visionaries like Kroeger and Co. make the big bucks, I suppose. Fittingly, the song is the official theme for this year’s WWE Survivor Series event, to be held in St. Louis on November 23. The WWE is exactly the place this track belongs.

    And lucky for all of us, the ‘Back won’t be putting away the politics anytime soon. Well, maybe. Kroeger tells Yahoo! that he generally doesn’t have any idea what he is going to say or sing or write about before it just comes spilling out of his face — who’d have thunk it?

    Wiederhorn: Do you think you’ll address more political content in the future?

    Kroeger: Y’know, I’m just as surprised as anybody else when something comes out of my mouth. I get to hear it for the first time, too. I think other people actually think about the things that they say. And with songwriting, it’s the same way. It’s just kind of happens. It comes out that way. There’s no agenda. There’s no “Let’s plan this. Let’s plot this. Let’s see where this will take us.” And for that song that line just came out. Then I said, “What if we wrote a song called ‘Standing on the Edge of a Revolution’?”

    Like the great Gil Scott-Heron said: “The revolution will not be planned for or thought out at all whatsoever.” Or something like that.

    I’m sorry, I once again posted pretty much the entire article. This time, because I could barely stop laughing. If I didn’t laugh, I would cry. Go, Nickelback, go forth and be political. My analysis shall simply consist of ‘Wow!’ as I turn off the radio.

    +++

    Word of warning for those keeping up, tomorrow morning’s (my morning, not yours) update may come late, as I actually get to work during the day tomorrow, which means no access to twitter, but I’ll have stuff for you in the evening (my evening, though if I’m feeling particularly lazy, your evening (or next day, all you living in the future)).
    In case that matters to anyone.

  53. rq says

    Dammit, ate my comment.
    Anyway, via The Toronto Star, a surprisingly fear-less piece on the strain in Ferguson: Residents of Ferguson battle fog of fear while waiting for grand jury

    One man not buying it is Charles Davis, who together with his wife, Kizzie, launched Ferguson Burger Bar on West Florissant with strikingly bad timing — the day before Brown was killed.

    Davis never boarded up his little shop and he doesn’t plan to start now. The windows remain intact, unsmashed, 103 days later. And when you step inside, it’s a family affair — a church-going family big on inspirational messages.

    Business was so good Wednesday Davis barely had time to speak to us. “No plywood on these windows. We’re hanging onto hope and leaving it all in God’s hands.”

    Davis’s aunt, Ruth Hopkins, pointed us to the inspirational messages on the restaurant walls. “You say I dream too big, I say you think too small,” read one poster. Another, “If Plan A don’t work, the alphabet has 25 more letters, stay cool.”
    […]

    Elsewhere in Ferguson Wednesday, a creative crew of six men and women was busy channelling the nervous energy into public art, pasting an array of poster-sized images of human hands of all colours and ages over one of West Florissant’s bare plywood storefronts.

    East St. Louis artist Damon Davis, who created the images, told the Star his goal was simply to “lift people up, give them something less depressing to look at.

    “Living in this drama, in this plywood landscape, eats away at the soul,” said Davis. “So we’re just trying to push humanity forward a bit and remind people we’re all in this together.”

    Sounds like they spoke to the right people for once.

  54. rq says

    Going to do this backwards through time, because otherwise I’m pretty sure I’ll mess up photos from last night and the night before (and it’s nothing pretty). I’ll probably mix them up anyway.
    Also, so many tabs and browser crashes. Going to be several comments.

    Some articles first:
    Michael Brown’s father: ‘I don’t want my son’s death to be in vain’:

    “My family and I are hurting, our whole region is hurting,” Michael Brown Sr. said in the video, uploaded by St. Louis Forward, a St. Louis civic collective. “I thank you for lifting your voices to end racial profiling and police intimidation. But hurting others or destroying property is not the answer.

    “No matter what the grand jury decides, I do not want my son’s death to be in vain. I want it to lead to incredible change, positive change, change that makes the St. Louis region better for everyone.” […]

    Activists and local black politicians have been fighting back against the assumption that protests will turn violent if there is no indictment, but disruptive protests are expected. Five demonstrators, two of them from out of state, were arrested outside the Ferguson Police Department late Wednesday after several dozen protesters squared off with a small line of riot officers.

    The remarks Thursday from Michael Brown Sr. were largely aimed at trying to prevent a return of the sporadic violence seen in August.

    “We live here together, this is our home, we are stronger united,” Brown said. “Continue to lift your voices with us and let’s work together to heal, to creating lasting change for all people regardless of race.”

    Also, same subject, via USA Today, with video: Michael Brown’s father asks for calm in new video – someone on twitter commented that they’ve seen more convincing hostage videos.

    Ferguson Organizer: ‘Police Are Preparing for War’:

    “What the police publicly are saying is that they’re interested in protecting the First Amendment rights of protesters, but what they’re sort of doing is sending a racist dog whistle that the First Amendment is really dangerous,” he said. “So on the one side of their mouth they’re telling people they are preparing for peace, and on the other side of their mouth they’re instructing businesses to board up their windows and prepare for civil unrest.” […]

    MORE has already trained more than 500 people in non-violent civil disobedience and will continue until the grand jury decision is announced. Its trainings include participating in direct action, documenting police misconduct and conducting jail support. Marcano said MORE has seen more than 300 arrests in Ferguson, and the organization will continue to play a key role in paying bail for protesters.

    “You’ll see not just a legal defense strategy but an offensive legal strategy on our part,” he said. “We have a rock star team of civil rights lawyers coming to town to monitor the situation.”

    From the more positive and supportive news section, As anxiety rises, Riverview Gardens rolls out support in advance of grand jury announcement:

    Since the start of school, teachers and administrators in this north St. Louis County school district have worked on how to best address protests against police brutality and the death of Brown, who attended school here as a sophomore. Initially, staff was instructed to avoid the subject unless it was raised by students.

    But within days, the district began rolling out an approach that fuses therapy with instruction through writing exercises, art and historical comparisons. The district is working to support students and teachers who are showing signs of stress trauma. Teachers are also trying to use Ferguson as a teaching moment to springboard into other academic areas.

    Lessons have been developed to help children cope with whatever unfolds after the announcement.

    For example, some kindergartners in the district’s nine elementary schools will be learning about conflict resolution through the story of Peter Rabbit and his nemesis, Mr. McGregor.

    Children at the two middle schools will be deconstructing the 1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles and will use Venn diagrams to compare them with Ferguson. Teachers at the high school will continue to use the situation to touch on the legal system, government and economics through discussions and essay writing.

    “We are trying to focus on not only the social and emotional piece but the aspects that can be transitioned into the classroom,” said Bonita Jamison, an assistant superintendent with the district.

    thisisthemovement, installment #57 (I seem to be skipping issues lately, not sure how, but hopefully there’s enough overlap in material that y’all are not missing out on some important reading):

    Companies Request Out-of-State Security Officers Be Granted Licenses by STL County PD, PD Speeds Up Processing Timeline There has been an increased demand in the number of requests for licenses to private security. In response to the demand, the police have sped up processing timelines. But you need to read this entire article for yourself. And importantly, this is written by Christine Byers — check the title and tone as a defense of police practices. Absolute must read.

    Lawyer Who Killed VonDerrit Is Identified Jason H. Flanery has been identified as the officer who killed VonDerrit. His name was accidently released to the family. Absolute must read.

    Ferguson Mayor and Police Chief Declining All Interviews Until After GJ Announcement In an interesting twist, Mayor Knowles and Chief Jackson are declining to speak to any media until after the GJ decision is announced. Important read.

    Were The Deleted Ferguson Emails Searched? It appears that when the City of Ferguson searched through emails to comply with a data request, they did not search through deleted emails. Deeply problematic and another seeming indication of corruption. Absolute must read.

    Protestor Artist Raises Hands of Hope, Covers Boarded Up Buildings Protestor Damon Davis recently began an innovative art project wherein he placed art over the boards on some of the boarded up business in Ferguson. Powerful read/view.

    Should VonDerrit Have Been Let Out On Bail? This article is included simply so you can see all sides of the media coverage re: STL. This article presents the arguments that perhaps VonDerrit would still be alive if he had not been allowed out on bail. Though we find this to be subtle victim-blaming, we encourage you to read it.

    Grand Jury Decision May Come Friday, Announcement Later The Grand Jury will meet on Friday and may render a decision, which would then be announced at a later date. This article provides a brief recap and hypothesis of potential timing.

    Meet Brittany Packnett, A Member of the Ferguson Commission This is an interview and profile of Brittany Packnett, one of two youth members and active protestors on the Ferguson Commission. Must read.

    Red Cross Is Ready to Respond in Ferguson The Red Cross of Greater St. Louis is prepared and ready to respond in the event of emergencies resulting after the GJ announcement.

    Country Star Hunter Hayes Cancels STL Concert Due to Pending GJ Announcement We won’t lie to you — we didn’t know who Hunter Hayes was before reading this article. But Hayes has canceled his concert scheduled for today due to the GJ announcement. Interesting.

    5 Questions About The National Guard This succinct and informative Q&A will help you better understand the role of the National Guard. Read it.

    Important read: previous estimates had it at 90ft, but BREAKING VIDEO: Police Lied. Mike Brown was killed 148 feet away from Darren Wilson’s SUV (with video of measurement, and photos) –

    131 feet, 1 inch (Distance between the fire hydrant and where Mike Brown died)
    + 17 feet (distance between the fire hydrant and the driver’s side door of Darren Wilson’s SUV)
    = 148 feet. […]

    On this past Monday, Gov. Jay Nixon declared a state of emergency in Missouri in anticipation for some level of unrest regarding a decision from the grand jury in the Darren Wilson case. Covering this decision, and the case in general, CNN authoritatively states that the Mike Brown was found 35 feet away from Darren Wilson’s SUV. […]

    Six different witnesses on the scene claimed that Mike Brown was shot at repeatedly from behind before he turned around, faced Darren Wilson, verbally surrendered, and put his hands in the air. Wilson, having already shot at Mike Brown at least six times while he fled, then fired off a barrage of four quick shots at the surrendered Brown he was looking at face to face, killing him on the spot. With his lifeless body face down on the road, Mike Brown’s blood literally flowed down Canfield Drive for more than four hours. The shooting and the aftermath that evening, which included bringing police dogs to the scene, infuriated residents as never before, and the anger was spreading rapidly across St. Louis and into the nation.

    When Chief Belmar sat down the next day to brief the press on his summary of the facts, he stated at 1:13 (and then even more emphatically at 6:01) in the video below, “The entire scene, from approximately the car door (of Officer Wilson) to the shooting, is, uh, about 35 feet.” […]

    It turns, out, though, that the distance Mike Brown fled was not 35 feet, as was stated in the press conference and cited in hundreds of articles since. Nor was it 45 feet, or 75 feet, or even 95 feet, but approximately 148 feet away from Darren Wilson’s SUV. Below, you will find photos from the day of the murder, maps, infographics, and more to confirm for you that the distance was more 500 percent farther away than originally claimed by Chief Belmar and subsequently quoted as fact in almost every narrative of the case.

    While the initial reporting of this distance from the chief could have been an error, albeit an egregious one, it seems clear now, after over 100 days of requests for the police to clarify this discrepancy have only produced silence, that it wasn’t an oversight, but a deliberate misrepresentation of the facts. […]

    When the police came out the morning after Mike Brown was killed and deliberately included the distance between the SUV and the shooting, it successfully created a very particular narrative. The arc of their initial story, magnified in importance by the absence of even one official report, is that Darren Wilson shot and killed a young man who, in a short distance from the SUV, posed him grave harm. How far Mike Brown actually fled, how far Darren Wilson chased him, and where each of them were in relation to each other and to the SUV, are facts of paramount importance. If Mike Brown fled over 100 feet away from Darren Wilson, it clearly suggests it Brown—unarmed, shot, missing a shoe, in lounge clothes—feared for his life and not the other way around.

    Furthermore, police, in many cases, use the distance in which a suspect flees and the distance between them in an encounter, as evidence to prove they were reasonably afraid for their safety—which is required by law.

    Lots more at the link, including pictures and numbers and a pretty clear picture of police lies. (Unless, of course, Darren Wilson chased Mike Brown all that distance just to remain within the allowed threat zone.)

  55. rq says

    Putting up pictures from last night’s protests, to clear up some space, and also, umm… Remember how officials have been saying that police* will be working in regular uniforms? Wearing riot gear only if they are directly threatened, or at least sentiments to that effect? Yeah. Keep in mind, last night was the second night they came out looking like they do in the photos.

    * It could be that they were speaking only about the National Guard, since Slay’s letter clearly mentions that they will be working in regular uniform. So it’s entirely possible that police are to be in riot gear right from the start.

    Anyway.
    photo 1; photo 2; photo 3; photo 4; photo 5; photo 6.
    More to come.

  56. rq says

    Okay, not photos, but text to read, from last night:
    Please get the word out this is the 2nd night in a row people are reporting police are laughing as they tackle protesters.#Ferguson;
    At St. Ann neighborhood watch meeting, 15 minutes from #Fergsuon, police tell residents to expect grand jury announcement on Sunday. (please mark Sunday as the next apocalypse – which may or may not arrive, since even rumours from police are just rumours).
    Perspective: All of the white people on Donnybrook think the National Guard is necessary. The sole black person said no.;
    Some military vehicles: Sitting behind QT on Natural Bridge and 170… and NOW: Mo. National Guard on I-70 EB traveling toward St. Louis. .

  57. rq says

    Oh, this one: If there is no #Ferguson GJ decision this weekend, there will be a riot – of national news media against their assigning editors. Sounds about right, considering the yes-no nature of the news lately.

    A few pictures about the night before last:
    photo 1; photo 2; photo 3; photo 4, and an important note: We saw 3 outside agitators throw bottles at the cops last night. Taylor did a great job at pointing them out and they were confronted. Remember that when news emerges that protestors are trying to incite violence.

  58. rq says

    5 second video of Ferguson two nights ago;

    Mother’s movement: Kim Rhodes supports #Ferguson protestors with water and juice. @LBPhoto1 ;

    STLSTL County cop joins the livestreaming revolution last night during wintry #Ferguson protest. @LBPhoto1 ;

    Ominous for journalism: 3 separate livingstreamers said that when #Ferguson police advance close their livestream dies. Anti-journalism continues. #FergusonNovember;

    Tonight, #Ferguson police arrested livestreamer @bassem_masri & then broke his phone, help get him another one here: https://fundly.com/keep-me-streaming# ….

  59. rq says

    So the evening ended with five arrests, including this woman and the livestreamer Bassem Masri. A bit more from him later.
    Meanwhile, Donate to the Legal Support Fund for Justice for Mike Brown:

    Please donate to the legal support fund for those arrested in Ferguson protests standing for Justice for Mike Brown!

    Since August 9, over 200 people have been arrested in Ferguson while protesting Mike Brown’s death and the epidemic of police violence facing Black and Brown communities in the United States.The Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (MORE) legal support team aims to provide accessible, democratic and accountable legal support to a wide range of people participating in the struggle for social change.

    We provide Know Your Rights trainings, staff a 24-hour legal support hotline, track arrestees so they don’t get lost in the system, fundraise for legal support costs, bond people out of jail, connect defendants with pro bono attorneys, coordinate with attorneys, organize volunteers & support people who go to trial.

    Money donated to the MORE legal support fund goes towards bail, court fees, and ensuring that protestors have access to free legal representation. Any money that is returned to the fund will go towards supporting civil disobedience in St. Louis.

    The Guardian on the protests: Ferguson protesters and police clash as grand jury decision nears

    In the most serious confrontation since a grand jury decision on Wilson became imminent in mid-November, protesters sounded sirens, shouted abuse at police and revived chants of “hands up – don’t shoot” from the nights of unrest in the St Louis suburb after Brown’s death.

    “I will stand here because I have the right to stand here,” said Walter Rice, 75, who was banging a large metal bucket with a spoon in time to the chants. Several other stalwarts of the demonstrations in August were also among the crowd.

    After sharp criticism of the militarised response to the summer demonstrations, police chiefs had in recent days stressed that officers would reserve the right to put on riot gear when their safety was at risk. Yet the protest on Wednesday night posed no apparent threat and had even begun thinning out before the situation escalated after police put on a show of force.

    They arrested five people including Bassem Masri, an activist-journalist who officers said had a series of outstanding warrants to his name. Others were grabbed by officers from the ground on South Florissant Road after refusing to retreat to the pavement underneath a “Season’s Greetings” banner in temperatures of -2C (28F).

    Although small in scale, the clash is likely to be viewed as a foretaste of actions likely to follow the announcement of whether Wilson, 28, is to be indicted. The widespread assumption among protesters, informed by leaks from the jury hearings, is that he will not be charged.

    Hereš KSDK.com on the arrests, too: Five arrested in Ferguson Wednesday,

    Schellman says the on-scene commander and four or five county officers told the demonstrators they needed to get out of the street or they would be arrested. He says more protesters arrived and started lying in the middle of the street.

    Officers made the following five arrests:

    Bassem Masri, 27, of Chesterfield – Fugitive from the City of St. Louis
    Maxwell Peterson, 24, from Wisconsin – Refusal to disperse, unlawful assembly
    Terry Poucher, 29, from Farmington – Refusal to disperse, unlawful assembly
    Rebecca Ragland, 46, from Webster Groves – Refusal to disperse, failure to move a vehicle obstructing the flow of traffic
    David Rodriguez, 26, of Oak Lawn, Ill. – Refusal to disperse, unlawful assembly

  60. rq says

    So Bassem Masri has a few complaints about the St Louis police: St. Louis police pressured me “to snitch on my friends,” says Palestinian-American protester –

    Masri told The Electronic Intifada that during his jail stay, St. Louis City police pressured the Palestinian-American to become a collaborator against his fellow protesters in exchange for leniency.

    After being held overnight at the Richmond Heights police station, police transferred Masri to the St. Louis Justice Center on Tuesday morning. It was there, he says, that they tried to recruit him as a collaborator.

    According to Masri, he was taken into an interrogation room and told to give an official statement about spitting at the officer.

    “I just remained silent,” he recounted. “Then they said that there was a video of me doing it, so I asked to see my lawyer. But they didn’t even let me contact my lawyer. So I said, ‘What are y’all really bringing me in here for? You got me here for a reason. So come out with it.’”

    It was then that the officers told Masri that the third degree assault charge would be taken under advisement, or put on hold, in exchange for information about protesters.

    “They wanted me to put names to faces on protesters and to let them know where we be going,” recalled Masri. “It’s like extortion. I have to snitch on my friends. If I don’t snitch on my friends, they’ll re-arrest me on the [third degree assault] charge.”

    Masri refused their offer and demanded he be taken back to his cell.

    As this was taking place, the officers “tried to get me lost in the justice system” because “they didn’t put a wristband on me,” Masri said.

    “The wristband identifies you in jail,” explained Masri. “If you’re in the county or city jails, they have to put a wristband on you because there’s so many prisoners. Otherwise they won’t know who you are. When it comes time for you to get released, they ain’t gonna release you unless you have a wrist band.”

    Had it not been for a sympathetic Black corrections officer who noticed Masri was missing a wristband and got him one, Masri might not have been released, he said.

    So… go police?

    But, you know – Two states of emergency, zero leadership (St Louis American):

    What is most troubling about Nixon’s preemptive overreaction of a non-existent emergency was his response when asked at a press conference who ultimately is in charge. A Governor who declares a State of Emergency for a region at peace had better be prepared to unequivocally take command of the situation, but Nixon’s stuttering failure to provide an answer (which became national news, in media starved of some actual news out of Ferguson) shows that he still – amazingly – is not prepared to take responsibility and show the leadership we so desperately need.

    It’s a good rundown of the leadership situation in Ferguson and St Louis, including the now-long-forgotten ascension of Ron Johnson, who isn’t getting nearly as many compliments as he was in the beginning.

    Let’s look at some art: Ferguson ‘Hands’ Together: Artist Aims to Unite Community (with autoplay video!!!)

    “There are a lot of nice people who live here and a lot of nice people are part of this movement, and we certainly want to show them you can also have beauty in a time of very serious circumstances,” said Michael Skolnik, president of popular hip-hop and pop culture website, Global Grind, who traveled from New York to help Davis.

    The photos that Davis, Skolnik and others plan to plaster on buildings lining W. Florissant Avenue show the racially diverse hands of people who have been active in focusing attention on inequalities in Ferguson. “All of these folks with their hands [photographed] have led this movement. Even the kids, the little ones, have led this movement,” Skolnik said. “Damon wanted to make sure we showed diversity.”

    Aziza Binti, who used to live in the apartments near where Brown was shot and is helping put the photographs up, said she hoped the pictures could inspire conversation among her peers and help form a bond. The group intends to hang hundreds of Davis’ photos across the block.

    For Davis, achieving this goal is personal.

    “The issues in St. Louis are one thing, but I’m a young black person. I am a target,” he said. “If I don’t stand up and say something, no one else is going to stand up and say something.”

    Some photos: Extraordinarily proud of our project today in Ferguson. Damon Davis is the artist. #AllHandsOnDeck is the movement.

    And You can have several seats. It’s short and to the point. Please read it.

  61. rq says

    Oh, one more on Bassem Masri: Update: The Local #Ferguson National Lawyers Guild team posted bond for @bassem_masri at 1:30pm today. via @rousseau_ist, so that’s nice for him.

    And I forgot this article regarding the protest: Protesters block traffic at Ferguson Police Station prompting arrests.

    Darren Wilson. More on him:
    Ferguson officer Darren Wilson in talks to resign from police force, sources say. I wouldn’t bet money on it, though – more like a horizontal transfer or a department shift.

    Wilson maintains he hasn’t done anything wrong, and the resignation talks have hinged on whether a grand jury returns an indictment against him in the death of Brown, people close to the talks said.

    Wilson has told associates he would resign as a way to help ease pressure and protect his fellow officers. Wilson has expressed concern about resigning while the grand jury was hearing evidence for fear it would appear he was admitting fault.

    Wilson could announce as soon as Friday his plans to resign, the same day a St. Louis County grand jury meets to deliberate and possibly decide on an indictment.

    It’s all speculation and third sources, though. Like I said, I wouldn’t count on it. Especially since the previous appeared on the same day as the next article:
    As Ferguson waits on edge for Michael Brown ruling, Officer Darren Wilson remains invisible:

    Wilson has been seemingly invisible since the controversial Aug. 9 shooting. He reportedly testified before the grand jury last month, but has made no public statements.

    “I talk to him every other day, he’s doing OK,” a close friend of the officer told Yahoo News this week.

    The friend declined to elaborate. “Maybe after the grand jury ruling,” he said.

    That decision is expected any day. The grand jury convened Aug. 20 to begin hearing evidence in the case. It will decide if Wilson avoids being charged or faces the possibility of up to life in prison.

    A representative with the St. Louis Police Officers’ Association said he met with Wilson on Thursday. The officer has been under a lot of pressure and stress but seems confident in the outcome of the grand jury investigation, Jeff Roorda, the union’s business manager, told the AP.

    “It’s fair to say that neither he nor his defense team expect an indictment,” Roorda said.

    Late Thursday night, CNN cited people close to the situation in reporting that Wilson was in final negotiations with the city of Ferguson to resign. The measure would depend on the officer being cleared by the grand jury and would be seen as a way of easing tension on the department and his fellow officers. […]

    Wilson, 28, was not arrested and has been on paid leave since the shooting. He lives 40 minutes from Ferguson with his girlfriend, who is also a Ferguson police officer. The couple reportedly deserted their home several days before Wilson’s name was made public.

    The Ferguson Police Department has been widely criticized for its public relations surrounding the case. Almost a week passed before Chief Tom Jackson publicly identified Wilson as the shooter and characterized him as a “quiet, gentle man” and an “excellent officer.” Last week, Jackson told Yahoo News that Wilson would “immediately” return to active duty in an undetermined role if he isn’t indicted, but would “most likely” be terminated “if it is a felony.” It’s unknown if Wilson, an officer in the town for three years, wants to return to Ferguson.

    At the August press conference where Jackson identified Wilson, the chief also handed out video of Brown stealing cigars and shoving a convenience store clerk about 15 minutes before being killed.

    “From the very beginning, the Ferguson Police Dept. has followed what is now seemingly standard operating procedure for police departments around the country: to vilify the victim and put the shooter on a pedestal,” attorneys for the Brown family recently said in a statement.

    Wilson the good guy. Sure.

    Darren Wilson and the status quo:

    We are now on the brink of the grand jury announcement with plenty of angst and fear to go around. As guns fly off the retail shelves and the mainstream media over-exaggerates the extremes on both sides, one lone fact has deliberately been clouded to divert our attention. Regardless of the circumstances (which we are still piecing together), an unarmed teen was shot down by police. Remember this.

    Darren Wilson’s most devoted followers seem to be mainly white folks in the law enforcement community, their families and friends. But Wilson also has white allies in high places like Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCulloch, Gov. Jay Nixon, Senator Claire McCaskill and a host of others who refused to work to create an environment of justice in this case. This is a clue to Wilson’s importance.

    Another group of white allies feel they have a dog in this fight – the Ku Klux Klan. The KKK has vowed to use “lethal force” against “terrorists masquerading as peaceful protestors” – a view apparently shared by the white decision-makers who have authorized the use of a militarized response to non-violent protesters. Frank Ancona, Imperial Wizard of Missouri’s KKK Chapter, has publicly boasted that Ferguson has been great for their recruitment efforts.

    The need to maintain white supremacy and uphold the system is what is playing out in Ferguson. Police or the Klan (or a combo) have been instrumental in repressing and controlling those who dare challenge that system; their roles in propping up a racist system is indispensable. What used to be strange fruit hanging from Southern trees is now taking the modern form of black men and women being in the wrong place (Trayvon Martin) or making white people feel threatened (Renisha McBride).

    As white allies for white supremacy align, many sectors of our society are joining in the chorus for much needed change in policing methods, court procedures and discriminatory laws. Documentation of police abuse and prosecutorial misconduct are rife. We are bombarded daily with videos of police brutality. Yet evidence of police raping, stealing and killing citizens is met with justification and resistance. The message is that the system must be protected at all costs – even if it means that the results are mistrust and hate of those we pay to insure the carriage of justice. […]

    Just like this fight has transcended the shooting of Mike Brown, it’s also bigger than Darren Wilson. Wilson was not some decorated hero in the Ferguson police force but he is now the symbol for white supremacy. What happens in this case will have huge implications in the future for the justice system, race relations and governance in our region. We will all have to answer the question posed to us in the old union song, “Which Side are You On?”

    “Down Outright Murder”: A Complete Guide to the Shooting of Michael Brown by Darren Wilson. A rather long yet strangely unquotable summary of everything since August 9. Well worth a read, I recommend, just for the information and the facts.
    This seems relevant to that: How To Get Away With Murder: Ferguson –

    People, we seem to have lost the entire thread of what Ferguson is all about — the reasons this story has stirred the passions of millions of Americans. The so-called leaders of St. Louis County, the scene of the crime, have spent most of the last two months focused on these three things. 1) Stocking up, and I mean stocking up big-time, on the latest state-of-the-art riot control equipment, to the tune of at least $100,000. 2) Amassing a civilian army of 1,000 police, who’ve received, in total, at least 5,000 hours (costing God only knows what) of training in battling civil unrest, etc. and 3) Constructing an artificial, bogus narrative that will keep the focus on the possibility of violent protest (something there’s actually been very little of over the last three months) and away from any culpability for the reckless actions of Darren Wilson…or the separate and unequal society that Wilson’s department props up.

    Politically, what Nixon, the zealously pro-cop St. Louis prosecutor Bob McCulloch, and the predominantly white power structure in Ferguson have accomplished has been nothing short of remarkable. Beginning in those four excruciating, humiliating four hours when Mike Brown’s bullet-ridden body was left face down on the hot Ferguson asphalt, the powers-that-be have worked the story line. They pushed against the “micro” story — why did a police officer fire multiple rounds at an unarmed youth, some 100 feet away with (as multiple, credible witnesses report) his hands in the air? And they’ve done so much to vanish the “macro” story line — the systemic discrimination against mostly black communities like Ferguson — from City Hall to almost intentionally crappy schools to a slew of fines against poor people to keep corporate taxes low to the police harassment and brutality against communities of color, and a justice system that distorts all burdens of proof when the accused wears a badge.[…]

    It’s kind of ironic that in the midst of all this, ABC launched a prime-time series called “How To Get Away With Murder.” That’s an entertaining notion for a fictional character, but in real life it’s not hard to pull off, not when you have the power of the state, its ability to manipulate the many layers of justice, and to set the parameters of the narrative in the mainstream media. Let’s look back on some of the critical plot twists on “How To Get Away With Murder: Ferguson.”

    Stonewall, stonewall, stonewall: The bias toward shielding critical information from the public, rather than informing citizens, started with the initial police report that disclosed zero information and included no account of what happened from Officer Wilson, presumably on advice of the police union or an attorney or both. The most basic information about the incident — such as the name of the officer involved or the number of shots that struck Brown and the location of the bullets — were not released until a week or more after the confrontation, if then.

    Lie about critical facts: As thoroughly documented by the writer/activist Shaun King and others, the information that law enforcement did release in those critical early days of the case were often misleading at best and flat-out wrong at worst. A prime example: Ferguson police chief Thomas Jackson told reporters that the police officer, at his police car, fired at Brown when he was just 35 feet away, a distance that made it somewhat more plausible that Wilson felt threatened. But the numerous photos of the scene prove that Brown was 100 feet away, a much greater distance that alters the narrative. This is just one blatant example of a fog of ever-changing information that have obscured the most basic truths — such as why Brown and his friend Dorian Johnson were stopped,, and what transpired in the critical first few seconds of their encounter.

    Smear the victim, and lie in the process: At the same news conference at which Wilson’s name was finally made public, Ferguson chief Jackson released video that shows the dead youth, Brown, earlier on the day he was shot, apparently stealing a type of cigars from a convenience store and physically confronting a clerk. Jackson publicly claimed he was only releasing the video because of requests from the news media. If true, this would have been the only instance where local police eagerly complied with an information request — but in fact it was shown to be a lie. There was no request. What’s more, Jackson initially said the convenience store report was the reason for the pedestrian stop, but after that story went public Jackson again changed his tune. The damage to Brown’s reputation had already been done, and the mission of shining the spotlight away from Wilson had been accomplished. And if Wilson were to be charged, the local jury pool would have been poisoned, against the victim, by the video release.

    All but suspend the 1st Amendment. Local law enforcement went out of its way to make Ferguson a hostile work environment for reporters covering the story. The tone was set early in the citizen protests, when working journalists for major news organizations like the Washington Post were arrested by police without provocation. There were multiple episodes of journalists, some independent and some from prestigious news organizations, who were threatened, harassed, roughed up or tear-gassed by the cops. Authorities, including the Federal Aviation Administration, even created a no-fly zone over Ferguson and lied about its real purpose, which was to keep out journalists. The Nobel Peace Prize-winning rights group Amnesty International came to Ferguson this summer and found “legal and human rights observers as well as members of the media have repeatedly been obstructed from carrying out their roles and responsibilities by law enforcement in Ferguson” — with 19 journalists arrested.

    Abuse the grand jury process to spin a misleading narrative: Rather than charge Wilson with a felony offense in the immediate aftermath of the killing, the authorities decided to take all the evidence before a grand jury. It is arguable that this was a legally valid move, but it’s important to understand that this was also a stalling tactic, to drag the case into the winter months when leaders hoped (wrongly, it looks like), passions would have cooled along with the temperature. Never forget that justice delayed is justice denied. What’s more, prosecutors have enormous power to sway a grand jury in whatever direction they wish. Anyone who follows the law remembers the comment by New York justice Sol Wachtler, that a prosecutor could convince a grand jury “to indict a ham sandwich.” […]

    Forceful, but non-violent, protests — sit-ins, boycotts, and the like — would surely be warranted if this slow motion train wreck of injustice in the American Heartland plays out the way it surely seems to be playing out. And here’s why: The authorities in Missouri are trying to write an ending to their fairy tale that what transpired there was business as usual — when in the moral, reality-based world it’s been anything but. And people should make it known that this is no longer business as usual, not just in Ferguson but in Philadelphia and in all four corners of this country.

    Because the words that Dr. King uttered a half-century ago are as true today as they were then: that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” The road back to justice in this case is a long one, and it doesn’t begin when the grand jury’s decision is announced. It starts right now, in taking back a narrative that the authorities have larded down with fiction. Because the killing of Mike Brown isn’t their script to re-write. It’s a nightmare that’s all too real.

    Yeah.

    From Upworthy, One Of The Biggest Racial Injustices Of Our Time, As Told By Those Living It, on police brutality and a link to the Communique from Ferguson video I linked day before yesterday.

    People often ask, “What do the citizens of Ferguson want?” Here is a pretty clear answer.

    It’s a really thoughtful conversation about what is happening all over our country and what needs to happen to prevent this from happening ever again. (Also, yes, that is “Grey’s Anatomy” star Jesse Williams saying lots of great things in the middle of this.) Here’s what you need to know. […]

    DISCLOSURE: I am white. If you are white and this story makes you uncomfortable, I urge you to fight the urge to close this window and to read the whole story. It’s not racist to feel challenged and awkward in thinking about these issues. It is depressing, though, if you can’t muster the strength to get a different perspective than your own. I would urge you to really listen, hear the whole thing, get a fresh perspective, and consider ALL the facts. […]

    I want to believe that cops are here to protect us. And the best way for them to earn that trust is to learn a new way to police that doesn’t do more harm than good. If you think there’s more to this than just taking a side, if you think that we maybe should have a grown-up conversation about how to end systemic discrimination by people in authority, I’d appreciate you sharing this.

  62. rq says

    Too many links. Repeat post in two parts.

    Darren Wilson. More on him:
    Ferguson officer Darren Wilson in talks to resign from police force, sources say. I wouldn’t bet money on it, though – more like a horizontal transfer or a department shift.

    Wilson maintains he hasn’t done anything wrong, and the resignation talks have hinged on whether a grand jury returns an indictment against him in the death of Brown, people close to the talks said.

    Wilson has told associates he would resign as a way to help ease pressure and protect his fellow officers. Wilson has expressed concern about resigning while the grand jury was hearing evidence for fear it would appear he was admitting fault.

    Wilson could announce as soon as Friday his plans to resign, the same day a St. Louis County grand jury meets to deliberate and possibly decide on an indictment.

    It’s all speculation and third sources, though. Like I said, I wouldn’t count on it. Especially since the previous appeared on the same day as the next article:
    As Ferguson waits on edge for Michael Brown ruling, Officer Darren Wilson remains invisible:

    Wilson has been seemingly invisible since the controversial Aug. 9 shooting. He reportedly testified before the grand jury last month, but has made no public statements.

    “I talk to him every other day, he’s doing OK,” a close friend of the officer told Yahoo News this week.

    The friend declined to elaborate. “Maybe after the grand jury ruling,” he said.

    That decision is expected any day. The grand jury convened Aug. 20 to begin hearing evidence in the case. It will decide if Wilson avoids being charged or faces the possibility of up to life in prison.

    A representative with the St. Louis Police Officers’ Association said he met with Wilson on Thursday. The officer has been under a lot of pressure and stress but seems confident in the outcome of the grand jury investigation, Jeff Roorda, the union’s business manager, told the AP.

    “It’s fair to say that neither he nor his defense team expect an indictment,” Roorda said.

    Late Thursday night, CNN cited people close to the situation in reporting that Wilson was in final negotiations with the city of Ferguson to resign. The measure would depend on the officer being cleared by the grand jury and would be seen as a way of easing tension on the department and his fellow officers. […]

    Wilson, 28, was not arrested and has been on paid leave since the shooting. He lives 40 minutes from Ferguson with his girlfriend, who is also a Ferguson police officer. The couple reportedly deserted their home several days before Wilson’s name was made public.

    The Ferguson Police Department has been widely criticized for its public relations surrounding the case. Almost a week passed before Chief Tom Jackson publicly identified Wilson as the shooter and characterized him as a “quiet, gentle man” and an “excellent officer.” Last week, Jackson told Yahoo News that Wilson would “immediately” return to active duty in an undetermined role if he isn’t indicted, but would “most likely” be terminated “if it is a felony.” It’s unknown if Wilson, an officer in the town for three years, wants to return to Ferguson.

    At the August press conference where Jackson identified Wilson, the chief also handed out video of Brown stealing cigars and shoving a convenience store clerk about 15 minutes before being killed.

    “From the very beginning, the Ferguson Police Dept. has followed what is now seemingly standard operating procedure for police departments around the country: to vilify the victim and put the shooter on a pedestal,” attorneys for the Brown family recently said in a statement.

    Wilson the good guy. Sure.

    Darren Wilson and the status quo:

    We are now on the brink of the grand jury announcement with plenty of angst and fear to go around. As guns fly off the retail shelves and the mainstream media over-exaggerates the extremes on both sides, one lone fact has deliberately been clouded to divert our attention. Regardless of the circumstances (which we are still piecing together), an unarmed teen was shot down by police. Remember this.

    Darren Wilson’s most devoted followers seem to be mainly white folks in the law enforcement community, their families and friends. But Wilson also has white allies in high places like Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCulloch, Gov. Jay Nixon, Senator Claire McCaskill and a host of others who refused to work to create an environment of justice in this case. This is a clue to Wilson’s importance.

    Another group of white allies feel they have a dog in this fight – the Ku Klux Klan. The KKK has vowed to use “lethal force” against “terrorists masquerading as peaceful protestors” – a view apparently shared by the white decision-makers who have authorized the use of a militarized response to non-violent protesters. Frank Ancona, Imperial Wizard of Missouri’s KKK Chapter, has publicly boasted that Ferguson has been great for their recruitment efforts.

    The need to maintain white supremacy and uphold the system is what is playing out in Ferguson. Police or the Klan (or a combo) have been instrumental in repressing and controlling those who dare challenge that system; their roles in propping up a racist system is indispensable. What used to be strange fruit hanging from Southern trees is now taking the modern form of black men and women being in the wrong place (Trayvon Martin) or making white people feel threatened (Renisha McBride).

    As white allies for white supremacy align, many sectors of our society are joining in the chorus for much needed change in policing methods, court procedures and discriminatory laws. Documentation of police abuse and prosecutorial misconduct are rife. We are bombarded daily with videos of police brutality. Yet evidence of police raping, stealing and killing citizens is met with justification and resistance. The message is that the system must be protected at all costs – even if it means that the results are mistrust and hate of those we pay to insure the carriage of justice. […]

    Just like this fight has transcended the shooting of Mike Brown, it’s also bigger than Darren Wilson. Wilson was not some decorated hero in the Ferguson police force but he is now the symbol for white supremacy. What happens in this case will have huge implications in the future for the justice system, race relations and governance in our region. We will all have to answer the question posed to us in the old union song, “Which Side are You On?”

    “Down Outright Murder”: A Complete Guide to the Shooting of Michael Brown by Darren Wilson. A rather long yet strangely unquotable summary of everything since August 9. Well worth a read, I recommend, just for the information and the facts.
    This seems relevant to that: How To Get Away With Murder: Ferguson –

    People, we seem to have lost the entire thread of what Ferguson is all about — the reasons this story has stirred the passions of millions of Americans. The so-called leaders of St. Louis County, the scene of the crime, have spent most of the last two months focused on these three things. 1) Stocking up, and I mean stocking up big-time, on the latest state-of-the-art riot control equipment, to the tune of at least $100,000. 2) Amassing a civilian army of 1,000 police, who’ve received, in total, at least 5,000 hours (costing God only knows what) of training in battling civil unrest, etc. and 3) Constructing an artificial, bogus narrative that will keep the focus on the possibility of violent protest (something there’s actually been very little of over the last three months) and away from any culpability for the reckless actions of Darren Wilson…or the separate and unequal society that Wilson’s department props up.

    Politically, what Nixon, the zealously pro-cop St. Louis prosecutor Bob McCulloch, and the predominantly white power structure in Ferguson have accomplished has been nothing short of remarkable. Beginning in those four excruciating, humiliating four hours when Mike Brown’s bullet-ridden body was left face down on the hot Ferguson asphalt, the powers-that-be have worked the story line. They pushed against the “micro” story — why did a police officer fire multiple rounds at an unarmed youth, some 100 feet away with (as multiple, credible witnesses report) his hands in the air? And they’ve done so much to vanish the “macro” story line — the systemic discrimination against mostly black communities like Ferguson — from City Hall to almost intentionally crappy schools to a slew of fines against poor people to keep corporate taxes low to the police harassment and brutality against communities of color, and a justice system that distorts all burdens of proof when the accused wears a badge.[…]

    It’s kind of ironic that in the midst of all this, ABC launched a prime-time series called “How To Get Away With Murder.” That’s an entertaining notion for a fictional character, but in real life it’s not hard to pull off, not when you have the power of the state, its ability to manipulate the many layers of justice, and to set the parameters of the narrative in the mainstream media. Let’s look back on some of the critical plot twists on “How To Get Away With Murder: Ferguson.”

    Stonewall, stonewall, stonewall: The bias toward shielding critical information from the public, rather than informing citizens, started with the initial police report that disclosed zero information and included no account of what happened from Officer Wilson, presumably on advice of the police union or an attorney or both. The most basic information about the incident — such as the name of the officer involved or the number of shots that struck Brown and the location of the bullets — were not released until a week or more after the confrontation, if then.

    Lie about critical facts: As thoroughly documented by the writer/activist Shaun King and others, the information that law enforcement did release in those critical early days of the case were often misleading at best and flat-out wrong at worst. A prime example: Ferguson police chief Thomas Jackson told reporters that the police officer, at his police car, fired at Brown when he was just 35 feet away, a distance that made it somewhat more plausible that Wilson felt threatened. But the numerous photos of the scene prove that Brown was 100 feet away, a much greater distance that alters the narrative. This is just one blatant example of a fog of ever-changing information that have obscured the most basic truths — such as why Brown and his friend Dorian Johnson were stopped,, and what transpired in the critical first few seconds of their encounter.

    Smear the victim, and lie in the process: At the same news conference at which Wilson’s name was finally made public, Ferguson chief Jackson released video that shows the dead youth, Brown, earlier on the day he was shot, apparently stealing a type of cigars from a convenience store and physically confronting a clerk. Jackson publicly claimed he was only releasing the video because of requests from the news media. If true, this would have been the only instance where local police eagerly complied with an information request — but in fact it was shown to be a lie. There was no request. What’s more, Jackson initially said the convenience store report was the reason for the pedestrian stop, but after that story went public Jackson again changed his tune. The damage to Brown’s reputation had already been done, and the mission of shining the spotlight away from Wilson had been accomplished. And if Wilson were to be charged, the local jury pool would have been poisoned, against the victim, by the video release.

    All but suspend the 1st Amendment. Local law enforcement went out of its way to make Ferguson a hostile work environment for reporters covering the story. The tone was set early in the citizen protests, when working journalists for major news organizations like the Washington Post were arrested by police without provocation. There were multiple episodes of journalists, some independent and some from prestigious news organizations, who were threatened, harassed, roughed up or tear-gassed by the cops. Authorities, including the Federal Aviation Administration, even created a no-fly zone over Ferguson and lied about its real purpose, which was to keep out journalists. The Nobel Peace Prize-winning rights group Amnesty International came to Ferguson this summer and found “legal and human rights observers as well as members of the media have repeatedly been obstructed from carrying out their roles and responsibilities by law enforcement in Ferguson” — with 19 journalists arrested.

    Abuse the grand jury process to spin a misleading narrative: Rather than charge Wilson with a felony offense in the immediate aftermath of the killing, the authorities decided to take all the evidence before a grand jury. It is arguable that this was a legally valid move, but it’s important to understand that this was also a stalling tactic, to drag the case into the winter months when leaders hoped (wrongly, it looks like), passions would have cooled along with the temperature. Never forget that justice delayed is justice denied. What’s more, prosecutors have enormous power to sway a grand jury in whatever direction they wish. Anyone who follows the law remembers the comment by New York justice Sol Wachtler, that a prosecutor could convince a grand jury “to indict a ham sandwich.” […]

    Forceful, but non-violent, protests — sit-ins, boycotts, and the like — would surely be warranted if this slow motion train wreck of injustice in the American Heartland plays out the way it surely seems to be playing out. And here’s why: The authorities in Missouri are trying to write an ending to their fairy tale that what transpired there was business as usual — when in the moral, reality-based world it’s been anything but. And people should make it known that this is no longer business as usual, not just in Ferguson but in Philadelphia and in all four corners of this country.

    Because the words that Dr. King uttered a half-century ago are as true today as they were then: that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” The road back to justice in this case is a long one, and it doesn’t begin when the grand jury’s decision is announced. It starts right now, in taking back a narrative that the authorities have larded down with fiction. Because the killing of Mike Brown isn’t their script to re-write. It’s a nightmare that’s all too real.

    Yeah.

    From Upworthy, One Of The Biggest Racial Injustices Of Our Time, As Told By Those Living It, on police brutality and a link to the Communique from Ferguson video I linked day before yesterday.

    People often ask, “What do the citizens of Ferguson want?” Here is a pretty clear answer.

    It’s a really thoughtful conversation about what is happening all over our country and what needs to happen to prevent this from happening ever again. (Also, yes, that is “Grey’s Anatomy” star Jesse Williams saying lots of great things in the middle of this.) Here’s what you need to know. […]

    DISCLOSURE: I am white. If you are white and this story makes you uncomfortable, I urge you to fight the urge to close this window and to read the whole story. It’s not racist to feel challenged and awkward in thinking about these issues. It is depressing, though, if you can’t muster the strength to get a different perspective than your own. I would urge you to really listen, hear the whole thing, get a fresh perspective, and consider ALL the facts. […]

    I want to believe that cops are here to protect us. And the best way for them to earn that trust is to learn a new way to police that doesn’t do more harm than good. If you think there’s more to this than just taking a side, if you think that we maybe should have a grown-up conversation about how to end systemic discrimination by people in authority, I’d appreciate you sharing this.

  63. rq says

    Oh, one more on Bassem Masri: Update: The Local #Ferguson National Lawyers Guild team posted bond for @bassem_masri at 1:30pm today. via @rousseau_ist, so that’s nice for him.

    And I forgot this article regarding the protest: Protesters block traffic at Ferguson Police Station prompting arrests, plus a 4-minute video recap.

    Also, among the many links are the lost ones: Michael Brown, Sr., Discusses Moving St. Louis Forward (the youtube video). Meant to put that up with the article.

    4 Reasons Cases Like Ferguson Are Hard for Feds to Prosecute, with Eric Holder in autoplay video. I HATE AUTOPLAY VIDEO.

    Here are the top four challenges facing federal prosecutors, according to many of those who’ve prosecuted such cases:

    1. “The law”

    Under federal law, prosecutors need to prove two things: (1) it was “unreasonable” for Wilson to believe Brown posed a threat to him or the public, and (2) Wilson “willfully” deprived Brown of his constitutional rights. […]

    2. “Issues of proof”

    In cases of excessive force, “You may have issues of proof,” and there are “certain limitations,” the current federal prosecutor nominated to replace Holder said more than a decade ago. […]

    3. “Strong presumption in favor of law enforcement”

    “There is a strong presumption in favor of law enforcement” when deciding whether to charge a police officer, Yeomans said. “And it is a risky business to be too proactive in second-guessing their instantaneous choices.”

    Both the law and juries give officers a lot of so-called “leeway” in that regard. […]

    4. “Selective leaking” and “public opinion”

    Holder has condemned the “selective leak” of certain information in the case, saying it is “harmful to the process.”

    Yeomans said the release of case information outside a grand jury room can have an impact on what happens inside the room.

    And transparency? Still not a priority, obviously. Ferguson City Council, officials hold special closed door meeting – I wonder if any activists or community leaders were invited?

    The notice that was sent out for the meeting cites a Missouri law that allows government meetings to be behind closed doors if police and first responder plans are being discussed. St. Louis County Police told News 4 they did not know about the meeting ahead of time, but do have plans to coordinate security with the Missouri Highway Patrol.

    I guess not.

  64. rq says

    Almost done!
    Important news in the Vonderrit Myers shooting – the cop who shot him has been identified!!!
    Lawyer identifies St. Louis officer who killed VonDerrit Myers Jr.

    The officer’s name is listed on an evidence envelope that was inadvertently included with Myers’ body when it was delivered to the funeral home, said Jermaine Wooten, one of the family’s lawyers.

    Police have not released the name, pending a “threat assessment.” The department declined to comment on the disclosure.

    Brian Millikan, the lawyer representing the officer involved in the shooting, would not confirm or deny the name provided by Wooten — Jason H. Flanery — but the Post-Dispatch verified it independently.

    So, was he a model citizen? Not likely:

    Wooten noted online posts attributed to Flanery that call President Barack Obama “Nobama” and say that in a speech by Michelle Obama, “She looks drunk, high, and dumb as hell.” The lawyer said repeated disparaging remarks about blacks in Flanery’s postings reflected a “strong negatively biased view of African-Americans.”

    He also cited Flanery’s online criticism of liberals and homosexuality. The lawyer complained that “right-wing conservatives” have not traditionally been “the friendliest” to people such as Myers. […]

    Wooten said social media provided insight to Flanery as well.

    He said online pictures showed “a guy who is actually in love with weaponry.” More problematic, Wooten said, are comments on YouTube videos. In those, Flanery criticizes liberals and posts comments such as, “Conservatives are better. At everything.”

    Flanery’s Instagram account showed pictures of him in the Marines and a video of him in civilian clothes, firing a fully automatic rifle. He praises family and farm life and posted comments such as “runyourgunnotyourmouth.” He also wrote, “I’ve been blessed with the ability to be exactly who I wanted to be when I grew up,” followed by the hashtags “lawman” and “Marines.”

    Flanery, 32, on the force for six years, also posted comments on videos of police actions, including a shooting in New York. One comment: “And the moral of the story is … if you shoot at men with guns they are going to shoot you back. And probably a lot.”

    Wooten said, “That says to me, if someone has a gun … he is going to continue to fire shots at that person until he is dead. Meaning if you fire one shot at me, I’ll fire 100 at you.”

    The lawyer noted that Flanery was arrested on a weapons charge while he was in high school.

    So I’d say in this case the officer’s past and character actually have bearing on his actions. His actions, not the victim’s. But that’s just me.

    WANTED: Jason H. Flannery for the murder of #VonDerritMyers (Jason is a member of the gang @SLMPD) #Ferguson #poltwt , that’s a photo.
    Also, Flannery was apparently present during the previous Ferguson unrest: The officer who killed VonDerrit also policed the protests. Wow. (via @kodacohen) . I don’t know if that’s him in the photo, but I’m not surprised, considering the amount of police that were called in in August.

    And while Anonymous and the police are in comment, let’s add the KKK: TAK KKK and Police Ties Statement

    Several days ago, the South East Missouri Chapter of the KKK known as TAKKKK distributed flyers in Ferguson, MO making lethal threats toward activists on the ground. In response, several activists asked Anonymous to launch #OpKKK. Local Anons in the St Louis and Ferguson area then launched #HoodsOff as a way to identify Klan members who might try to embed themselves within the protester community. After identifying multiple members of TAKKKK, we discovered that 3 of the highest ranking members were present at a Darren Wilson rally in Imperial, MO, that had previously been rumored to be organized by the Klan. At the time of the rally, both The Klan, and the organization known as “We Support Darren Wilson” denied this claim, and it was then dropped. But, after several identities of TAKKKK members where posted online, the “We Support Darren Wilson” group removed multiple photos from social media that where taken at the rally. The photos where removed from social media BEFORE we made public our findings. This made us suspicious, and we then continued to search for the Darren Wilson/TAKKKK connection. The circumstantial evidence was overwhelming. Then we got a tip. A source came forward claiming they had information that would link Frank Ancona and TAKKKK to Darren Wilson and the events unfolding in Ferguson. After multiple conversations with the informant, we where able to confirm this person was not connected to Darren Wilson, but instead had direct ties to his girlfriend, Ferguson Police Officer Barbara Spradling. We where so focused on Darren Wilson himself, that we let the fact slip by us that Officer Spradling was from the Imperial, MO area where Ancona co-organized the fundraiser for Darren Wilson. During the time that we where verifying this information, the global collective of Anonymous joined in on #OpKKK thereby taking this operation to the next level, taking multiple Klan websites off line, and taking over the national KKK twitter page. #OpKKK then began to gain the attention of media around the world, and death threats towards Anons from Ancona and other members of TAKKKK started to come our way. Then, early yesterday morning we received an email from our whistle blower that read like this: “This has gotten out of control. They want to kill you. And after you release this information, they will want to kill me. I am scared for my life right now. I am begging you to please do not release the information that I gave. I’m afraid that because the information I provided is so specific, that it will definately be traced back to me, and I will be in danger. I am a long time supporter of Anonymous, and have trusted you with my identity. Now I feel my life is in your hands. I’m begging you please. I have a family to think of.” All Anons involved in this where immediatly notified, and spent most of yesterday discussing this matter. We went back and forth about this situation, and debated on how to handle this plea from the whistle blower. We decided to try and take the information that we where given and connect the dots ourselves. We were unsuccessful. After much deliberation, we have decided as important as this information was, we will not endanger the life of any person. We believe the information to be too specific to this person to release to the public. We will instead, hold this information until we can connect the dots ourselves, without putting innocent lives at risk. We are confident that as we continue to expose members of the terrorist organization TAKKKK, we will no doubt connect them to Ferguson Law enforcement on our own. Ex TAKKKK member Henry Harrell has come forward saying ” I know for a fact that the TAKKKK had a lot to do with what went on in Ferguson” he then stated that certain law enforcement in the area are silent members of TAKKKK known as “Ghoul Squad” and continued by outing the recently deceased Leadwood, MO Police Chief as a TAKKKK member. We know for a fact that Ancona was called in to Ferguson by Ghoul Squad members employed by both Ferguson and St Louis County PD. We will continue our efforts to expose all law enforcement affiliated with TAKKKK, while at the same time protecting activists on the ground in Ferguson fighting for justice. Furthermore, the global collective of Anonymous promises to continue it’s war on the terrorist group known as the KKK.

    (Yes, it’s one of those robotic Anonymous videos, but at least there’s a transcript.)
    And an article on the subject: Anonymous: KKK members may have infiltrated Ferguson cop support group.

  65. rq says

    Justa few more. Some general crime and police misconduct:
    Ferguson police email deletion and search questioned (with autoplay video!)

    Leopold, with the international online news channel Vice News filed, an open records request asking for “any and all emails” police sent about Brown and the protests in the five weeks that followed.

    He made national headlines when he had to pay $1200 for the search which produced seven email exchanges he published.

    That’s right, just seven emails, in more than a month.

    When we asked about the city’s search procedures, Ferguson’s city manager issued a statement.

    “The City has instructed the contractor to search all emails on the system,” said Ferguson City Manager John Shaw. “Including deleted emails for the keywords provided by the requester.”

    But we started asking more questions when we discovered a report on the email search.

    It’s from Acumen Consulting, the St. Louis-based company the city hired to do the email search.

    One line describes the search process.

    “Per City of Ferguson policy, it is assumed at this time that no one has violated the ‘no email deletions’ policy,” the document sent by Acumen to Ferguson says.

    What’s that mean? Two computer experts we consulted called it unusual.

    “This does not appear to be a thorough search,” said Minneapolis based cyber-security expert Mark Lanterman.

    Lanterman says although the consultant may have searched for some deleted emails, the only comprehensive way to do a search is to look for deleted – and purged deleted – emails, too.

    That’s because even after you hit delete – and clean out your trash box – they sometimes survive deep in a computer’s memory.

    But if you check the email search contract, there is a section called “Assumptions and Conditions.”

    The “Assumptions and Conditions” clause from Acumen states: “It is our understanding that no one has intentionally deleted or purged email.”

    Yes, because they’re not going to delete aaaaannnyyyyy emails. Especially prior to knowing journalists have been requesting searches. And were given lenghty waiting period.

    Call For Help Leads to Murder when Officer Slams Innocent Woman to Pavement :

    In a statement in the Facebook group ran by family members who are demanding justice, the following summary is written.

    When the police arrived, the family asked if they could take Tanisha to the Hospital for a mental health evaluation, but as they attempted to put Tanisha in the police car, she did not want to go. She begged and pleaded not to be taken to the hospital where she had been before and avoided getting in the car. She was then restrained by a male police officer using excessive force, tackled down to the ground using the “Take Down” move, then put into hand cuffs .The police officer then called over a second officer who assisted in pinning Tanisha face down on the ground with his knee pressed down heavily into the back for 6 to 7 minutes, until her body went completely limp. When witnesses asked was she OK after noticing she stopped moving, the officers replied by saying she was fine, SHES JUST SLEEPING; ATTEMPTING TO COVER UP THE FACT THE HE JUST COMMITTED MURDER. The officer allowed my sister to lie faced down on the blistering cold ground, handcuffed, for over 20 minutes until the ambulance finally arrive. They never attempted to resuscitate her at any point before EMT arrived. Instead they continued to cover up the fact that she was dead by saying she was sleeping while she lie there Life-Less!!

    Tanisha’s Nephew Jacob and Mauvion, her 16yr old daughter have also written eyewitness accounts of the tragic incident describing what happened in the final moments of Tanishas life.

    Those accoutns are also at the link. Plus,

    In addition to the Go Fund Me campaign, a local community trust fund account has been set at “KEY BANK” under the name “THE TANISHA NICOLE ANDERSON MEMORIAL FUND” to better allow family and members of the local community to donate. If you would like to contribute, please Visit Key Bank. Every dollar will go to help fund Tanisha’s Burial and funeral expenses. Any amount is welcomed and greatly appreciated.

    Also, How Police Use Military Tactics to Quash Dissent:

    Making a Counter-insurgency

    The Army Field Manual defines an insurgency as an “organized, protracted politico-military struggle designed to weaken the control and legitimacy of an established government…increasing insurgent control.” A counterinsurgency strategy (COIN) includes the use of “military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological, and civic actions” to defeat the insurgency. Everything from spying to media-messaging to smoke bombing counts as a COIN tactic when it is used to undermine what the military calls an insurgency. […]

    Community policing sounds benign and even progressive on the surface, but after 9/11, heightened contact between police and citizens became an important intelligence-gathering strategy. This information is filed in one of nearly 100 fusion center databases shared by police, the FBI, and other federal agencies. Building a massive database with information culled from a population is foundational to COIN operations, which aim to quash a nascent insurgency before it gains popular support.

    Ironically, this “prevention” strategy was developed by domestic police, not the military, because in the places where America implemented large-scale COIN operations—Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan—an insurgency was already well-established. As Kristian Williams notes, “police innovations that COIN theorists recommend for military use are: the Neighborhood Watch, embedded video, computerized intelligence files, and statistical analysis.” Sometimes soldiers are literally the pupils of police. In 2010, 70 Marines on the eve of deployment to Afghanistan accompanied Los Angeles police officers on shifts. The Marines watched as the officers queried Angelenos for tips on gang members, a tactic they later used in Afghanistan. […]

    Edge City observed that the police, state troopers and the National Guard exerted “total spatial dominance” over the town’s streets. This included setting up a command center in a strip mall overlooking streets where officers and protesters frequently clashed. From this central position, police established multi-layered checkpoints to keep protesters from coalescing. The no-fly zone was established for two COIN tactical ends: to keep media out (in order to control the public narrative) and to provide an unimpeded aerial view of the land.

    Buttressing control of space was the use of “strategic incapacitation” to separate “good” protesters from “bad” ones. This tactic also utilized geography: The areas that police deemed permissible for protest featured members of the clergy, local politicians, and other “moderate” activists who set up tents and served food. These groups actively negotiated and planned with police to keep popular anger from coalescing into a more radical movement (a tactic used by the Army in Baghdad). As George Ciccariello-Maher notes, the US Army Counterinsurgency Field Manual emphasizes “a focus on the local population rather than the enemy, and the ideological winning of the hearts and minds of the uncommitted middle.” In Ferguson, moderates were used to coax youth into respecting the state-imposed curfew and channeling their frustrations in less destructive ways. […]

    Nobody knows what will happen once the grand jury decision is announced, but we can speculate. Michael Brown’s family may be disappointed. Darren Wilson may feel relief. St. Louis may or may not explode. The police may or may not act in a way that elicits global condemnation. We can, however, be sure that counterinsurgency tactics in the streets will complement clandestine intelligence-gathering that is almost certainly happening now, and after the smoke clears, journalists, activists and citizens will hopefully work to uncover a counterinsurgency campaign in action.

    Not quite as succinct as I would have hoped, but. Ah well.

    And from Chief Dotson, Chief Dotson on crime In St. Louis. *sigh*

    And a repost, but it’s nice to be reminded: An Open Letter From Ferguson Protestors and Allies, the one originally published in October (17).

    In Ferguson, police met our protesting of police brutality with the disgusting irony of greater brutality, the likes of which Americans have rarely seen on our own soil. In this American town, officers tapped their batons, pointed guns in our faces, kneed our women’s heads, threw our pregnant mothers to the ground, jailed our peaceful clergy and academics, and tear gassed our children.

    We are living an American Horror Story.

    But it is significantly past time for the story to end. Never to be told again.

    The onus to close this book falls directly on our leadership. Our elected leaders bear direct responsibility to ensure the safety of every one of its citizens at the hands of its agents, and to capture justice for every life taken. In this, the land of the free, you are responsible for securing and preserving that freedom for all of your citizens, irrespective of — or perhaps, especially because of — our skin. In a story in which we have been overwhelmingly targeted, unduly struck down by threat of our blackness, we require explicit attention, protection and value. We require freedom, and will hold everyone accountable to preserving our inalienable right.

    We will no longer live this American Horror Story.

    Nonviolent direct action is a necessary, vital, and wholly American tool in forcing meaningful, permanent, transformative action from our leaders and fellow citizens.

    Today, the 70th day of this nightmare, some may wonder why we have yet to stop – to stop chanting, stop marching, stop occupying. But we have not yet found peace because we do not yet know justice. Therefore we, together with our allies, will continue to occupy the streets and the American consciousness until the book is closed.

    Even in facing this terror, we have not met those who mean us harm with the same. Even in the face of this terror, we will continue to force the readers and writers of this, a most American of horror stories, to face the blackness that they fear, the blackness they have spent this entire story trying to erase, trying to soften, trying to co-opt, trying to escape. We will no longer allow you to escape this story and pretend that the epidemic of black lives dying by white hands is merely a figment of an active Black imagination. You must come face to face with the horror that we live daily. You must come to know and profess the truth of this story, and be determined to end it.

    We are not concerned if this inconveniences you. Dead children are more than an inconvenience.

    We are not concerned if this disturbs your comfort. Freedom outweighs that privilege.

    We are not concerned if this upsets order. Your calm is built on our terror.

    We are not concerned if this disrupts normalcy. We will disrupt life until we can live.

    This is an American Horror Story. Together, we are writing the final chapter.

    We sign:

    @2LiveUnchained
    @AbernM
    @akacharleswade
    @alaurice
    @ampstlouis
    @barbd_wyre
    @bdoulaoblongata
    @BeutfulStranger
    @blackstarjus
    @BrownBlaze
    @dejuanh
    @deray
    @dlatchison011
    @dreamhampton
    @Felonius_munk
    @geauxAWAYheaux
    @Haiku_RS
    @iam_MzCaram3l
    @ittynitty1992
    @jadorekennedy
    @JamilahLemieux
    @JustAlandria
    @justinbaragona
    @JustRod
    @Kaephoria
    @Kenya_D
    @kfen73
    @kidnoble
    @missleighcarter
    @Misterbiceps
    @Mocha_Skyy
    @mollyrosestl
    @MsPackyetti
    @NakedDiary
    @nettaaaaaaaa
    @nina_badasz
    @OwlAsylum
    @Patricialicious
    @princebraden
    @RE_invent_ED
    @realbodean
    @rikrik__
    @Salute_DeezNutz
    @Search4Swag
    @shear_beauty
    @StaceDiva

  66. rq says

    And last little bit for now, on the Ferguson Commission:
    Ferguson commission looks to shift focus away from indictment,

    “There’s no decision that makes 100% of the people happy,” Rev. Starsky Wilson, a co-chair of the Ferguson Commission, told msnbc in an interview. “And so what’s best right now is to be thoughtful about how we can get to know one another, and move beyond whatever the announcement is.”

    Rich McClure, a veteran of St. Louis civic life and Starsky’s co-chair, laid out some of the issues the panel will aim to tackle: Racial and ethnic disparities, a lack of economic and educational opportunities, and police-community relations. […]

    “Their most important work will not be what is written on sheets of paper or on a website,” Nixon said. “Their most important work will be the changes we see in our institutions and our work places, in our communities and in our interactions with one another. Change of this magnitude is hard; but maintaining the status quo is simply not acceptable.”

    The commission is charged with releasing a report by no later than September 15, 2015, on the underlying issues raised by the unrest in Ferguson. […]

    “This kind of engaged group of people, who are diverse, taking responsibility for stewarding a process by which the entire region has input into its future, is a model for the democratic project of inclusive democracy,” he said. “This is really what America is about.”

    An announcement on whether Officer Darren Wilson has been indicted for Brown’s killing is expected any day. A decision not to indict could set off a new spasm of anger, over three months after protests and isolated violence roiled this St. Louis suburb in the wake of Brown’s death.

    Starsky Wilson said commissioners’ ties to the community could allow it to help act as a force for calm in the wake of a decision.

    “One of the great things about this commission is that it’s filled with active citizens, who are engaged in the dialogue and the preparation already,” he said. [… – I think we’ve already remarked on the visibility of engaged citizens on the Commission list, but hey, I don’t live in STL so I don’t have all the info]

    “But when I look at the group that the governor has put together, it’s representative of the community, and I also think it’s a group that can then go out into the community long after the commission has ended its work and work to make these things happen,” Gore said.

    And Brittany Packnett, another commissioner who’s an executive at Teach for America St. Louis and who has been active in the protest movement, said the only way to measure the panel is on what it ultimately achieves for ordinary people.

    “Every time somebody’s been tweeting at me and saying congratulations for being on the commission, I’ve been saying, congratulate us for when we get something done for you,” Packnett told msnbc. “Because you are who we are accountable to.”

    But Joshua Williams, 18, who was protesting Wednesday in the cold outside the Ferguson Police Department, said he didn’t have much faith that the commission was going to lead to positive changes.

    “I think they just did it shut us up for a little while,” said Williams.

    And speaking of Brittany Packnett, Meet The Teach For America Official Charged With Bringing Change To Ferguson And Beyond

    Brittany Packnett, who is also one of the youngest members of the commission, is a native of St. Louis County. She graduated from Washington University in St. Louis, and got a graduate degree at American University while working for Teach For America in southeast Washington, D.C. Later, Packnett worked as a congressional staffer for U.S. Rep. Lacy Clay (D-Mo.) before returning to her hometown to become the executive director of Teach For America in St. Louis.

    In an interview with The Huffington Post, Packnett said she took on a role on the commission, which is expected to submit its final report by September 2015, because she was assured it would be independent. She believes that the biggest contribution the commission can make is “firmly clarifying” the policy solutions that are necessary for “systemic change” in the region.

    “I don’t think the commission is the answer. I think it’s part of the answer that is potentially well-positioned to push progress forward in a truly systemic way,” Packnett said.

    She says her involvement with the commission will not keep her from participating in demonstrations going forward.

    “While the commission is happening, I know that protests will continue, and I will be continuing to participate in those protests,” Packnett said.

    “I want to make sure there’s a truthful narrative about what’s happening on the ground, what people on the ground stand for, and how we are pursing justice. We’re pursing justice peacefully, thoughtfully, creatively, and in a way we believe honors not just the memory of Mike Brown, but the memory of so many lives lost around this country,” she added.

    Regarding last night’s protests, there were arrests (two that I know of, but probably more): SL County police say Dasha @lostvoices14 is on a 24 hour hold. #Ferguson Jail support was immediately called for Dasha, Brandy, & Mustafa.

  67. rq says

    Random tweetage:
    What’s scary about the continued aggressive police response in #Ferguson is that public opinion has no influence.

    we’ve confirmed last 2 nights that new #Ferguson PD rushes crowd & PRE-targets specific protesters based on past warrants/resistance.

    Police shoved us from a lawful place, to an unlawful place in the road. Then into a dark pk lot where they became violent and arrested folks

    A Police Officer told a woman in are group “B*tch we should get u!” Cause she told one of are members to run! #Ferguson #MikeBrown

    Not ONE cop has got HURT, But yet the PEACEFUL PROTESTORS keep getting ABUSED!! #Ferguson #MikeBrown #STL #shawshooting

  68. rq says

    More arrests as protesters await Ferguson grand jury decision:

    About a dozen protesters gathered again outside the police station in Ferguson in frigid conditions, sometimes blocking vehicles as they waved placards and chanted “Whose streets? Our streets!” and “Killer cops have got to go!”

    Officers in helmets and shields were deployed after a commander told protesters not to block traffic. Brief scuffles broke out and at least one woman and a man were handcuffed and taken away.

    Yes, this is how they prepare for peaceful protests, where leaders have specifically said that disruption would be allowed. But not violence. I think some of those officers are overstepping the boundaries a little bit.

  69. rq says

    Female Ferguson pastor: I was grabbed and dragged along the ground by police during peaceful protests before Michael Brown grand jury decision:

    Speaking to MailOnline just hours after her release Pastor Rebecca Ragland recalled her ordeal and voiced her belief that anyone of conscience should stand with the protesters.

    She said: ‘I was completely stunned. All I can tell you is what my body experienced. My mind at that point was just in shock.

    ‘I was grabbed so hard that I fell to the ground. Then I was just being yanked and it was pretty rough. I’m hurting today.’

    Pastor Ragland’s arrest marked the first police action to be taken against protesters following Governor Nixon’s declaration of a state of emergency. […]

    Rev Ragland is one of many local clergy who have taken to the streets in an attempt to defuse the volatile relationship between protesters and police that saw the Missouri town erupt in violence following the shooting on August 9.

    She was wearing a bright orange vest with the word ‘Clergy’ clearly printed across her back. Today she believes that far from protecting her this made her a target for officers keen to make a point ahead of the violence anticipated when the Grand Jury makes its announcement.

    Last night’s arrest has been read as a clear message that law enforcement will come down hard on any and all protesters.

    Eric Holder speaks on Maintaining Public Safety while Safeguarding Constitutional Rights (with non-autoplay video):

    Attorney General Holder Announces New Law Enforcement Guide for Community Engagement, Urges Police and Demonstrators to Show Mutual Respect

    In today’s video, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Bureau of Justice Assistance and the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services are providing a new guide to law enforcement officers that compiles information, tools, and best practices to maintain public safety while safeguarding constitutional rights during First Amendment-protected events. Attorney General Holder reiterated that the Department of Justice encourages law enforcement officials, in every jurisdiction, to work with the communities they serve to minimize needless confrontation. And he reminded all individuals that—while demonstrations and protests have the potential to spark a positive national dialog and bring about critical reform—history has shown us that the most successful and enduring movements for change are those that adhere to non-aggression and nonviolence.

    Another with non-autoplay video, Ferguson police chief: ‘I think I can see this through’:

    Saying he “intends to see this thing through,” Jackson told CNN’s “Erin Burnett OutFront” on Thursday that he has been working with community leaders and others to create a dialogue in the community.

    “Yes, I think I can see this through and come out on the other side with the community, the region and even the country a whole lot better,” he said. […]

    Gov. Jay Nixon took authority from the Ferguson Police Department and gave it to state authorities in the days following Brown’s shooting.

    Nixon said he put state troopers in charge because tension between law enforcement and demonstrators “appeared to be at a flash point.” This week, ahead of the anticipated grand jury announcement, Nixon declared a state of emergency in Missouri and called up National Guard troops to play a backup role.

    Even so, Jackson said local police officers will be patrolling the streets.

    “I’m running the response here locally,” he said. […]

    Ferguson Police and St. Louis County law enforcement were widely criticized for being too heavy-handed in dealing with protesters and in how they interacted with media. Reporters said they were targeted for arrest or physical attacks from law enforcement for simply trying to do their job.

    CNN reported in October that Jackson was bowing to pressure to step down.

    But since then, he has wavered multiple times and now wants to stay on longer, government sources familiar with the discussions told CNN on Thursday.

    The plan continues to be, according to the sources, for Jackson to be encouraged to step down for the good of the police department and the community. […]

    Jackson told CNN that the “pool of candidates is generally pretty small,” and that a goal of the police department has been to work to hire and retain qualified officers.

    The police department currently has four black police officers, he said.

    Wow! Four black officers!!! And they use the same bathroom as everyone else!!!!!!! WHEEEE!!!

    Churches to serve as safe spaces after Ferguson grand jury announcement:

    Clergy anticipate that for various reasons, whether to escape violence or find fellowship, some might seek refuge in places of worship in the coming weeks. The grand jury decision on whether to indict Darren Wilson, the officer who fatally shot African-American teenager Michael Brown, is expected by the end of the month, potentially triggering further civil unrest.

    Organizations such as the Don’t Shoot Coalition, which was formed after the death of Brown, and Metropolitan Congregations United, a group of interdenominational, multiracial congregations from around the region, are in the process of creating a list of churches that are volunteering the use of their space. Many of these churches will be packed with supplies such as food, water and phone chargers. Medics, legal observers and counselors will also be on hand.

    Some believe that unless officers are needed in an emergency, churches should also function as police-free zones during protests. […]

    Danieley, like other clergy, says that though she considers her church to be a sanctuary, her interaction with the police will be no different from any other time.

    Danieley says she and the St. Louis police have always had a good relationship. She doesn’t expect that to change if and when protests take place in her neighborhood.

    She notes, for example, that police have been respectful when she’s asked them to intervene with the mentally ill who visit the church to receive free meals.

    “We have our own boundaries and our expectations for the use of our space,” Danieley said.

    “I’m not worried about police not respecting our boundaries. I think if you have transparency and communication, then this doesn’t even come up.” […]

    Although churches are under no special legal protection, there is a long history of them operating as safe houses. The Bible refers to cities of refuge for accidental killings where those accused of murder could safely await trial. In the 19th century, churches hid runaway slaves.

    In the 1960s, civil rights leaders often gathered at churches. In 1963, for example, Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., which the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used as a meeting spot, was bombed, killing four girls.

    And in the 1980s, hundreds of churches supported the so-called sanctuary movement in an attempt to save Central American refugees, fleeing civil conflict in their homeland, from deportation. Some of those active in the movement were put on trial and criminally prosecuted for transporting illegal immigrants.

    Churches are also involved in the current battle for immigration reform, sometimes hiding undocumented immigrants. […]

    St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay, for his part, released a letter earlier this week that specified the city plans to “honor safe houses, and will consider churches to be sanctuaries, except in extremely rare circumstances.”

    “We will not use subterfuge such as building inspections to shut them down,” it read.

    St. Louis County police also say officers will enter churches only “under one or more of three conditions: consent, exigent circumstances, and search warrant.”

    The long history of church-as-sanctuary continues. Possible benefit of religion?

    Watch video from last night: Nov 20, 2014 – Officer Dean of St. Louis County PD attacks media in Ferguson.

  70. rq says

    Going to start heavy with a trigger warning for images and reenactment of lynching:
    Demonstrators Stage Symbolic Lynching Outside Old Court House in St. Louis; more photos here, here and here.

    Ino ther news:
    ACLU wins federal court orders on right to film police in Ferguson, elsewhere:

    U.S. District Judge John A. Ross signed orders in response to a motion filed last week in whcih the ACLU complained that authorities were still inhibiting people from making videos of protest events, despite earlier court agreements with St. Louis County, Ferguson and Missouri Highway Patrol Superintendent Ronald Replogle.

    The orders say the highway patrol and county police are “permanently enjoined from enforcing a policy or custom of interfering with individuals who are photographing or recording at public places but who are not threatening the safety of others or physically interfering with the ability of law enforcement to perform their duties.”

    The wording reflects the earlier agreement between the parties reached on Aug. 15.

    The order relating to Ferguson police is similar but specifies that it applies to any “rule, policy, or practice that grants law enforcement officers the authority or discretion to arrest, threaten to arrest, or interfere with any individual, including any member of the media or member of the public.”

    “With court orders in place, immediate recourse will be available if the freedom of the press is violated,” said Tony Rothert, legal director of the ACLU of Missouri, in a statement.

    Well, that’s the press taken care of.

    Activists had a list of 19 rules they wanted police to follow. Police have responded – sorry, that’s the Unified Command has responded. Mostly with agreement, though with a lot of bluster and… on the important points (such as use of violence, etc.) they seem rather set on maintaining the violent-protestor narrative and leaving themselves lots of room to wiggle. (Sorry, it’s just a twitter photo, I may transcribe tomorrow.)

  71. rq says

    Also, there have been like three press conferences within the last couple of hours, so I’m hoping they’ll all have some sort of write-ups by tomorrow, because I jsut can’t keep up with that. Some responses on twitter, though, and they haven’t been particularly hopeful.

    Biggest news: JUST IN; STL MAYOR: “We Expect a Grand Jury Decision Very Shortly” -#Ferguson . It’s not much of an article, and no real new information. Twitter, though, had a few comments about school on Monday and Tuesday being cancelled in Jennings (nearby). So there’s definitely a sense of expectancy.

    Darren Wilson’s first job was on a troubled police force disbanded by authorities – I know the subject was brought up way back, and the article is from August 23, but re-read that. That is pretty much the sum of all the information known on Darren Wilson.


    Chris Brown-hosted event postponed over concern for his safety     – pretty soon, there will be no more music in STL. *sigh*

    Lest we forget what the protestors are facing, Here Is The St. Louis County Police Department’s Arsenal. Read the article for the pictures.

    The department has an arsenal. It has acquired an armored personnel carrier, a 270-pound metal shield, three helicopters, two projectile launchers, and hundreds of smaller armaments during the past 10 years, according to public records obtained by BuzzFeed News. The department has amassed its cache through direct purchases, as well as state, regional, and federal grant programs. […]

    BuzzFeed News received the St. Louis County Police Department’s “Capital Asset List” as of August 2014 through a Missouri Sunshine Law request. The full equipment list can be found here. The list is only a partial accounting of everything that rolled through the streets of Ferguson during the high-profile demonstrations because other departments, including the Ferguson Police Department and the Missouri State Highway Patrol, deployed there as well.

    Officials with the St. Louis County Police Department did not respond to detailed questions about these items.

    But there follows a list with technical information and photographs of various rather impressively horrifying weapons in use during the protests in August.

    FBI Sends 100 Agents to Ferguson Ahead of Grand Jury Decision:

    The FBI has ordered its Ferguson contingent to mobilize and arrive in the St. Louis area today. In addition to FBI personnel already in the St. Louis area, about 100 more are being dispatched, law enforcement sources said. Additional FBI personnel have been put on alert so that they could be called in as part of a second emergency wave if necessary, ABC News has learned.

    The FBI is opening up its special St. Louis intelligence center today. This facility will be in constant contact with the Missouri and St. Louis County Emergency Operations Center.

    According to twitter, the FBI has a long history of supporting racism. No surprise there.

    Oh, from one of thep ress conferences, this seemed relevant: St. Louis county official just dismissed credible death threats from KKK members to protesters as “rumors” #CopsAndKlanHandInHand #Ferguson. Considering that the KKK has openly threatened violence while protestors have struggled to present themselves as peaceful, this is a bullshit dismissal that shouldn’t be a dismissal at all. But y’all know that.

    But speaking of authorities, etc., something from the history books – Long Before Ferguson, Authorities Feared Riots at King’s March on Washington:

    Slate’s Jamelle Bouie wrote astutely on how law enforcement preparations in Ferguson represent a misunderstanding of what caused the unrest that followed Mike Brown’s killing.

    “Put simply, the unrest in Ferguson was as much the fault of the police as it was the protesters.’ But by declaring a ‘state of emergency’ aimed at residents of Ferguson and the broader St. Louis County, Gov. Nixon obscures this fact and smears the community, pretending that it’s solely responsible for anything that happens in the wake of a grand jury announcement and all but giving license to law enforcement to reprise its draconian response,” wrote Bouie.

    The expectation of violence in Ferguson goes beyond misunderstanding of the events following Mike Brown’s killing, however. The surge of gun sales in suburban St. Louis and current emergency preparations in Seattle (yes, that mecca for black revolutionary action) are also motivated by an irrational fear of black violence.

    This phobia of black rage is nothing new. It motivated the slave codes that prohibited blacks from handling guns. It morphs wallets into weapons. Ironically, it’s why Ferguson police responded to what was a gathering of concerned residents with armored vehicles and tear gas. Almost laughably, it even led authorities to believe that the 1963 March on Washington would surely erupt into violence. […]

    “I asked for leave, and they told me that I couldn’t take off, and that I didn’t want to be a part of ‘anything like that.’ We went through a whole go ‘round that resulted in them telling me I couldn’t go,” she said. “Then Kennedy sent out a bulletin announcing the government would be closed.”

    The day of the march, all D.C. liquor stores and bars were ordered closed. The Washington Senators baseball game against the Minnesota Twins was cancelled and federal employees, including Pechman, were given the day off. There was also a large military and police presence at the march. The entire D.C. police force was mobilized, along with 500 reserves and 2,500 members of the National Guard.

    Authorities feared the march would lead to violence. In fact, when Roy Wilkins and Martin Luther King, Jr. appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press just before the march, panelists questioned if it would be possible to “bring more than 100,000 militant Negroes into Washington without incidents and possibly riot.” […]

    The March on Washington is regarded in history books as a shining example of large-scale nonviolent protest. It was organized, in part, by one of the most respected nonviolent activists of all time. It’s clear in retrospect that authorities were reacting, not to credible threats, but to a much deeper fear. In order to understand the current mood around Ferguson and, perhaps, to understand why an unarmed Mike Brown was shot at least six times, it’s necessary that we interrogate that fear.

    Obama has no plans to speak on Ferguson before grand jury decision. It’s also kind of a bullshit article that doesn’t say much except for the fact that Obama is not saying much about Ferguson or Michael Brown.

    Holder urges police restraint in Ferguson response:

    The attorney general, who is overseeing a parallel inquiry into the Aug. 9 shooting of Michael Brown by officer Darren Wilson, also issued written guidance to police across the country, identifying “best practices that will help law enforcement officers maintain public safety while safeguarding constitutional rights.”

    He is also sending out Disciples of Justice to participate in Ferguson response protests to help keep the peace. Consdiering that these are not people familiar with the protestors, twitter response has accordingly been rather negative about this idea.

  72. rq says

    Ugh, the previous comment went to moderation, but I hope it gets fished out soon enough, I’m not going to split the links this time.

    Moving on:
    thisisthemovement, installment #58:

    NYPD Officer Fatally Shoots Unarmed Man Akai Gurley, was shot and killed by a police officer in a Brooklyn housing project on November 20th at around 11:15pm. Burley’s friend, Melissa Butler says the police did not identify themselves or give an explanation, “They just pulled a gun and shot him in the chest.” Akai Gurley was unarmed.

    2nd Night of Arrests at Ferguson Protest Thursday night police rushed the auto car repair parking lot across from the Ferguson PD to snatch and grab protesters. Three people were arrested, and protesters say at least one officer used pepper spray.

    Pastor Rebecca Ragland Reflects on Being Arrested in Ferguson On Wednesday night five people were arrested by the St. Louis County Police in front of the Ferguson police department, one of them was Pastor Ragland. “I was grabbed so hard that I fell to the ground. Then I was just being yanked and it was pretty rough,” says Ragland on being snatched by the police.

    Individuals Making a Difference Meet Alexis Templeton, Johnetta Elzie, Molly Greider, Larry Fellows III and DeRay McKesson. The activists tell their stories of why they’re involved into this now lifelong commitment to social justice work.

    AG Holder Issues New Police Guidance Ahead of GJ Announcement AG Holder posted a new video this morning in which he released new guidelines to police that speaks to protestors and law enforcement. Important read.

    Kansas City Students Walk Out of Gov. Nixon Speech This quick read describes a walk-out by students at Lincoln College Preparatory of a speech by Gov. Nixon. The movement lives.

    St. Louis Teens Reflect on the Protests This semi-long read follows the stories of a set of St. Louis teens as they reflect on how they’ve experienced the death of Mike Brown and the ensuing protests. Powerful read.

    Country Singer David Nail Cancels St. Louis Concert Due to State of Emergency Another country singer, David Nail, has cancelled his concert in St. Louis due to the protests. No, we did not know who David Nail was before reading this article.

    Ferguson City Council Holds Special Closed Door Meeting Last Wednesday The Ferguson City Council held a special closed door meeting last Wednesday. There are no further details about the meeting besides that it happened. Interesting.

    Ferguson Police Wife Remains Afraid, Interesting UMSL Study On Citizen Perceptions W The beginning of this article, and the video, focus on a police wife who is afraid — this is a conscious recycling of the trope of the scared white woman that has gotten many black men filled (i.e. Emmett Till). The last section of the article talks about an interesting study conducted in May 2014 of Ferguson resident perceptions of City services, including police. Interesting.

    Washington DC Prepares for Protests Washington DC Police Chief Cathy Lanier has put the DC police on notice to be prepared for potential unrest on Sunday and Monday due to the GJ decision.

    And some more twitterage (you have to say it the French way):
    In response to my letter on Monday, the administration will be briefing aldermen on city preparations today. (this means keeping city officials abreast of any preparations made by police, etc. – a good thing);
    .@shawncarrie asks if preparations have been made against KKK threats. Dooley says no. #Ferguson (questions regarding police violence were also deflected);
    @eyeFLOODpanties in GQ magazine (Protestor of the Year – that’s the guy in the flag shirt with the tear gas canister);

    And a link for flier and poster material for Ferguson, for anyone in the area or thinking of going.

  73. rq says

    A reminder about noindictment.org, where all kinds of information on prep work can be found for those planning on participating or able to etc. in any response activities.

    Also, Holder frustrated with Mo. governor over actions before Ferguson grand jury decision (with non-autoplay video!):

    A top aide to Holder called the office of Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon (D) earlier this week to express Holder’s displeasure and “frustration” that the governor had declared a state of emergency at a news conference and activated the National Guard in advance of the grand jury decision in the Ferguson shooting, expected to be announced in the next few days, according to a Justice Department official.

    “Instead of de-escalating the situation, the governor escalated it,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the subject. “He sent the wrong message. The tone of the press conference was counterproductive.”

    Senior Justice officials also told U.S. attorneys around the country on Tuesday to be in close touch with local police to prepare for any possible violence in their cities, should the grand jury decision not result in an indictment of Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson for the fatal shooting of Brown, an unarmed black teenager, on Aug. 9. […]

    “The Justice Department encourages law enforcement officials, in every jurisdiction, to work with the communities that they serve to minimize needless confrontation,” Holder said. “It is vital to engage in planning and preparation, from evaluating protocols and training to choosing the appropriate equipment and uniforms. Now this is the hard work that is necessary to preserve the peace and to maintain the public trust at all times — particularly in moments of heightened community tension.”

  74. rq says

    Good morning.
    Have I got some funny stuff this morning! And by funny, I mean not funny at all.
    Let’s start with the FBI arresting two men yesterday in Ferguson, ok? This is the article you will read about it: FBI arrests 2 men on firearms charges near Ferguson, but last night, that headline was a little different.
    Then there were the connections to be made: Two with Black Panther connections charged in St. Louis in federal firearms case, which has warranted a reply from the Black Panthers themselves: NBPP OFFICIAL STATEMENT: ON OLAJUWON ALI AND BRANDON MUHAMMAD CHARGES AND ARREST

    It’s being widely reported via right-wing Internet sources, that the chairman of the St. Louis chapter of the New Black Panther Party, Olajuwon Ali and Brandon Baldwin were arraigned on Federal charges in the court of US Magistrate Tom Mummert for trying to purchase pipe bombs. [… – so they got the info before it was downgraded]

    It has not been proven, that Olajuwon Ali ( s/n Davis) or Brandon Muhammad ( s/n Baldwin), had any intent to be deceptive in regards to where the firearm was going or who it was going to. Both, Olajuwon Ali and Brandon Muhammad were reportedly attempting to purchase a legal firearm at a reputable dealership. It is also notable, that Olajuwon Ali, is a member of the Moorish Science Temple of America and claim his Nationality, as a Moorish American.

    The allegations that the two were in, ” preparations to destroy the arch by blowing it up as a sign of white racial oppression as well as killing as many cops as they could during the impending unrest in Ferguson after the grand jury decision is announced” we believe is TOTALLY UNFOUNDED, and is against the rules and regulations of the New Black Panther Party.

    The New Black Panther Party, does not teach, endorse, or allow its members to commit acts of violence against anyone regardless to the circumstance unless in imminent danger and in Self- Defense.

    So fair and unbiased reporting in advance of the announcement. You can feel the tension going up from way over here.

    Oh, and another funny one. The following link will take you to a no-longer-existent article, but read the words in the link itself. Try it. It was up for a short while (my) overnight and has now been taken down. That’s Fox. (Also, they spell Darren Wilson wrong.)

    And while on the subject of mistakes, St. Louis County police spokesman apologizes for incorrectly saying Dasha Jones was resisting arrest. She was arrested for unlawful assembly instead. So much confusion!

  75. rq says

    Vote Ferguson protestors as TIME person of the year – not sure if that will open up straight to their blurb, but just click through. An idea.

    Not sure if I got this before, so I’m just going to put up both (though the information is already above: VonDerrit Myers Officer Identified by Lawyer.

    KKK, Police, and Darren Wilson: Anonymous Claims to Have Evidence Directly Connecting Darren Wilson & Ferguson PD to KKK:

    In the process of outing Ku Klux Klan members, Anonymous discovered connections between the Klan and the “We Support Darren Wilson” group.

    One of the Darren Wilson rallies was held in Imperial, Missouri, and was rumored to have been organized by the Klan. It’s important to note that this is also allegedly the hometown of Darren Wilson’s girlfriend and fellow Ferguson police officer Barbara Spradling.

    Prior to going public with the connection between the KKK and “We Support Darren Wilson” group, the group purged many photos from the rally from their social media pages, most likely in an attempt to obscure the connections between the groups. […]

    Then an informant came to Anonymous and described their direct ties to not Darren Wilson himself, but his girlfriend, fellow Ferguson police officer Barbara Spradling. Remember, Spradling is allegedly from the Imperial Missouri area where an alleged KKK supported pro-Darren Wilson rally was held.

    The source claimed they had information that directly linked Darren Wilson and the Klan to the events unfolding in Ferguson. While this information was being seriously vetted by Anonymous, and ultimately confirmed, death threats from the Klan started being directed at the hacker collective. Anonymous has since responded to these threats, putting the KKK and Ferguson PD on notice that “We are the law now.”

    And Anonymous: Ferguson Killer Cop Darren Wilson ‘Linked to KKK Ghoul Squad’.

    In it latest statement, Anonymous claims there is a strong link between the TAKKKK and the Ferguson police department, and in the last week has published evidence showing that three high-ranking members of the TAKKKK attended a support rally for Darren Wilson in Imperial, Missouri – evidence which has now been removed from social media websites.

    The group claims members of the law enforcement community in the area are silent members of the TAKKKK and call themselves the ‘Ghoul Squad’.

    This claim is substantiated by an ex-member of the TAKKKK called Henry Harrell who told Anonymous: “I know for a fact that the TAKKKK had a lot to do with what went on in Ferguson.”

    Frank Ancona, the imperial wizard of the TAKKKK is also accused of being part of this Ghoul Squad with Anonymous pointing to the fact Ancona recently checked in on Facebook at the Ferguson Police Department as evidence of his ties with law enforcement.

    Both of those articles are freaky as all hell.

    Two bits from VICE News.
    Private Military Contractors Hired to Move Guns and Gold Out of Ferguson:

    “There’s a lot of people that brought in a lot of money to have people secure their assets,” said Stephen King, owner of Metro Shooting Supplies gun shop, a 15-minute drive from Ferguson. “Some of those people spent $10 an hour on security guards and some people have $1,000 a day private contractors.”

    King confirmed that gun shops in the area are hiring private military contractors to escort the transport of their guns to secure locations. A private military contractor who spoke to VICE News on condition of anonymity said that more than 300 private military contractors, or PMCs, have been contracted for work in direct response to Ferguson security concerns. [… – so, in addition to three police forces, the NG and the FBI, PMCs? yikes.]

    “We got everything out last week, we put it back on Monday,” said Duke, who had heard the grand jury decision would be announced on a Sunday. “This weekend it’s going out again. A lot of it has already been moved.” Moving his product back and forth comes at quite a cost, though exactly how much he wouldn’t say.

    “It’s costing a lot of money,” he said. “The worst part is the stores that are normally are producing cash in the North County stores, for the last three months, nobody’s doing business in North County. Revenue’s way down. It’s horrible.”

    Duke said he employs Cook Security, a private security and surveillance company, to provide security for his shops and has recently hired 12 additional private security guards to protect his stores, and one to escort the transport of gold, diamonds and coins from the stores to a safe location. [..]

    “We’re going to have to do whatever we have to do legally to defend ourselves against some type of violent threat. It wouldn’t be a brain surgeon that’s going to be coming to our store to attack us,” he said. “We know what we’re going to do but they don’t know, and that’s the way we want to keep it.”

    And ‘This Is Similar to the Way Jesus Was Treated’: Letters to Missouri Governor Shed Light on Racial Tensions in Ferguson Aftermath:

    The correspondence, obtained by VICE News in response to an open records request, provides deep insight into public opinion about the shooting in the city of Ferguson and the racial tensions between whites and blacks in the state and around the country that have been laid bare since the 18-year-old Brown died. […]

    The communications addressed to Nixon were largely prompted by his public comments in mid-August when he said Brown’s family deserves “justice” and a “vigorous prosecution must be pursued.” An overwhelming number of the letters sent to his office condemned his remarks.

    A volunteer with the Ferguson Police Department accused Nixon, who formerly served as Missouri’s attorney general, of playing “judge, jury, and executioner.”

    “Your whole speech was incendiary, but when I heard the words ‘vigorous prosecution’ come out of your mouth, I was horrified!” wrote Beverly Walker, a resident of Ferguson, on August 20. “Lives of our police officers on the front lines in Ferguson, trying to keep peace and calm while dealing with a mob of irrational and apparently uneducated citizens calling for ‘justice’? Their idea of ‘justice’ is to arrest and indict a police officer for ‘murder, excessive force’ and everything in between, even before all the evidence has been collected, the investigation has been completed or the grand jury has been convened. I call it what it really is … revenge.”

    One letter compared Wilson’s treatment by Nixon and the media with Jesus Christ’s crucifixion.

    “What has happened to our justice system where a person is considered innocent until proven guilty? Officer Wilson’s side hasn’t even been heard,” wrote Jane Wade of Houston, Missouri, on August 24. “According to scenes on TV, Michael Brown was a big bully inside the store which makes us wonder just what happened between Officer Wilson and him. This whole thing is similar to the way Jesus was treated when He was crucified.” […]

    Yet the cache of documents turned over to VICE News also contained hundreds of letters, emails, and petitions demanding that Wilson be charged with murder. Protesters also wrote to Nixon detailing their alleged mistreatment by law enforcement.

    According to several published reports, the grand jury hearing evidence in the Wilson case is nearing a decision on whether to indict the 28-year-old police officer. In preparation of the verdict, Nixon declared another state of emergency and asked the National Guard to assist local police in the event of unrest.

    One of the documents Nixon’s office released to VICE News was an email that showed taxpayers in the state are on the hook for nearly $300,000 — the estimated cost to pay for the National Guard deployed to the city from August 18-27. More than $60,000 was earmarked for food, according to an itemized breakdown of costs.

    If the grand jury doesn’t return an indictment against Wilson, East St. Louis resident Kathy Coudie is convinced it will lead to unrest in the community and neighboring towns.

    “Let the record show this is not a threat when I say that there most likely will be more trouble if the white police officer who murdered Michael Brown in Ferguson is not held accountable,” Coudie wrote in a letter to Nixon on August 19.

  76. rq says

    Ah, it’s not just various authorities descending on Ferguson, it’s the lawyers as well! Lawyers descend on Ferguson ahead of grand jury decision. A mecca of the justice system as a whole!

    The lawyers, some from as far afield as New York and California, have responded to calls from the American Civil Liberties Union and protest groups in Ferguson to monitor police behavior in the wake of the grand jury decision. They will also take an aggressive legal posture, the attorneys said, filing quick fire lawsuits to fight potentially shoddy jail conditions, onerous bail bonds and civil rights abuses.

    “We will be using the sword as well as the shield,” said Justin Hansford, a St. Louis University law professor who is part of the legal team. “We have lawyers from Washington, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. They won’t just be observing. They will be filing lawsuits.”

    Prominent civil rights lawyer Vince Warren, executive director of the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights has been in Ferguson since Monday. Nicole Lee, an international human rights lawyer from Washington, arrived on Wednesday.

    Warren said 280 lawyers and law students had answered emails and have volunteered to travel to Ferguson. The lawyers are taking instructions from the CCR, the National Lawyers Guild, the Missouri Chapter of the ACLU and the NAACP Legal defense Fund. […]

    “The area we are most concerned about is the militarized response, and we are still waiting to hear on that,” said Denise Lieberman, a lawyer and co-chair of the Don’t Shoot Coalition.

    Tory Russell, a founder of the protest group Hands Up United, said he had only been asked to one meeting with police officials, in late October, which he attended.

    “All they wanted to know was where we are going to be after the grand jury decision,” Russell said. “They didn’t tell us where they were going to be. It was just a dig for information. We don’t trust them at all.”

    The St. Louis County Police, city police, and the Missouri Highway Patrol, did not respond to requests for comment.

    “They won’t just be observing. They will be filing lawsuits.” Life of a lawyer, so action-packed! (I’m having a laugh at the language, not the lawyers, just to be clear.)

    Death threats all over: Pastor says he has received numerous death threats since Michael Brown shooting

    Pastor Carlton Lee said threats are mailed to the church or left on the door. Lee said people have threatened to kill him or burn his church with everyone inside. Lee believes he is a target because he has been protesting against police brutality.

    “As Michael Brown, Sr. being a part of my church, we are evermore committed to the situation not just because they are family to us but because there are injustices going on all over the country,” Lee said.

    Lee met with the FBI Friday. He said agents told them they are not surprised by the dozens of threats against him because they are investigating similar cases in the St. Louis area. Lee said he will not let the threats stop him.

    Short bit from Race Forward on the Lost Voices, youtube video.

    Race Forward advances racial justice through research, media and practice. Founded in 1981, Race Forward brings systematic analysis and an innovative approach to complex race issues to help people take effective action toward racial equity. Race Forward publishes the daily news site Colorlines and presents Facing Race, the country’s largest multiracial conference on racial justice.

    And some Twitter:
    A riot helmet has never hurt anyone. Presence of an armored vehicle has never hurt anyone – @ChiefSLMPD on #Ferguson (and a gun never kills a person, a PERSON KILLS A PERSON!!!!!)

    Nothing has changed tonight. 20 officers came out and picked off certain protesters from the Wurm Lot. #Ferguson

    The police have pushed the barricade up to the street and built a wooden shack #ferguson (that hut is actually protecting the brand new Ferguson Police Department sign).

  78. rq says

    Giliell
    Interesting about that link, Daily Kos is so far the only site carrying that information. You’d think something so momentous would get out into the wilds of journalism.

  79. rq says

    Remember the two men arrested? Originally for explosives, later for trying to buy guns?
    I have no doubt that the original story was planted on purpose – to increase public fear. And I’m even more confident about that after this article from CBC.ca, Michael Brown shooting: leaders urge calm ahead of grand jury decision . Corrections to articles are often missed, passed by, or ignored completely. See the second paragraph:

    Against the backdrop of heightened tension, the FBI Friday arrested two men suspected of buying explosives they intended to detonate during demonstrations in Ferguson, Missouri, a law enforcement official told Reuters. […]

    The spectre of violence was raised again by news that two reputed members of a militant group called the New Black Panther party were arrested in the St. Louis area in an FBI sting operation.

    As initially reported by CBS News, the men were suspected of acquiring explosives for pipe bombs they planned to set off during protests in Ferguson, said the law enforcement official, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to publicly discuss the case.

    The official said the men have been named in a newly unsealed federal indictment returned on Nov. 19, charging Brandon Orlando Baldwin and Olajuwon Davis with buying two pistols from a firearms dealer under false pretenses.

    Some activists decried the timing of the arrests, suggesting they were aimed at either smearing protest organizers or justifying what was expected to be a heavy law enforcement presence once protests take place. Others welcomed the news. […]

    The nearby Jennings School District said it would close on Monday and Tuesday, for fear of unrest in Ferguson, although the Ferguson-Florrisant school district planned to keep its schools open.

    Activists held a news conference at a church in Ferguson on Friday to announce plans to deploy more than 50 volunteers, dubbed “Disciples of Justice,” who will mill about protesters to help diffuse tensions on the street.
    […]

    “We have instructed our police officers to protect the protesters’ constitutional rights,” he said. “We have directed them to use more active tactics only when necessary to keep people safe or to protect property.”

    Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon has declared a state of emergency and called in U.S. National Guard troops to back up police. Groups across the country have said they would take to the streets again in large numbers if charges are not brought.

    More from the CBC, Ferguson grand jury: Michael Brown’s family calls for calm ahead of decision.

    The shooting of an unarmed 18-year-old black man by a white police officer led to protests, some of which turned violent. Demonstrations have continued for more than three months, though the number of protesters has dwindled and violence has become uncommon. […]

    Calls for peace and restraint emanated from several quarters, including President Barack Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder and civil-rights leaders and business owners.

    The most emotional appeal came from Brown’s father, Michael Brown Sr.

    “Hurting others or destroying property is not the answer,” Brown said in the video released by the group STL Forward. “No matter what the grand jury decides, I don’t want my son’s death to be in vain. I want it to lead to incredible change, positive change, change that makes the St. Louis region better for everyone.”

    Holder issued a general reminder to police to prepare for demonstrations and to “minimize needless confrontation.”
    […]

    Obama also urged Ferguson to keep the protests peaceful, saying all Americans have the right to peacefully assemble to speak against actions they regard as unjust. But, he said, using any event as an excuse for violence is contrary to the rule of law.

    But from what I know, Obama has not appealed to the police to use restraint or to refrain from violence when dealing with protestors. So there’s that.

    And a short one, Business is way up for gun shop owner near Ferguson, Missouri ahead of grand jury decision, which is basically what has been posted before, though the last little paragraph is a bit anxiety-inducing:

    “We’ve lost count [of the amount of guns sold],” he says. “We’ve sold several hundred guns over the past 10 days or so and it’s just about the people coming in and being afraid and having to buy guns because they’re afraid of the unknown.”

  80. rq says

    And the Toronto Star weighs in – America on edge awaiting grand jury’s deliberations on Michael Brown shooting.

    With the fate of a single white police officer apparently settled, a tense St. Louis and more than 75 other cities entered an agonizing final weekend awaiting an announcement many fear will trigger the largest wave of American civil unrest in a generation.

    As night fell on the final day of grand jury deliberations over the Aug. 9 shooting of unarmed black teen Michael Brown in this working-class suburb of St. Louis, the veil of secrecy remained.

    Officials had forewarned of a 48-hour window between the point of decision and the public announcement to enable the mobilization of security teams and final pleas for a peaceful aftermath.

    And as the day unfolded, there were multiple signs that mobilization was underway, with the addition of FBI and ATF officers to a multi-force effort throughout St. Louis.
    [… – so all that mobilization is actually advance notice of an impending announcement? I wasn’t aware that this was the last weekend, since they have a January deadline…]

    A broad coalition of protest groups, now months-deep into the demonstrations in Ferguson, promise to widen the campaign across the country, regardless of the outcome. The lone demonstration outside of the U.S. appears set to take place outside the U.S. consulate in Toronto immediately following the announcement.

    Protesters in Ferguson emphasize that their goal is to build a national movement aimed at mandatory body cameras for active-duty police officers, a system that they argue would provide empirical evidence to protect officers and civilians alike against false accusations.

    But protest organizers also fear agitators within and an overwrought police response could halt momentum toward that goal, with demonstrations devolving into chaotic clashes.
    […]

    At least one of those rules — the promise that police not infringe on the right of protesters and reporters to film law enforcement actions — came with court orders signed Friday by United States District Judge John A Ross.

    “We are pleased that there are court orders requiring the police to respect the First Amendment rights of journalists,” said Tony Rothert, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri.

    “With court orders in place, immediate recourse will be available if the freedom of the press is violated.”
    […]

    On Wednesday, demonstrators trying to block traffic on the main road clashed with a line riot cops, resulting in five arrests. One night later, a different and more aggressive crowd of protesters engaged in nearly an hour of verbal abuse aimed at police.

    The insults, though protected on paper by the constitutional guarantee to free speech, eventually triggered an overwrought police response [bolding mine – and finally! someone puts it into words, now go and run with it.] witnessed by the Toronto Star. The baton-and-shield-bearing team of about 20 riot control officers chased the crowd of about 30 fleeing demonstrators across the street and deep into a darkened parking lot, tackling, arresting and dragging away three of the loudest agitators.

  81. HappyNat says

    Thanks again, rq. Good stuff. I heard the explosives story on the radio as I was heading home last night. My immediate thought was we would later find out it was bullshit. For the past 106 days very “leak” and every bit of information released to the media has been planned to take pressure off of Wilson and the actions of the police. It doesn’t matter if they were trying to buy legal guns or not, the original report was explosives for pipe bombs and that is all the racists need. I have a feeling I’ll be arguing against, “they wanted to make pipe bombs” for the rest of my life.

  82. rq says

    Soooooo…. rumours of a decision, eh? Well. Here’s several pieces on the fact that there will not be a decision this weekend.

    Chicago Sun Times – Ferguson grand jury decision not expected this weekend (this one actually pulls together info from several sites);

    Reports: Ferguson grand jury to reconvene on Monday, no decision yet;

    St Louis Post-Dispatch – No decision from Michael Brown grand jury this weekend;

    CNN – Ferguson waits: No decision this weekend.

  83. rq says

    Some tweets with pictures and text of people preparing for the decision:
    This is a law office ladies and gentlemen. #Ferguson ;

    Carondelet b/w Bemiston & Central closed to traffic. Certain entrances closed at justice center and county building;

    Grand Jury did not reach a decision on Friday and will reconvene on Monday to continue deliberations ASN is told. #Ferguson @argusnewsnow (okay this one belongs with previous comment);

    #STL County Justice Center barricaded in prep for #MikeBrown Grand Jury decision;

    State of emergency, schools cancelled, barricades up…. GRAND JURY HASNT EVEN DECIDED. What planet are these people on? #Ferguson;

    Indictment Decision Day. Be prepared. #Ferguson.

    It all seems so… pre-emptive.

  84. rq says

    And then an article on all those preparations: mind, it is from Fox. Command post set up ahead of grand jury decision, Protests lead to crash, arrests.

    Via Twitter, CBS issues a retraction on the explosives, but, as HappyNat says above, the well has been poisoned, and it will be ‘there were no explosives’ from here on in.

    #Ferguson activists: CLEAN OUT YOUR CARS TODAY! Clear up space for ppl/stuff. REMOVE ANYTHING SUSPICIOUS!! Check insurance card! #Ferg411. A couple of the responses are almost funny.

    Ah, yes. Plot twists. So Fox falsely reports that Darren Wilson has been indicted & CBS baselessly reports a terror plot. Getting impatient for a plot twist much?

    President Obama: Don’t Use Ferguson as ‘An Excuse for Violence’, with autoplay video. Again, this is the part where President Obama speaks to the protestors to be peaceful, but nary a mention of the police and their armaments.

    Ferguson: 100 days | 100 Seconds

    In 100 seconds, this riveting visual piece is a culmination of images that encompasses filmmaker Christopher Phillips’ experience during the first 100 days in Ferguson since Michael Brown Jr’s shooting death from Officer Darren Wilson on August 9th, 2014.

    Please visit 100daysinferguson.com for additional content and updates as the saga continues and the whole world awaits the grand jury decision whether to indict Darren Wilson.

  85. rq says

    Ferguson demonstrations planned in Philadelphia, around nation;

    Yesterday I put up the pictures of the mock lynching – A Symbolic Protest at the Old Courthouse:

    “We did this to stand in solidarity with all the people we’ve lost to murders by law enforcement,” the rapper said. “The Michael Brown situation, he was left in the middle of the street for four and a half hours. To us that was a modern-day lynching, his body left on display as a reminder for who’s in power.”

    After about half an hour, the performers, shivering from the cold wind, stood up and removed their ropes and chains.

    Why police actions in August may have helped them this time – This Time, the Protesters in Ferguson May Decide to Pass:

    “At the time when I did get arrested, my job was in jeopardy because I had work the next day,” Mr. Bass said. “I was like, ‘I’m going to try to avoid getting locked up.’”

    With his sole source of income at stake, Mr. Bass said he was unsure whether he would join a new round of protests, expected after the grand jury decides whether to indict Darren Wilson, a white police officer, for killing Michael Brown, 18. That decision is expected to come any day. […]

    Several protesters contacted in the past week said they are unlikely to join a new round of demonstrations because of the bitter Midwestern cold, or because they cannot afford to miss work. Some said they have heard the stern pronouncements of law enforcement agencies and seen reports of business owners arming themselves and boarding up their shops, and were scared by them.

    “Basically, you doing what you did before, it’s suicide,” said Aaron Davis, 30, a barber from Ferguson who was a regular during the summer protests but avoided the violence. “Let’s be real about it. You know when you go out there, it’s over. They’re ready for you.”

    Much of the talk, on the street and online, about confronting police officers is just empty boasting, several young men said. Time and again, Mr. Davis said, he has heard people come into his barbershop warning that things will get out of control. But, he said, he has not heard one person say he will actually partake in violence.

    For some, the question is not about whether to protest, but how aggressive those protests should be.

    I know there will be people out there, but it’s sad to see so many discouraged due to police aggression. And yes, at the same time, I do understand them and I do not condemn them at all.

    #DCFerguson Opposes DC Chief’s Threat Of Riot Squads Against Protests:

    Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, Executive Director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund warns the use of riot police would be illegal under DC law: “If Chief Lanier deploys riot-gear police against peaceful protesters, she will be breaking the law. We caution Chief Lanier not to engage in the provocative, repressive and violent acts that have been carried out by the police in Ferguson and in Washington, D.C. in the past. The District has paid out tens of millions of dollars in lawsuits to protesters over the last decade as a result of unconstitutional police tactics. In addition to litigating these cases, the PCJF worked with the D.C. Council to pass new laws precisely to prevent the same from happening again, to make the District a place that was hospitable rather than hostile to protests.” Verheyden-Hilliard points to Section 116 of the First Amendment Rights and Police Standards Act, which says that riot-gear police may only be deployed where there is a danger of violence. […]

    #DCFerguson demands that the MPD rescind the Civil Disturbance Unit activation and apologize for creating any implication that protesters are planning to do anything more than what they have for years—assert their rights in the street, and demand an end to dehumanizing, racist practices by police departments around the country. Further we demand that the D.C. Council, Mayor Gray, and Mayor-­elect Bowser disavow this order and affirm that they support the right of #DCFerguson and anyone else to express their outrage free of police intimidation.

    We reiterate to residents of the D.C. Metro Area that our protest is welcome to all outraged by the killing of Michael Brown and police abuses here in D.C. and other area municipalities. We will not be silenced.

    From the Christian Science Monitor, Darren Wilson to resign from Ferguson Police Department, reports say (+video). Nothing actually new, the usual about relieving stress but not before the GJ decision, etc.

    Ferguson by the numbers: Breakdown since protests began:

    THROUGH TODAY THERE HAVE BEEN:

    • Zero deaths.

    • Zero police officers seriously injured.

    • 37 St. Louis County police officers with minor injuries; zero requiring overnight hospitalization.

    • About 20 civilians sent to hospitals from protest sites.

    • One person shot and wounded by St. Louis County police officer on Aug. 13, after, police said, he pointed a gun at an officer.

    • On Aug. 14, a man was surrounded by protesters and punched in the chest by one. An ambulance came to the scene. The victim’s identity and condition were unknown.

    • 10 people injured during a high-speed chase that ended in a collision on Aug. 17. That night, two adults suffered gunshot wounds, and two children were treated for tear gas exposure; all were treated and released.

    • On Aug. 19, three people were treated at hospitals, two for breathing difficulties and one for minor injuries.

    • On Nov. 6, a college student was beaten at a protest planning meeting after some people accused him of using his smartphone to broadcast a meeting that was supposed to be private.

    • 28 businesses were reported to have been burglarized on Aug. 10, the first night of unrest after the Brown shooting. Many had glass windows shattered: Sprint Store, McDonalds, Beauty Town, STL Cordless |Taco Bell, Walmart, Walgreens, Toys R Us |The Original Red’s BBQ, Family Dollar, St. Vincent de Paul Thrift Store, Ferguson Laundry| Metro PCS, Shoe Carnival, Zisser Tire & Auto, AutoZone, Foot Locker, Ross Dress for Less, Hibbett Sports, Kmart, DTLR Inc, Phillips 66, Meineke, Nu Fashion Beauty, Boost Mobile, Party City, Princess Beauty Supply/ Sam’s Meat Market and Liquor.

    • One business in the city of St. Louis was burglarized in a targeted operation by looters on Aug. 11: Shoe Carnival.

    • Insurance claims from property damage due to Ferguson protests reported to the state totaled $250,000 after the first month of unrest; one prominent local insurance adjuster who processed three claims on West Florissant Avenue estimated damages were no more than $5 million, which included $1 million to $1.5 million for the burned QuikTrip.

    • By comparison, damage to property in the 2001 St. Louis hailstorm: $2 billion.

    • And the 2012 St. Louis hailstorm: $1.2 billion.

    • Another way of looking at it is that the two St. Louis weather events combined caused 640 times as much damage as the unrest after the Brown shooting so far.

    • More perspective: In 1992, the damage to property in Los Angeles from riots and some 7,000 fires was about $1 billion.

    • Windows broken in St. Louis during protests: 25, according to St. Louis police Chief Sam Dotson.

    • Flags stolen and burned in Shaw neighborhood after the VonDerrit Myers Jr. shooting: At least two.

    • The Washington Post described Ferguson as “a burned-out symbol of racial and class divisions in America.”

    • Number of buildings destroyed by fire: One.

    • That was QuikTrip, hit by vandals Aug. 10. On Sept. 23, tension flared when a memorial to Brown burned. Someone poured gasoline around the outside of the Whistle Stop Café, a former train depot and a historic Ferguson site off South Florissant Road, and lit it on fire. The cafe had minor damage but never closed.

    • Arrests: About 400.

    • Why the disproportionate images of violence in St. Louis?

    238 journalists receive daily updates from the St. Louis County police spokesman.

    That’s pretty much all the numbers at the article. Telling.

  86. rq says

    thisisthemovement, installment #59:

    Emails to Gov. Nixon Released Simply put, you’ve gotta see these emails in order to believe some of them. In response to a records request, Gov. Nixon’s office released Ferguson-related emails sent to the MO government site. Must read/see.

    Ferguson By The Numbers This provides a helpful update on the key facts and numbers regarding Ferguson. Absolute must read. Now.

    FBI Sends 100 Agents to Ferguson Yes, this is real. The FBI has sent 100 agents to Ferguson to assist in maintaining safety after the GJ announcement. And the FBI will be opening a special STL Intelligence Center. Must read.

    ACLU Wins Lawsuit Protecting Citizen Right to Film Police The ACLU recently got federal court orders that protect the rights of citizens to record police officers. Solid read.

    Holder Expresses Concern Re: Gov. Nixon’s Actions The WaPo reports that, according to sources, AG Holder was frustrated with Gov. Nixon’s recent actions that actually escalated the tension instead of de-escalating it. Important read.

    Chris Brown Event Rescheduled Due to Protests An event hosted by Chris Brown that was originally scheduled for Nov. 30th has been rescheduled to Dec. 14th due to the protests.

    5 Tips for Pet Owners in The Midst of Protest This article provides brief tips for pet owners regarding pet safety and care in light of protests. Definitely a different type of read.

    Six ways the Ferguson grand jury is unusual:

    EXTRA TIME

    At the time of Brown’s shooting, a St. Louis County grand jury already had been hearing cases and was scheduled to disband Sept. 10. In one of the first indications that Brown’s case would be different, a judge extended the jurors’ service until January, the maximum amount of time allowed.

    Whereas a typical case might be presented to a grand jury in a single day, this case has stretched over three months.

    NO SPECIFIC CHARGE

    It’s fairly common in Missouri for a prosecutor to first file a complaint charging an individual with a crime, then go later to a grand jury asking it to indict the person for that offense. In this case, St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch hasn’t publicly suggested any particular charge against Wilson.

    NUMEROUS WITNESSES

    Often, a grand jury hears testimony from just one or a few people, such as police investigators who summarize physical evidence and statements they’ve gathered from witnesses. In this case, McCulloch has said “all witnesses with any relevant evidence” were being summoned to testify.

    TYPES OF WITNESSES

    Typically, a prosecutor presents only witnesses who would aid his quest for an indictment. The target of the inquiry does not typically testify. But Wilson testified to the grand jury considering charges against him. Grand jurors also heard from a forensic expert hired by Brown’s family — unusual because such testimony typically comes only from government sources.

    RECORD KEEPING

    There often is no record of exactly what’s said in Missouri grand juries. That’s because only the jurors, witness and prosecutor are in the room. In this case, however, McCulloch’s office has said the proceedings are being recorded and transcribed.

    SECRETS MADE PUBLIC

    What’s said in a grand jury typically remains secret under Missouri law, though when an indictment is issued, the evidence can be aired at a trial. If Wilson is not indicted, McCulloch says he will ask a judge for permission to publicly release the grand jury evidence as soon as possible.

    More on the KKK: EXCLUSIVE: Battle of Ferguson II: An Inside Look at #OpKKK. They’re still outing people on twitter.

    Uuuugh, missed this tweet on the CBS retraction: The biggest problem with journalism today. You’re wrong, issue a retraction – too late. via @shaunking. There’s two document photos for comparison at the site.

    Another document photo via twitter, Just got this statement from Gov. Jay Nixon’s office on Ferguson and mental health. . In short, Nixon claiming reassurances that mental health professionals are available for those who need them, sort of a follow-up to Antonio French’s letter regarding the trauma experienced by Ferguson (and surrounding) residents.

    Police shooting gone bad, this time in New York: Officer’s Errant Shot Kills Unarmed Brooklyn Man

    The shooting occurred in the Louis H. Pink Houses in the East New York neighborhood. The housing project had been the scene of a recent spate of crimes — there have been two robberies and four assaults in the development in the past month, two homicides in the past year, and a shooting in a nearby lobby last Saturday, Mr. Bratton said.

    Additional officers, many new to the Police Department, were assigned to patrol the buildings, including the two officers in the stairwell on Thursday night, who were working an overtime tour.

    Having just inspected the roof, the officers prepared to conduct what is known as a vertical patrol, an inspection of a building’s staircases, which tend to be a magnet for criminal activity or quality-of-life nuisances.

    Both officers took out their flashlights, and one, Peter Liang, 27, a probationary officer with less than 18 months on the job, drew his sidearm, a 9-millimeter semiautomatic.

    Officer Liang is left-handed, and he tried to turn the knob of the door that opens to the stairwell with that hand while also holding the gun, according to a high-ranking police official who was familiar with the investigation and who emphasized that the account could change.

    It appears that in turning the knob and pushing the door open, Officer Liang rotated the barrel of the gun down and accidentally fired, the official said. He and the other officer both jumped back into the hallway, and Officer Liang shouted something to the effect that he had accidentally fired his weapon, the official said.

    Mr. Gurley had spent the past hours getting his hair braided at a friend’s apartment. Neighbors said he had posted photos of himself on an online site for models, featuring his tattoos, his clothing and his muscular frame.

    He and his girlfriend, Melissa Butler, waited for an elevator on the seventh floor, but it never came, so they opened the door to the dark stairwell instead. An instant later, the shot was fired. Mr. Gurley and Ms. Butler were probably unaware that the shot came from a police officer’s gun.

    Via twitter, some pictuers of Akai. Another young man, another father, another future… Gone. Accidental firing. You police officers, competent or not, in the end?

  88. carlie says

    I wonder how much the state has spent so far having the National Guard stationed there for a week for no good reason.

  89. rq says

    And how much it will continue to spend. Yes.
    One of the articles above had a figure for August, that taxpayers will be on the line for something like $300 000, but that seems low. Too tired to search now.

  90. rq says

    So, morep rotesting last night, in photos. It all started quietly:
    Thx so much @ mother of #MikeBrown for protesting with us in #Ferguson #FergusonAction ;

    Scene in front of #Ferguson police department right now. ;

    Protest is out of the street, now directly in front of #ferguson police station. Crowd is pretty fired up. ‘;

    But what police are doing now? This is what they SHOULD be doing every night. Keeping people safe, not being aggressive. Tolerating speech;

    The commanding officer is actually in the middle of the street with protestors right now too. Just standing. Odd. #Ferguson;

    Someone clearly told them that they cannot wear riot gear anymore. #Ferguson .

  91. rq says

    Lt. Jerry Lohr of St Louis County running things at Ferguson PD tonight. Calmer response, talking to people ;

    Then the riot gear appeared (sorry, not all of this will be in sequence after all):
    Police in riot gear on one side of the street at the Ferguson PD station, Michael Brown protesters on the other side ;

    Police with riot gear leaving after crowd calms down. On scene commander says he recognizes they antagonize #ferguson ;

    #Ferguson Tensions have died down considerably. ;

    And then they came back:
    Police came from around the corner we were still peaceful ALL IN RIOT GEAR!

    First arrest:
    Police arrested this man after he said he was a journalist standing on the side walk outside the ferguson police dept .

  92. rq says

    Ferguson ;

    The gate is literally strapped to the bricks. #Ferguson (because it’s an awesome gate and protestors will want to steal it);

    Misinformation: .@stlcountypd here is a photo of @TreyYingst being taken into custody. He was on the sidewalk.

    Oh, and St Louis banks going down: St. Louis area bank websites taken down for #OpFerguson: http://jeffersonbank-stl.com http://eaglebankandtrust.com http://rockwoodbank.com #Ferguson.

    And an article on the detained journalist: Independent journalist detained at Ferguson protest –

    In a message posted on the social media website Twitter, the St. Louis County Police Department said Yingst was taken into custody after failing to comply with a police officer’s request to move out of a city street.

    “Trey Yingst, (a) reporter from D.C., taken into custody for failure to disperse,” the tweet read. “Was asked to leave street by the commander and refused.”

    A number of journalists and eyewitnesses who were on the scene dispute the police’s account leading up to the arrest, asserting Yingst was on a sidewalk outside the Ferguson Police Department building. Various photos and at least one video feed reviewed by The Desk support claims that Yingst was not standing on a city street when he was detained by officers.

  93. rq says

    Previous in moderation, but it’s just more on the protesting.

    Amnesty International on site.

    Michael Brown’s family writes to Special Rapporteurs (full text of the letter):

    November 21, 2014
    Dear Special Rapporteur Forst:
    Last week, we, as the family of Michael Brown, Jr. and as civil society representatives, presented a
    report to the 53rd Session of the United Nations Committee Against Torture regarding the killing of
    unarmed 18 year-old black teenager Michael Brown, Jr. in Ferguson, Missouri (a small town outside of
    St. Louis) by police officer Darren Wilson on August 9, 2014, and the numerous human rights violations
    committed by the police in the demonstrations that took place in the weeks that followed the killing. In
    the report, we detailed a range of human rights violations including cruel, inhumane and degrading
    treatment at the hands of law enforcement, excessive use of force by law enforcement against
    protesters, racial profiling and racially biased police harassment.
    Today, we, as civil society members, write you this urgent letter requesting you come to the St. Louis
    area under your thematic mandate as the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights
    defenders to document violations of the human rights of those working to ensure accountability for
    Mike Brown’s killing and an end to discriminatory police practices.
    As you are aware the United States has signed on to treaties to protect the rights of speech, assembly, life and due process as described in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) and the Convention Against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel,
    Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT). Yet, the acts of the state of Missouri and local law enforcement, including the severe, militarized repression and ongoing harassment of human rights defenders call into question their commitment to ensure that these basic rights be respected. In particular, we are concerned that the intimidation, surveillance and arrests of community organizers will only increase in the coming days.
    On November 17, 2014, Governor Jay Nixon issued a preemptive state of emergency and emphasized that protesters must conform to the demands of law enforcement. However, state officials have been silent about credible threats made by white supremacist hate groups to use lethal force against protesters. Further, since August, the St. Louis County Police Department has spent over $300,000 acquiring additional armaments to respond to demonstrations.
    1 Understandably, these acts have created the impression that the state is preparing for warfare against its own citizens.
    Currently a grand jury continues its deliberations as to whether to criminally charge Officer Darren Wilson with the killing of Michael Brown. Protests have continued and we expect mass protests immediately following the decision, which we have been informed will be handed down soon. Your attention to this issue is imperative to help prevent the systematic violation of protesters’ and, in particular, organizers’ human rights similar to or worse than those perpetrated during the August 2014 protests. We believe that international oversight may be the only safeguard against the commission of future human rights violations, as well as the only mechanism by which the voices of the citizens of the
    St. Louis area will be heard and respected.
    Signed,
    The Family of Michael Brown and their Attorneys,
    HandsUpUnited,
    Missourians Organizing for Refo
    rm and Empowerment (MORE),
    Organization for Black Struggle (OBS),
    and the Ferguson to Geneva Delegation:
    Cheeraz Gormon,
    Justin Hansford,
    Kareem Jackson,
    Meena Jagannath, and
    Tara Thompson

    1 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/20/us/as-ferguson-grand-jury-report-looms-police-say-they-dont-fear-
    protests.html?mabReward=RI%3A12&_r=0

    On the FBI and additional security: FBI notorious for assassinating blacks: US activist –

    “They have been notorious in having black men and women, in particular who’ve been fighting for the freedom of African-Americans, murdered, killed, framed or assassinated,” he added.

    The activist made the remarks after the FBI arrested two black people suspected of buying explosives for possible protests in Ferguson, Missouri, after a grand jury decides the Michael Brown case.

    Aha, he may quit early after all – Darren Wilson May Quit Ferguson Police Ahead of Grand Jury Decision:

    Wilson has been on paid administrative leave since the shooting. Ferguson officials reportedly have advised that Wilson resign, but Wilson didn’t agree with the timing. However, Wilson’s attorneys have been in talks with Ferguson officials for the past two months about terms of the resignation.

    Ferguson police chief Tom Jackson said previously that Wilson could potentially still work as an officer in the department. “Legally speaking, if he is not indicted he can return to his job,” Jackson said last week.

    The city likely won’t offer Wilson severance pay or any other compensation for his resignation, a source close to the matter told the Times.

    (I may have posted this one already.)

    Grand jury decision on Ferguson police shooting anxiously awaited:

    At least one area school district has canceled classes Monday and Tuesday, giving students a whole week for Thanksgiving break, in anticipation of a possible weekend announcement.

    Local clergy and government officials at every level of government, including President Obama and Atty. Gen. Eric Holder, have called for calm. Additionally, on Saturday, Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon said mental health services provided by a coalition of public and private advocates would be available for Ferguson residents struggling with events. Mental health professionals are expected to be stationed at churches throughout the area.

    “As we continue to address the many challenges raised by events in Ferguson, it’s important to note that the past several months have taken an emotional toll as well,” Nixon said in a statement. “That is why we took action, working with local providers and advocates, to help meet the mental and emotional needs of people in the region.”

  94. rq says

    Liked this: So #Ferguson cops have arrested a journalist tonight and an Episcopal priest Thursday night. Damn, they’re serious crime fighters. Yes. Yes, they are.

    Toronto Star: Decision day in Ferguson will be Monday at the earliest

    Officials with the St. Louis County Prosecutors office have refused comment since Friday, when they signalled an announcement was imminent. But on Saturday, a St. Louis downtown business association circulated an email telling its membership that the grand jury had not yet reached a decision and would reconvene Monday to continue deliberations. Multiple major U.S. news agencies later confirmed the news, or lack thereof, citing unnamed officials.

    CBC: Michael Brown shooting: Civic group says no grand jury decision yet

    Downtown STL Inc., a St. Louis civic group that promotes downtown businesses, told members in an email Saturday that the grand jury will reconvene Monday to continue deliberating whether charges are warranted against Ferguson police Officer Darren Wilson in the Aug. 9 fatal shooting of Brown.

    The email did not explain how the group knew the information, and a spokeswoman declined comment. Ed Magee, a spokesman for St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch, didn’t respond to several messages Saturday.

    The Brown family’s attorney, Ben Crump, said Saturday that he hadn’t heard a decision had been reached and that prosecutors had promised to tell him when that happened.

    So they riled everyone up with preparations and rumours, and gave them nothing.

    For the feminists: Women find their voice in Ferguson protest movement

    It was about three weeks after Ferguson erupted in unrest last summer and Elzie, another female activist, and six men from the fledgling protest movement were speaking to a room full of Washington University students in St. Louis. Except only the men were talking. […]

    Several young women involved in organizing the Ferguson protests have described similar encounters with a gender barrier: men bowling them over at meetings or not inviting them to help make decisions. The media, they said, also tended to focus on the guys, who sometimes delivered more inflammatory sound bites — about, say, the likelihood of a riot.

    But refusing to be silenced, Elzie and her peers have elbowed to the front lines of protests over the Aug. 9 shooting of unarmed, black, 18-year-old Brown by Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson. As a tense Ferguson awaits a grand jury decision on whether Wilson will be criminally charged in the shooting, many women will be behind the protest bullhorns in the days and weeks ahead.

    With a partner, Elzie, who has more than 20,000 Twitter followers, puts out a daily newsletter about Ferguson that has more than 7,000 subscribers and has become a central repository of information about developments around St. Louis.

    Other women similarly refused to back down after early skirmishes with their male counterparts. They organized their own demonstrations, contributing to the complicated mesh of establishment and start-up activist groups that took to the streets in the chaotic, early weeks after the shooting.

    “There are some who still think God only speaks in baritone, and that leaders only speak in baritone,” said Traci Blackmon, a pastor in the Ferguson-adjoining city of Florissant, who said that her fellow clergy tend to be men. “We still teach our males to be dominant, domineering.” […]

    Complaints about male prominence in other left-leaning activist movements have surfaced before. A 2011 Guardian article, titled “Occupy Wall Street’s women struggle to make their voices heard,” described the deep discomfort of female activists with some of their male counterparts, who overran the women and made a disproportionate number of the speeches.

    Ferguson demonstrator Rika Tyler, 23, recalled an incident when she arrived at the neighborhood where the shooting occurred with two local friends who are rappers, Tef Poe and T-Dubb-O. As tensions escalated, “they were like, ‘Hang back until we figure out what’s going on.’”

    She refused — and was tear-gassed alongside the area’s outspoken state senator, Maria Chappelle-Nadal. Tyler said although Poe tries to include her, “he gets more shine because he is a rapper and he’s male,” adding: “Every time I try to say something, he overpowers me, and we’ve had a long conversation about it.” […]

    Tony Rice, a Ferguson resident who became a dedicated demonstrator and tweeter in the city’s protests, said he doesn’t think he has talked over women, though “as women they’ve probably picked up on stuff I’ve done.”

    Over the months, he said, the protests have become a “women-led movement. … They’re stronger, smarter, sober. A lot of guys are saying, ‘I can’t be up there [on the front lines], because I’ve got warrants.’ The women don’t make excuses.” […]

    “What you see on the ground and what you see on the news is two completely different pictures,” Richardson said. “You’d think this is all about men, giving all these speeches, having all these ideas. When you’re there, you see women have a more prominent role.”

    In her activism, Richardson said she brings up black women and girls throughout the nation who have been killed by police.

    “When it comes to being a black woman, you deal with the oppression of both race and gender,” Richardson said. “You can’t turn one off. I will always be black and a woman. … Black lives matter, trans lives matter, women’s lives matter. I’m standing for all of black lives.” […]

    Kayla Reed, 25, a pharmacy technician from University City, said she wasn’t invited to be a part of planning meetings made of mostly men from established activist groups — until she led her own surprise demonstration in October, earning an invitation to meet with groups like the Organization for Black Struggle and Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment.

    Now, Reed said, at some protests “there’s actually more women than men. A lot of times you’ll see women on the bullhorn — we’re not just coming in after the fact, cleaning up, making sandwiches.”

    I’m so glad they’re talking about this – because honestly? “Earning an invitation” to participate in protests that affect these women as much as the men in the community? Bullshit, that is. Bullshit. Go, black women!

    And some more on the Kajieme Powell shootin: EXCLUSIVE: ‘They filled him with bullets… then hoped it would go away’: Devastated family of black man, 25, shot dead in St Louis days after Michael Brown lash out at police for dragging heels with investigation

    Kajieme was shot dead by two white St Louis Metropolitan Police officers on August 19 after shouting ‘Shoot me! Shoot me!’ and walking towards them with a knife in his hand.

    The killing happened amid heightened tensions in St Louis and came after Brown, 18, was shot dead by white Ferguson cop Darren Wilson, sparking riots and protests that exposed deep racial divisions in the city.

    But unlike Brown’s death, Kajieme’s death was captured in its entirely on video taken by a passer by and showed that within 20 seconds of two policemen pulling up in their SUV he had 12 bullets in his body.

    The officers then handcuffed him, even though he was already dead.
    […]

    ‘They claimed he had a knife. When he gets upset he holds his hands to his side and they be real stiff.

    ‘So I don’t know why they done him like that. I guess they were upset over the other boy (Michael Brown) and they were getting rid of as many of them as they could, that’s all I could say. He never done anything to anybody.’

    Kajieme’s aunt Kathleen Turner, 48, a FedEx worker could barely contain her anger.

    She said that the officers ‘didn’t warn him to get down’ and that they ‘intended on killing him. They filled him with bullets.’

    She said: ‘They could have talked to him…It was like they could finish it so they could get back to whatever they was doing.’[..]

    But the video of Kajieme’s killing makes clear that there should have been warning signs for the officers that this was a disturbed man.

    Even though it was a blisteringly hot August day Kajieme is seen wearing a hoodie.

    He is seen pacing back and forth and talking to himself – passers by deem his behaviour so odd that they stop and stare and call him ‘straight up crazy’.

    He has put the two cans of drink he allegedly stole from the convenience store moments before on the sidewalk and is walking around them saying: ‘I’m tired of this s***’.

    When the police arrive Kajieme initially backs off but then walks towards them saying: ‘Shoot me! Shoot me!’

    The cops can be heard saying repeatedly: ‘Put the knife down!’

    Kajieme climbs up onto small wall and onto a car park and walks towards the officers.

    When he is about 12ft away they open fire with nine audible shots – Kajieme drops to the floor and does not move.

    On the video a passer by can be heard reacting with disgust as the officers handcuff his dead body.

    He says: ‘He’s dead. Oh my god. They just killed this man. He didn’t have a gun on him. Now they’re cuffing him. He’s already dead. The man is already dead.’ […]

    The police were originally called because Kajieme was suspected of stealing two energy drinks and a cake from the Six Star Market convenience store, which is five blocks from his home.

    But his family revealed for the first time that he actually did odd jobs in the shop and that he used to get paid in kind by helping himself to a few drinks or snacks.

    On the day he was shot the man he had the arrangement with was not working behind the counter, meaning that what was normal for Kajieme could have seemed like theft to somebody who didn’t know him.

    Kajieme’s cousin Eric Mayes, 33, a sports trainer, said that this is one of the reasons why Brown’s death has received more attention – because Kajieme was ‘labelled a thief’.

    Joel said: ‘I feel it’s really important that the perception that he was some black guy that goes in and shoplifts, it’s important that perception is dealt with.

    ‘He did actually work in that store…what the public was told was not the total story. To me that’s important’. […]

    Among the most egregious issues is that the police will not release the name of the officers who shot their son, citing a ‘threat assessment’ that has still not been completed.

    That was one of the main reasons they filed the unlawful death lawsuit which wants $25,000 in damages for officers’ use of unreasonable force which breached his constitutional rights and subjected him to punishment without jury trial.

    And Protests now in NYC after #NYPD shoot & kills unarmed 28yo man #AkaiGurley livestream: http://new.livestream.com/accounts/124908/events/3608830 … That’s the one that happened yesterday (or day before by now?).

  95. rq says

    Okay, that’s one more for fishing out of moderation. Sorry, PZ, sometimes the text has links that I don’t catch or miscount. :(

  96. rq says

    Young leaders emerging from Ferguson movement:

    It’s not their commitment to showing up that distinguishes these young leaders from the thousands of other protesters. It’s the endless hours behind the scenes that have kept the movement going since Michael Brown was shot Aug. 9 in Ferguson. Days spent in meetings to train, to organize others, to plan, to speak out. Hours on phone calls, texts and tweets to connect and inform others. Energy spent raising money, distributing supplies, negotiating with others, testifying in courts and council meetings.

    The head of this movement lacks a single charismatic head. It has many tentacles, all connected to a larger cause. The young leaders embody the passion and zeal endemic to youth. They challenge the assumptions of gender roles and chain-of-command hierarchies. They’ve become social media fixtures and prominent in the global media spotlight.

    The emotional and physical intensity of what they have experienced since the fatal police shooting has bound them like family, even when the family disagrees.

    The leadership includes the privileged, the disaffected, the able-bodied and physically challenged. Experienced activists say they are seeing more women leading the protest movement.

    Very optimistic read. While being rather depressing.

    The clergy’s place is with the protesters in Ferguson, very dramatic read:

    In August, when militarized police occupied Ferguson, Phil Agnew, co-founder of the Dream Defenders, presented me with a challenge: “Ferguson will determine whether or not the church is still relevant.” Our teargas summer has become a bitter winter of waiting, and the clergy seem to be running that risk of irrelevancy. Some have expressed dismay at the angry youth who responded to both the unconscionable killing of Mike Brown and the unconstitutional repression of protest. It has been noted that the rage-filled protesters make many clergy and their congregants uncomfortable, and that acts of civil disobedience have caused our movement to lose ground in the white community.

    White anxiety cannot become the measure of this movement or of the nation. Our movement must not be guided by the need to assuage white discomfort in the face of righteous black rage. Too often, there has been minimal or fleeting efforts by many in the liberal white community to address police brutality and the bone-crushing poverty exacted upon black bodies across this nation. If we rush to accommodate and appease those white liberals whose presence on the streets of Ferguson has been negligible, we betray the blood of the innumerable Mike Browns of America. […]

    There is a certain irony in clergy calling upon youth to calm down to allow the system a chance to run its course. These calls for moderation are the hallmark of leadership too closely tied to the powers that be. It is grounded in a fundamental belief that the system is largely good, perhaps flawed, and with a few bad apples. On the contrary, our struggle is not against a few bad apples, but against a rotten system. As the young activists have chanted: “The whole damn system is guilty as hell.”

    These words, chanted with the voraciousness of an injured, traumatized, but deeply resilient community must be affirmed. And we must also take a step further. We, too, should be angry; we, too, should be mad as hell. Our blood should boil at that fact that black blood is spilled with impunity in the United States. If we are not mad as hell, is it because we have forgotten that Mike Brown lay on the street for more than four hours? Or that police dogs and back-up officers were called to the scene before emergency services? Have we chosen to repress the litany of names from Emmett Till to Jordan Davis to Renisha McBride to Amadou Diallo to Andy Lopez to Trayvon Martin to John Crawford and on and on and on? Are we not paying attention to this critical moment in the struggle against oppression? To be sure we must be angry, but our anger cannot have the last word.

    Nonviolent civil disobedience presents us with the container to channel our anger into a powerful force for justice. The spirit that guides nonviolent civil disobedience is a deep abiding love, which only comes with deep preparation. “Acceptable” protest only tampers the fire and quiets the possibility of deep abiding love to run its course.

    Hence we are called to choose sides. Clergy must not only “support” protesters. We are called to be protesters — at once outraged and disciplined. By placing our bodies on the cross of a militarized police, deep infrastructural racial bias and a system that profits from human misery, a new way of being and seeing America and all its promise is being born.

    A willingness to be bruised, broken or detained for the sake of the gospel is our only option. Once we make this choice then and only then will our presence be warranted and blessed by the youth who quite reasonably distrust us. The side of love requires that we are uncomfortable. Deep abiding love challenges pastor, protester and police officer alike. The road from accommodation to acting in nonviolent civil disobedience is long and muddy. But we will get there.

    On last night – Brown’s mother joins protesters, urges peace; two arrested

    During the march, which began about 7 p.m., protesters briefly blocked traffic at West Florissant and Ferguson avenues before marching back to the memorial site where Brown was fatally shot by Ferguson police Officer Darren Wilson. They held a prayer service.

    Lesley McSpadden, Brown’s mother, joined the protesters at the memorial and urged them to remain peaceful but enthusiastic.

    At least two people were arrested around midnight in front of the Ferguson police department on South Florissant Road. One of those taken into custody was an independent Washington, D.C.-based journalist who police said refused an order for protesters to leave a sidewalk and move across the street.

    Throughout the evening, groups of protesters blocked the street in front of the police department and were warned by police before moving back to the sidewalk.

    Ferguson’s challenge goes beyond race: Column, on leadership (or lack thereof) in Ferguson:

    It remains astonishing even now — more than three months into a period of unprecedented unrest that resulted in the deployment of the National Guard and military-grade equipment to confront protesters — that most Americans still do not know the name of Ferguson’s mayor or any other elected official.

    John Shaw, the city manager, employs Ferguson’s hapless police chief, Thomas Jackson. But neither Mayor James Knowles nor Shaw ever really surfaced during the unrest, and calls for the firing of the police chief have never been directed at Shaw. […]

    Without question, African Americans must fully participate in elections if they want their local government to respond. Community organizing efforts to register voters in the wake of Brown’s death are intended to increase black turnout. A number of voters participated in a session convened by national civil rights groups about how to conduct recalls of elected officials. Other activists have begun preparing to run for office in the coming years.

    While these efforts are important and encouraging, they are unlikely to produce the kind of transformative leadership that Ferguson needs.

    Why not? For starters, the office of mayor is a part-time job that pays $350 per month. Elections for mayor and City Council members are held in March (primary) and April (general) in odd years — seeming to deliberately bypass those election years and times when voters would be most likely to turn out. […]

    Given their lack of leadership, Ferguson’s mayor and City Council should expect to be turned out of office in future elections. Ferguson residents deserve a better and more responsive government. But they also deserve a governing structure that can produce effective, responsive and visionary leadership for this beleaguered community.

    … which kind of leads into:

    Why Ferguson has been in a state of emergency for years:

    Here is a typical day for residents of St. Louis: You wake up to a notice—from work, from your children’s school—on “emergency procedures” for the impending but unspecified disaster. Local officials tell you to stock up on bottled water and fill your gas tank. Your child is sent home with extra homework in case school is canceled for “unrest.” In one district, school is canceled out of fear. Nursery schools say your three-year-old is practicing “emergency drills.” No one will say, exactly, for what.

    On the highway you pass a convoy of military equipment. You see something that looks like a tank at a Dairy Queen. You spot a fleet of Department of Homeland Security vehicles at a Drury Plaza Hotel, and a camp of National Guard soldiers behind a QuikTrip. Mundane sights are militarized, made threatening by association.

    As you pass the boarded buildings and military vehicles and long lines of citizens waiting to buy weaponry, city and county officials have one message: “Keep calm.” At a press conference shortly after Nixon declared the state of emergency, St. Louis city mayor Francis Slay and St. Louis County Executive Charlie Dooley chastised residents for their hysteria. “Take a deep breath, stand back and calm down,” Dooley proclaimed, as 1,000 extra police officers and 100 extra FBI agents descended on St. Louis. Keep calm, they say, while everything around you tells you not to be.

    From the very beginning, Ferguson has been a study in paranoia and fear-mongering. The geography of St. Louis is carved by racial politics, and the actions of Wilson are arguably tragic evidence of those politics in action. Brown, unarmed, was perceived as threatening by virtue of being a large, black teenager. There was no rational reason to view him as a deadly threat. There was no need to respond to a grieving community with weaponry, to tears with tear gas. Every move by St. Louis police and officials over the past few months has been rooted in a defensiveness that causes panic in residents, which in turn increases panic among low-level officials, who release panicked warnings to citizens. Ferguson is an ouroboros of irrational incongruity. […]

    Missouri’s “state of emergency” is reminiscent of the fear-mongering after 9/11, when Americans were on near-constant “orange alert.” It was an era of hysterical panic about invented catastrophes, like Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” and false reassurances about real catastrophes, like the bubble economy. Americans pay the price today for the Bush administration’s lapsed priorities, and St. Louis will pay the price for its own paranoia in the months to come. While impoverished schools in St Louis’s North County struggle to stay open, the police who tear-gassed North County residents are given hundreds of thousands of dollars for riot gear.

    In St. Louis tensions are high, and opportunism, as in any time of crisis, abounds. It would be imprudent to assume that no violence or property damage will occur after the grand jury decision is announced. But the greatest cause of panic in St. Louis is, at this point, panic. Fear has led to an armed and angry populace, disruption of children’s lives, bloated police expenditures, and emotional trauma to citizens.

    In Missouri, states of emergency are usually ordered for weather events like tornados. But black citizens demanding justice is not a natural disaster, and St. Louis’s tragedies are man-made. Those wanting protests to stop so St. Louis can go back to “normal” forget that “normal” is what precipitated the protests. “Normal” has meant poverty and brutality disproportionately endured by the black population. In St. Louis, the state of emergency has become the status quo, but the status quo was always a state of emergency, one that remains unaddressed.

  97. rq says

    How Ferguson Officer Darren Wilson mastered the disappearing act:

    For 3 1/2 months, Wilson has been the officer that almost everybody has an opinion on and almost nobody knows. With a grand jury set to determine as soon as this weekend whether Wilson’s shooting was justified, the 28-year-old white officer hasn’t given a public account of what transpired before Brown’s death. Neither have his attorneys. Both his lead attorneys have ignored multiple requests for comment.

    Experts and lawyers familiar with other racially charged cases emphasize that Wilson has no obligation to speak publicly — and even doing so might not change many opinions after the volatile protests that followed Brown’s death. What makes Wilson’s case notable, they said, is the completeness of the information void: Wilson left no traces on social media. His police chief says they haven’t spoken since the aftermath of the shooting. Even at pro-Wilson rallies, most who show up say they’re simply showing support for police officers and due process. Nobody in Wilson’s far-flung family has spoken on his behalf.

    “If anything is going to be said, it will come straight from him,” said Wilson’s sister, Kara Sosko.

    Wilson is believed to be in police protection, having left his suburban ranch-style brick home, where the blinds are drawn and leaves collect in the front yard. He is on paid leave, but Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson said this week that Wilson is unlikely to return to the job, regardless of whether he is indicted.

    CNN has reported that Wilson may be negotiating his resignation. […]

    In mapping Wilson’s steps since the shooting, there are just a few shards of evidence. Surveillance videos taken hours after Brown’s death show Wilson leaving the Ferguson police station for the hospital and then returning 2 1/2 hours later, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Wilson, with big ears and short hair light enough to blend with his skin, is seen for a matter of seconds in the footage. […]

    What little is known about Wilson comes mostly from public records uncovered in the aftermath of the shooting. He comes from a fractured family, his mother marrying three times and then dying at age 35 after being convicted of financial crimes. Wilson himself divorced last year. He began his police career in another St. Louis neighborhood, Jennings, whose department was disbanded over racial relations problems and a corruption scandal. Wilson then latched on at Ferguson.

    With Wilson in hiding, some of what he accomplished on that force is being undone. Days after Wilson no-showed at the Brooks hearing, the St. Louis County prosecutors’ office said that several other pending felony cases were being dismissed because they “could not proceed without the testimony of Wilson.”

    Some legal experts said this week that Wilson will have a hard time reviving his career, even if he is not indicted, although public opinion could still swing based on grand jury findings. Should Wilson be cleared of wrongdoing, the St. Louis County prosecutors’ office has pledged to release a trove of documents that will provide much-needed details on the confrontation that led to the shooting.

    For somebody in Wilson’s shoes, there is no perfect way to handle the aftermath of a volatile controversy, and experts who have advised in similar cases have conflicting feelings about what Wilson should say or do. […]

    “If the Brown family is saying what they want, silence from Darren Wilson is really devastating,” O’Mara said. “He could just say, ‘I was being a cop. I always wanted this. I always wanted to serve.’ Seeing those words would give him a persona that’s sorely lacking. Any vacuum you create will come back to haunt you. Silence — that may have been a strategy in 2001. Not in 2014, in a national event.”

    I’m still not moved. In related news, here’s a rumour: #Ferguson: TV anchors meet off record with Darren Wilson seeking interview reports CNN. Matt Laur, Anderson Cooper, Scott Pelley, others. Huh.

    Michael Brown’s Neighborhood In Ferguson Is Dying:

    “I will say a lot of residents have moved out over the past several months,” said Randy Lipton, president of the St. Louis-based Lipton Group, which owns Canfield Green. He declined to give figures, but only 60% of the apartment’s 450 units were occupied as of Friday, according to an employee in the leasing office who didn’t want to be identified. While she wouldn’t say how much the occupancy rate had fallen since August, she did say, “It’s down.”

    Parking lots are virtually empty. Unkempt shrubbery reaches through the chain-link fence that rings the perimeter of the complex. At least one building has no signs of life at all — there are no cars in front, and all the windows along the back remain dark at night. Canfield Green often looks abandoned.

    And in other cities, 12-year-old boy shot by Cleveland police has died. They shot him in the stomach, because he had a fake gun. @tchopstl @deray 911 call told operator “it was probly a toy gun” twice but not told to cops. Why do people call 911? 911 calls fatal in OH! The gun looks dangerous, but it’s a 12-year-old boy, for fucks’ sakes.

    And in New York, more protesting: New York City is turning up right now for #AkaiGurley. #PoliceViolenceWillNotBeTolerated #Ferguson 2 #NYC .

  99. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

    Should Wilson be cleared of wrongdoing

    This is misleading. He is not on trial. The Grand Jury is deciding whether or not to bring charges against him. Sadly, in the eyes of many, if he is not indicted that will mean he is innocent.

  100. rq says

    Tony
    And that’s the biggest confusion about this whole process: it’s not even a trial, it’s just to see if there’s enough evidence to even charge Wilson. The cleared-of-wrongdoing part would mean a trial.
    All of this, not even for a trial: just an admission that enough wrong was done to warrant a trial.

  101. rq says

    Remember how McCullogh said he would make everything public in the case of a non-indictment? Read this statement re: release of GJ documents. Y’all. #Ferguson (full text):

    There is a report today in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch as follows: “If there is an indictment, only that document will be revealed. But if there is not, McCullogh has said he will take the rare step of obtaining a court order to reveal virtually all the evidence that was considered. Judge Carolyn Whittington has agreed to grant the request, said Paul Fox, the court administrator.”

    Judge Whittington has entered no such order and has made no such agreement.

    If the Grand Jury returns a no true bill, the Judge anticipates the Court will receive requests for Grand Jury records. Some of those requests will require the Court to analyze the need for maintaining secrecy of the records with the need for public disclosure of the records.

    The Court had done no such analysis. In order to analyze the need for maintaining secrecy, the Court will need information it does not have. It does not show the names of the witnesses who have testified before the Grand Jury and it has not heard the testimony or read transcriptions of testimony. The Court has not seen documents or material presented to the Grand Jury.

    The Court awaits the decision of the Grand Jury. The Court will thereafter be guided by the law in its response to requests for Grand Jury records.

    The quote attributed to me in the Post-Dispatch this morning is not accurate.

    Sincerely,
    [signature]
    Paul Fox

    Here’s the article under discussion: If Officer Wilson Is Not Indicted, McCulloch Plans To Release Grand Jury Transcripts, Recordings. So basically if the judge says no, then McCullogh can say that this was his intention all along and that he’s not the bad guy here. Shifting blame, woo.

    In the meantime, more on that arrest of the journalist – St. Louis County Police Violate Court Order By Arresting Journalist Standing on Sidewalk.

  102. rq says

    So there’s been some confusion, as it appears that several news anchors have been able to meet with Darren Wilson (though he has, apparently, refused to appear publicly). People have been asking “Where is Darren Wilson?” for 100+ days. Apparently the top anchors at networks found out and stayed silent? This just adds a whole new level.
    Article on that: Darren Wilson has been meeting with network anchors: What the heck?

    Credit CNN’s Brian Stelter with a very big scoop. On today’s “Reliable Sources” media-news program, Stelter reported that “high-profile news anchors” have spoken in “secret locations” with Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson. The sessions have been off-the-record and, the way Stelter tells it, they’ve been auditions for one of the biggest exclusives of this century — namely, the sit-down talk with the elusive officer who killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., on Aug. 9.

    Some details exist. NBC News’s Matt Lauer, ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos, CBS News’s Scott Pelley and Anderson Cooper and Don Lemon of CNN have met with Wilson, according to Stelter.

    “Because it was off the record, those anchors can’t talk about the meetings and the networks can’t even confirm that they happened,” Stelter notes. [… – Anderson Cooper owned up to it on twitter, at least]

    Yet this is the case of Darren Wilson. As the Washington Post’s Chico Harlan noted in a recent story, Wilson has pulled off an extraordinary disappearing act since his clash with Brown. So absolute has been his exit from the public eye that the St. Louis County prosecutors’ office said that “several” pending felony cases relying on testimony from Wilson “could not proceed” in his absence, Harlan reported. […]

    There’s a big “but” in the middle of this, however. When “off the record” is used to protect not only what’s said in a particular meeting, but also the meeting itself, it becomes a tool not so much for journalists but for the sources seeking to own them.

    Let’s consider the White House. For years, presidents have been holding off-the-record sessions with reporters in attempts to co-opt them, to get advice from them, to stroke them — and, perhaps, to enable them to do their jobs better. As this blog discovered to its great dismay, getting journalists to acknowledge their participation in such events is a challenge. “Since it was off the record, she’s unable to discuss,” a Huffington Post spokesman once told the Erik Wemple Blog about Arianna Huffington’s attendance at one of the sessions. […]

    What the television networks have done here is to bind themselves to a more restrictive, more censorious version of “off the record.” A more gross one, too. That Wilson would be absenting himself from official court testimony while shopping his story around to TV network types is enormous news in and of itself — perhaps as big as what he might eventually say in the sit-down interview. […]

    Perhaps CNN was attempting to voice its own revulsion over the off-the-record restrictions via Stelter’s scoop. When we asked whether the network was acknowledging that the sessions in themselves were huge news, he replied, “I’d say that it was an effort by me, not by CNN as an organization, to acknowledge that.” Not to mention the effort by Stelter’s sources, who refused to sit by as ego-driven network anchors played games with the public’s right to know.

    Well, now we know where Darren Wilson is: at home, writing a script for that big-budget movie they’ll be putting out once his book hits the big-time.

    McCullogh still doubling down on that information release in case of a non-indictment, disregarding the fact that the judge has already said no – Mark Reardon: St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCulloch (radio interview), and elsewhere: @mollyrosestl @deray but he claimed the judge had already agreed to it. Someone is lying. Again .

    More official barricades, in twitter photos: Media pen on W. Florissant is filling up. FoxNews has been moved inside the pen. #Ferguson ; Command Center behind the Target barricaded and guarded to keep prying eyes out. #Ferguson .

  103. rq says

    And here’s a good one from a local hotel. Sorry, it’s a twitter photo-document and I don’t have time to transcribe – The Crowne Plaza in Clayton put this under guest doors last night. Y’all. #Ferguson . Basically, extra safety precautions for hotel guests starting Monday through Wednesday (unless extended), such as closing down the Plaza Bar & Grill.

    We realize that the media certainly has not helped matters, but we truly do not anticipate anything in Clayton like you may have seen on the news in Ferguson, Missouri.

    Yes, which is why they’re warning guests about extra precautions and keycard-only access, etc. etc.

  104. rq says

    Missouri ACLU on the arrest of the journalist: ACLU Statement Regarding the Nov. 22 Arrest of Reporter in Ferguson

    November 23, 2014

    ST. LOUIS – The ACLU of Missouri is reviewing information regarding the November 22 arrest of Trey Yingst, a News2Share reporter and producer, in Ferguson, Missouri. According to the St. Louis County Police Department, Mr. Yingst was arrested for allegedly standing in the street and failing to disperse after being asked by law enforcement to do so. However, several eye-witness accounts and video recordings of the incident suggest that Mr. Yingst was standing on the sidewalk exercising his First Amendment right to record police at the time of his arrest and it is unclear what legal authority police officers would have had to order him to disperse.

    “We are deeply troubled that the First Amendment rights of the media are still being violated in spite of the recent court order we secured against such action by the County of St. Louis,” said Jeffrey Mittman, ACLU of Missouri executive director. “We will continue to monitor the situation and if necessary swiftly pursue aggressive action to ensure that unlawful interference with the press comes to an end.”

    “Police are not allowed to threaten to arrest or order individuals to move who are peaceably standing, marching or assembling on public sidewalks in Ferguson. Missouri law enforcement may only ask those assembled on the street or sidewalk to disperse if there are six or more people gathered for an unlawful purpose or if a riot is taking place,” said Tony Rothert, legal director of the ACLU of Missouri. “Police have an obligation to protect First Amendment rights, not violate them.”

    In response to the repeated attacks on protestors’ and the media’s First Amendment rights since August, the ACLU of Missouri filed a motion for a preliminary injunction in Hussein v. County of Saint Louis, et al., on Friday, Nov. 14. On Nov. 21 United States District Judge John A. Ross granted three court orders against the Missouri State Highway Patrol, the County of St. Louis and the City of Ferguson. In a related case, Abdullah v. County of St. Louis, et al., a federal court issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting law enforcement from arresting those standing on sidewalks. Related documents and more information for both cases are on the ACLU of Missouri website.

    The ACLU of Missouri is a non-partisan, not-for-profit organization that defends and expands the constitutional rights and civil liberties of all Missourians guaranteed under the United States and Missouri Constitutions, through its litigation, legislative and public education programs. It is an affiliate of the national ACLU.

    And here’s the St Louis Post-Dispatch on the story: Police arrest two in protests near Ferguson Police Department.

    Ope, just for fun, Missouri Revised Statutes on what Grand Jurors may disclose.

    Also, it’s interesting that Darren Wilson is said only to have met with male journalists for the “exclusive” interview. #Ferguson.

  106. rq says

    Ryan J Reilly on a couple of nights ago: On A Night Of Peaceful Protests In Ferguson, One Reporter’s Arrest Breaks The Calm

    That arrest marred what was otherwise a professional and noncontroversial police response to demonstrations under the temporary leadership of Lt. Jerry Lohr of the St. Louis County Police Department. The department is sending officers to manage the police response to the protests on a rotational basis, and Lohr was on duty Saturday night. Lohr has been commended for regularly engaging in conversations with protesters gathered outside the Ferguson Police Department and for de-escalating situations that would likely have resulted in an aggressive police response on other nights.

    Despite Lohr’s conciliatory attitude, his colleague Lt. James Vollmer, the commanding officer who ordered the journalist’s arrest, took a more aggressive approach. […]

    Yingst was standing on the initial sidewalk, wearing media credentials and a camera around his neck. Within seconds of encountering him, the commanding officer ordered that the journalist be taken into custody.

    The St. Louis County Police Department stated in a tweet posted Saturday night that Yingst, 21, had been standing in the road and was arrested for “failure to disperse.” However, as this reporter and a multitude of other witnesses saw firsthand — and as was captured on video — Yingst was not in the street. A subsequent statement by the department on Sunday morning claimed that Yingst had been standing not in the street but, rather, in “the area,” this time saying that he would be charged with unlawful assembly.

    Later, a spokesman said the department “is looking into the circumstances surrounding Mr. Yingst’s arrest.”

    In an interview with The Huffington Post, Yingst said he was shocked that he was taken into custody. Before he was locked up, he pointed out, he had actually been composing a tweet about the “fantastic restraint” that Lohr was showing in the handling of the demonstrations.

    How… ironic. But another sign of the odd leadership in Ferguson – there seems to be no consistency to it.

    Court: Judge hasn’t agreed to release Ferguson grand jury evidence if no indictment

    with the grand jury’s decision expected this week, the county court’s top administrator on Sunday said no such agreement exists. He said Whittington has not agreed that she will release evidence in the grand jury review of the Aug. 9 shooting death of the unarmed teenager by the Ferguson police officer.

    In a statement Sunday, Court Administrator Paul Fox said Whittington will have to “analyze the need for maintaining secrecy of the records with the need for public disclosure of the records.”

    Fox also said the comments attributed to him in a Sunday Post-Dispatch article saying Whittington had agreed if there is not an indictment to grant such a request were “not accurate.”

    “The court will need information it doesn’t have,” Fox said in the statement released Sunday. “It does not know the names of the witnesses who have testified before the grand jury and it has not heard the testimony or read transcriptions of testimony. The court has not seen documents or material presented to the grand jury….

    “The court awaits the decision of the grand jury. The court will thereafter be guided by the law in its response to requests for grand jury records.”

    That’s just more on McCullogh’s backout plan.

    In Ferguson, media’s long vigil is welcomed by some, wearing on others

    The national media has again assembled in Ferguson, but this time, they’ve been drawn here not by something that just happened but something that’s about to, with a grand jury deliberating whether to indict a white police officer who fatally shot a black teen. The any-day-now anticipation, coming with ever-revised cable news speculation, has returned this city of 21,000 to a spotlight it both understands and sometimes bristles at. […]

    Many residents, business owners and elected officials have welcomed the increased scrutiny, saying that a media presence helps expose systemic, race-related problems in the police force and the justice system. But others, particularly those who haven’t taken part in the protests, say news organizations have produced a warped portrait of Ferguson, a small city with middle-class homes and a historic shopping district. […]

    The grand jury, after a weekend pause, could meet again as early as Monday to discuss the case of Darren Wilson, the officer, who has not spoken publicly since the shooting. CNN anchors Don Lemon and Anderson Cooper both revealed Sunday on Twitter that they had met secretly with Wilson to solicit an exclusive interview. Several other networks and channels are in the running, said CNN’s Brian Stelter, who first reported the off-the-record negotiations.

    A Wilson interview would provide a missing version of events that led to the shooting, but the negotiations themselves are noteworthy, given how tightly Wilson’s whereabouts and activities have been kept under wraps.

    So, “literally only journalists know where [Wilson] is at?” one Twitter user asked Cooper after the anchor acknowledged “meeting briefly” with Wilson. […]

    “A lot of the press corps is looking for that kind of [violent] action, and that is contributing to the nonstop narrative of expecting violence,” said Mervyn Marcano, a communications strategist who works for several St. Louis grass-roots organizations. “I think that actually undermines the community-building work people are trying to do here.”

    Many reporters and Ferguson residents say a complicated relationship has formed since the shooting in August. Some restaurants have benefited financially from the droves of hungry reporters. Other businesses, such as barbershops and dollar stores, say the media presence has at times emboldened protesters to be more violent, forcing owners to board their windows and costing them business.

    Barber Thomas Bradley estimates that he has lost 80 percent of his business, in large part because many regulars want to avoid the neighborhood where the shooting occurred until things calm down. The boards covering the windows and the newspeople often hovering outside, he added, don’t necessarily help.

    “It’s a Catch-22,” he said. “You want justice, and you want people to have their voices be heard. But I also need to pay my bills.” […]

    Carson said he has experienced the deep suspicion that the community feels about the media. On Sept. 23, he arrived at the spot where Brown was killed — where a memorial of candles and stuffed animals had been erected — to take pictures of another potential crime scene.

    Part of the memorial had caught fire — accidentally or deliberately — opening fresh wounds among residents on Canfield Avenue.

    “Some people came at me and told me to delete the pictures on my camera,” Carson said. “. . . They said, ‘You guys are just down here being vultures.’ I said, ‘No, I’ve been down here since the first day.’ ”

    Carson said some residents and protesters, who had seen him working for weeks to document the community’s response to Brown’s shooting, vouched for him, and the crowd backed off.

  107. rq says

    Increase in gun sales? Increase in responsible gun ownership: Police: Woman allegedly kills herself with gun bought to prepare for Ferguson unrest

    The boyfriend, who wasn’t identified, told police that the couple had bought a gun because of fears of unrest related to the pending grand jury decision on the shooting of Michael Brown, the sources said.

    He told investigators that as they drove late Friday night, the victim waved a gun, jokingly saying the couple were ready for Ferguson, the sources said.

    He ducked to get out of the way of the gun and accidentally rear-ended another car. He said the accident caused the gun to go off and she was struck by a bullet in the head, the sources said.

    The victim was rushed to a hospital but died.

    Ready for Ferguson, indeed.

    A rather interesting read, and not very long: From Occupy To Ferguson

    What limits did the Occupy movement reach? Why did it subside without achieving its object of transforming society? First, it offered almost no analysis of racialized power, despite the central role of race in dividing labor struggles and poor people’s resistance in the US. Second, perhaps not coincidentally, its discourse was largely legalistic and reformist—it was premised on the assumption that the laws and institutions of the state are fundamentally beneficial, or at least legitimate. Finally, it began as a political rather than social movement—hence the decision to occupy Wall Street instead of acting on a terrain closer to most people’s everyday lives, as if capitalism were not a ubiquitous relation but something emanating from the stock market. As a result of these three factors, the majority of the participants in Occupy were activists, newly precarious exiles from the middle class, and members of the underclass, in roughly that order; the working poor were notably absent. The simplistic sloganeering of Occupy obscured the lines of conflict that run through our society from top to bottom: “police are part of the 99%” is technically true, economically speaking, but so are most rapists and white supremacists. All of this meant that when the police came to evict the encampments and kill the movement, Occupy had neither the numbers, nor the fierceness, nor the analysis it would have needed to defend itself. […]

    The momentum proceeding from the demonstrations in Ferguson has its own internal tensions, which will become more apparent the further it goes. Is the problem police brutality, or policing itself? Is the rightful protagonist of this struggle the local poor person of color, the respectable leader of color, the white ally, or everyone who opposes police killings? If it is the latter, how should we deal with the power imbalances within this “everyone”? How should demonstrators from outside the most targeted communities relate to conflicts playing out within them, such as disputes over tactics or risk? And do we really have to repeat the debate about violence and nonviolence yet again?

    And the article on the two runners: Meet The Two Men Who Ran 550 Miles, From Atlanta To Michael Brown’s Memorial In Ferguson – that’s a lot of kilometres.

    Hall, a 28-year-old Florida native, explained to ThinkProgress that running is how he copes with internal problems, which is how he came up with the idea to start Run for Justice. “The Mike Brown incident happened and I had a reason to run for not just my problems, but the problems of the world. I came to Ray with the idea of running to Ferguson to raise awareness of what’s going on here, and he was behind it 100 percent. In our society we get complacent and things come and go, like Trayvon…and Mike Brown, so I wanted to do something that was meaningful and kept an eye on Ferguson.” […]

    When the two finally landed at Brown’s memorial, Hall immediately dropped to the ground and began to cry. “My experience was putting myself in his shoes the entire way,” he explained. “From [Shnucks, a local grocery store], we had the locals walk us [to the memorial] and tell us the story. When I got here I broke down and cried because I was in his shoes and felt the same pain that he would feel, and that the community felt. I know there’s a lot of tension, and I can just feel the energy here and my soul cried out.”

    Mills described the scene at Brown’s memorial as “surreal.” […]

    When Hall and Mills set out on their journey several weeks ago, they had multiple goals. In addition to running hundreds of miles in Brown’s memory, the duo also aimed to raise $1 million on GoFundMe.com, a crowdfunding website. They intend to donate every cent raised to Michael Brown’s family in Ferguson; the relatives of 22-year old John Crawford, who was killed in Ohio; and those of 29-year-old Charles Smith, who was shot and killed by police while handcuffed in Savannah, Georgia. Money will also go towards paying the bail and court fees of protesters who were arrested in Ferguson last August.

    Hall and MIlls created a website and filmed a promotional video, calling for donations. They also sell merchandise on the website, with all proceeds going to the four entities. None of the money raised thus far has funded Hall and Mill’s 20-day journey. In fact, the two paid for hotels on their own dime.

    They have raised $2,362. […]

    So far, Hall and Mills say they’re well on their way to achieving both their short and long-term goals. “I think it’s been pretty successful,” Hall said enthusiastically. “People are paying attention to us and paying attention to Ferguson,” “It doesn’t stop here. This is only the beginning; this is just the first run. This is the first leg of continuing to raise awareness of police brutality and racial injustice.”

    And the Hunger Games connections continue. First in Thailand where they banned the three-finger salute and cancelled the movies, and now in St Louis: Flora place in #Shaw tagged: if we burn you burn w us! #Ferguson @deray @TefPoe @WesKnuckle @ShaunKing @brownblaze .

    And to start with some protest photos from last night, in Shaw, in honour of Vonderrit Myers and Michael Brown: photo 1, photo 2.

  109. rq says

    So the responsible gun owner upthread was a Ferguson protestor.

    This is a long and rambling read that starts off with an interesting angle, tying together Darrien Hunt (remember, the kid cosplaying a samurai n got shot in the back multiple times after running away?), the police and mental illness (in a decent manner, in my opinion, but if I am wrong here, please do correct). Tony Brandenburg: Darrien Hunt (Part 2): Cosplaying Execution and Other Acts of Total Insanity – it goes on about the police officer who shot him, a lack of information on police shootings, and police abuse of power in general.

    Darrien Hunt probably liked the police,too. He was, after all, smiling at them before things went so horribly downhill that he was executed by those same police officers just moments later. I am not suggesting that Darrien Hunt was on the autism spectrum. But you had better believe I suspect he might have been from the things that I have read. His behavior that day makes me think that. He was cosplaying. In character. He was confronted, in a serious situation. And he miscued. I am of the opinion that he had no idea what was going down, or just how badly it was going to end.

    And that breaks my heart.

    What I do know, is this. Black males are statistically under-represented on the spectrum, and there are thousands of black and Latino males in schools across America that – because they are not identified – are being labeled as something else. And those kids end up in trouble at school, and then they end up in trouble with the law.

    And I have seen, first hand, how a small town community over reacts to autism. I have also seen how members of law enforcement – totally caught up in their crime paradigm – miscue and misinterpret and misuse the law to criminalize behavior that is organic in nature. By that, I mean that the behavior is chemical, but has nothing at all to do with criminal intent. […]

    Ear buds, a smile on his face when confronted by the police, and dressed as a samurai? In the middle of Utah?

    It sure sounds like he wasn’t cuing very well. His responses to the police demonstrated this. He didn’t get it, and the seriousness of the situation may have been lost on him completely.

    Until they were shooting him. […]

    The Youth Justice Coalition report offers a number of detailed recommendations to help reduce police and community violence. It calls on U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to launch a civil rights investigation into officer-involved shootings and the use of force countywide. It also calls for demilitarizing the police through the elimination of surplus military equipment, as well as the end of stop-and-frisk searches, gang databases and gang injunctions.

    “We know personally that police violence isn’t only the bullets that pierce our dome, but the police baton that breaks our bones, and the battering ram that breaks our homes,” the YJC report concludes, quoting from a statement authored by the group that was originally read at Ford’s burial in August.

    “It’s the war on drugs and the war on gangs that gentrifies our communities and fills our prisons,” the report continues. “It’s the separation of families through gang injunctions, incarceration and deportation that leaves us orphaned. It’s California’s addiction to police and prison spending that bankrupts our schools and shuts down positive resources in our communities –- jobs, youth centers, libraries, health and mental health clinics, parks and playgrounds. It’s these programs that Ezell needed and all of us need -– not the police lock-down of our neighborhoods.”

    “Demand a city, a state and a nation where Ezell Ford and Deandre Brunston, Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, Oscar Grant, Suzie Peña, and Devin Brown would be in college and not in the ground.”

    It goes on for quite a while.

    CNN, still speculating – I wonder when they’ll start printing actual news, and not just ‘not today, not this weekend, nobody knows!’. Is Ferguson grand jury close to deciding?

    Prosecutors haven’t said what their plans are, but local officials told CNN that if the grand jury decides whether to indict Officer Darren Wilson on Monday, an official announcement of that decision could come soon afterward — rather than 48 hours later as previously planned.

    Let the rumour mill mill its rumours.

    A while ago, I may have mentioned her once or twice (but not more than that), around the time of the first GJ leak, I think, a woman came up – a Christine Byers, who was supposedly getting information from the PD on Darren Wilson and witnesses, etc. She’s a police reporter for the Post-Dispatch, and here’s a storify on how she has affected media portrayal of Ferguson: The Curious Case of Christine Byers: The Police Leak Who Has Shaped the Media Narrative in the Darren Wilson Case. Some very inflammatory tweets put outthere.

    [tweet] Police sources tell me more than a dozen witnesses have corroborated cop’s version of events in shooting #Ferguson

    […]
    However, after the Post-Dispatch got wind of the “more than a dozen witnesses” tweet, this came this half a day later…

    [tweet]On FMLA from paper. Earlier tweets did not meet standards for publication.

    The Editor of the Post-Dispatch, Gilbert Bailon, even had to issue a clarification.

    [text]A tweet Monday night by St. Louis Post-Dispatch police reporter Christine Byers has generated a lot of attention online: Police sources tell me more than a dozen witnesses have corroborated cop’s version of events in shooting #Ferguson – Christine Byers (@ChristineDByers) August 19, 2014 Byers has been on FMLA leave since March.

    The “more than a dozen witnesses” tweet has never been verified, but it helped shape the Darren Wilson narrative from the very beginning. Thus, we begin the odyssey of the reporter who has shaped the local, and then national, media narrative surrounding the Darren Wilson case.

    And that’s just part one.

    Protesters marching in Shaw just held a moment of silence for child shot and killed by officer in Cleveland yesterday (yes, that’s the 12-year-old Tamir Rice).

  110. rq says

    Christine Byers, Part II: The Curious Case of Christine Byers: The Police Leak Who Has Shaped the Media Narrative in the Darren Wilson Case.

    The first unconfirmed Christine Byers’ “leak” on August 18th acted in concert with the infamous “Josie” call to the Dana Loesch radio show on August 19th to establish the unverified, but treated-as-factual Darren Wilson narrative in the media. […]

    After being chastised in print by Post-Dispatch Editor Gilbert Bailon, Christine Byers came back off of FMLA and worked her normal beat until the middle of September without making many waves. However, the tide was about to break. On September 16th, Judge Carolyn Whittington extended the Darren Wilson Grand Jury term until January 7, 2015. On September 17th, Post-Dispatch published that Darren Wilson testified before the Grand Jury for close to four hours, which is highly unusual for the defendant, or as McCulloch puts it, the target of the investigation. […]

    Notice that Christine Byers was a contributor and not a byline. This will become a theme in the Post-Dispatch’s reporting on the Darren Wilson case. Byers will not actually write all the pieces, but it appears her police contacts provide the leaks. […]

    In the meantime, on September 19th, Christine Byers suggested a potential rift between the St. Louis County Police Department and the prosecutor’s office in her story about the man who was shot by police during the August protests on W. Florissant after he allegedly pointed a gun at the police. This story served to establish Byers as the reporter with the closest connections to the St. Louis County Police. Note the language in her lede, which firmly framed the police as having been wronged by the judicial establishment:
    “Members of the St. Louis County Police Association are “disgusted” that a St. Louis County circuit judge released a 19-year-old accused of pointing a gun at police and that no one told them about it.” […]

    On September 22nd, Christine Byers published a defense of the offensive flyer from the media consultant who created it and who would conduct the media trainings, Rick Rosenthal. He claimed that, while the language was insensitive given the context of Ferguson, the wording wasn’t intentionally offensive.
    Byers also published St. Louis County PD’s official response: “This flier has been worded in nearly the same manner for all of Mr. Rosenthal’s prior teachings at our academy, with the exception of the newly added lines referencing Ferguson. Being that the flier was sent by our police academy, we apologize for anyone hurt by the wording of the flier. We believe Mr. Rosenthal’s use of the terms ‘900-pound gorilla’ and ‘feeding the animals’ were mentioning police departments from across the nation dealing with the media and meant no racial harm.” The explanation did not satisfy those critical of County PD’s mostly tone-deaf attempts at pacification of the public criticism.

    And thus ends part 2.

    ‘A Reason to Run’: For Two Men, the Road Leads to Ferguson, with autoplay video, on those two runners.

    Via KSDK.com, with autoplay video, Grand jury evidence may not be released. Just more on McCullogh’s fibbing.

    Oh, by the way, Darren Wilson got married: Darren Wilson has married his girlfriend (and here I thought he’d marry his dog, :P ), and A Quiet Wedding for Police Officer in Shooting. Sounds like someone worried for his future.

  112. chimera says

    One twitter account I follow in Ferguson said they thought the news would be broken “while folks were at church this Sunday”. Then came news it wouldn’t be this week-end. I thought surely it would be today. I wonder if they’re ever going to move at all. Maybe they’re just waiting for the Nation to forget all about it?

  113. rq says

    Probably.
    On that note, CBC with the same non-news: Ferguson grand jury decision yet to come on Michael Brown shooting –

    “The more that they drag this out, the angrier people are going to be,” said Cunningham, 30, of St. Louis.

    Wilson himself has got married since the shooting, it was learned Monday. Records at the St. Louis County Recorder of Deeds office show that 28-year-old Darren Wilson married Barbara Spradling on Oct. 24. A municipal judge performed the ceremony in Overland, Mo.

    The shooting triggered riots and looting, and police responded with armoured vehicles and tear gas. Many in the area thought a grand jury decision on whether to charge Wilson with a crime would be announced Sunday, based partly on a stepped-up police presence in the preceding days, including the setting up of barricades around the building where the panel was meeting.

    Out of more than 100 days of peaceful protesting, two had some sort of looting going on, and yet the media chooses to fixate on that. But yes, the longer they drag it out, the more likely they are to face a build-up of pressure and stress that just isn’t going away. Perhaps initially they hoped it would all disappear quietly and be swept away, but I’m glad to see that the issue is still alive and kicking, especially locally. And very specifically – it’s still about indicting and arresting Darren Wilson. While the movement has managed to spread out slightly into general racism and police brutality, it has not lost its focus. If anything, that focus has intensified – and this is a good thing. Especially since, from where I’m sitting, it looks like there is preparation to work beyond this one Grand Jury, no matter what the outcome is. This is also a good thing.

    Anyway, this next one is a nice article, though I have to say, I haven’t heard of this person at all until now: Meet the Ferguson Rage Whisperer.

    Call him The Rage Whisperer: Gillis, 56, pays the bills as an autoworker at General Motors plant in nearby Wentzville. But he’s got serious musical chops, honed during his younger years in Memphis, where he recorded for Hi Records alongside soul greats like Al Green. [..]

    “The tension is palpable and these kids Michael Brown’s age, it’s festering in their minds but they don’t know what to do with it,” Gillis told the Star as he caught his breath.

    “I’m just trying to bring down the temperature. Help channel that energy in a positive direction.”

    Gillis has been a fixture of the protest community in Ferguson, where he has grandchildren, counselling youth that want to hear words to go with the music. The rest of the time, he says it with sound.
    […]

    Rhetoric has been flying furiously as the secretive grand jury process drags on. Democratic lawmaker John Lewis, the legendary Georgia Democrat and elder statesman of the U.S. civil rights movement, made headlines predicting a “miscarriage” of justice would make Ferguson “a turning point” in U.S. race relations as powerful as Selma was a half-century ago.

    President Barack Obama dismissed the comparison in an interview with ABC, saying, “the kinds of ongoing problems we have with police and communities of colour around the country are not the sort that we saw in Selma.

    “We’re not talking about systematic segregation or discrimination,” said Obama. “They are solvable problems if in fact law enforcement officials are open to the kind of training and practices that we’ve seen instituted in lots of parts of the country.”

    Adding to the confusion and doubt, however, St. Louis County officials on Sunday backtracked on earlier promises that the secretive grand jury proceedings would be published simultaneously with the announced outcome.

    Instead, officials said, the material would be subject to further judicial review, with no records released until after the material is analyzed and approved by St. Louis Judge Carolyn Whittington.

    Judge Whittington, meanwhile, has said she has not received any such request (see links above). So… It’s one giant mess of information and misinformation right now. All the easier to fool you with, my dears.

    I have no idea if maintaining this thread in any way helps to clarify things. But it’s because of the media that I keep posting those non-violent protest photos, because that is important to see: the engagement, and the non-violence, and the frustration and anger that is there. It’s easy to dismiss people as violent or too angry, but I hope that at least a few of those photos leave a better impression of the people behind the movement. *shrug*

    Anyway, there’s this forum and they’ve just sent out a message that they think an announcement will come tonight. It’s about as reliable as any other source, though, so, take that as you will. I’m resigned to reading about the announcement when it is made. At this point, it just can’t come too soon.

  115. rq says

    So via that forum Nixon is apparently having a press conference at 5.30 local time, with the announcement at 8. That’s pretty specific.
    Hm.

  116. rq says

    Maybe even correct: JUST IN: Grand jury announcement officially set for 8 pm tonight at County Justice Center. @KMOX will carry live;
    Grand jury decision will be announced at a 8 p.m. CT press conference, prosecutor’s office says.;
    CONFIRMED grand-jury announcement presser is at 8 p.m. via McCulloch’s office;
    Not that it was a surprise: (view the pictures with captions…).

    The police in Clayton that are by the media are ready for anything. #Ferguson ;
    Well, at least they haven’t built a moat… yet.

  117. rq says

    #Ferguson: AP reports lawyer for Michael Brown’s family says grand jury announcement coming this evening. @TheAtlantic says 8 PM tonight.;

    City in preparation:
    QT and Natural Bridge & 170 closed. Police tape surrounding it, gas prices taken down. ;
    Some, but not all, businesses boarded up in Clayton.;
    Street crews closing road to Justice Center. #FergusonDecision ;

    In related news, St. Louis County prosecutor will release records if no indictment:

    Hessel said in a telephone interview Monday that, “The motion was withdrawn because we concluded that we didn’t need an order of the court to release the testimony and other documents presented to the grand jury.”

    He said that there was no significance to the timing of the withdrawal. Hessel said that after reviewing the law, McCulloch decided a provision of Missouri’s Sunshine Law allowed the release of the records.

    “If it’s an open record, with all due respect (to the court), we didn’t need permission,” he said.

    They better have everything ready.

  118. rq says

    CNN on Ferguson: Grand Jury reaches decision, but not announced yet.

    With Michael Brown Grand Jury Verdict Near, Missouri District Cancels School;

    For CNN, Michael Smerconish Helps Police Create Propaganda Against Ferguson Protesters:

    The entire segment put the focus on protesters, who are concerned Officer Darren Wilson will not be indicted for killing an unarmed black teenager, Mike Brown, and there was an air of sanctimony to it. Even the guest who producers chose to be chastised on cable news television was a product of elitism. Altogether, it was a glaring example of how media can aid police in the suppression of dissent and what made it even more remarkable was that the guest resisted Smerconish while he was on air.

    “Some protesters want to spark violence between themselves and police. Up next, a man who calls himself a citizen journalist, I might call him something else entirely. You’ll decide for yourself when we come back,” Smerconish condescendingly said before going to break.

    The guest was Bassem Masri, a Palestinian American livestreamer who has been in the St. Louis area for months covering protests. In the past month, he was arrested multiple times, including during “Ferguson October” when he was arrested at a demonstration at Walmart and charged with “third degree assault” for allegedly spitting on a police officer. [..]

    Smerconish elevated profanity and insults to the level of violence and treated this speech as some kind of signal that officers are surely going to be hurt.

    As Masri attempted to explain to Smerconish, “I don’t think we should be looking at citizens about how they react towards their public servants. It should be the other way around.”

    “Now, what you saw right there was reality TV. People are pissed off about how they’re getting treated in the streets and how people are getting killed. They should be looking at that besides our reaction. We have a right to be mad. Our anger is justified,” Masri declared.

    Eventually, Masri called out Smerconish for his pathetic and amateurish attempt to hold protesters “accountable.”

    “Why don’t you go investigate something real? Why don’t you go investigate something real?” Masri asked. “I spoke my mind. I’m a citizen. Why don’t you worry about us getting killed? The warrants, the extortion, the limits on the Constitution they put on us. Do you [worry] about that, Michael? No, you’re worried about what I said.”

    Smerconish expressed the main view behind his animosity toward community residents who have been protesting:

    “Why not everybody catch their breath, allow this thing to run its course and then when all of the evidence that was evaluated by the grand jurors get put on line and we can review hundreds, thousands of pages of factual evidence, then we catch our breath, evaluate what it says, and plan what our next moves will be? Doesn’t that seem like the more prudent course?” Smerconish asked. […]

    During the same edition of his show and before Masri appeared, Smerconish had Jeff Roorda, business manager of the St. Louis Police Officers Association, on as a guest. Roorda has said he is done letting high-profile cases be tried in the court of public opinion without “hard evidence” and his union will no longer stand in the shadows in these kinds of cases.

    Roorda claimed there have been “very broad threats against law enforcement,” and there were “violent attempts to kill or injure police officers every night for two weeks on the streets of Ferguson. “I’m afraid in the wake of this decision that we’ll see far worse,” he suggested.

    “There needs to be somebody speaking for this officer because all we hear about is folks that want to try him without the benefit of hearing any evidence,” Roorda said of Officer Wilson. […]

    At no point did Smerconish contest this idea that there were attempts by protesters to kill and injure police. He at no point asked Roorda to differentiate between activists and the few in a community who may take advantage of a situation to commit criminal acts, which could happen anywhere.

    Smerconish did not ask Roorda to think about what Brown’s family is going through. Quite the opposite. Just moments before having Masri on to condemn protesters for making up their minds without seeing the evidence the grand jury has seen he prompted Roorda to explain why he had made up his mind that Wilson is innocent and there’ll be no indictment. […]

    The message from the broadcast was clear: it is okay for a voice speaking on behalf of police to take a simplistic position that this was a “kill or be killed scenario.” It is not okay for protesters, the rabble incensed by what they perceive as injustice, to insist Wilson is guilty because he shot to kill, not to apprehend, and there is something terribly wrong if he is not indicted.

    It probably pleased police officers in St. Louis to see Smerconish reinforce why any violence employed by police after the grand jury decision will be defended or excused by authorities.

    There are bits and pieces of the actual interviews in the piece, very good stuff!

    On Tamir Rice, Black child Tamir Rice murdered for holding a gun in an state where white people are free to roam around like this: (yup, open carry).

  119. rq says

    Protesters near the #Ferguson police station .

    Somebody please be up and watch, I have to go to bed because morning, and I really, really wanted to be awake for this, but there’s no way I can do that and still do what I have to do tomorrow. Perhaps someone in a closer timezone. Just, at least, watch, if nothing else.
    I’ll do the twitter catch-up tomorrow.

  120. rq says

    Hysteria over Ferguson grand jury an indictment of America

    Here in Boston, police are sending out robocalls to public school students and sending messages to college students to stay calm. In Oakland, California, businesses are putting steel plates on their doors. In Los Angeles, Police Chief Charlie Beck said he hopes to get advance notice from Missouri authorities about whether or not the grand jury indicts Ferguson officer Darren Wilson for Brown’s shooting. And in Ferguson, some schools are already closed in anticipation of the decision, gun sales have skyrocketed and a state of emergency was declared by Missouri Governor Jay Nixon.

    To be sure, Attorney General Eric Holder and many black clergy have also asked for police restraint for any protests after the grand jury decision is announced. But such balanced pleas have been drowned out by the drama of an FBI warning that the grand jury’s decision “will likely be exploited by some individuals to justify threats and attacks against law enforcement and critical infrastructure.” The memo said people “could be armed with bladed weapons or firearms, equipped with tactical gear/gas masks, or bulletproof vests to mitigate law enforcement measures.” […]

    Also last week, an unarmed black man was shot to death in New York City in a dark public housing stairwell by a rookie police officer. The police said the shooting was accidental, but at a rally protesting the shooting, the Associated Press quoted 64-year-old former public housing resident Alex Mallory as saying, “Until you address the issue of police killing people of color, we’re always going to have the problem. . .What are you saying, people who live in developments are animals or something?”

    Until the nation frets more about actual police killings than it does speculating on potential black violence, questions like Mallory’s will continue to be asked.In 1968, the literary critic Hoyt Fuller wrote, “Black people are being called ‘violent’ these days, as if violence is a new invention out of the ghetto. But violence against the black minority is in-built in the established American society.” […]

    So far, the nation has settled for the worm’s eye view on police while maintaining an eagle watch for an explosion by black people. Although few want riots, the disparity between these views is so blatantly unequal that it guarantees that violence against the black minority will remain built into established American society.

    Militarized police, not just in the USA anymore! Armed and Dangerous
    How mission creep is turning our cops into warriors    , from Canada. Excellent reading.

    On Vonderrit, former colleague writes character letter on Jason Flannery, the cop who shot Myers: basically, he was as racist, conservative and assholish as you could imagine. And prone to violence.

  121. rq says

    Okay, Nixon’s press conference has ended with a lot of talk about protecting property, etc. Have fun waiting for the actual GJ announcement. Good night!

  125. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Only 6:15 CT, and the announcement *snicker* won’t be for another hour and a quarter.

  127. Ichthyic says

    yup, some of us predicted this particular incident would have far ranging effects when it happened.

    seems the entire country is using it as a test bed for programs designed to stamp out civil unrest, from dissemination of misleading information, to gearing up police for mass response against potential “riots”.

    http://www.mercurynews.com/crime-courts/ci_27004434/ferguson-decision-oakland-officials-community-leaders-prepare-potential

    this is the second volley in the war to eat the rich, mark my words. the first was the Occupy movement, and the response to that.

    If they are successful in putting down civil unrest with these tactics, then you can expect MUCH more of the same.

    sad, but it rather looks like the war is going badly already for those who want positive change.

  128. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    I have to admit to being confused about this emote?

    The cynic in me says the fix is in and the the policeman won’t be indicted (which he should be, as should any police officer in a fatal shooting). No suspense, so why not get it over with?

  129. Ichthyic says

    why not get it over with?

    They want the suspense to build, so the maximum civilian outrage is reached, so they can really test their response ability to put down civilian unrest.

    THAT is the cynic in me. I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t think I am.

  130. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    They want the suspense to build, so the maximum civilian outrage is reached, so they can really test their response ability to put down civilian unrest.

    I hope what has changed is the ability of people on the line to document the abuses, and get the evidence into the hands of parties that will hold the powers that be to the fire. I don’t think they are ready for that.

  132. Pteryxx says

    Thanks rq, do stand down and get some rest. I’m on the road but I cleared my evening and I’ll be watching the TV and twitter as best I can tonight. I feel for all those people waiting on the street to find out if their one shred of hope (or complete lack of hope) for an indictment is justified.

    I remember that when George Zimmerman was acquitted, some assholes in my town and others across the country set off fireworks. Nobody should have to sit in their homes and hear any damn fireworks tonight.

  133. Ichthyic says

    They want the photo of rioting people of color at night.

    followed by the photo of effective control systems putting down “violent terrorists”.

    did I say terrorists?

    yes, I did. We’re literally only a step away from money telling us that anyone who protests injustice is a terrorist.

  135. toska says

    They want the photo of rioting people of color at night.

    And that’s where I lost my composure. I’ve been watching, waiting, knowing what the announcement will almost certainly be, but I kept holding on to that tiny bit of hope that one little step toward justice might happen tonight. But you’re right, and my hope is gone.

    Thank you to everyone (especially rq!) who has kept these threads going. You all are amazing. Here’s to not letting this issue be forgotten.

  136. Ichthyic says

    yup, if that grand jury EVER had the slightest inclination to indict, it would have done so after just a few days deliberation, max.

    remember, THIS IS NOT A TRIAL, a grand jury is simply there to make sure due process was followed.

    it’s rather obvious that as much due process as was allowed by the DA and the Ferguson police was already followed. An indictment should have been nearly immediate if one was ever forthcoming.

    now they can say they “took their time to look at all the evidence”, which frankly ISN’T SUPPOSED TO BE THEIR FUCKING JOB.

    no, this was a sham from the start, and it’s obvious to anyone with half a brain.

  137. Pteryxx says

    MSNBC live page with reporters on the ground: MSNBC

    Daily Dot list of twitter reporters and livestreams to follow, including @DotPolitics, ABC and Bloomberg on the ground, and Argus Radio. Daily Dot

    and MSNBC’s Chris Hayes is live in Ferguson again on regular old TV, with Trymaine Lee. Hayes says that prosecutor Bob McCulloch (him of the police family and petition for removal from the case) may make the announcement himself.

  138. ceesays says

    There’s a piece of me that hopes that they’re having a “twelve angry men” moment.

    I know that piece of me that still hopes for justice will die tonight.

  139. Ichthyic says

    Bob McCulloch (him of the police family and petition for removal from the case) may make the announcement himself.

    of course he will. He’s very proud to interfere with the course of justice. that’s apparently Missouri tradition.

  141. Ichthyic says

    The Brown family should sue for delay of due process, REGARDLESS of what the verdict was of the grand jury. The process was WAYYYYY out of bounds for what a grand jury is supposed to be responsible for in a case like this. The new AG should look into civil action against the entire county.

  142. Esteleth is Groot says

    Not just that, toska, but I can describe what said photo will look like, including the probable clothing, artful capture of flames in the background, perhaps a Molotov cocktail or makeshift club in hand.

  143. Pteryxx says

    Mayor of St Louis: (paraphrased) ‘We’re going to have the best police officers in the country protecting protesters and property tonight.’

    *headdesk*

    via Twitter somewhere, words not to use and/or drinking game: “thug”, “riot”, “violence”, “property”.

    —

    Ryan J. Reilly says the street in front of the Ferguson PD is now closed, with Vine links: (twitter)

    Ryan J. Reilly @ryanjreilly

    Police ordering protesters out of the road down the street from #ferguson police station https://vine.co/v/O1gmjjOP7MY

    5:07 PM – 24 Nov 2014

    Protesters in New York are facing NYPD. (twitter)

    Molly Crabapple ‏@mollycrabapple

    Crowd chants to NYPD “how many kids have you killed today?” #Ferguson solidarity rally nyc Union square

    5:04 PM – 24 Nov 2014

  144. Pteryxx says

    Protesters in Seattle via a local news station: (twitter)

    Scott Jensen ‏@sjensenK5

    Seven posters of faces with the caption, “No More Stolen Lives” at Westlake. #FergusonDecision
    Seattle, WA

    5:26 PM – 24 Nov 2014

    —

    Steven Blunt ‏@countdooku33

    My face while

  145. toska says

    Esteleth
    Don’t forget the made up gang signs. An African American hand in any position is flashing a gang sign.
    Schrodinger’s gang sign?

  146. Pteryxx says

    Protesters in Chicago: (twitter)

    Progress Illinois ‏@progressIL

    ‘No justice, no peace,’ chant Chicagoans outside city police HQ ahead of grand jury decision in Mike Brown case

    4:56 PM – 24 Nov 2014

    looks like some symbol or other in that last post got cut off. Edited:

    Steven Blunt ‏@countdooku33

    My face while [?] to people on FOX argue that an indictment is evidence of “reverse racism.” #FergusonDecision

    5:26 PM – 24 Nov 2014

    (twitter)

  147. Pteryxx says

    Jonathan Blakely ‏@JonathanBlakely

    And now we wait… View from inside the courtroom where announcement will be read. #Ferguson #MikeBrown #DarrenWilson

    5:23 PM – 24 Nov 2014

    (twitter)

  148. Pteryxx says

    Brown family lawyer says the family has NOT been informed of what the decision will be. They have to learn at the same time as everyone else. (via watching MSNBC)

  149. Pteryxx says

    From overhead shots from MSNBC, there’s minimal police presence around the building – protesters fill the street up to barricades around the building, and there are single rows of cops in ordinary street uniforms on the sidewalks twenty feet or so back. From this height I don’t see helmets, gas masks or riot shields. MSNBC’s reporter says Amnesty International has observers on the ground.

    —-

    Joshua Bennett ‏@SirJoshBennett

    Turned on CNN a few minutes ago, only to see that Mark O’Mara is out here trying to garner sympathy for Darren Wilson. Absolutely absurd.

    4:52 PM – 24 Nov 2014

    (twitter)

    That’s George Zimmerman’s lawyer acting as analyst for CNN.

    Joshua Bennett ‏@SirJoshBennett

    Mainstream news media’s vilification of the protesters in Ferguson is truly unrelenting. Not even thinly veiled at this point.

    4:53 PM – 24 Nov 2014

    (twitter)

    —

    Hari KondaboluVerified account ‏@harikondabolu

    The #Ferguson grand jury isn’t deciding if Darren Wilson is guilty, but if a Black man’s murder is even worth further discussion in America.

    2:17 PM – 24 Nov 2014

    (twitter)

  150. Pteryxx says

    Bob McCulloch will give a 20-minute statement and then take questions, starting momentarily.

  152. Pteryxx says

    HuffPo liveblog noting protests in LA, Oakland, New York: (link)

    With the night long since arrived in St. Louis, an announcement is expected at around 8 p.m. Central time. Several commentators have questioned whether waiting until the late evening — when protests were at their most confrontational in August — was a wise decision.

    Asked about the timing at a press conference earlier tonight, Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon (D) said the choice was McCulloch’s.

    “Those were decisions made by the St. Louis County prosecutor’s office, and that is who made that call,” said Nixon.

    — Matt Sledge

  153. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Why should it take 20 minutes, unless some bigotsplainin’ in going on?

  155. Tethys says

    Maybe they moved to indict and McColloch is having difficulty spinning that. /hopespringseternal

  157. carlie says

    And the FIRST THING HE SAYS is that social media started immediately and got it wrong and it’s all their fault.

  158. Pteryxx says

    …McCulloch started with sympathies for Michael Brown’s family and how well we know that pain. (That’s a reference to his own police family history that he campaigns on. *hurk*) There’ll be better transcripts than I can do.

  161. Pteryxx says

    McCulloch claims witnesses made statements inconsistent with physical evidence? But that “shot in the back” claim was debunked back in August. They said Wilson shot AT Brown’s back…

  162. Pteryxx says

    (twitter)

    Ryan J. ReillyVerified account ‏@ryanjreilly

    McCulloch criticizing 24-hour media coverage and social media rumors. #Ferguson

    6:20 PM – 24 Nov 2014

    (twitter)

    Ryan J. ReillyVerified account ‏@ryanjreilly

    McCulloch says St. Louis County Police and Justice Department shared evidence. #Ferguson

    6:18 PM – 24 Nov 2014

  164. Pteryxx says

    “No cause exists”.

    I can’t hear much other words besides those echoing. “No cause exists.”

  165. ceesays says

    it’s weird. I knew they wouldn’t indict. I knew it from the beginning. I knew.
    but there was still something in me left to hurt.

  166. Pteryxx says

    McCulloch’s gone right back to the corner store and Michael Brown grabbing a handful of cigars. Really? Really? That’s the reason he’s giving – that Wilson tied them to the store.

  167. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    I can’t hear much other words besides those echoing. “No cause exists.”

    And an unarmed dead body of citizen with multiple wounds from a police pistol isn’t cause??? It always should be.

  168. HappyNat says

    I can’t even take this shit. I love them blaming social media for falsifications , when they have done everything they can to poison the well, every step of the way.

  171. Pteryxx says

    The riot shields are out in Ferguson. Cops in helmets and shields lined up behind the fences, guarding the building.

  172. Esteleth is Groot says

    Well, time for me to cry myself to sleep. My heart breaks for Michael Brown’s family.

  173. Pteryxx says

    *now* McCulloch will reveal Brown’s blood inside the vehicle door and on Wilson’s clothing.

  174. Pteryxx says

    Thanks Tethys but I’m not parsing the statement very well. I know I’m missing the most significant parts (which are the spin and spin and omissions and false narratives).

  175. toska says

    Esteleth

    My heart breaks for Michael Brown’s family.

    I almost can’t believe how disrespectfully the Brown family has been treated by police since day 1.

    #BlackLivesMatter

  176. Pteryxx says

    and now McCulloch is emphasizing what witnesses didn’t see or only saw part of as regards Brown facing Wilson and moving toward him or not. (Nothing about Shaun King’s revelation of the 100-plus foot distance between Wilson’s car and where Brown fell.)

  177. toska says

    Pteryxx

    *now* McCulloch will reveal Brown’s blood inside the vehicle door and on Wilson’s clothing.

    Ah, but they’ll never willfully explain how Mike Brown’s body ended up so far away from the car when he died. Couldn’t be that he was running. . .

  179. ck says

    Ichthyic wrote:

    no, this was a sham from the start, and it’s obvious to anyone with half a brain.

    Forgive my ignorance of the U.S. justice system (I’m Canadian), but isn’t that the point of the Grand Jury anyway? From all I can tell, its only real purpose is to protect the political career of a prosecutor, so they can play both sides of any controversial situation. McCulloch gets to say he tried, even if he didn’t.

  180. Pteryxx says

    There just is no way for a bunch of human eyewitnesses to a real event to agree closely enough to be taken seriously by this prosecution. Slight inconsistencies in eyewitness reports are NORMAL and EXPECTED. Witness reports would only be perfectly consistent if they had been coached!

    —

    He did mention 153 feet distance in the scene just now.

  182. Pteryxx says

    ‘all decisions have to be decided by the scientific and physical evidence and the CONSISTENT testimony of eyewitnesses…’

    Take that paraphrase with a grain of salt, the rage is buzzing in my ears.

  183. HappyNat says

    The whole thing has been blaming Michael Brown and defending Wilson. Fuck this guy. Fuck the police.

  184. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Forgive my ignorance of the U.S. justice system (I’m Canadian), but isn’t that the point of the Grand Jury anyway?

    Any Grand Jury will not hear from the defence. Only the prosecutions case as to whether this is probable cause for an indictment. DW should have never testified. It was part of the fix, to show that they were being fair, while being bigots.

  185. Pteryxx says

    McCulloch in questions is saying that an African-American witness said Brown had been “charging” at Wilson.

  186. Ichthyic says

    but isn’t that the point of the Grand Jury anyway?

    NO. the point of the grand jury system is to prevent the government from using the justice system to punish individuals it doesn’t like.

    that was the purpose of forming it to begin with.; another layer to protect citizens from a corrupt government.

    this, however, is the flip side… rewarding individuals the government DOES like. Corruption can take many forms, and you’re seeing a clear case of it here.

  187. Ichthyic says

    DW should have never testified.

    exactly.

    that very thing makes it clear this was a sham, as if a corrupt prosecutor being involved from the start wasn’t sufficient enough evidence.

  188. Ichthyic says

    McCulloch in questions is saying that an African-American witness said Brown had been “charging” at Wilson.

    it doesn’t matter. and it shouldn’t have mattered.

    listen:

    ALL THAT MATTERS for a grand jury is that there is sufficient actual evidence to proceed to a trial.

    THAT’S FUCKING IT.

    that WAS NOT what happened here. not at all.

    this was a circus trial, wearing the mask of a grand jury. it was not in any way shape or form, a proper use of a grand jury.

    fucking travesty is what it was.

  189. Pteryxx says

    argh… McCulloch said exactly what we’ve all been discussing re the grand jury process. That how can anyone say the system didn’t work when they were given all the evidence and all the information… I need to bleach my ears from hearing that.

  190. Ichthyic says

    Michael’s poor family, I can’t even begin to imagine how they must be feeling right now.

    I’m hoping they feel outrage, and plan a giant civil suit. There certainly is cause.

  191. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    McCulloch in questions is saying that an African-American witness said Brown had been “charging” at Wilson.

    That isn’t a call for pistol shots. Tazer, maybe.

  192. Ichthyic says

    . That how can anyone say the system didn’t work when they were given all the evidence and all the information

    that there WAS SUFFICIENT EVIDENCE that this grand jury took MONTHS to evaluate it, is all that is needed TO GO TO FUCKING TRIAL.

    again, this is a fucking mockery of what a grand jury is supposed to do, what its purview is.

  194. Ichthyic says

    Newsfeed says President Obama is going to speak shortly

    Holder is the one who should speak. but he caved… right when he needed to stand up the most, and walked off the job.

    Obama is irrelevant.

    the fat lady has sung. America is no more.

  196. Pteryxx says

    …….

    McCulloch on what a tragedy Brown’s death is even though it was justified – “No police officer – no young man” should die at the hands of a police officer, more or less.

    I mark that as telling because McCulloch has campaigned for decades, and said in several press interviews since Brown’s death, that his officer father’s death in the line of duty makes him have compassion and understanding for shooting victims.

  197. Ichthyic says

    UNITED STATES:

    STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM THE REST OF THE CIVILIZED WORLD.

    you’ve been warned.

  198. Pteryxx says

    someone on MSNBC saying that through that whole statement, it sounded more like Brown being put on trial (so to speak) than Wilson.

  199. Ichthyic says

    duh. Brown was on trial from the moment he walked down the street.

    the grand jury system is supposed to PROTECT the citizens from wrongful government prosecution, not REWARD those who murder in the name of that same government. It’s a fucking complete perversion.

  201. Pteryxx says

    A police car window got broken, cops line advanced, word is the order to disperse was just given. via MSNBC

  202. toska says

    Obama has already made it clear that he wants to play both sides and take the “moderate” approach to Ferguson. He’s fucking useless.

  203. Pteryxx says

    MSNBC saying things seem calm enough, there’s distance between crowds and police lines, no advancing. Just the breaking police car windows – now hearing sirens and announcements to clear, very loudly, from what I think is a newscopter.

    Obama starting out with the understandable reaction and urging the Brown side to protest peacefully…

  204. ck says

    Ichthyic wrote:

    NO. the point of the grand jury system is to prevent the government from using the justice system to punish individuals it doesn’t like.

    I hate to break it to you, but it hasn’t been terribly successful at that, either. The absurd numbers of young black men who end up charged with (often fabricated) crimes should be evidence of that. And as much as I’d like to applaud the anti-authoritarian streak behind the idea, it is obviously become quite easy to exploit by anyone with a particular axe to grind and the power to do so.

    Without the Grand Jury, people could rightly demand this man’s job because the responsibility would start and end at his office. As it is, the jury has become a convenient shield he can hide behind and avoid political fallout. Hell, the idea that a prosecutor should be an elected official rather than a simple civil servant is a major problem in itself.

  205. Pteryxx says

    Obama’s calling for police to show respect and for people to remember cops have a hard job. Meanwhile, on MSNBC split-screen, milling riot cops moving about and loud sirens breaking through his speech.

  206. Pteryxx says

    I hope someone’s recording this, it’s like surreal performance art. Obama saying poor communities need good policing, to work with communities to address their problems, while cops’ loudspeakers are blaring ‘Stop throwing things!’ and floodlit streets full of milling people.

    So, that was probably the imagery they wanted, huh.

  207. Ichthyic says

    I hate to break it to you, but it hasn’t been terribly successful at that, either

    you’re not telling me anything I don’t already know.

  208. Pteryxx says

    The tear gas clouds are out while Obama’s saying this is not a cause for throwing things or vandalizing property.

    I’m disgusted. It’s like telling an ER patient to calm down and stop making all that noise.

  209. Ichthyic says

    the idea that a prosecutor should be an elected official rather than a simple civil servant is a major problem in itself.

    that’s an excellent point that never gets brought up enough. Having traveled the world a bit, the US is rather unique in having a lot of legal positions be elected positions. Where I live now, they scratch their heads in confusion at the obvious conflicts of interest that engenders.

  210. HappyNat says

    Obama:”There is never an excuse for violence” – But killing an unarmed teenager is totes OK.

    “Both sides” Obama strikes again.

  211. twas brillig (stevem) says

    about the Grand Jury decision to NOT prosecute: The ribbon captioning said the decision required a minimum of 9-3 vote. Later, it stated the Grand Jury was 9 White + 3 Black citizens. I’m curious at how the final vote was distributed among that arrangement of citizens on the Grand Jury. I DO NOT KNOW, but willing to bet, that the vote was distinctly along racial lines.
    But I’m just bigoted, that the recent events have made me characterize the (white) residents there as mere stereotypes

  212. Pteryxx says

    twas brillig: McCulloch said, if I remember right, that *nobody* would ever know which jurors voted which way. Apparently it’s the grand jury’s privilege to keep their individual votes secret.

  213. Pteryxx says

    HappyNat – I guess taking 90 seconds (or 20, or 45, in other cases) to fill an unarmed black person with bullets doesn’t count as “violence-violence”.

  214. yazikus says

    the US is rather unique in having a lot of legal positions be elected positions.

    Where I live, both the county sheriff & coroner are elected officials, which is absurd. We’ve had a coroner who used to be a garbage truck driver.

  215. Ichthyic says

    Obama has already made it clear that he wants to play both sides and take the “moderate” approach to Ferguson. He’s fucking useless.

    he let Holder burn. Why do you think, on the eve of the very thing Holder had worked for for decades, he all of a sudden decides to quit being Attorney General and step down?

  216. Ichthyic says

    to fill an unarmed black person with bullets doesn’t count as “violence-violence”.

    it’s not legitimate violence? :P

    seriously, I keep thinking of “To Kill a Mockingbird”

  218. Pteryxx says

    via MSNBC, the St Louis Police would like us all to know that that’s not tear gas, only smoke grenades. Gee, thanks.

  219. Pteryxx says

    MSNBC (O’Donnell now) pointing out that in that entire statement, no new information was given. Particularly nothing about Wilson’s decision to shoot, state of mind, or what informed it – nothing about Wilson’s testimony whatsoever. Also, none of the journalists asked why McCulloch decided to make the announcement so late at night.

  222. Pteryxx says

    More and more riot cops keep showing up, more and more vehicles – a dozen officers per vehicle-load, apparently, that’s where they’re coming from. The officers *are* wearing gas masks. (Smoke grenades only, huh.) Protesters have pulled far back and are somewhat scattered.

  223. Ichthyic says

    via MSNBC, the St Louis Police would like us all to know that that’s not tear gas, only smoke grenades. Gee, thanks.

    …and it’s not lead bullets, only rubber!

    I have to go, before I have a stroke.

    like others, I fully expected that since it went so long, no indictment would be forthcoming, but somehow was hoping for something that is simply no longer there in the US.

    I’ve got to kick this habit of having any hope for the US. After all, after careful deliberation, I DID abandon the place. I didn’t do it on a whim.

    I shouldn’t be looking back all the time. Frankly, if the US would mind its own fucking business, I probably wouldn’t be.

    but it’s like watching the rise of Nazi Germany. You just KNOW it’s gonna come back and bite you on the ass. Nowhere to hide.

  224. Pteryxx says

    There’s one police car on fire with nobody anywhere around it, and a bit further from the police station, ordinary street traffic is driving through. Groups of riot cops moving forward in short increments and pausing, with nobody close to them. They’re sort of glancing at each other to see what to do next. Protesters not cooperating in the rioter role, I suppose.

  225. Pteryxx says

    Maddow addressing the empty statements of “make things better” or “make sure this never happens again” when there are no answers to asking the system to work, when the very simple request of an indictment wasn’t answered.

  226. toska says

    seriously, I keep thinking of “To Kill a Mockingbird”

    Amazing how little things have changed since then.

  227. Pteryxx says

    As complete speculation, it just looks silly and suspicious to me that there was one cop car attacked and immediately withdrawn from, one report of shots fired a few blocks away where nobody much was, and one cop car (not sure if the same one) on fire with nobody around. It looks as if the small fraction of planted agitators (normal procedure for this sort of protest) did the bare minimum of their jobs, gave the cameras a nice fire to look at, and nobody else whatsoever among the protesters took them up on it.

  228. Pteryxx says

    seriously, MSNBC, quit training the helicopter cameras on the boring burning car with no humans anywhere around it. There’s no point. Ooh, shiny.

  230. Pteryxx says

    Oh, and nobody is approaching the car to put it out, either. It’s been a good ten minutes. Do SWAT vehicles not carry any fire extinguishers among all the grenades and beanbags and shit?

  232. Pteryxx says

    O’Donnell going over the one reporter who asked McCulloch what evidence was given that informed Wilson’s decision to fire shots outside the car; McCulloch’s answer was oh how he can’t know what was important to the grand jury’s decision and “Everything presented”.

  233. Pteryxx says

    Chris Hayes says some protesters on the ground said the smoke burned them like tear gas; he went over the hollowness of McCulloch’s statement, and that MSNBC’s legal experts are going over the massive document dump that McCulloch’s office made available to them. He’s reporting a lot of anger, and another couple of fires, but not all that big a crowd. There also don’t seem to be the clergy or peacekeeper groups out tonight.

    Protests hundreds strong also in California and New York being shown.

  234. rq says

    So it was black people’s word against white people word and then when one black person supported what the white people were saying, they chose that as the correct answer.
    Fuck. This. Shit.

    Woke up with a shred of hope (unwarranted, I know) and now I’m going to cry because those pictures coming out of there. Unlabelled canisters on twitter. ‘Looting’.
    Fuck you, American justice system, this is bullshit.

  237. rq says

    White House;

    This one’s awesome: LOS ANGELES: 10 Freeway from La Brea backed up for miles after #Ferguson protesters walk onto freeway – @ABC7.

    There’s a about three fires in Ferguson, Fire Department trying to put out fire on West Florissant in #Ferguson.

    Police outside ferguson brewhouse putting on gas masks about to march to the PD ;

    National Guard is everywhere in Clayton where it’s quiet. Nowhere to be seen in Ferguson. (But of course, hteyŗe there to protect property. :P)

  238. rq says

    Want more outrage? Here are the photos of a beat-up Darren Wilson, as he appeared right after the shooting: Darren Wilson after being “beat up” ; Just for comparison, here’s what Rodney King looked like after the police beat him. ; “@MNYves: This is rosacea. Please stop, America. Stop playing us for dumb. ” Agree entirely. No broken skin. Bullshit.
    To be fair, back in forensics class, you’re supposed to photograph bruises about 24 hours after you get them for maximum visibility, but c’mon. That is what made him fear for his life? Never should have been a cop, Darren Wilson.

    #Ferguson protesters in #Oakland shut down westbound I-580 http://sfchron.cl/1vHRet7 via @sfchronicle ;
    Police walk by the second burned out cruiser in Ferguson;
    Aerial view of those fires in Ferguson: lots of smoke.

  239. Pteryxx says

    from HuffPo’s liveblog, St Louis Public Radio has put the grand jury documents up for the public to peruse: STL evidence page

    Stunning photo – Season’s Greetings (twitter)

    (image is a street level view of a row of police below a lighted town banner reading “Season’s Greetings”)

  240. rq says

    Protecting property, ha: Lots of stores broken into at N. Florissant and Hereford, including Walgreens, Aaron’s, and now US Bank. No police on the scene.
    Yes, Rioters continue to throw rocks and bottles at officers at W. Florissant & Solway. Officers are obligated to protect life and property. But they’re doing a crap job with the property.
    “It’s not tear gas, it’s smoke. Also these aren’t bullets, they’re high-velocity metal crowd dispersal nuggets.” #Ferguson;
    AND Times Square is SHUT DOWN #Ferguson;
    Happy Holidays from #Ferguson. This picture speaks volumes. (via @bdoulaoblongata);
    So sad.

  241. Pteryxx says

    FAA has just reactivated Ferguson’s no-fly zone, via HuffPo: (link)

    Today 12:15 AM EST
    FAA Activates No-Fly Zone Over Ferguson

    The Federal Aviation Administration activated a no-fly zone over Ferguson from 10:15 p.m. CT to 4:15 a.m.

    Ferguson no-fly zone back in effect. I’m taking a closer look at the legal basis. http://t.co/Ziqv36gHzI pic.twitter.com/xX7AKTEStX

    — Matt Pearce (@mattdpearce) November 25, 2014

    Los Angeles Times reporter Matt Pearce interpreted the legal basis as the “strictest kind of no fly zone.”

    It’s 91.137(a)(1), for hazard areas — the strictest kind of no fly zone. No media choppers, no commercial flights.

    — Matt Pearce (@mattdpearce) November 25, 2014

  243. rq says

    IF THERE ARE CONFLICTING ACCOUNTS FROM PHYSICAL WITNESSES THAT MEANS YOU NEED TO HAVE A TRIAL TO DETERMINE WHAT HAPPENED. #BlackLivesMatter (all caps in the twet);
    If only there were some process, perhaps a legal process, to present conflicting accounts and statements, weigh them, and come to a verdict.;
    What a picture – Letter from Darren Wilson being read thanking his supporters while protesters get tear gassed: #Ferguson #KSDK;
    RT @JayChillinBro: “Darren Wilson never stood over Mike Brown’s body” – Bob McCullough;
    Statement from Brown family on grand jury decision. #FergusonDecision #mikebrownverdict ;

  244. rq says

    #Ferguson police seem to think excessive use of force will silence folks angry about their excessive use of force.
    Shots fired, shots heard, in Ferguson, an the cops hide: shots fired. crowd runs. police run behind car and draw out guns #Ferguson;
    Riot gear. in position ready to run over all innocent protesters. #Ferguson (the riot gear that wasn’t supposed to come out pre-emptively);
    “@Bipartisanism: Can anyone identify these? They are being used against citizens in #Ferguson “;
    No labels #Ferguson (tear gas?);

  245. rq says

    Before the announcement: Crowd quiets, gathers to car to listen to announcement. @altontelegraph ;
    Easily 500+ out at the #Ferguson PD now;

    The protests: I never thought I would get to march on Lake Shore Drive again. 2003 & today. #Chi2Ferguson #WeShutShitDown ;
    Protesters take to the #Seattle streets to block traffic in a “die in” in response to #Ferguson ruling. #MichaelBrown;

    Racism is white people destroying property for sporting events while black people must remain “civil” when our children are shot by cops.
    thisisthemovement, installment #60:

    Grand Jury Announcement Will Come Tonight at 8pm The grand jury has reached a decision in the Darren Wilson case. Wilson, killed Mike Brown Jr on August 9, 2014 in Ferguson, MO.

    Major Broadcast Stations Met With Darren Wilson Matt Lauer, George Stephanopoulos, Scott Pelley, Don Lemon, and Anderson Cooper have all met with Darren Wilson to go through the TV guest booking process. Wilson could choose to not be interviewed by anyone.

    McCulloch Plans to Release Records Regardless Of Judge’s Order St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert P. McCulloch plans to release grand jury documents without a judge’s approval, after seeking the approval from Judge Carolyn Whittington on Nov. 12th.

    12 Year Black Boy Shot Dead in Cleveland By Police Tamir Rice, 12, was shot and killed this week after a caller called 911 to report seeing him with a gun. The caller also emphasized, twice, that that the pistol was “probably a fake.” Tamir did not make any verbal threats or point the “airsoft” replica gun at police. Cleveland police officer shot Tamir Rice twice, for failing to obey an order to raise his hands. Absolute must read.

    Darren Wilson Married His Girlfriend in October Darren Wilson married his girlfriend in late October. Interesting. Absolute must read.

    Woman Accidentally Kills Herself With Gun Bought For To Prepare For Ferguson Unrest A couple purchased a gun in order to prepare for potential unrest and a woman died while they accidentally played with the gun. Must read.

    Obama Does Not Rule Out Trip To Ferguson Obama has not ruled out a trip to Ferguson. Interesting read.

  247. rq says

    So. much. Shit. still. going. on out there.
    Going to be a mad dump of pictures and hopefully articles later, too, because ye olde browsere keeps crashing, but holy shit, it’s like August all over again, except it’s not a fear reaction, it’s a victory march from the justice system – get down and stay down, all you uppity black folk, because we gonna keep you there. Such a slap in the face to the 100+ days of peaceful activism that happened before.
    So yes, a lot of pictures will be dramatic, but let’s not forget that much of it started peacefully, and, in many places, it also ended peacefully (or with minimum fuss). Ferguson right now is in flames (some of it) and I don’t know what else is still going on over there. Current count is at 29 arrests.
    Anyhow, to the point:

    Yes, this happened: Was just in a cafe full of people resting from the #Ferguson protests when police shot tear gas at safe space – after promising, quite publicly if I recall, that there will be no tear gas, and no touchy of safe spaces;
    Also, keep this in mind: Arsonists, looters and criminals are damaging the last 100 days of hard work of organized protestors. Though after yesterday, I can’t go and tell angry black folk how to express their anger. I may not condone violence or destruction of property, but I’m not living their lives or feeling their feelings right now, and I find it difficult to express any sort of disappointment or condemnation.
    Not all was destruction: @RebaSparkles @kirabanks @bdoulaoblongata @MusicOverPeople protecting local business after it almost got robbed #shaw ;
    Meeting. #Shaw (with photos);
    Protestors. #Shaw.

  248. rq says

    they just shot protesters at close fucking range #Shaw;
    the Armored truck is back. they are gassing protesters at CLOSE RANGE #Shaw ;
    Safe houses and sanctuary? They. Raided. A. Church. #Ferguson.
    See, that’s what I get for thinking I was ever safe. I was literally in the coffee shop sitting down on the phone. Then, tear gas. #Shaw. Inside the coffee shop. INSIDE!!!
    Police are raiding designated safe spaces tonight including a church. Driving peaceful people out of safe havens and into the streets.
    They have West Florissant barricaded in. Shining blinding spotlights. August all over again. , short video.

  249. rq says

    Cop in my hotel lobby just told me so far they have 29 arrests counted, but it’s climbing, not everyone counted & more coming in #Ferguson;
    Really starting to think Darren Wilson was not indicted based on the idea that Michael Brown was an evil superhero: (document pic shows a fragment of DW testimony – read it. READ it. and think about it);
    The horror of it all – It just dawned on me that while Darren Wilson was taking photos @ the hospital Mike was still laying on the street. Looks like a very broken man, that. Broken on the inside.
    And that awesome Unified Command: GTFOH. RT @tchopstl: Unified Command is blaming clergy for not coming out and stopping the “violent” demonstrations in #Ferguson. When the clergy have been out there. They set up the protestors, and now they’re standing back and watching. Just watching. As if this is proof of the inherently violent nature of the Negro, not just symptoms of people pushed right over the edge.
    But save your anger, the media ain’t any better: BREAKING: Fox News Hosts #Ferguson Panel On “Race In America” Composed Exclusively of White People.
    Auto Zone fire. On west Florissant rd. #Ferguson.

  250. rq says

    Yes, this: I feel ashamed for the white jurors that bought Wilson’s yarn or felt it was OK to smile and nod. Enough! White culture must change!

    Chicago: BREAKING: Thousands storm the streets of #Chicago in collective rage. #Ferguson
    Peaceful protest spoiled by agitators who broke a window at fed ex. Mass group stopped to distance themselves;

    Event in Toronto: Toronto Rally in response to Ferguson decision. Tomorrow. 6pm. Across US Consulate @TorontoStar @StarGTANews ;
    Event in London: Solidarity with Ferguson.

  251. rq says

    Some articles, sorry won’tb e blockquoting too much: Bob McCulloch’s grand jury charade: County Prosecutor shows how to not get an indictment:

    Here’s how it works in the real world: A person is arrested. The police take the case to the prosecutor’s office. The prosecutor’s office talks with the officer and any witnesses available. The prosecutor determines the proper charges. The case is charged by information and set for preliminary hearing or grand jury review. Probable cause has to be determined by a neutral party before the case can move forward to trial. […]
    Now, remember this is just a “probable cause” hearing; jurors are not trying to determine guilt or innocence. They just have to determine if there was “probable cause” to move on to trial. In short, jurors must ask themselves: “Do we have the right person; are they charged correctly; and is there enough evidence to move forward?”

    The standing joke is that prosecutors can get a grand jury “to indict a ham sandwich.” It’s a stretch, but probably over 95 percent of the cases presented in the grand jury end with an indictment. If a case doesn’t get indicted, more than likely, the prosecutor didn’t think there was sufficient evidence to move forward.

    Even if the grand jury decides not to indict on the prosecutor’s case, it could be presented again or sent to another grand jury. In other words, if McCulloch’s office really wanted to prosecute Officer Wilson, he would already be charged based on the information his office already has and it would be sent to the grand jury for confirmation. […]
    Reportedly, Mr. Wilson testified for four hours. I can’t imagine putting my client in front of the grand jury for four hours, unless of course I was confident of how the prosecutor was going to handle my client in front of the grand jury. Prior to testifying before the grand jury, Officer Wilson had opportunity to hear witness statements and conform his account of what happen based on the evidence that was reported.

    Let’s not discount the psychological edge the prosecutor’s office has over the current grand jury if they really don’t want an indictment. This is a “holdover” grand jury, which means they are staying past their normal four-month term to hear this case. By now, this grand jury is very familiar with this prosecutor’s office and the way it presents cases. I’m certain they’ve formed a trust with the attorney that presents cases before them. They are accustomed to hearing police testimony and have probably even heard from Ferguson police officers before and have already formed an opinion on the reliability of their testimonies.

    This holdover grand jury has developed a close relationship with the prosecutor’s office and also understands that this case has been presented differently than previous cases. They realize that the office normally gives them a charge to indict on, and never before have they been told to figure it out themselves.

    Unlike what McCulloch would have us believe, prosecutors do not simply tell grand juries to “figure out the charges yourselves.” His office brings the grand jury enough evidence to charge or not. Prosecutors persuade grand juries to pursue their desired route.

    This one stings: It’s Incredibly Rare For A Grand Jury To Do What Ferguson’s Just Did :

    Former New York state Chief Judge Sol Wachtler famously remarked that a prosecutor could persuade a grand jury to “indict a ham sandwich.” The data suggests he was barely exaggerating: According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. attorneys prosecuted 162,000 federal cases in 2010, the most recent year for which we have data. Grand juries declined to return an indictment in 11 of them.

    See bolded part. SEE BOLDED PART.

    Portland preachers plan to rally at police’s Central Precinct when Ferguson grand jury issues decision. So I guess they were out there after all, hm?

    Must see: Insane picture taken from @nbc4eddie video tonight as #LAPD opens fire with non-lethal rounds off of Pico skirmish line. #LA #Ferguson #News.

    Protesters Shut Down Three New York City Bridges In Reaction To Ferguson Decision. Saw some photos of that already (if not, they’re upcoming!).

    Protesters in Denver decry grand jury decision in Ferguson. That’s the die-in they did.

    LA Protesters Take to Streets After Ferguson Decision. Blocking streets, being peaceful.

  252. rq says

    Sorry, previous had more links but I counted one too many, here’s to PZ bringing it back soon! In the meantime, what an asshole: Darren Wilson’s Lawyers Release A Statement And It Doesn’t Mention Michael Brown. Statement full text:

    Today, a St. Louis County grand jury released its decision that no charges would be filed in the case involving Officer Darren Wilson. From the onset, we have maintained and the grand jury agreed that Officer Wilson’s actions on August 9 were in accordance with the laws and regulations that govern the procedures of an officer.

    In a case of this magnitude, a team of prosecutors rightfully presented evidence to this St. Louis County grand jury. This group of citizens, drawn at random from the community, listened to witnesses and heard all the evidence in the case. Based on the evidence and witness testimony, the grand jury collectively determined there was no basis for criminal charges against Officer Wilson.

    Law enforcement personnel must frequently make split-second and difficult decisions. Officer Wilson followed his training and followed the law. We recognize that many people will want to second-guess the grand jury’s decision. We would encourage anyone who wants to express an opinion do so in a respectful and peaceful manner.

    On a side note, Officer Wilson would like to thank those who have stood by his side throughout the process. This continued support is greatly appreciated by Officer Wilson and his family. Moving forward, any commentary on this matter will be done in the appropriate venue and not through the media.

    This is from before the decision: In Ferguson, a Militarized Police Force Isn’t Necessary for Suppression:

    It remained relatively calm for a time. The police, lined up as if to block the passageway to the department doors, already unavailable to anyone because of the metal barricade, played a game of cat and mouse, advancing a few feet and backing protesters up, before retreating themselves. Things escalated when during one of their advances they arrested a young man who had shown up to livestream the event.

    The police advanced further as the protesters took to the streets, directing traffic away from their action. Protestors ran to what they thought would be a safe space across the street, but a few weren’t lucky enough to make it. At least five people were arrested that night, mostly for unlawful assembly as well as resisting arrest.

    Aside from the chanting, there was no provocation of the police on the part of the protesters. There was one instance of an object a being thrown, a water bottle, but other protesters quickly handled it: the person responsible, dressed in all black from head-to-toe, including a black mask that obscured their face, was run off of the protest site and heckled as an agitator who was putting the lives of the protesters at risk.

    “If the media wasn’t out here, they’d have arrested us all,” one protester remarked.

    A similar scene played out on Thursday evening, with the lesson here being that a militarized police force isn’t necessary to inflict terror. The police have proved themselves violent even without the use of tanks and tear gas. The people’s right to assemble peacefully won’t be protected. The Ferguson police department hasn’t taken any of the national or international criticism they have received to heart. And as the announcement of the decision on whether to indict Wilson dangles in some unknown future, the anxiety builds and takes an unknowable psychic toll on the most dedicated protesters.

    Read: Officer Wilson pens letter to supporters, full text:

    To all of the pro Officer Wilson Supporters –

    I would like to thank you all for standing up for me during this stressful time. Your support and dedication is amazing and it is still hard to believe that all of these people that I have never met are doing so much for me. I watched the CNN video we recorded at the rally on Saturday and it brought tears to my eyes.

    All of you are simply amazing, and I don’t know how to thank you all enough. I wish I could attend meet you, hug you, and personally thank you for all of your continued support, however, due to my and my families safety I am unable to. Please don’t give this letter to any media or post it where they can see it. Relay the message of thanks to all and keep this letter private until the investigation is complete.

    I want you all to know that I do get updates on the amount of support. Unfortunately, I don’t get to see all of the comments made through social media, but overall messages are relayed to me.

    Thank you from the bottom of my heart, and know that I would do the same for any of you.

    Also please keep my family in blue in your hearts and prayers, they have all made a sacrifice to their own lives in order to work the excessive hours through the heat and rain to ensure that the riots and protests in Ferguson were as safe as they could be.

    Thank you,

    P.O. Darren Wilson

    Again, no mention of Michael Brown, no actual words saying he shot down a young black man in the street. The avoidance and denial is so strong here.

    Read Darren Wilson’s Testimony to the Ferguson Grand Jury. The transcript is in there, but I just can’t do it right now.

    For more reading material, here’s 4,799 pages of grand jury testimony and evidence in the Darren Wilson case. There’s a woman sifting through the evidence and tweeting, and there’s already evidence of sloppiness and broken chain-of-evidence in how the PD handled the evidence.

    On Monday evening, the grand jury in the Darren Wilson case decided against indicting him in the shooting death of unarmed Ferguson teenager Mike Brown. Soon thereafter prosecutor Bob McCulloch released 4,799 pages of grand jury testimony. Below are all of the links you’ll need to access it and review it for yourself.

    All 4,799 pages can be viewed in a PDF here via the NY Times.

    The Washington Post organized the voluminous document into small sections here.

    The Guardian broke the testimony up into 76 different documents here.

    View just the testimony of Darren Wilson here.

    Also, we’ve embedded the entire PDF below (may load slowly, it’s a huge file):

    IN FERGUSON: Police cars, businesses on fire, tear gas deployed at protesters after no indictment announcement;

    Wonkette: Ferguson Grand Jury Says Darren Wilson Killed Michael Brown But It’s Cool
    Read more at     http://wonkette.com/567518/ferguson-grand-jury-says-darren-wilson-killed-michael-brown-but-its-cool#ToDA8IZcySJ1kMhE.99;

    An open letter prepared for yesterday: The Results Are In, full texT:

    The Results Are In

    An Open Letter from Protestors On The Grand Jury Decision (11.24.14)

    In Ferguson, a wound bleeds. For 108 days, we have been in a state of prolonged and protracted grief. In that time, we have found community with one another, bonding together as family around the simple notion that our love for our community compels us to fight for our community. We have had no choice but to cling together in hope, faith, love, and indomitable determination to capture that ever-escaping reality of justice. After 108 days, that bleeding wound has been reopened, salt poured in, insult added to the deepest of injury. On August 9th, we found ourselves pushed into unknown territory, learning day by day, minute by minute, to lead and support a movement bigger than ourselves, the most important of our lifetime. We were indeed unprepared to begin with, and even in our maturation through these 108 days, we find ourselves reinjured, continually heartbroken, and robbed of even the remote possibility of judicial resolution. A life has been violently taken before it could barely begin. In this moment, we know, beyond any doubt, that no one will be held accountable within the confines of a system to which we were taught to pledge allegiance. The very hands with which we pledged that allegiance were not enough to save Mike in surrender. Once again, in our community, in our country, that pledge has returned to us void.
    For 108 days, we have continuously been admonished that we should “let the system work,” and wait to
    see what the results are. The results are in.
    And we still don’t have justice.
    This fight for the dignity of our people, for the importance of our lives, for the protection of our children,
    is one that did not begin Michael’s murder and will not end with this announcement. The ‘system’ you
    have told us to rely on has kept us on the margins of society. This system has housed us in her worst homes, educated our children in her worst schools, locked up our men at disproportionate rates and shamed our women for receiving the support they need to be our mothers. This system you have admonished us to believe in has consistently, unfailingly, and unabashedly let us down and kicked us out, time and time again.
    This same system in which you’ve told us to trust–this same system meant to serve and protect citizens– has once again killed two more of our unarmed brothers: Walking up a staircase and shot down in cold blood, we fight for Akai Gurley; Playing with a toy after police had been warned that he held a bb gun and not a real gun at only twelve
    years old, we fight for Tamir Rice.

    So you will likely ask yourself, now that the announcement has been made, why we will still take to the streets? Why we will still raise our voices to protect our community? Why will still cry tears of heartbreak and sing songs of determination? We will continue to struggle because without struggle, there is no progress. We will continue to disrupt life, because without disruption we fear for our lives.
    We will continue because Assata reminds us daily that “it is our duty to fight for freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love and support one another. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”
    Those chains have bound us-all of us- up for too long. And do not be mistaken- if one of us is bound, we all are. We are, altogether, bound up in a system that continues to treat some men better than others. A system that preserves some and disregards others. A system that protects the rights of some and does not guard the rights of all. And until this system is dismantled, until the status quo that deems us less valuable than others is no longer acceptable or profitable, we will struggle. We will fight. We will protest. Grief, even in its most righteous state, cannot last forever. No community can sustain itself this way. So we still continue to stand for progress, and stand alongside anyone who will make a personal investment in ending our grief and will take a personal stake in achieving justice. We march on with purpose. The work continues. This is not a moment but a movement. The movement lives.
    This letter was written and signed by numerous protestors and supporters, too many to list. Permission is granted in advance for reproduction by all outlets.

  253. rq says

    Okay, that’s two comments in moderation. But PZ should be awake anytime now.
    In the meantime, more from twitter:
    Another group just arrived from the west. I think we are well over a thousand people protesting at the White House;
    Hands up. Don’t shoot. #DCFerguson #Ferguson #speaktruthtopower @WhiteHouse @BarackObama ;
    #Ferguson;
    What appears to be absurd juxtaposition is this holiday reality for the people of #Ferguson.;
    We shut down the highway. Finally.;
    Moment of silence for this police car? Naw? Naw. #Ferguson .

  255. rq says

    Some animals may have been harmed: Protesters have broken into the Portland Police Mounted Patrol barn & let 5 horses out. They’re currently running loose in the Pearl;
    Die-in in LA: Protesters laying in the middle of LaBrea and Wilshire in silence #LosAngeles #ferguson ;
    Darren Wilson described Michael Brown as “it” and a “demon” to the grand jury;
    Media: It’s so strang to compare how CNN International & CNN US chose to TITLE the #Ferguson decision. QUESTION EVERYTHING! (Protests Erupt in International vs. Violence Erupts in Domestic…);
    And this, yes this: “We told them no justice,no peace. We didn’t get our justice,so they don’t get their peace. We’re fucking shit up over here.Plain & simple.”

  256. rq says

    Skepchick: Humanists Must Unite To Show That Black Lives Matter:

    “This isn’t knee-jerk pessimism at work here. To the black community, a non-indictment for Brown would be predictable. It would be as predictable as the verdict in the trial over the shooting death of unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, a verdict that acquitted defendant George Zimmerman, allowing him to continue doing stupid things. Or as predictable as the involuntary manslaughter verdict handed down in the shooting death of restrained, unarmed, 23-year-old Oscar Grant in Oakland. Or as predictable as the acquittal of police officers charged with killing unarmed Sean Bell in Queens, New York by firing 50 shots into his vehicle. As predictable as the acquittal of the police officers who fatally shot unarmed Amadou Diallo 19 times, killing him. As predictable as the acquittals in the infamous police beating of Rodney King. And so on, back to Emmett Till and before.” […]

    Even tonight, St. Louis Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCulloch attempted to say in his question & answer session that this wasn’t about race – after all, he says, young white men are killed too. But we do not live in a colorblind or post-racial world. To ignore the racial aspects of Michael Brown’s killing is to ignore the greater context of what many are calling Jim Crow 2.0. Many of us (myself included) will never be affected by the realities listed above, and it is tragic that issues affecting people of color continue to be ignored by a predominantly white-led atheist and humanist movement. Part of the definition of humanism is that we emphasize common human needs, and that includes needs that are common for people other than ourselves. […]

    As humanists and atheists we should stand in solidarity with those in Ferguson – and beyond. To find Ferguson National Response events near you, click here, here, or check with your local interfaith chapter, many of whom are organizing protests. Don’t see one in your area? Here are tips for organizing one yourself. You can also donate to the United Way’s Ferguson Fund or this IndieGoGo. However you can, take a stand and show the black community that humanists believe that black lives matter.

    All of that, as much as possible. They have religion and the clergy with them, but all people should stand with them.

  258. carlie says

    This could use a repost: In defense of the Ferguson riots.

    What both the local news interviewees and the crowd at the scene of Brown’s death seemed to understand was that they needed to disrupt the interplay between racial subjugation and capitalism. They felt that a march or some other acceptable form of benign indignation would not address their political needs — and they weren’t wrong.

  260. rq says

    carlie
    You beat me to it! But yes, that’s a good one.

    +++

    In Canada, Grand jury decides not to indict officer in Ferguson shooting;
    Violence, looting erupt in Ferguson after officer cleared in fatal shooting NOT A WORD about the peaceful marches and acts of civil disobedience such as shutting down traffic in various locations, not a word;

    Ferguson shooting grand jury decides not to indict Officer Darren Wilson;
    Ferguson reacts to grand jury verdict;
    Ferguson protests erupt after grand jury decision in Michael Brown shooting.
    Those three are from the CBC and they all use the same hpoto. Of an angry black woman.

  262. rq says

    IMPORTANT TO READ: National Bar Association comes out with statement on the non-indictment, full text:

    THE NATIONAL BAR ASSOCIATION RESPONDS TO THE GRAND JURY’S DECISION NOT TO INDICT POLICE OFFICER DARREN WILSON IN THE SHOOTING DEATH OF MICHAEL BROWN

    WASHINGTON, DC – The National Bar Association is questioning how the Grand Jury, considering the evidence before them, could reach the conclusion that Darren Wilson should not be indicted and tried for the shooting death of Michael Brown. National Bar Association President Pamela J. Meanes expresses her sincere disappointment with the outcome of the Grand Jury’s decision but has made it abundantly clear that the National Bar Association stands firm and will be calling on the U.S. Department of Justice to pursue federal charges against officer Darren Wilson. “We will not rest until Michael Brown and his family has justice” states Pamela Meanes, President of the National Bar Association.

    President Meanes is requesting that the citizens of Ferguson, Missouri not allow this decision to cause an unnecessary uproar in the community that could lead to arrests, injuries or even deaths of innocent people. “I am asking for everyone to remain as calm as possible and to join in solidarity as we continue to support the family of Michael Brown and put our legal plan into full effect” says President Meanes “I feel the magnitude of the grand jury’s ruling as Ferguson, Missouri is only minutes from where I reside”, adds President Meanes.

    Over the last couple of months, the National Bar Association has hosted Town Hall meetings informing attendees of their Fourth Amendment (Search & Seizure) constitutional rights, whether it is legal to record police activity, and how citizens should behave/respond if and when they interface with police officers. “The death of Michael Brown was the last straw and the catalyst for addressing issues of inequality and racial bias in policing, the justice system, and violence against members of minority communities,” states Pamela Meanes.

    The family of Michael Brown requested that District Attorney McCullough step aside and allow a special prosecutor be assigned to the investigation to give the community confidence that the grand jury would conduct a complete and thorough investigation into the tragic shooting death of 18 year old Michael Brown. The grand jury’s decision confirms the fear that many expressed months ago — that a fair and impartial investigation would not happen.

    “The National Bar Association is adamant about our desire for transformative justice. While we are disappointed with the grand jury’s ruling, we are promoting peace on every street corner around the world. The only way to foster systemic change is to organize, educate, and mobilize. We are imploring everyone to fight against the injustice in Ferguson, Missouri and throughout the United States by banding together and working within the confines of the law,” states President Meanes.

    For complaints related to Ferguson, please contact the FBI 24 Hour Hotline at 314-589-2500.
    #

    ABOUT THE NATIONAL BAR ASSOCIATION
    The National Bar Association was founded in 1925 and is the nation’s oldest and largest national network of predominantly African-American attorneys and judges. It represents the interests of approximately 60,000 lawyers, judges, law professors and law students.The NBA is organized around 23 substantive law sections, 9 divisions, 12 regions and 80 affiliate chapters throughout the United States and around the world. For more information, visit: http://www.nationalbar.org

    Well, from what I understand, the Grand Jury isn’t lawyers, so this is just ordinary people supposed to make a momentous decision. Is this correct?

    A Ferguson Commission member (the very same Brittany Packnett) speaks out – Ferguson Commission Member: ‘Riots Are the Language of the Unheard’

    Brittany Packnett evokes Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when discussing the tensions in Ferguson, Missouri, following the grand jury decision.

    The video is, unfortunately, unavailable in my country, but it should be a good view.

    In Clayton, Protestors take to streets of Clayton morning after Ferguson ruling. With a nice photo of peaceful protesting.

    The protestors, marched through downtown Clayton just before 8 a.m. Tuesday, stopping to walk in circles at the intersection of Forsyth and Bemiston.

    They also observed a 4 1/2-minute moment of silence to mark the 4 1/2 hours that Brown’s body remained on the Ferguson street before it was removed.

    The demonstration took place just a block or two from the St. Louis County Justice Center where on Monday a grand jury opted not to indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown in August.

    This has been posted, but I post it again: Why It’s Impossible to Indict a Cop . As if we needed a reminder.

  263. rq says

    From Twitter, Everyone who gets mad that “the attention of the media fuels riots” doesn’t give a shit that a lack of media attention fuels police abuse.;
    Dear TV media, “Protestors” protest. “Looters” steal. “Arsonists” set things on fire. Please use the appropriate label to match your video.;
    The morning after. People rebuilding. #Ferguson ;
    Black people rioting last night, White People will riot on Thursday night for flat-screens that are 60% off #Ferguson (great picture);
    West Florissant blocked off this morning by Highway Patrol. This is what’s left of the Beauty Town and #HealSTL bldg.

    Darren Wilson Wasn’t the First: A Short History of Killer Cops Let Off The Hook:

    Chicago

    Over the past 45 years, Chicago has been a prime example of official indifference and cover-up when it comes to prosecuting the police for wanton brutality and torture.

    On December 4, 1969, Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were slain in a police raid that implicated the Cook County State’s Attorney and the FBI’s Cointelpro program. A public outcry led to a Federal Civil Rights investigation. Despite finding that the raiding police fired more than 90 shots to one by the Panthers, the Grand Jury in 1970 did not indict, but rather issued a report that equally blamed the police perpetrators and the Panther victims. […]

    New Orleans

    Chicago is by no means an isolated example of how difficult it is to obtain justice for wanton police violence through the judicial system. In New Orleans, a crew of white detectives responded to the killing of a white police officer in 1980 by terrorizing the black community of Algiers, killing four innocent people and torturing numerous others by “booking and bagging” them: beating suspects with telephone books and suffocating them with bags over their heads.

    Seven officers were indicted by the Department of Justice for civil rights violations arising from the torture of one of the victims and three were convicted. No officers were charged for the four killings or for the other acts of torture. […]

    New York

    In 1997, an NYPD officer sexually assaulted a Haitian-American man named Abner Louima in a precinct station bathroom by shoving a broken broomstick up his rectum. Louima’s attacker was subsequently charged with federal civil rights violations, while three of his police accomplices were charged with covering up the crimes.

    After Louima’s attacker pleaded guilty, his accomplices were convicted, but the Second Circuit Court of Appeals overturned their convictions on the grounds that the lawyers who represented the officers had a conflict of interest. After they were convicted a second time, the Appeals Court again overturned their convictions—this time on the basis that there was insufficient evidence of intent. […]

    Los Angeles

    Among the most notorious cases was the brutal 1991 beating of Rodney King by five LAPD officers. A videotape captured most of the brutality and also showed several other officers standing by and doing nothing to stop the pummeling of a defenseless black man.

    Four officers were charged at the state level with assault with a deadly weapon and use of excessive force. The trial was moved to a predominantly white suburban county, and three of the officers were acquitted of all charges, while the fourth was acquitted of assault with a deadly weapon and other lesser charges. But the jury failed to reach a verdict on his use of excessive force. […]

    Oakland

    In Oakland, California in the late 1990s, a unit of police officers dubbed the “Rough Riders” systematically beat, framed and planted narcotics on African Americans whom they claimed were dealing drugs. Four of the “Riders” were indicted by the District Attorney’s Office, and the trial was moved to a suburban county. The ringleader fled the country, and was tried in absentia.

    After a year-long trial before a bitterly divided jury on which there were no blacks, the officers were acquitted of eight charges, and the jury was hung on the remaining 27 counts. At the urging of then-Mayor Jerry Brown, the officers were not re-tried. […]

    Milwaukee

    From 2007-2012 in Milwaukee, a unit of white police officers, spurred on by the Department’s CompStat program of aggressive policing, stopped and illegally body cavity searched more than 70 African-American men whom they claimed to be investigating for drug dealing. In conducting these searches, most commonly performed on the street, the searching officer reached inside the men’s underwear, and probed their anuses and genitals.

    After this highly illegal practice came to light, the unit’s ringleader, Michael Vagnini, was indicted by the Milwaukee County District Attorney on numerous counts of sexual assault, illegal searches, and official misconduct, while three of the other unit officers were also charged for participating in two of the searches. The unit’s sergeant and several other members of the unit, all of whom were present for many of the searches, were not charged. […]

    Recently, the Justice Department declined to prosecute Little Rock, Arkansas, officers who shot and killed Eugene Ellison, an elderly African American man who was walking out of his home with a cane in his hand, while there have been documented reports of unarmed black men recently being shot down by the police in Chicago; Houston; San Antonio; Beaver Creek, Ohio; and Sarasota, Florida.

    In 1994, the United States Congress, recognizing that police misconduct and violence was systemic in many parts of the country, passed 42 U.S. Code Section 14141, which empowered the Justice Department to file suit against police departments alleging patterns and practices of unconstitutional conduct, and to obtain wide ranging court orders, consent decrees, and independent monitors in order to implement reforms to those practices.

    Although understaffed, the Pattern and Practice Unit of the Justice Department has attacked systemic and discriminatory deficiencies in police hiring, supervision, and monitoring in numerous police departments over the past 20 years. A particularly egregious act or series of acts of police violence often prompts the Unit to initiate an investigation, and its lawyers have obtained consent decrees or court orders in Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Steubenville, Ohio, New Orleans, Puerto Rico, Oakland, and Miami.

    Last month, lawyers handling the Little Rock cases requested that the DOJ do a pattern and investigation of the LRPD, and the Unit is reportedly now investigating the practices of the Ferguson Police Department. While these investigations are not a panacea, they offer a mechanism for exposing and reforming blatantly unconstitutional police practices, and have also demonstrated how pervasive the problem systemic police violence continues to be.

    Much, much more at the link. And please note, even convictions have been overturned on the barest of pretenses. So even in cases where justice may have been served, it is rather quickly unserved. (I would argue that it needs to be re-served, and with cherries all over.)

  265. Pteryxx says

    HuffPo: Republicans Are Blocking The Only Congressional Response To Ferguson

    Because of course they are.

    WASHINGTON — The only Congressional response to this summer’s brutal police crackdown in Ferguson, Missouri appears to be dead, with the House GOP leadership blocking a vote on a bipartisan bill introduced by Reps. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) and Raul Labrador (R-Idaho).

    The legislation seeks to curb controversial transfers of military weapons and equipment to local police forces. It would ban the Pentagon from granting local police free automatic weapons, armored vehicles, weaponized drones, combat helicopters, grenades, silencers, sound cannons and other equipment, although police could still purchase such gear with local budgets or through grants from the Department of Homeland Security.

    It would also impose more stringent safeguards to account for the equipment that does get transferred. Collectively, more than $4 billion in military weaponry and equipment has been distributed to police forces across the U.S. since the inception of the initiative, known as the 1033 Program.

    […]

    In June, the House shot down similar legislation introduced by Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) by a vote of 355 to 62. But Grayson’s amendment had been subject to limited debate in which opponents insisted that police never misuse their Pentagon gear.

    “To just outright ban the usage of that equipment would devastate local law enforcement agencies across the nation,” Rep. Richard Nugent (R-Fla.) said on the House floor in June. “This is absolutely ludicrous, to think the equipment that’s utilized by law enforcement is utilized for any reason other than public safety.”

  266. Saad says

    “To just outright ban the usage of that equipment would devastate local law enforcement agencies across the nation,” Rep. Richard Nugent (R-Fla.) said on the House floor in June. “This is absolutely ludicrous, to think the equipment that’s utilized by law enforcement is utilized for any reason other than public safety.”

    Yeah, they would be devastated (!!!) they can’t detect mines and launch grenades in a neighborhood anymore.

    How low can these people get?

  267. Pteryxx says

    from Ben Kesling: (twitter)

    Ben Kesling ‏@bkesling

    Clergy-led protest this morning in Clayton began with sunrise prayer vigil. #Ferguson

    5:32 AM – 25 Nov 2014

    More at his paywalled WSJ article, which is about all the media coverage there is.

    Ferguson Area Clergy Lead Peaceful Protest
    Hours After Violent Riots, Pastors Lead Sunrise Prayer Vigil
    By
    Ben Kesling

    CLAYTON, Mo.—A sunrise prayer vigil and dozens of clergy marching in the streets here Tuesday was a stark counterpoint to the destruction and looting that took place Monday night just miles away in Ferguson.

    Pastors in bright orange vests led a calm protest with more than 100 people here, blocking a few intersections and ending up in front of the building where the county…

    (twitter)

    Ben Kesling ‏@bkesling

    “I have never seen a prosecutor hold a press conference to discredit the victim.” Al Sharpton speaking in #Ferguson

    9:44 AM – 25 Nov 2014

  268. rq says

    Saad
    Don’t you feel safer after reading that?

    +++

    6 Revelations from the Michael Brown Grand Jury Documents : not much to blockquote, as it simply presents six interesting excerpts from the GJ evidence. Read them.

    In case you were wondering, Why Ferguson grand jury decision was announced when it was – apaprently it was coordinated with law enforcement.

    The decision of a grand jury not to indict a white police officer in the shooting death of a black teenager was announced yesterday after 8 p.m. in Clayton, Missouri, to ensure children would be safe and businesses could decide how to handle the situation, the spokesman for St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch said. [… – for the CHILDREN]

    As a former defense attorney, this is 100% on point. Please read the attached twitter document, a very good perspective on why allowing DW to testify (for instance) was a co-ordinated bad move.

    This is… Howard University replaced the American flag with a Black solidarity flag today. At half mast. *tears*

    This is parked across from my house (aka home to 2+ protesters) on my block. I fucking see you.;

    Yes, also this: While every major news network fixates on property damage in #Ferguson, remind yourself that this is bigger than that. I hear it’s 160 cities right now. One hundred bloody sixty.

  269. rq says

    Are we writing this down? Combing through transcript, Wilson described Brown as intimidating, Hulk Hogan, “it,” and a demon. That matters. Yes, it does.

    W. Florissant blocked off by police at Westfall Plaza and checkin ids. Was going to patronize @FergusonBurgers #Ferguson. Also, I lost the tab, but a man was found dead in his car on Canfield. I’ll track it down.

    +++

    Thanks, awakeinmo, that was a really good one. Within, I found this: Officer Darren Wilson’s story is unbelievable. Literally. Read that, too. *whistles*

  270. rq says

    Protests continue today:
    Fake blood on 10th Street in front of federal courthouse.

    Courthouse protest. #Ferguson ;

    Demands. #Ferguson;

    “Let’s not forget what the media isn’t showing you. Young Men cleaning up after the #Ferguson protests. ” ❤️❤️;

    Congressional Black Caucus denounces Ferguson grand jury:

    “The Ferguson grand jury’s decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson in the death of Michael Brown is a miscarriage of justice,” CBC Chair Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio) said in a statement released after the decision was announced late Monday evening in Missouri. “It is a slap in the face to Americans nationwide who continue to hope and believe that justice will prevail.”

    “This decision seems to underscore an unwritten rule that Black lives hold no value; that you may kill Black men in this country without consequences or repercussions,” Fudge’s statement continued. “This is a frightening narrative for every parent and guardian of Black and brown children, and another setback for race relations in America.”
    […]

    “We must end the prevailing policing paradigm where police departments are more like occupying forces, imposing their will to control communities,” the statement read.

    Once the decision not to indict was announced, Ferguson again became engulfed in unrest. The Associated Press reports dozens of businesses were set ablaze and authorities said they heard hundreds of gunshots. Dozens of people were arrested.

    Rep. John Lewis, known for his role in the civil rights movement, took to Twitter shortly after McCulloch finished his statement.

  271. rq says

    Also, as a note, the Reverend Al Sharpton was supposedly amazing in his vocal condemnation of the Grand Jury and McCullogh.

  273. rq says

    Protesting Ferguson, Pols Walk Out of Council Meeting Crying ‘Black Lives Matter’:

    The protest, led by Councilman Andy King, a Bronx Democrat and co-chair of the Black, Latino and Asian Caucus, interrupted the roll call at the beginning of a stated City Council meeting–black council members, joined by Latino and Asian allies, marched out of the chambers, reporters in tow.

    “We are the New York City Council, representatives of a majority minority city to proclaim in solidarity that black lives matter,” the group cried in unison.

    “Black lives matter in Ferguson, Missouri. Black lives matter in the stairwells of NYCHA communities. Black lives matter on the streets of Staten Island,” they said in the City Hall rotunda downstairs, reading from prepared remarks. “Black lives matter in this chamber, in the most progressive city in America, in the body of 26 members of color, we refuse to move forward with business as usual today–not when Michael Brown’s parents will never taste real justice through the criminal justice system”.”

    In Chicago, Ferguson protesters take to Lake Shore Drive :

    Protesters gathered by the dozens in the Loop—at State and Jackson streets—and by the hundreds at 35th Street and Michigan Avenue—Chicago Police headquarters—hours before an announcement about the grand jury’s decision in Ferguson, Mo. After a series of songs, chants, and poetry, word spread that an official announcement would be made around 8 p.m. The protesters at police headquarters fell quiet and crowded around a radio to hear St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch publicize the grand jury decision.

    When McCulloch announced that the grand jury would not indict, the crowd started murmuring, then broke into chants—and while many protesters were emotional, few were surprised.

    “Just because we expect it doesn’t make it any less of a tragedy,” Christine Folch said. “The fact that our expectations were met makes it even more sad. … This is a time of grief.” […]

    During Monday’s demonstrations, protesters moved from the city’s police headquarters on the South Side to Lake Shore Drive to downtown. At about 10 p.m. they paused briefly at the Thompson Center, then continued moving through downtown late into the evening. By about 11 p.m., the bulk of the protesters were stopped by mounted police at Michigan Avenue, while a smaller group headed south on Michigan.

    “We’re not going to turn the protest into anything other than a protest,” Police Chief Garry McCarthy said Monday night in a televised interview on WLS-TV just after 10 p.m., adding that there had not yet been any arrests or reports of property damage. Police declined to comment Monday night on whether arrests were made.

    Earlier, activists speaking at the Bronzeville protest were quick to say the evening was not just about Brown.

    “The indictment doesn’t fucking matter. … We are not indicting a man, we are indicting a system,” said London, quoting local activist Mariame Kaba.

    When chants of “black lives matter” were met with calls of “all lives matter,” London addressed the white activists in the crowd, saying he was appreciative of their efforts but that they needed to acknowledge that “the very system in which we live was built for you,” he said. “That is privilege. Nobody’s asking your asses to feel guilty about it. … All lives matter, but black lives clearly do not matter to the state.”

    That response at the end, there, to ‘All lives matter!’ – super. As someone said, this goes beyond race. And yes, it does. But it most certainly begins with race, in this instance especially.

  275. rq says

    Anyone who can watch this??? Exclusive: George Stephanopoulos Interviews Police Officer Darren Wilson . Hasn’t happened yet, just a preview thingy at the site right now, but boy oh boy…

    Home> U.S.
    Exclusive: George Stephanopoulos Interviews Police Officer Darren Wilson
    Nov 25, 2014, 2:37 PM ET
    By MEGHAN KENEALLY
    Meghan Keneally More from Meghan »
    Digital Reporter
    via Good Morning America
    PHOTO: ABC News George Stephanopoulos sat down with Darren Wilson in the Ferguson police officers first interview since the shooting death of Michael Brown.
    George Stephanopoulos Previews His Interview With Officer Darren Wilson
    Next Video Businesses Destroyed by Violent Demonstrations in Ferguson, Mo.
    Auto Start: On | Off

    In an exclusive interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, police officer Darren Wilson breaks his silence about the shooting of Michael Brown.

    Wilson told ABC News that he did not execute Brown on August 9 but was in fear for his life and was just doing his job.

    Wilson told ABC News that Brown reached into his car and grabbed his gun. He described how Brown charged toward him and he felt that he had to shoot Michael Brown.

    The interview comes a day after the grand jury’s decision not to indict Wilson in an incident that sparked national outcry.

    Wilson did say that he was sorry for the loss of life but he would not do anything different that day. He says he has a clean conscious over his actions that day.

    He has a clean conscious – I just bet he does. :P How’s his conscience, though?

    Also, on that bridge, kind of funny: Police are on the wrong side of the highway. The fake out worked! #Ferguson. *tee hee*
    CASA Middle School In solidarity with Ferguson!!!!

  276. says

    Brittney Cooper at Salon had a heartbreaking and honestly angry post that made me appropriately discomfited, as a white person: http://www.salon.com/2014/11/25/i_am_utterly_undone_my_struggle_with_black_rage_and_fear_after_ferguson/

    Thanks for keeping up on this, everyone, it helps a bit. It’s all so grimly frustrating and angering, and that’s speaking as someone with relative privilege in this regard (as long as the fuzz don’t recognise I’m trans, that is). :/

  277. rq says

    Cait
    This place. I think is the only one (for me) that understands. That matters.

    +++

    Protestors on I-70 exit ramp Downtown are throwing objects at police officers. Unlawful behavior will be not be tolerated. Whatever happened to those words saying that civil disobedience and disruption will be tolerated somewhat?

    Police surround us. #Ferguson ;
    They march us down the ramp. #Ferguson ;
    Arrests happening. Police shaking mace cans. #Ferguson;
    #Ferguson “Who do you protect? Who do you serve?” Legal observers in green hats just pepper sprayed.;
    Blue cans. Mace. #Ferguson

  278. rq says

    Ferguson’s Trial

    Everyone, on all sides, has had their worst suspicions confirmed.:

    Finally, last night, on November 24, prosecutor Bob McCulloch sauntered in late to the press conference where he announced that Darren Wilson would face no charges for killing Michael Brown. He began by blaming social media for distributing what he deemed inflammatory information, and ended by declaring Brown’s death an “opportunity” for St. Louis’ civic engagement. Where he sees “opportunity” many St. Louisans see stone-cold murder. Everything about the announcement—the timing, the condescending tone, the weeks of militarized vehicles patrolling the roads—seemed designed to inflame and incite the region.

    And it did. As I write this, I hear gunshots and sirens outside my window and watch burning vehicles and buildings on my TV. Officials and media who have spent weeks falsely proclaiming that there were “riots” in St. Louis may have finally gotten what they wanted: real riots, retroactive justification for police militarization and brutality.

    Nothing has changed in St. Louis since August—not the tear gas or the riot gear and especially not the fear. Nothing has changed except any remaining pretense that Brown’s killer would face consequences. Instead, Wilson is the recipient of a financial windfall, made possible through donations of supporters, as the region he swore to serve and protect burns.

    This is the reality St. Louis parents will explain to their children today when they ask why school is canceled. They will have to tell children that a white officer killed a black teenager in the street, and not only was this officer not held accountable, he was ultimately rewarded. St. Louis’ children will look in the mirror and see their future in the color of their skin. They will look at the streets and see new ruins accompanying the boarded windows and blight of St. Louis’ racial geography.

    Officer Wilson Says He Was ‘Trained’ To Shoot People Like Mike Brown:

    For starters, Wilson told the grand jury that Mike Brown looked “like a demon” when he shot him.

    He added that the unarmed teenager “had the most intense aggressive face. The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that’s how angry he looked.”

    Noting his powerlessness without a gun in his hand, Officer Wilson said “I felt like a five-year-old holding Hulk Hogan. That’s just how big he felt and how small I felt just from grasping his arm.”

    He claimed that Browns punches were so hard that he felt like they might kill him. But photos from the post-homicide hospital checkup reveal no visible injuries whatsoever. The punches were so hard that they might kill, and yet they didn’t leave a single mark on the slight-of-frame Officer Wilson? It is a strange assertion, to say the least. […]

    We see from Wilson’s statement a direct admission that it was in his police training to shoot seven shots into an unarmed man who he claims charged him like a football player. The “police training” for responding to a football player charging you is to shoot them seven times.

    A police officer finding themselves injured, or falling down is apparently more than any officer has been trained to bear. If any injury – even if they are not life threatening in nature – might occur, the officer’s “training” is to nearly unload his firearm’s high capacity magazine into an unarmed suspect, even from 125 yards away.

    This might in fact be the most honest statement from Officer Wilson about this entire incident. If police are indeed “trained” to shoot unarmed suspects from 125 yards away, then there is a systematic problem, not simply with police brutality, but police training to exert brutal responses to any physical challenge to their authority, even if non-lethal options exist…

    Mike Brown Sr:”This is a bad time for everyone.We’re still hurting.I feel like they just killed him again.” #Ferguson ;
    Police in riot gear forcing protestors off the 70 with pepper spray. Several arrest. #shutitdown #Fergsuon #STL;
    Shut it down Hwy 70 now #Ferguson #BlackLivesMatter ;
    Proud to see so many courageous young people marching in #seattle against racism. #ferguson

  282. Ichthyic says

    McCulloch is now 0 for 5 in grand jury cop indictments.

    gee, you’d think someone who was that poor at their job would get fired…

  285. Ichthyic says

    I wonder why the media isn’t asking Nixon why he finds a prosecutor with such a poor record to be acceptable…

  286. Ichthyic says

    … I mean, as a judge is famously quoted as saying:

    “a grand jury would ‘indict a ham sandwich,’ if that’s what you wanted.”

  287. Esteleth is Groot says

    Drove past a protest on my way home. All the signs we’ve seen: “Hands up don’t shoot,” “RIP Michael Brown,” “Black lives matter.”

    Nearby, a gaggle of cops. They were openly contemptuous of the protestors in body language and gesture.

    Around the corner in a hotel parking lot, a group of idling squad cars.

    One bright spot: didn’t see any riot gear or paddy wagons.

    Come home to an email from the university president (the protest was on campus) going on about how nice it is that the protestors last night (apparently there was another protest last night) were peaceful and are going to be peaceful tonight, and that campus security and local cops are “professional.” Continue to blather re: peaceful assembly and free speech r/t First Amendment and “academic freedom.” Also, that the death of Michael Brown is a tragedy and that “everyone” can agree that this is so.

  288. Pteryxx says

    Transcript of Obama’s remarks last night at WaPo.

    I also appeal to the law enforcement officials in Ferguson and the region to show care and restraint in managing peaceful protests that may occur. Understand, our police officers put their lives on the line for us every single day. They’ve got a tough job to do to maintain public safety and hold accountable those who break the law.

    As they do their jobs in the coming days, they need to work with the community, not against the community, to distinguish the handful of people who may use the grand jury’s decision as an excuse for violence. Distinguish them from the vast majority who just want their voices heard around legitimate issues in terms of how communities and law enforcement interact.

    Finally, we need to recognize that the situation in Ferguson speaks to broader challenges that we still face as a nation. The fact is in too many parts of this country a deep distrust exists between law enforcement and communities of color. Some of this is the result of the legacy of racial discrimination in this country. And this is tragic because nobody needs good policing more than poor communities with higher crime rates.

    which is about where I gave up trying to listen.

    Video of Al Sharpton’s remarks last night at Mediaite. I haven’t found a transcript but HuffPo has some coverage here. Sharpton was speaking from Harlem, where he’s standing with the family of Eric Garner, who are still awaiting a grand jury’s decision whether to charge the officer who killed their son.

    From HuffPo:

    This is one case. You have another case with [Akai] Gurley,” Sharpton said, referring to the unarmed black man who was accidentally killed last week by a police officer conducting a sweep through a Brooklyn housing project.

    Both cases exemplify the concerns many African-Americans have towards law enforcement in regards to racial profiling and police brutality.

    Sharpton was joined by the family of Eric Garner, a Staten Island man who died in July after being placed in a chokehold by a police officer. Garner’s family members are currently waiting for a grand jury to decide whether the officer involved should face charges.

    “Let it be clear. We are dealing with the same attitudes in Ferguson right here in the city,” Sharpton said. “It was expected, but still an absolute blow to those of us that wanted to see a fair and open trial.”

    He reiterated that they had no confidence in this local prosecutor and called for federal intervention, and that it’s interesting this prosecutor tried to tie the state and federal investigations together when they have different standards and different legal goals. Sharpton then mentioned Missouri’s fleeing-felon law and other conflicts with federal standards of excessive force, and possible shoplifting turning Brown into a “fleeing felon”. However (he says) most interesting was the prosecutor’s generalizing about “some witnesses” disagreeing while not mentioning whether any of the grand jurors dissented from the decision to not indict.

    Finishing with: “Ferguson is not just in Missouri” referring to other cities and deaths, and “We can lose a round, but the fight is not over.”

  289. Pteryxx says

    Seen several places on Twitter, the hashtag #FergusonGoddam referencing Nina Simone’s 1965 song “Mississippi Goddam”. (youtube link)

    Alabama’s gotten me so upset
    Tennessee made me lose my rest
    And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

    This is a show tune
    But the show hasn’t been written for it, yet

    Hound dogs on my trail
    School children sitting in jail
    Black cat cross my path
    I think every day’s gonna be my last

    Lord have mercy on this land of mine
    We all gonna get it in due time
    I don’t belong here
    I don’t belong there
    I’ve even stopped believing in prayer

    Don’t tell me
    I tell you
    Me and my people just about due
    I’ve been there so I know
    They keep on saying “Go slow!”

    But that’s just the trouble
    “do it slow”
    Washing the windows
    “do it slow”
    Picking the cotton
    “do it slow”
    You’re just plain rotten
    “do it slow”
    You’re too damn lazy
    “do it slow”
    The thinking’s crazy
    “do it slow”
    Where am I going
    What am I doing
    I don’t know
    I don’t know

    Just try to do your very best
    Stand up be counted with all the rest
    For everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

  290. Pteryxx says

    via Antonio French’s feed:

    Chris Hayes ‏@ChrisHayesTV

    MO Governor says Nat’l Guard will increase from 700 to 2200 tonight.

    1:23 PM – 25 Nov 2014

    (twitter)

    The Associated PressVerified account ‏@AP

    BREAKING: Missouri governor says more than 2,200 National Guardsmen will be in Ferguson area tonight http://apne.ws/1vdr26l

    The Associated Press
    Missouri governor: More National Guard in Ferguson

    FERGUSON, Mo. (AP) — Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon says more than 2,200 National Guardsmen will be in place in the region near Ferguson on Tuesday night in the event of more violence. He said Tuesday that…

    1:30 PM – 25 Nov 2014

    (twitter)

  291. Pteryxx says

    Antonio French from last night:

    Antonio French ‏@AntonioFrench

    I didn’t see any National Guardsmen on West Florissant tonight. In fact, when looting started, I didn’t see any police either.

    11:10 PM – 24 Nov 2014

    (twitter)

    Antonio French ‏@AntonioFrench

    We got all the downside of preemptively calling a State of Emergency, but none of the benefit.

    11:23 PM – 24 Nov 2014

    (twitter)

    Antonio French ‏@AntonioFrench

    Arsonists, looters and criminals are damaging the last 100 days of hard work of organized protestors.

    11:42 PM – 24 Nov 2014

    (twitter)

    and this morning:

    Antonio French ‏@AntonioFrench

    After months to prepare, McCulloch’s decision to release the verdict at night, without consulting law enforcement, was beyond irresponsible.

    8:06 AM – 25 Nov 2014

    (twitter)

  294. Pteryxx says

    Rather than paraphrase or react to any of that tripe, I’ll just post this piece also from Vox last night: Why Obama won’t give the Ferguson speech his supporters want

    Obama’s supporters aren’t asking for anything Obama can’t do — or even anything he hasn’t done before. Obama was elected president because he seemed, alone among American politicians, to be able to bridge the deep divides in American politics. The speech that rocketed him into national life was about bridging the red-blue divide. The speech that sealed his nomination was about bridging the racial divide. That speech, born of a crisis that could have ended Obama’s presidential campaign, is remembered by both his supporters and even many of his detractors as his finest moment. That was the speech where Obama seemed capable of something different, something more, than other politicians. In the White House, it’s simply called “the Race Speech.” And though the administration often fields demands to repeat it, they have no plans to do so.

    The problem is the White House no longer believes Obama can bridge those divides. They believe — with good reason — that he widens them. They learned this early in his presidency, when Obama said that the police had “acted stupidly” when they arrested Harvard University professor Skip Gates on the porch of his own home. The backlash was fierce. To defuse it, Obama ended up inviting both Gates and his arresting officer for a “beer summit” at the White House.

    […]

    Moreover, Obama’s presidency has seen a potent merging of the racial and political divides. It’s always been true that views on racial issues drive views on American politics. But as political scientist Michael Tesler has documented, during Obama’s presidency, views on American politics have begun driving views on racially charged issues.

  295. toska says

    From Antonio French’s twitter feed:
    https://twitter.com/AntonioFrench/status/537361546817847296

    We’ve seen this several times throughout the protests. Police officers wear full face masks to hide their identity. Disturbing… I imagine the police would not like it if they faced a crowd of protesters fully masked that way. It just adds to their power over citizens. They have the right to be anonymous, to not face social consequences for their violent acts.

  296. rq says

    Obama’s response to this has been disappointingly lukewarm. He hasn’t once talked about the police and their excesses, but only addresses the protestors and urges calm. Here’s a leader who could make a huge difference, and the opportunity is *whoosh* flying by.

    +++

    The following will be images of protesting overnight (some still going on) in various cities. And it is interesting to see that each city seems to have its own style of protest, ranging from rather violent and smoky in Ferguson and Oakland, to extremely peaceful yet disruptive in New York.
    Anyway.

    Here’s Denver: Officer pointing rifle at peaceful protestors in Denver. #Ferguson #DenverForFerguson (that’s the only pic I have of Denver, I think…);
    Shaw: Smaller than last night but a group of protestors in #Shaw say it’s important to continue to have their voices heard;
    Ferguson: Photographers getting their shot #Ferguson ;
    Oakland: #Oakland in solidarity with #Ferguson. Barricades up with massive police presence, arrests imminent. ;
    Honolulu: .@allxfoo: We’re here, peacefully protesting for #ferguson Honolulu , Hawaii is here for you too! ✊✊

  297. rq says

    How did New York get cut off? And moderation??
    New York: TRULY INCREDIBLE wouldnt have happened under Bloomberg RT @KeeganNYC: West Side Highway #FergusonDecision NYC.

    So in Ferguson itself things are going to shit, with burning and vandalism going on. There was a moment when some (white) guy threw something at the police from behind protestors, and he nearly got beat up (by the protestors) and had to be walked off the lot. So there’s that.
    Ferguson city hall is the new front after protesters threw rocks and damaged a police car. ;
    SWAT was there, too:     Police approach #Ferguson Walgreens with guns drawn.;
    How cops protect their own property: Smoke bombs, dogs, armored cars in response to PD car vandalized at #Ferguson City Hall.;
    The power of media: Stopped at a bar a couple of blocks from Ferguson PD and the standoff there is live on the TVs. It looks several times worse on TV..

  298. rq says

    Wanna see the National Guard? National Guard raises their shields after a thrown glass bottle landed several feet in front of their line. They’re finally in Ferguson, too. Maybe they can protect some of those black businesses now.
    Ferguson protestors: Young protesters shut down Union Square. No cars getting through. Peaceful. Officers arriving. #Ferguson

    Holy shit, New York!!! 10,000 in #DC: #FergusonDecision March moving down New York Avenue, NW. | Photo @coltraveler |;
    Wall Street: Wall Street, occupied. #Ferguson2nyc
    FDR drive half an hour ago. Stretched way back from there. #ferguson2nyc
    #HandsUpDontShoot moment of silence in front of the United Nations for #MikeBrown. #FergusonDecision NYC. #Ferguson (Seriously, New York, holy shit.)

  299. rq says

    This is Ferguson earlier in the night: Things heating up. Protesters block street outside Ferguson PD. Being told to disperse. Officers moving in w/clubs.

    Now for some actual reading:
    Via Lynna on the Utterly thread, Experts Blast Ferguson Prosecutor’s Press Conference, Legal Strategy

    Ben Trachtenberg, an associate professor of law at the University of Missouri School of Law, said the entire announcement “read like a closing argument for the defense,” while Susan McGraugh, an associate professor at the Saint Louis University School of Law, said she was “furious” when she watched it.

    “Bob McCulloch took a very defensive posture,” McGraugh said. “It was a poor choice to be so confrontational in presenting a grand jury verdict that he had to know would upset a large number of people. He should have left out the editorializing.”

    Marjorie Cohn, a professor of criminal law and procedure at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, said the way McCulloch presented the facts to the public was unlike anything she had ever seen. “In 98 percent of cases, the prosecutor would just announce the grand jury decision and that’s it,” she said. “He would not characterize the evidence defensively, or attack the media.”

    However, Andrew Leipold, the director of the Program in Criminal Law and Procedure at the University of Illinois College of Law, said McCulloch’s detailed presentation of the case before revealing the decision was necessary.

    Here’s an overview of the Ferguson protests from the BBC – it’s a live feed of short updates focussing mainly on the aggression in Ferguson itself: Ferguson Protests Nationwide.

    These are photos of nation-wide protests. Day 2: Ferguson Protesters Take to the Streets Across the U.S. (Photos) Not every city, obviously, but they try to represent.

    NY Times on the protests in NYC: Thousands Protesting Ferguson Decision Block Traffic in New York City:

    The protesters marched on Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, through Times Square and across the Manhattan Bridge, disrupting traffic along those routes and at the Lincoln Tunnel.

    One group of protesters tried to cross the Williamsburg Bridge to Brooklyn, but a wall of police stopped them, even as they tried to pull down a police barricade.

    Another group of protesters marched from Union Square through the East Village and hopped a barricade onto F.D.R. Drive. Officers standing nearby blocked car traffic as the protesters walked in the street.

    The protesters, a diverse and relatively young crowd, held signs saying, “Hands up, don’t shoot,” and “Black Lives Matter.” Around 9 p.m., they began to enter the roadway on the Manhattan Bridge, chanting, “Whose bridge? Our bridge,” and then crossed into Brooklyn.

    Then there’s two from NY Times behind a subscription wall:
    After Ferguson Announcement, Racial Divide Remains over Views of Justice; and
    Despite Chaos, Ferguson Police React with Restraint not Shown In August. That second headline really pisses me off, because protestors on twitter were complaining about tear gas behind about the same or worse than in August. Plus no insides of safe spaces were targeted in August. They may not be pulling guns and tanks as much, or chasing people down, but there is definitely no restraint to be seen. Asshole reporter.

  300. rq says

    Repost because moderation for links:
    This is Ferguson earlier in the night: Things heating up. Protesters block street outside Ferguson PD. Being told to disperse. Officers moving in w/clubs.

    Now for some actual reading:
    Via Lynna on the Utterly thread, Experts Blast Ferguson Prosecutor’s Press Conference, Legal Strategy

    Ben Trachtenberg, an associate professor of law at the University of Missouri School of Law, said the entire announcement “read like a closing argument for the defense,” while Susan McGraugh, an associate professor at the Saint Louis University School of Law, said she was “furious” when she watched it.

    “Bob McCulloch took a very defensive posture,” McGraugh said. “It was a poor choice to be so confrontational in presenting a grand jury verdict that he had to know would upset a large number of people. He should have left out the editorializing.”

    Marjorie Cohn, a professor of criminal law and procedure at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, said the way McCulloch presented the facts to the public was unlike anything she had ever seen. “In 98 percent of cases, the prosecutor would just announce the grand jury decision and that’s it,” she said. “He would not characterize the evidence defensively, or attack the media.”

    However, Andrew Leipold, the director of the Program in Criminal Law and Procedure at the University of Illinois College of Law, said McCulloch’s detailed presentation of the case before revealing the decision was necessary.

    Here’s an overview of the Ferguson protests from the BBC – it’s a live feed of short updates focussing mainly on the aggression in Ferguson itself: Ferguson Protests Nationwide.

    These are photos of nation-wide protests. Day 2: Ferguson Protesters Take to the Streets Across the U.S. (Photos) Not every city, obviously, but they try to represent.

    NY Times on the protests in NYC: Thousands Protesting Ferguson Decision Block Traffic in New York City:

    The protesters marched on Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, through Times Square and across the Manhattan Bridge, disrupting traffic along those routes and at the Lincoln Tunnel.

    One group of protesters tried to cross the Williamsburg Bridge to Brooklyn, but a wall of police stopped them, even as they tried to pull down a police barricade.

    Another group of protesters marched from Union Square through the East Village and hopped a barricade onto F.D.R. Drive. Officers standing nearby blocked car traffic as the protesters walked in the street.

    The protesters, a diverse and relatively young crowd, held signs saying, “Hands up, don’t shoot,” and “Black Lives Matter.” Around 9 p.m., they began to enter the roadway on the Manhattan Bridge, chanting, “Whose bridge? Our bridge,” and then crossed into Brooklyn.

  301. rq says

    Then there’s two from NY Times behind a subscription wall:
    After Ferguson Announcement, Racial Divide Remains over Views of Justice; and
    Despite Chaos, Ferguson Police React with Restraint not Shown In August. That second headline really pisses me off, because protestors on twitter were complaining about tear gas behind about the same or worse than in August. Plus no insides of safe spaces were targeted in August. They may not be pulling guns and tanks as much, or chasing people down, but there is definitely no restraint to be seen. Asshole reporter.

    Does this link work for anyone? From the Boston Globe: Boston Ferguson Protestors want Leaders to Listen not Speak or similar…?

    Athletes speak out: Why Star Athletes Are Speaking Out Against The Ferguson Decision

    “How many black male athletes have had confrontations with the police?” Elmore asked in a USA Today column. “In the present, it was Michael Brown or Eric Garner. It could be a black athlete, his father, brother or son tomorrow. Where is their outrage? Where are their voices?”

    Indeed, multiple athletes have had high-profile confrontations in recent years. In 2011, former NFL running back Warrick Dunn, who is black, was pulled over for looking like someone “transporting drugs and guns.” The same year, Major League Baseball outfielder Torii Hunter, also black, was confronted by gun-wielding police outside his own home when his alarm malfunctioned because they didn’t believe he lived there.

    Many of these athletes, no matter their social or economic stature, continue dealing with the same problems that affect people like Brown and the community in which he lived. Which, at the very least, should be another reminder of how deeply ingrained these racial injustices — and the stereotypes and structures that perpetuate them — remain in our society.

    And this tweet in the text hit me hard:

    Chad Johnson ✔ @ochocinco
    Follow

    My grandma texted me she loved me at 5am, oddly saying set my clock back 50 years, wasn’t till I washed my face I put together her riddle…
    1:44 PM – 25 Nov 2014

    And where is the white outrage? The white athletes supporting their less-pale colleagues? Oh, right.

    Tsk, tsk, Minneapolis. Car Plows Through Line of Protesters at Ferguson Rally in Minneapolis:

    Here’s what happened via the Star Tribune:

    A Star Tribune reporter who is at the rally says that witnesses say the vehicle started honking at protesters blocking the intersection before running down a woman around the start of the rally at 4:30 p.m. In video from KSTP’s Chopper 5, the involved vehicle goes around another stopped car and into the crowd as other vehicles go around the crowd. People appear to get on the hood of the car as it pushes its way through the crowd and it hits and appears to run over the legs of a demonstrator. In video captured by Star Tribune videographer Mark Vancleave, what appears to be a dark-colored Subaru Outback is seen driving with a few people clinging to its hood as it pushes and then apparently runs over a victim’s leg. Protesters rush the vehicle with some people hitting its windows and windshield before it takes off.

    With video.

    Philadelphia: Ferguson protests continue in Philly; 2 released from custody

    Marchers filed up four-lane North Broad Street from City Hall, stopped at Temple University, then headed to the Ninth District police station in Franklintown, capping a day of demonstrations across the region reflecting nationwide unease over Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson’s fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown on Aug. 9 in the predominantly black St. Louis suburb.

    Hundreds of Philadelphia police officers on bicycles, on horseback, and in squad cars accompanied the hordes as they walked – as much as five miles – and chanted, passionately but peacefully, beneath the roar of news and police helicopters overhead.

    The march began to wind down around 10 p.m. in Rittenhouse Square. […]

    “A lot of our kids feel abandoned and broken,” Eric Barnes, 47, said of youths he counsels as a juvenile probation officer. The grand jury’s decision was on his mind when Barnes decided to join the City Hall demonstration.

    “I don’t know what to tell them,” he said of the teenagers with whom he works. “I’ve been trying not to cry since I heard.”

    The mixed-race crowd of several hundred that descended on City Hall around 3:30 p.m. swelled to a peak of about 500 when it reached the Temple campus an hour later, joining with hundreds of residents and students who had gathered there.

    “We all are Mike Brown,” said the Rev. Gregory Holston, a member of the interfaith group Philadelphians Organized to Witness, Empower and Rebuild, his shouts drawing fierce applause. […]

    Junior Byron Cooper described a stigma he feels for being black, despite being an ambitious undergraduate and self-described scholar-athlete.

    “I’m a thug no matter where I go,” Cooper said. “Playing sports, I’m a thug. In class, I’m considered a thug.”

    Kelsey Hunter, a white senior, was overcome with emotion. “I don’t want to raise my kids in a world like this,” she said, her eyes filling with tears.

  302. rq says

    Darren Wilson to Grand Jury: ‘I Had to Kill Him’ (you know, his face up close and personal like that at the head of all kinds of articles, is really starting to piss me off).

    Wilson walked back to his police cruiser. His sergeant pulled up and Wilson walked over to him.

    “I have to tell you what happened,” Wilson recalled telling his sergeant. “I said, ‘I had to kill him.’ He goes, ‘You what?’ I said, ‘He grabbed my gun, I shot him, I killed him.'” […]

    Wilson recalled his sergeant telling him to “go sit in the car.” He refused the order, citing fear of attack by the angry crowds that were already forming on the surrounding sidewalks.

    “I said, ‘Sarge, I can’t be singled out. It is already getting hostile, I can’t be singled out in the car. I will leave if you want me to leave,’ ” Wilson said. “He said, ‘Take my car and leave.’ So I got in his car and I drove to the police station.” [… – where he proceeded to wash his hands and not write any reports]

    More troublingly, prosecutors also appeared to interrogate witnesses about their various accounts of the shooting, asking whether they were pressured into repeating the familiar narrative that emerged in the days after the deadly encounter — that Brown had his hands up and was surrendering when he was shot.

    Prosecutors particularly grilled witnesses who delivered this account, telling them their stories didn’t line up with forensic evidence collected by investigators.

    In his testimony, Wilson characterized the neighborhood where Brown lived as a “hostile environment” where “gangs reside” and “associate.” […]

    Wilson said he saw one of the last bullets he fired at Brown “go into him.”

    “And then when it went into him, the demeanor on his face went blank, the aggression was gone, it was gone, I mean, I knew he stopped, the threat was stopped,” Wilson said. “When he fell, he fell on his face.”

    Much of what Wilson recounted for the grand jury was omitted from his interview with the police detective.

    He did not tell the detective that he saw Brown carrying a box of cigarillos, nor did he disclose to the detective that he suspected that Brown was a suspect in the theft. Wilson also did not say that he feared that Brown’s punches would knock him out or kill him.

    More testimony from witnesses at the link, just a warning: it ain’t pretty.

    St. Louis Thanksgiving Day parade is postponed due to Ferguson unrest. Good. Let people think instead. Though they’ll probably just complain.

    Oh, the old pot = agrgession myth: Grand jury testimony suggested marijuana made Michael Brown violent. That’s unlikely.

    “The amount of marijuana he has could cause abnormal behavior, but usually doesn’t,” the unnamed expert said on November 13. “Ninety-nine out of 100 people taking marijuana aren’t going to get in a fight with a police officer over it in my experience.”

    Immediately after, a prosecutor questioned the expert’s credentials: “Can I just clarify something here, doctor? Your credentials are as a forensic pathologist, although you have a working understanding of toxicology, you are not a toxicologist, correct?” A grand juror joined in, suggesting the expert had no way of confirming that his statements are true.

    But there’s actually no reason to believe, based on the available research and the scientific understanding of pot, that marijuana would actually make someone more violent. […]

    A recent study on the topic, from researchers at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, found that there’s no connection between domestic abuse and marijuana. The Knoxville researchers acknowledged that the issue needs more study, especially given the conflicting findings in previous studies. But the study shows that a link between pot and aggression is, at the very least, nowhere close to established.

    Similarly, another recent study from researchers at the University of Buffalo found marijuana users are actually less likely to report domestic violence — even after controlling for factors like demographic variables, behavioral problems, and alcohol use. That doesn’t prove a causal link between marijuana use and reduced violence, but it certainly goes against the notion that marijuana would make someone more violent.

    This makes sense to anyone with even a vague notion of marijuana’s effects. Pot is most popularly known as a sedative that relaxes users. One of the prominent arguments against its use, in fact, is that it makes users so sedated that they’re lazy and, as a result, unproductive.

    How Teachers Around The Country Plan To Talk To Their Students About Ferguson:

    In the weeks following Brown’s death, amid sometimes violent local protests, schools in Ferguson and the surrounding area were forced to cancel days of classes. This week, some school districts in the area have once again cancelled class to ensure the safety of students and staff in the aftermath of the grand jury announcement. Some districts also prepared for the grand jury’s decision by providing parents and teachers with resources on how to talk with students about the case.

    The link then lists tweets from teachers with suggestions and questions. Good ones.

    Darren Wilson Joins Hundreds of Cops Who Commit ‘Justifiable Homicide’ Each Year:

    The Federal Bureau of Investigation recorded 410 “justifiable homicides” in 2012, and that is self-reported by states with varying degrees of rigor. The actual count is likely higher.

    Fatal shootings such as Wilson’s encounter with the unarmed Brown on Aug. 9 resonate deeply in African-American communities across the country. Black teenagers were 21 times as likely to be shot dead by an officer than white teenagers, according to statistics compiled by Pro Publica.

    A police officer is charged under the same homicide laws that apply to private citizens, but most state legislatures have carved out exceptional circumstances for officers in the line of duty. In Missouri, the protections come down to three short sentences located in a single statute.

    Michael Brown Sr.’s Church Burned in Ferguson, with autoplay video.

  305. rq says

    Just another pic from Ferguson: on front line. #Ferguson they are staring at @MusicOverPeople and I. flashing their lights. they’re targeting folks.;

    Echoes of Tiananmen: Incredible Image Of Man Stopping In Front Of Police Military Vehicles #Ferguson ;

    Chicago: Preparing for arrest at #Chi2Ferguson occupation of of city hall, dead silence in this room. ;

    Baltimore: #Ferguson protesters in Baltimore blocking I-83 North at Fayette St. Entire intersection blocked by police. ;

    DC: Large crowd gathering at Mt. Vernon Square in DC. Speaker says killing a person every 28 hours is terrorism.;

    Everywhere: #Ferguson #BlackLivesMatter #demilitarizethepolice #ShutItDownForMichaelBrown #WeAreFerguson (open pic to enlarge);

  306. rq says

    Oakland again: LITERALLY 1000 COPS PROTECTING ZERO CITIZENS #Oakland
    This is what the California Highway Patrol are firing at the citizens of #Oakland tonight. #FergusonDecision

    Back in ferguson – All that training and riot drills and they missed the bigger picture.We don’t need guns or vest for this fight.YOU CANT STOP THE REVOLUTION.;

    Police push protesters into residential neighborhoods. Now allowing people to leave and go to their cars. Tiffin ave.

    A painful truth: Since Michael Brown died, the only sign that police might stop shooting black teens was when they shot a 12-year-old. #FergusonDecision

    Michael Brown: in photos.

  307. rq says

    Miami: 2 arrested in Ferguson protest outside Miami courthouse – from the end of that article,

    In an exclusive interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, Wilson said he was sorry that Brown is dead but added his conscience is clear because he was simply doing his job.

    It’s not his fucking job to gun down black teens running away. Or is it? Holy shit that smarmy asshole makes me want to puke. But about that interview.

    Exclusive: ABC Paid ‘Mid-to-High’ Six Figures For #DarrenWilson Interview. Can we have a collective round of disgust over this? Kill a kid, make some money – I swear, there will be a book, and a movie, with Michael Brown presented as the most blackest uber-villainest of black teenagers everywhere, and Darren Wilson will be the scrawny underdog of the law, courageously driving through a really really bad neighbourhood, attacked by gangsters, single-handedly fighting his way back to safe space…. *retch* Anyway, from the article:

    A NBC source with knowledge of the #DarrenWilson interview talks said that ABC offered to pay “mid-to-high” six figures for the interview.

    The source did not say an exact figure because NBC stopped bidding for it after ABC upped the ante.

    ABC has not spoken on the issue, far as I can tell, though they haven’t denied it.

    Prosecutor faces new criticism over Ferguson case. New criticism? I thought it was all the same old, same old, just with new passion and energy.

    St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch — whose impartiality has been questioned since soon after Michael Brown was killed by Officer Darren Wilson on Aug. 9 — has come under renewed scrutiny since he appeared before television cameras to announce that the grand jury would not indict Wilson. A defensive McCulloch repeatedly cited what he said were inconsistencies and erroneous witness accounts. He never mentioned that Brown was unarmed.

    Attorneys for Brown’s family and activists said Tuesday that everything from how evidence was presented to the grand jury to the way McCulloch delivered the news of its decision bolstered their belief that the outcome was predetermined by McCulloch, who has deep family roots and relationships with police.

    “This grand jury decision, we feel, is a reflection of the sentiment of those that presented the evidence,” Anthony Gray, an attorney for Brown’s family, said at a news conference.

    Ah, renewed. That sounds more accurate.

    Amnesty International statement: Amnesty International USA: Ferguson, the World is Watching .

    Nearly 24 hours after the grand jury decision was announced, and after an initial night which included peaceful protests as well as widespread incidents of looting, arson and vandalism, Amnesty International USA Executive Director Steven W. Hawkins issued the following statement:

    “This has to be made clear – the burden to keep protests peaceful is shared. Armored vehicles, tear gas and smoke bombs used large-scale against largely peaceful protesters in order to quell acts of violence by a minority only serves to escalate and exacerbate an already incredibly tense environment.

    “Law enforcement officers have a right to defend themselves and a duty to protect the safety of the public, but this role should be carried out in a way that ensures full respect for the right to life, liberty and security of all persons, including those suspected of crime. Even when confronting violence, they must work within the law and in conformity with international standards governing the use of force.

    “The eyes of the world continue to watch the events in Ferguson as a measure of the United States’ capacity to respect the fundamental human right to assemble. Our right to protest peacefully should be bolstered by law enforcement, not inhibited through intimidation.”

    Amnesty International USA reiterated its calls to the Department of Justice to demonstrate leadership on this issue, including by collecting national data on police killings, as it is required to do by law; implementing a nationwide review of police tactics; and championing a special law enforcement commission to make recommendations on policing policies and tactics more broadly.

    Finally someone addresses the police responsibility to refrain from excessive force and/or violence. Too bad it’s not the President.

    Just a thing: Diego Ibanez, who covered the NY police commissioner in fake blood, is looking at up to 225 years in prison with a $30,000 bail. #Ferguson. Can. You. Imagine. For fake blood. And Darren fucking Wilson walks.

    Nearly 75% of states in our country stood up w us in the last 24hrs, embarrassed of our justice system. @BarackObama this is #OnYourWatch. Last count I think was 37 of the 50. Not bad, but still feels like an overwhelming minority.

  309. rq says

    Oakland: Row of protesters sitting in the streets hands up. Cops call unlawful assembly. Helicopter circling above. #Oakland ;
    Cincinnati: Cincinnati,OH protestors shut down highway, kneeling in street w hands up #Ferguson #FergusonDecision via @UrbanCusp;
    Los Angeles: RT @ThisIsJLee: Protestors confronting LAPD at Flower & Olympic #LosAngeles #Ferguson .
    Portland: WOW. Portland, Oregon was not playing! #Ferguson #FergusonDecision.

    Al-Jazeera has an opinion: Ferguson resembles a war zone after ruling

    National Guardsmen rolled into town on military vehicles as part of a 2,200-strong security force.

    In the quiet backstreet of Canfield Drive on Tuesday night, a group of teenagers in hooded sweatshirts loitered around the bouquets of flowers that mark the spot where Michael Brown was shot and killed by a white lawman in August – the latest race-relations tragedy to send shockwaves across the United States.

    “You want to know where the protesters are? We’re the protests,” one of a half-dozen teenagers told Al Jazeera, without disclosing his name. “You should get out of here. Maybe you ain’t heard, but white people ain’t so popular round here no more.”

    […]

    “There’s a reason we’re armed the way we are,” said one officer, toting an assault rifle. “We figure we’re gonna get shot at here at this roadblock. And if we go down there, there would be even more serious trouble. They got guns, too.”

    You idiot.

    In Ferguson, rioters overturned a police car and set it ablaze while others hurled rocks at government offices on Tuesday night. As many as a dozen buildings were still smouldering alongside West Florissant Avenue, the site of many protests in recent months. […]

    Speaking in Chicago on Tuesday, Obama condemned the rioters, but also warned that concerns among ethnic minorities about a lopsided justice system are “rooted in realities that have existed in this country for a long time”.

    Comparable anger was evident after footage was aired of white Los Angeles cops beating Rodney King on the tarmac in 1991, and Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old who was shot and killed in Florida in 2012 by a neighbourhood watch volunteer, who was acquitted.

    “Shooting someone should have been the last resort, and not the first. These protests is gonna go on for a while. They can’t keep on sweeping this under the rug,” Carlos Mcduffie, 38, from Ferguson, told Al Jazeera.

    “It’s about a system that’s been out of control since it was created, and there’s nothing can be done to change it.”

    And Obama. You’d think. But no.

    So the justice system has indicted social media, the press & the public but not the man who killed a child holding up his hands in surrender. Yes.

  310. rq says

    Violent protests continue, text in Latvian. Of course, all the peaceful protesting that led to arrests anyway gets downplayed and barely a mention.

    Al-Jazeera again: US sectarianism: A nation still divided

    “A system cannot fail those it was never built to protect,” wrote W.E.B. Dubois, indicting structural inequity and exclusion as the very seeds that rear racial segregation. Dubois’ US was marred by formal segregation. A segregation that not only marked black and brown Americans as inferior; but relentlessly exposed them to legal processes that vilified their racial identities, and exonerated their assailants.

    Exactly 110 years later, Dubois’ words have never been more prescient. The thinker’s words foretell a divide that continues to fracture the US along racial lines, and exposes its most marginalised communities to structures that continuously persecute – rather than protect – them. Racial inequities on the ground, perpetuated by politics, law and their slanted processes, drive the racial sectarianism that marred the US at its inception, middle and current passages. […]

    Yet, if religious rifts are the primary lines of conflict in the Middle East, then the US’ ungodly racial divide looms as its most salient spaces of tension and violence, discord and disenfranchisement. Racism historically, and still today, stands as the US’ sectarianism.

    American sectarianism is nurtured by two complimentary myths. The first holds that, “racism is individual and aberrational”, stripping political, economic, and legal structures from any responsibility in perpetuating racial inequality.

    The second myth contends that these very structures are “colour-blind and objective systems, which function without racial bias”. Together, these myths not only caricature the meaning of racism, and vastly narrow its scope, but more importantly, conceal how government structures continually reinforce the US’ racial sectarianism. […]

    Ferguson was only demographically a “black community”. Its political institutions, police force, and grand jury were overwhelmingly white. Therefore, racial division in Ferguson aligned neatly with power disparities, which became blatantly clear when the grand jury rendered a definition of justice that served the interests of one officer, Wilson, instead of the collective concerns of the 14,200 black residents of Ferguson. Blacks simply lived in Ferguson, while whites controlled it. […]

    While neatly crafted myths perpetuate a thin veneer of racial harmony, Ferguson offers a sharp dose of the US’ unequal reality, which pierces through that veneer to reveal the racial sectarianism that still divides the US. A sectarianism where the most vulnerable are victimised, the racially excluded are vast villains, and the law and its processes are deployed to deepen primordial racial inequities. The nihilism and hopelessness embodied by protesters in Ferguson are, echoing Dubois, bred by a system that continuously strips a people of its dignity.

    Racial rifts and conflicts continue to fortify US sectarianism. A sectarianism that simultaneously rips this country apart as we gaze eastward, and ridicule distant peoples for their backward, tribal and primal divides – which deters us acknowledging our own sectarian crisis, even as it unfolds in our own back yards and on our televisions.

    Interesting tone to the article – smacks of a lot of North American articles about the Middle East, all this talk of ‘sectarianism’ and ‘tribalism’. Well done.

  312. rq says

    Where’s Bemidji? Ah, Minnesota. No surprise, then: Bemidji didn’t have the largest Ferguson protest, but maybe the coldest.

    Boston: Wow. As Boston #Ferguson protest takes the interstate near Southbay Prison, prisoners join in. #BlackLivesMatter ;

    A lesson: My eyes are now open;

    School superintendent receives a letter from the Saint Paul Police Federation: holy crap. how did i not see this until now? police federation just going stone cold full time straight thugging. Full text:

    Dear Superintendent Silva:

    The Star Tribune has reported on an apparent tweet of yours reading, “No indictment for Officer Wilson! Very sad day in America. How do I explain this to my black students?? Our office has received many calls from our members regarding this tweet.

    After 200 hours of examining the facts, the Grand Jury ruled no bill. We cannot understand how a leader of education could possibly post something so irresponsible and disturbing without complete knowledge of the facts. Statements like this foster a climate of fear and distrust. They are not constructive and create resentment. You are surely aware that a number of police offivers from a number of agencies send their children to your schools. How do you explain your ignorant tweet to them? Next time you should reconsider such tweets and find a more constructive way to help foster a healthier community for all.

    Sincerely,
    [signature]
    David A. Titus
    Federation President

    Well, I know who’s fostering a climate of fear and distrust as well as creating resentment, and it’s not Silva. Notice the transfer of attention from black students to (presumably mostly) white students. And all she did was ask a question.

  313. rq says

    Note: close tags.

    The fire Bob McCulloch started:

    The result of McCulloch’s choices was an unmitigated disaster. Brown’s family went blind with grief and rage, as anyone with a brain and a heart could have predicted they would, and the community convulsed around them. This enraged community – gathered in the night – included many young people who have not been seen at Ferguson Police Department protests since the hot days of August. It also included many new faces – or, rather, masks, since many of the new, edgier protestors who started showing up in recent weeks mask their faces (or shroud them with bandanas). Some of these outside agitators are seasoned riot chasers who seize any opportunity to fight the police at militant protests and who favor the rhetoric of fire and the practice of arson. This incredibly volatile mix of ingredients, handled by someone as brazen and reckless as McCulloch, exploded on West Florissant Avenue and South Florissant Road on Monday night and burned to the ground.

    Unless you live in a cave with no cable TV package, you know by now that a member of the extended Brown family, the youth’s stepfather Louis Head, responded with rage when he heard the grand jury’s decision publicly announced at the police department protest. This grief-enraged stepfather responded by chanting, “Burn the (expletive) down! Burn the (expletive) down!” His chant was picked up by the people around him and spread, expressing the anger and frustration of the gathering crowd all too well. This momentarily violent chant, to be clear, is not the message that this family has conveyed up until now. The Brown family has consistently pleaded for peaceful protests. Further, it is clear from the scale and effectiveness of the arsons staged in Ferguson on Monday that it was a planned operation and not the spontaneous outgrowth of one stepfather’s fit of rage.

    However, he will be blamed, and the family’s name and message of peace will be tarnished. We consider that unfair, considering that this enraged stepfather had almost no power to influence the course of events, whereas Bob McCulloch held all the reins of power – and every single decision he made culminated in the disaster we all saw on Monday night. McCulloch may have behaved as if he were proceeding by the rule of law and impartially administering criminal justice. But in fact the cumulative effect of every single decision the prosecutor made – up until and including when he stepped up to the podium after 8 p.m. on Monday night – had the effect of his chanting “Burn the (expletive) down! Burn the (expletive) down!”

    Nice.

    45 Arrested In Boston Ferguson Protests

    An estimated 1,500 people marched from Dudley Square in the Roxbury down Massachusetts Avenue to the South Bay. […]

    Police told WBZ NewsRadio 1030’s Carl Stevens Wednesday that most of those arrested were people from outside of Boston.

    Many were students from Harvard, Tufts, and other local universities.

    Why ISIS supporters can’t stop tweeting about Ferguson (a bit scary, this one):

    The Soviet strategy, according to Skrentny, was designed to appeal to audiences in Africa and Asia. As these nations gained independence from their colonial overlords, the Soviets publicized images of Western racism to try to convince these countries to align with the Soviet Union rather than the racist West. There are echoes of this today, with American foreign policy seen by some as colonial and oppressive. […] – I would say it is colonial and oppressive, but okay]

    President Eisenhower agreed — when he sent in the 101st Airborne to desegregate the Little Rock school, his public address cited international opinion and the Soviet threat as a major reason behind the move.

    Domestic racial issues, then, have been a liability for American foreign policy in the past. The approach to Ferguson taken by ISIS, or at least its supporters, is just picking up where the Soviet Union left off.

    Protesters Shut Down Three New York City Bridges In Reaction To Ferguson Decision

    The decision not to indict Wilson resonated with many New Yorkers who were also angry about the recent police killing of Akai Gurley, an unarmed 28-year-old who was shot to death last Friday by a rookie NYPD officer in the stairwell of a Brooklyn public housing project. On Tuesday, a number of protesters carried signs bearing Gurley’s photograph alongside calls to “end police terrorism from NYC to Ferguson.”

    Other demonstrators invoked the image of Eric Garner, the Staten Island father who was also unarmed when he died in a police chokehold last July after being arrested for illegally selling cigarettes.

    Protesters in Union Square thought the Ferguson decision represented part of a larger problem and said they had no plans to stop demonstrating anytime soon. “Innocent people are routinely shot, and these people are young, black and male,” Michael Chou, 24, told The Huffington Post. “I will protest as long as it’s needed to make a point about that.”

    See the post for pictures, plus Chief Bratton getting fake blood on him.

    And, incidentally, 2 FBI agents shot, hurt in St. Louis area; spokeswoman says not directly related to protests.

  314. rq says

    Diana, I wrote this at 22. I remember how angry I was. And yes it was more than that. It was pain/hurt. @Diana_Denis. It’s a clip of a newspaper article on being young, black, and frightening to white people.

    Old, from August 12, but re-readable: In defense of black rage: Michael Brown, police and the American dream

    It seems far easier to focus on the few looters who have reacted unproductively to this tragedy than to focus on the killing of Michael Brown. Perhaps looting seems like a thing we can control. I refuse. I refuse to condemn the folks engaged in these acts, because I respect black rage. I respect black people’s right to cry out, shout and be mad as hell that another one of our kids is dead at the hands of the police. Moreover I refuse the lie that the opportunism of a few in any way justifies or excuses the murderous opportunism undertaken by this as yet anonymous officer.

    The police mantra is “to serve and to protect.” But with black folks, we know that’s not the mantra. The mantra for many, many officers when dealing with black people is apparently “kill or be killed.” […]

    No, I don’t support looting. But I question a society that always sees the product of the provocation and never the provocation itself. I question a society that values property over black life. But I know that our particular system of law was conceived on the founding premise that black lives are white property. “Possession,” the old adage goes, “is nine-tenths of the law.”

    But we are the dispossessed. We cannot count on the law to protect us. We cannot count on police not to shoot us down in cold blood. We cannot count on politics to be a productive outlet for our rage. We cannot count on prayer to soothe our raging, ragged souls. […]

    The answer isn’t looting, no. The answer isn’t rioting, no. But the answer also isn’t preaching to black people about “black-on-black” crime without full acknowledgment that most crime is intraracial. The answer is not having a higher standard for the people than for the police. The answer is not demanding that black people get mad about and solve the problem of crime in Chicago before we get mad about the slaughter of a teen boy just outside St. Louis.

    We can be, and have been, and are mad about both. Violence is the effect, not the cause of the concentrated poverty that locks that many poor people up together with no conceivable way out and no productive way to channel their rage at having an existence that is adjacent to the American dream. This kind of social mendacity about the way that racism traumatizes black people individually and collectively is a festering sore, an undiagnosed cancer, a raging infection threatening to overtake every organ in our body politic.

    We are tired of these people preaching a one-sided gospel of peace. “Turn the other cheek” now means “here are our collective asses to kiss.” We are tired of forgiving people because they most assuredly do know what they do. […]

    Nothing makes white people more uncomfortable than black anger. But nothing is more threatening to black people on a systemic level than white anger. It won’t show up in mass killings. It will show up in overpolicing, mass incarceration, the gutting of the social safety net, and the occasional dead black kid. Of late, though, these killings have been far more than occasional. We should sit up and pay attention to where this trail of black bodies leads us. They are a compass pointing us to a raging fire just beneath the surface of our national consciousness. We feel it. We hear it. Our nostrils flare with the smell of it.

    James Baldwin called it “the fire next time.” A fire shut up in our bones. A sentient knowledge, a kind of black epistemology, honed for just such a time as this. And with this knowledge, a clarity that says if “we live by the sword, we will die by it.”

    Then, black rage emerges prophetic from across the decades in the words of Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay who penned these words 95 years ago in response to the Red Summer of 1919.

    If we must die, let it not be like hogs

    Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,

    While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs

    Making their mock at our accursèd lot.

    If we must die, O let us nobly die,

    So that our precious blood may not be shed

    In vain; then even the monsters we defy

    Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!

    O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!

    Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,

    And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!

    What though before us lies the open grave?

    Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,

    Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

    I offer no answers. I offer only grief and rage and hope.

    Love the poem.

    Guard reinforcements contain damage in Ferguson. Yes, yes, the Guard.

    Forty-five people were arrested, most for failure to disperse. Outside police headquarters, one woman was taken into custody after protesters hurled what appeared to be smoke bombs, flares and frozen water bottles at a line of officers. Several other protesters were arrested after defying police instructions to get out of the street or out of the way of police vehicles.

    Protesters threw rocks, tent poles, and bottles — some containing urine — at officers. As the crowd dispersed early Wednesday, some threw rocks through the windows of a muffler shop and a used-car dealership near a painted mural that read “Peace for Ferguson.”

    Some streets that had been overrun the previous night were deserted, except for the occasional police cruiser or National Guard vehicle. Some Guard crews monitored empty parking lots.

    Large demonstrations were held across the country for a second day Tuesday. Some were peaceful, such as in New York, where Union Square was the jumping-off point for a large protest that splintered into smaller groups that walked to places like Times Square and the entrances of the Williamsburg and Manhattan bridges. Hundreds of Seattle high school students walked out of classes, and several hundred people marched down a Cleveland freeway ramp to block rush-hour traffic.

    Other events weren’t as calm. In Oakland, California, a crowd of protesters smashed windows at car dealership, restaurants and convenience stores. A rally that drew thousands in Minneapolis took a turn when a car struck a protester and drove through a pack of others. And in Portland, Oregon, police used pepper spray and made arrests after about 300 people disrupted bus and light rail traffic by walking across a Willamette River bridge.

    44 Arrested as Ferguson Protesters Throw Rocks, Bottles at Police.

  315. rq says

    Yes, someone lost their life in the protests: Man, 20, dies amid Ferguson protests

    At 9 a.m. Tuesday, a resident of an apartment complex spotted Joshua’s body inside a parked car, a white Pontiac Grand Prix, near Canfield Green Apartments, the same complex where Ferguson Police officer Darren Wilson shot Brown on Aug. 9. Blood-soaked shattered glass lay in a pile on the ground beside the car.

    Family members said Joshua’s death is tied to the protests that consumed Ferguson after St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch revealed the grand jury’s decision not to indict Wilson. But family members said they did not know specifically how he died. […]

    As police towed Joshua’s car, his grandmother Renita Towns said she had little hope that police would investigate and learn the cause of her grandson’s death.

    “Police don’t care — he’s black,” Towns said.

    L.A., wow – 130 arrested during Ferguson protests in downtown L.A.

    Los Angeles police arrested 130 protesters overnight during a second round of demonstrations against a Missouri grand jury’s decision not to indict a white police officer in the shooting death of a black teenager.

    A large demonstration ended early Wednesday morning in downtown Los Angeles when police officers in riot gear surrounded a group of several dozen protesters near the intersection of Temple Street and Broadway.

    At about 12:45 a.m., Los Angeles police told the group they were under arrest and ordered the crowd to sit down. Two police buses then arrived to take the protesters into custody. A police spokesman said the arrests were made on charges of disorderly conduct.

    The arrests also included 33 protesters at the intersection of Flower Street and 9th Street, according to Capt. Martin Baeza.

    A lot in the article about Los Angeles protests and a lot of participant views within. Good reading.

    MSNBC offers another general overview: Ferguson protests continue across the nation. Several cities mentioned and discussed.

    fuckn animals destroying private property like that’s going to help. get a job losers SEE THE PICTURE BEFORE YOU REACT.

  317. rq says

    chimera
    When this is all over, I’m going to bind it into a book and keep it on a shelf as a reminder.
    When this is all over… *sob*

  318. Pteryxx says

    Thanks but I’m just sorry I haven’t posted more and in greater depth. rq’s the rockstar here.

    —

    More on the Boston South Bay prisoners as in rq’s #312 with more tweets and pictures: HuffPo

    According to the Boston Globe, approximately 1,400 people marched to the South Bay House of Correction. Protesters were reportedly chanting, “We see you,” and “Black lives matter.”

    The South Bay facility houses adult male and female inmates convicted of crimes with a sentence of 2.5 years or less.

    African-American men are six times more likely to be incarcerated than white men, according to The Sentencing Project. If current trends continue, one out of every three black men in the U.S. will go to prison. ProPublica recently found that “young black men [were] 21 times as likely as their white peers to be killed by police” between 2010 and 2012.

    Tweets with pics:

    Stanford Fraser ‏@Stanfordfraser

    Protestors outside the prison. A powerful moment #Boston #Ferguson

    5:38 PM – 25 Nov 2014

    (twitter)

    Eli Feghali ‏@efeghali

    Wow. As Boston #Ferguson protest takes the interstate near Southbay Prison, prisoners join in. #BlackLivesMatter

    5:48 PM – 25 Nov 2014

    (twitter)

    Eric Ethington ‏@EricEthington

    Crowd chants “WE SEE YOU” to Black inmates in Back Bay jail. #Boston #Ferguson

    5:35 PM – 25 Nov 2014

    (twitter)

  319. Pteryxx says

    Also from HuffPo: Ferguson Grand Jury Evidence Reveals Mistakes, Holes In Investigation

    1. Wilson washed away blood evidence.

    In an interview with police investigators, Wilson admitted that after the shooting he returned to police headquarters and washed blood off his body — physical evidence that could have helped to prove or disprove a critical piece of Wilson’s testimony regarding his struggle with Brown inside the police car. […]

    2. The first officer to interview Wilson failed to take any notes.

    The first supervising officer to the scene, who was also the first person to interview Wilson about the incident, didn’t take any notes about their conversation. In testimony more than a month after the incident, the officer offered his account from memory. He explained that he hadn’t been equipped with a recorder and hadn’t tried to take any written notes due to the chaotic nature of the situation. He also didn’t write up any notes soon after the fact. […]

    3. Investigators failed to measure the likely distance between Brown and Wilson.

    An unnamed medical legal examiner who responded to the shooting testified before the grand jury that he or she had not taken any distance measurements at the scene, because they appeared “self-explanatory.”

    “Somebody shot somebody. There was no question as to any distances or anything of that nature at the time I was there,” the examiner told the jury.

    The examiner also noted that he or she hadn’t been able to take pictures at the scene — as is standard — because the camera’s batteries were dead. […]

    5. Wilson did not immediately turn his weapon over to investigators after killing Brown.

    A detective with the St. Louis County Police Department, who conducted the first official interview of Wilson, testified to the grand jury that Wilson had packaged his own service weapon into an evidence envelope following his arrival at the police station in the wake of the shooting. […]

    and more at the link.

  320. rq says

    The CBC has several articles today:
    Ferguson aftermath: State militia reinforcements help contain damage That’s the second time I’ve seen that headline, and it doesn’t quite sit right. I’m not willing to credit the NG for the decrease in violence, rather the second-day effect, where those who came to agitate (or most) did their thing and left, while those who are in it for the long(er) run remain. I have no way to verify this, but I doubt it’s the NG that saved the day. Anyway, from the article:

    The toll from Monday’s protests — 12 commercial buildings burned to the ground, plus eight other blazes and a dozen vehicles torched — prompted Missouri governor Jay Nixon to send a large contingent of extra National Guard troops.

    The governor ordered the initial force of 700 to be increased to 2,200 in the hopes that their presence would help local law enforcement keep order in the St. Louis suburb.

    “Lives and property must be protected,” Nixon said. “This community deserves to have peace.”

    Lives and property, except for black lives and black property, of course, is what he really means, right?

    Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson speaks about Michael Brown shooting: I fucking hate how they’re giving him a platform. Go ahead and read that if you like, but I’m not going to quote it.

    Ferguson officer Darren Wilson’s grand jury testimony: 7 revelations – this one’s a better read, as while it delves into Wilson’s testimony, it … doesn’t really answer any questions. They may as well call them ‘oddities’ rather than revelations, because the author points out… I suppose, discrepancies, with proper procedure, yet never questions them or analyzes them, just sort of leaves them hanging. Par exemple:

    1. Why Wilson wasn’t carrying a Taser

    Wilson testified that on his duty belt he had his gun, a magazine pouch, an extendable baton, Mace, two sets of handcuffs and his radio. There was a flashlight on the passenger side of the car. Why no Taser? “I normally don’t carry a Taser. We only have a select amount. Usually there is one available but I elect not to carry one. It is not the most comfortable thing. They are very large, I don’t have a lot of room in the front for it to be positioned.”
    […]

    5. Why Wilson didn’t stay in his car and wait for backup

    According to Wilson’s account, Brown had assaulted him and tried to grab his gun, so why did he chase after him instead of waiting for the backup which he had requested in a radio call? Wilson testified that he was trying to buy time and planned to keep his distance from Brown, thinking his backup would be there within 20 to 30 seconds. But why get out of the car instead of tracking Brown’s movements from within it? Wilson said his comfort zone is not to be in his car talking to someone, and he prefers to be out of it so that if he needs to run, he can run.

    That’s a piss-poor excuse for not carrying a taser (seriously, your comfort outweighs your and other’s safety?), and a fucking piss-poor excuse for getting out of a car. “So that if he needs to run, he can run.” Just stay in the goddamned car, you idiot, and you can drive away!! Anyway. That’s your calm Canadian analysis of that. :P

    America’s Ferguson protests put police authority on trial:

    Most police despise any challenge to their authority. Some will abuse it, if necessary, to protect that authority, and the system can allow them to do that.

    Some police are bright, professional and educated. Some are louts. Some are racists. You never know which variety you’re facing.

    But what they all have in common (outside Great Britain) is the weapon at their hip, and the implicit threat of its ultimate use to settle matters.

    Let me acknowledge the obvious: I’m a privileged male Caucasian and I have no idea what it’s like to be a young black man in a mostly black American city where the police are mostly white. Pretty nasty at times, I imagine.

    But I’ve had my share of dealings with police, in the U.S., Canada, and elsewhere in the world, and there is a universal truth: when police demand submission, it’s best to submit. [… – except, you know, when even submission isn’t enough, but I’ll let that stand]

    But as the family of Michael Brown, and so many others in this country have discovered, police are more than enforcers of the law.

    They are enforcers of the status quo that provides their employment and power, and the system they protect has conferred upon them something very close to an immunity, which can be a terrifying reality, especially for underprivileged minorities. […]

    But the Ferguson story, with its pictures of militarized white cops training their combat weaponry at the crowds, has also brought the issue of race and class into awfully sharp relief.

    Everybody, including President Barack Obama and Robert McCullough, the prosecutor who announced the grand jury verdict, agreed something has to be done.

    Obama, who seemed unable to hide his disappointment at the verdict, talked about a system “in which the law too often feels as if it is being applied in discriminatory fashion.”

    But both men offered only bromides about holding a public discussion on accountability. As though that’s going to change anything. […]

    I suspect police here will probably resist the idea, though. Nothing questions authority like hard video evidence.

    The article more or less condemns the rioting in a tone-troll-y way (all this does is create a bad image!!!), and I find it too lukewarm after all. But, it is a white man writing it. So.

    As an aside, Police rules of engagement around the world. With pictures.

    On the terrible death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice: <a href="Tamir Rice shooting: Cleveland to release video of boy shot by police. I can’t even. I don’t know if they feel this will justify the shooting. It certainly didn’t help the police in Kajieme Powell’s shooting. And… a 12-year-old child. Shot. On video. Publicized. I just…

    City police plan to release the names of the two officers involved in the shooting death of a 12-year-old boy, along with dispatch calls and a surveillance video that authorities say clearly shows what happened.

    The evidence and names will be made public at a briefing early Wednesday afternoon. […]

    Police Chief Calvin Williams told Cleveland City Council members at a safety committee hearing Wednesday morning that police will be making the evidence public “so that people can come to their own conclusions.”

    The family’s attorneys saw the video Monday. They later called for the full footage to be released publicly. City officials had withheld the video, saying that it was evidence and that they wanted to be sensitive to the family, the community and the officer, whom they described as distraught.

    Police haven’t discussed what the video shows, but Deputy Chief Edward Tomba said the footage is “very clear” about what occurred.

    He believes a justified shooting, I’m sure. Wow.
    That information may already be out.

  321. rq says

    And the Toronto Star: Ferguson prosecutor under fire over ‘problematic’ grand jury strategy:

    “Our only goal was that our investigation would be thorough and complete, to give the grand jury, the Department of Justice and ultimately the public all available evidence,” McCulloch said in announcing that the jury had found no probable cause to bring Wilson to trial on criminal charges.

    The tactic was a shrewd manoeuvre, legal experts say, in which McCulloch deflected responsibility for his own failure to charge Wilson and — deliberately or not —created conditions in which the grand jury would not be likely to charge him either.

    “This was a strategic and problematic use of a grand jury to get the result he wanted,” said Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., director of the Harvard Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard University. “As a strategic move, it was smart; he got what he wanted without being seen as directly responsible for the result.”

    Sullivan called the case “the most unusual marshaling of a grand jury’s resources I’ve seen in my 25 years as lawyer and scholar.” […]

    Jeffrey Toobin, a legal analyst writing in the New Yorker, accused McCulloch of using the Wilson case for “a document dump, an approach that is virtually without precedent in the law of Missouri or anywhere else.”

    McCulloch said he laid out five possible charges, ranging from involuntary manslaughter to murder, and asked the grand jury to decide whether any of them applied.

    Most tellingly, legal experts said, McCulloch did not challenge officer Wilson’s detailed account of his encounter with Brown. That, they said, prompted jurors to accept at face value Wilson’s testimony that he feared for his life as Brown allegedly charged at him after he punched the officer and tried to grab his gun.

    “A first-year law student would have done a better job of cross-examining” Wilson, said Benjamin Crump, a lawyer for Brown’s family. “When was his credibility ever challenged?”

    McCulloch “allowed Darren Wilson to sit there and give his side of the story,” said Missouri state Sen. Jamilah Nasheed. “But there was no one there to give Michael Brown’s side of the story.” […]

    William Fitzpatrick, president-elect of the National District Attorneys Association, and the district attorney in Syracuse, N.Y., said it is not usual in a police-involved shooting case for a prosecutor to lay out all the evidence and not ask a grand jury for a specific criminal charge.

    “I think — and most of our members think — that Bob did it the right way in this case because he didn’t want to be criticized later by people saying, ‘well, you didn’t put in this or that piece of crucial evidence,”” Fitzpatrick said.

    “Bob went in from day one knowing no matter what he did, there was going to be adverse reaction on both sides. He decided that, before you criticize me, look at the evidence. Here — here it is.” […]

    “There is an enormous disconnect between how the officer describes the events in his car versus the quote injuries he suffered,” said Cohen, the Fordham professor.

    Nor did prosecutors press Wilson on why he got out of his car and pursued Brown if he was afraid that Brown might kill him.

    “He was frightened for his life — that’s what he said,” Cohen said of Wilson. “So why did he get out of the car? Why did he chase Brown? Why didn’t he wait for (police) backup, which he knew was on the way?”

  323. Pteryxx says

    via frogkisser in the MLK thread: LawyersGunsMoneyBlog

    The term “riots” is racist. Yes, this is about Ferguson.

    Last night, our fair-and-just judicial system decided that a White police officer shooting an unarmed Black teen in a town smothered in racism does not warrant a trial. In a community where the major perpetrator of racist violence and injustice are the police, in a community where the legal system doesn’t see this as a big enough issue to even have a trial, the community has little other option than to enact public protest. That protest can get violent, surely. But calling this form of public and sometimes violent disobedience a “riot” is racist. Riot is the term we use for Black protests and the aftermath of drunken sports victories or losses. When White people protest oppressive institutions, we call it revolution. The words we use matter.

    […]

    A heavily armed, militarized police force trying to suppress Black folk as they protest about police brutality against Black folk. Wait, didn’t I already see how this played out in The Hunger Games?

    For Black people to do this, to leave their homes and to publically protest, is scary and brave, because they shoot unarmed Black people in Ferguson. And it doesn’t even warrant a trial. And we call this rioting.

    and from our old friend Crommunist: Violence isn’t the answer, unless I’m asking the question

    The problem, in my eyes, is that the “violence solves nothing” crowd has a broad swath of representation from people with absolutely no connection to the issue. It is the ever-present spectre of respectability politics manifesting itself as a treatise about the merits of violent vs. non-violent protest. It is an excuse to remove one’s self from any sense of responsibility or complicity in the situation that has triggered the violence – “well, I agree that things are bad, but that’s no excuse to be violent!”

    In response to this sneer disguised as a moral stand, I sent out a couple of tweets:

    “Violence never accomplished anything” say people in a country stolen through murder, built by slavery, and secured with war.

    “Looting is wrong” say citizens living on stolen land, built by stolen labour, powered by resources stolen from poor countries.

    Violence and looting are wrong and futile unless you have white skin and a flag. Then they’re manifest destiny and Providence.

  324. Pteryxx says

    Also from Crommunist, as a separate point:

    If the state had just declared that police have the right to murder you and your family in the streets with little or no provocation, that your life is essentially worthless, and your peaceful attempts to redress the situation were not only futile, but actively branded as unjustified anger, then I’ve got to ask: why wouldn’t you riot? What exactly do you lose by rioting? What more can the state take from you? They have your dignity, they have your wealth, and they’ve made it clear they will not hesitate to take your life. What is the incentive not to riot?

  326. Pteryxx says

    Just saw St Louis local rapper and activist T-Dubb-O on MSNBC’s The Ed Show. St Louis police pulled over his car for no reason they’d disclose, put 40-caliber guns to his and his passenger’s heads, and told him to shut up “before they hold a march for you too”. Later he was told the police had been surveilling him and following his car thinking he’s an organizer of the protests. T-Dubb-O’s been receiving death threats from the KKK, which he has reported to local police, for all the good that’s done.

    No links to the segment or transcripts yet; I’ll try to put them up when I find some.

  327. Pteryxx says

    T-Dubb-O:

    T-DUBB-O ‏@TDUBBOHMYGOD

    What I am most surprised at is that most people had no idea these things happen in real life. Yes this is our lives.

    2:45 PM – 26 Nov 2014

  328. rq says

    Pteryxx
    Huh, they probably mistook him for the rapper TefPoe, who has been something of a leader in the activism. I guess them blacks, they all look the same, huh?

  329. rq says

    Mix’n’match of articles and tweets, because holy shit the material and [insert complaint about browser]. Kind of reverse order, kind of not. I’m actually not sure. To the HTML tags!

    From NY Times, Experts Weigh Officer’s Decisions Leading to Fatal Shooting of Michael Brown:

    To many experts, Officer Wilson’s actions in the confrontation with Mr. Brown — as he described them to the grand jury — were within the bounds of standard police protocol. Officer Wilson testified to the grand jury that the two struggled over his service weapon while he was still in his police vehicle, and that later, after a brief chase, he fired the fatal shots at Mr. Brown because the teenager was coming toward him in a threatening way. […]

    From the time Officer Wilson first encountered Mr. Brown walking with a friend in the middle of the street on a hot afternoon in August, to the point the teenager lay dead on the pavement, there were several opportunities to de-escalate the confrontation, said Eugene O’Donnell, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former New York City police officer. Mr. O’Donnell pointed in particular to the initial moments of the confrontation, when the officer and Mr. Brown are said to have struggled through the open window of the officer’s police cruiser.

    “There certainly wouldn’t be a prohibition of him driving a little further along and regrouping, calling for help and thinking about nonlethal weaponry,” Mr. O’Donnell said, referring to Officer Wilson. “Just because you’re a police officer doesn’t mean you have to go into a situation headfirst.”

    Officer Wilson, whose detailed, four-hour grand jury testimony was among the evidence made public this week, contends that he was caught up in a rapidly escalating confrontation that started as a routine police stop and quickly spun out of control. Mr. Brown, he said, essentially pinned him in his police cruiser, holding the door shut while punching him in the face. He said he considered an array of responses, including using pepper spray or his baton, but found them all lacking.
    Continue reading the main story

    “The only option I thought I had was my gun,” he said, according to a transcript of his testimony. [… – if your only option is a lethal weapon as a police officer, you’re doing it wrong]

    In his testimony, Officer Wilson said he never had any thought to fall back, even if only to make a tactical retreat to reassess and perhaps wait for backup officers. Part of the reason is training, experts said. In the heat of a violent altercation, police officers in many cases are trained to engage, not back down. In this case, though, human psychology may also have come into play, said Vincent E. Henry, an expert in the use of force by the police at the Homeland Security Management Institute at Long Island University.

    “To back up and maybe follow him until backup arrived, in retrospect it might have been a better choice, but we don’t know that Officer Wilson saw that as a valid option,” Mr. Henry said. “Who would want to get punched in the face and then kind of say, ‘Let me just back up and follow this individual.’ A natural emotional reaction is to ratchet it up.” […]

    But for some experts, the shooting and the events that preceded it raised broader policy questions, particularly about how officers engage with communities they patrol. In his initial encounter with Mr. Brown and his friend in the street, Officer Wilson never exited his vehicle, voicing commands through the window of his cruiser instead.
    Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story
    Continue reading the main story

    “The notion of riding through neighborhoods yelling, ‘Get up on the curb’ or ‘Get out of the street,’ is not where you want your officers to be,” Mr. Bealefeld said. “You want them out of their cars, engaging the public and explaining to people what it is you are trying to do. Drive-by policing is not good for any community.”

    Some live updates of protests around the country = Ferguson grand jury decision divides America LIVE UPDATES. LOOK AT ALL THE PEACEFUL PROTESTING.

    LA Times – LAPD arrests more than 120 Ferguson protesters in downtown L.A.:

    “I would hope that any future protests, people will think about the need to do it legally,” Beck said. “I think that there is sympathy for the point of view of these folks, but I think that sympathy is waning as they infringe on other people’s rights.”

    Before the arrests, the crowd had been heading toward Staples Center, after spending several hours marching to LAPD headquarters and the county’s main jail, frequently halting traffic.

    “We see you,” some chanted, as they walked past the Twin Towers Correctional Facility, an apparent reference to the protesters arrested Tuesday night being held inside.

    When protesters reached Cesar Chavez Avenue and Vignes Street, officers with hands on their batons blocked the way toward the Twin Towers Correctional Facility. Sirens blared in the background and a helicopter’s searchlight flashed on protesters chanting and standing in the intersection.

    “Free the protesters, kill killer cops,” they yelled.

    But rather than chant, Ray Spears, a resident of Eagle Rock, opted to strike up a conversation with a nearby officer. When the 25-year-old told the officer he was a Christian, the officer responded that he was too.

    “I think that all human beings are made in the image of God, and we have civil rights, human rights,” Spears said.

    “Hey man, we’re on the same page,” the officer responded.

    When Spears held out his fist for a fist bump, the officer raised his hands, he was holding a baton.

    “I would if I could right now,” the officer told him. Spears called the conversation “a little glimmer of hope.”

    Interesting stories of interaction and misunderstanding and… rowdy protesting?
    Here’s a tweet with pictures – Fuckery in L.A. .

    UMSL Criminology professor questions Ferguson PD’s handling of evidence – he’s not the only one, either.

    News 4 is learning more about the moments after Michael Brown was shot and the apparent mistakes made in the investigation. According to the grand jury transcripts, investigators failed to follow some standard procedures, according University of Missouri St. Louis criminology professor David Klinger.

    “It is rare to see this many failures in the first moments in the wake of an officer involved shooting,” Kilinger said.

    Klinger has reviewed hundreds of officer involved shootings. After the shooting, Darren Wilson told the grand jury that he drove himself back to the police station but his injuries and blood on his gun and uniform were evidence that needed to be supervised and controlled. Klinger says a supervisor should have driven him.

    “The notion of an officer leaving the scene by himself- I was stunned,” he said. “There’s no excuse for that.”

    Wilson also had blood on his hands from the altercation with Brown but told the grand jury he washed it off before it was photographed or a sample was taken.

    “We need to get the investigators in there as quickly as possible so that we can collect that blood evidence,” Klinger said. “Whose blood is it? Where did it come from and what’s the pattern of that blood? It needs to be photographed.”

    Lab tests showed Michael Brown’s blood on Officer Wilson’s gun. But it was Wilson himself who put it in an evidence bag, not a supervisor who could ensure the integrity of the chain of custody. Klinger says this was the Ferguson Police Department’s first deadly officer-involved shooting.

    “It’s not Darren Wilson’s fault, it’s the fault of the Ferguson Police Department that they didn’t have their supervisors trained on what should happen.”

  330. rq says

    Here’s What These High School Students Had To Say About Events In Ferguson:

    Rademacher, who teaches English at a school composed primarily of students of color, wrote down his students’ reactions to the events, and later tweeted the students’ remarks with the hashtag #FergusonInClass. He said many of his students identified with Brown, who had just finished high school at the time of his death and was unarmed.

    “In almost every class, the conversation turned very, very quickly away from the specifics of the Ferguson case and toward how much of this is reflected in their reality and their day-to-day lives and stuff they had seen and experienced — a lot of students commenting that this could so easily be them or their little brother or sister,” said Rademacher.

    Overall, though, Rademacher says, his students’ sentiments did not reflect anger — unlike many of the reactions he has heard outside his classroom.

    “I heard a lot of pain and I heard a lot of hope and a lot of hopelessness actually. Sometimes from the same kid at the same time,” said Rademacher. “But I didn’t hear a lot of anger.”

    The article concludes with a series of rather heartbreaking tweets from these conversations.

    The Great Police Violence Cover-Up:

    The story of the various failed national efforts to compile and release such data [on police use of excessive force]—or to obtain any reliable numbers on violence by police officers at all—is just another dimension of an issue that Monday’s grand-jury decision threw into relief: a sense that police departments across the country are simply not held accountable enough. Whatever the particular circumstances that led a grand jury to decline to indict Darren Wilson, police officers are typically given the benefits of all doubts in the use of force and are rarely prosecuted, criminologists and other experts say. And because a substantial portion of these alleged police abuses of law and justice appear to be directed against blacks and other minorities in certain communities—not the white-dominated power structure in their own communities—it rarely becomes a notable issue, at least until a Michael Brown-type killing provokes enough violence and outrage in the streets for the TV cameras to pay attention.

    All we have is anecdote, rumor and innuendo of the kind that came out after a grand jury declined to indict Wilson in the Aug. 9 shooting of Brown. Statistically, it is rare for a police officer to be indicted, much less convicted, for the use of violence. According to Bowling Green University professor Philip Stinson—who recently submitted a research project funded by the Justice Department’s National Institute of Justice (NIJ) titled “Police Integrity Lost: A Study of Law Enforcement Officers Arrested”—in the seven years from 2005 to 2011 there were only 59 arrests of on-duty police on charges of aggravated assault with a gun recorded in the entire country. Of those, only 13 resulted in convictions. Why so few? “Police work is by nature violent, and the on-duty violence of police officers is rarely regarded as criminal—even when it is,” says Stinson.

    Stinson says he was able to compile these numbers only through the sophisticated use of Google’s news search engine, bypassing unreliable and tightly held police department data. Little else exists in the way of truly national data. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program collects data from the roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the country to compile statistics about crime and law enforcement, and yet here too police departments are not required to submit data on what they consider to be justifiable homicides by officers.

    But given the average number of dubious shootings in any given year—most recently the killing of a 12-year-old boy wielding a BB gun in Cleveland—many criminologists say it’s clear that there is a serious problem, especially in minority neighborhoods, that has not been quantified. “If there’s smoke, there must be fire there,” says Sam Walker, an expert on police accountability at the University of Nebraska.

    SWAT team and pepper spray deployed on protestors at St. Louis City Hall

    The protestors had stopped at City Hall as part of their march around the downtown area, which started at 10:30 a.m. Wednesday. After being denied entrance into the building, protestors sat down on the steps and chanted, “No justice, no peace.” Ten minutes later, law enforcement from the Sheriff’s Office and St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department formed a semi-circle around the protest site. Shortly after, SWAT police in riot gear marched across the street from the St. Louis Police building. They then formed a line on the street in front of City Hall.

    Snow fell as several people yelled, “We are not unlawful.” The group of about 100 people included elders, infants and young children.

    Remember that guy throwing fake blood? 225 YEARS? 225 FUCKING YEARS FOR THROWING *PAINT* ON A COP AND DARREN WILSON WALKS FREE?

    Some positive news, fora change – Ferguson Woman Gets More Than $170,000 In Donations To Rebuild Beloved Bakery

    Natalie Dubose, a single mother of two young children, poured her life savings into her dream of opening a bakery in Ferguson, Missouri this June. This week, amid the Monday night protests that overtook the town, Natalie’s Cakes & More saw its windows smashed in, glass and debris ruining baking supplies, and marring the storefront she had invested so much time and money in.

    But her story took a twist after a couple of strangers asked how they might be able to make a donation to help rebuild. In short order, two GoFundMe pages (which have now been consolidated to one) popped up with a goal of raising $20,000.

    And now, on the eve of Thanksgiving, Natalie’s Cakes & More has received more than $170,000 in donations from thousands of well-wishers, and its Facebook page is overrun with messages of support from all over the nation: Ohio, Minnesota, Florida, New York, Arizona, South Carolina, to name a few, and even one from Amsterdam.

    “It’s just been totally overwhelming,” Dubose told BuzzFeed News on a brief break from baking cakes and filling orders for the busy Thanksgiving weekend. “I’m just grateful. Grateful is the only word I can describe feeling right now.”

    ♥

  331. rq says

    More on that young man found dead in his car – Police identify man found after Ferguson car fire:

    Joshua’s body was found Tuesday morning at the wheel of a 2004 Pontiac parked near the apartment complex where Brown was killed. He had severe burns, and an autopsy determined that Joshua was shot once in the head.

    Ferguson grand jury witnesses often cited fear in testifying:

    But the documents do provide a look at what some witnesses went through as they wrestled with the fallout of witnessing a controversial killing.

    Some feared saying something that would upset neighbors if it did not match other witness accounts.

    “You never know how people react to certain things,” testified one man, who did not speak to police until 13 days after Brown’s death but whose version of events bolstered the view that Brown had his hands up and was not posing a threat when Wilson shot him.

    Some were so distrustful of police that they did not offer information until investigators knocked on their doors.

    “You can’t say no to an FBI agent,” one woman told prosecutors after agents showed up at her apartment in the Canfield Green complex, which overlooks the scene of the killing. “I’ve seen the Ferguson police do some really awful things,” she added, explaining why she had told her boyfriend what she saw but not law enforcement. […]

    One of the first witnesses the grand jury heard from was Dorian Johnson, who was walking alongside Brown when Wilson rolled up beside them. Johnson described running in fear as shots rang out and then being scared to tell what he knew to the Ferguson police, even as he mingled in the growing crowd outside Canfield Green that day.

    “I was so afraid, I didn’t know what was going to happen to me,” Johnson said. “I basically just didn’t, really didn’t feel comfortable with Ferguson at the time,” said Johnson, who was not alone in his reluctance to speak with investigators.
    cComments

    On Oct. 23, more than two months into the jury’s proceedings, prosecutors told them that some witnesses did not want to talk.

    “The light is at the end of the tunnel so to speak,” Kathi Alizadeh, one of the attorneys presenting evidence, told jurors as she expressed hope their work would be done by mid-November. But she said there were about 15 eyewitnesses or other people with potentially valuable information still to question, and some were resisting.

    “Some of them have frankly said there is no way I’m coming in, no way I’m going to testify,” Alizadeh told the jury. In those cases, she said the only option was to serve them with subpoenas. “But if you knock on the door and nobody answers, we have no right, you know, to kick in the door,” she said. […]

    Even witnesses whose accounts bolstered many of their neighbors’ statements that Brown died with his hands up after being chased by Wilson expressed fear of saying the wrong thing, a sign of the pressure they felt to not do or say anything that could be construed as helping the police.

    That weighed on the mind of a man who said he had watched much of the action unfold from his balcony, and who later grew to fear both the Klan and some of his own neighbors. “I’m shaking and I’m nervous right now and I’m scared, you know,” said the witness, who testified that Brown “might have been punching” Wilson through his car window, but that Wilson shot Brown in the back. (Neither autopsy report presented to the jurors, however, indicated Brown was shot in the back.)

    A man who was at the apartment complex and had a different version also expressed unease at speaking to investigators. That witness, who described Brown as charging toward Wilson, said he felt uncomfortable walking into the Ferguson police station “past all the protesting going on,” but felt it was his duty to tell what he had seen.

    Investigators also faced the challenge of witnesses who would allude to what others had said, and who appeared to be swayed by their accounts. Others seemed afraid of giving an answer that would not satisfy those asking the questions.

    Oh, here’s video of protestors storming St Louis City Hall and being dangerous.

    Another bit of positive news – Ferguson library stays open, attracts over $175,000 in grassroot support:

    The money donated so far adds up to almost half of the library’s annual budget of about $400,000, and Bonner said he hoped it would allow him to hire another full-time librarian to work with children and programming. The independent library, which has its own tax levy, serves about 21,000 residents with one full-time librarian (Bonner) and 12 part-time staff members. It relies heavily on volunteers to help with programs. […]

    On Wednesday morning, about a dozen adults were in the building, most using computers. A BBC reporter sat in the children’s section typing on her laptop. The library wasn’t offering “school” because it wasn’t a day that public schools had suddenly canceled classes. As snow fell later in the day, more people arrived. Most of them were African-American, who make up the majority of patrons, Bonner said.

    The library drew students every day for the week in August that it offered teachers with lesson plans geared to help specific ages. That week, the First Baptist Church down the road offered overflow space as library attendance grew. The Ferguson-Florissant School District had delayed opening school because of continuing protests after Brown’s death Aug. 9.

    LA Times again – 183 arrested during Ferguson protests in downtown L.A.. That’s a lot of arrests.

  332. rq says

    Blockquote fail, but I hope it’s clear.

    Ferguson grand jury papers full of inconsistencies

    An Associated Press review of thousands of pages of grand jury documents reveals numerous examples of statements made during the shooting investigation that were inconsistent, fabricated or provably wrong. For one, the autopsies ultimately showed Brown was not struck by any bullets in his back.

    Prosecutors exposed these inconsistencies before the jurors, which likely influenced their decision not to indict Wilson in Brown’s death.

    Bob McCulloch, the St. Louis County prosecutor, said the grand jury had to weigh testimony that conflicted with physical evidence and conflicting statements by witnesses as it decided whether Wilson should face charges. […]

    What people thought were facts about the Aug. 9 shooting have become intertwined with what many see as abuses of power and racial inequality in America.

    And media coverage of the shooting’s aftermath made it into the grand jury proceedings. Before some witnesses testified, prosecutors showed jurors clips of the same people making statements on TV.

    Their inconsistencies began almost immediately after the shooting, from people in the neighborhood, the friend walking with Brown during the encounter and even one woman who authorities suggested probably wasn’t even at the scene at the time.

    Jurors also were presented with dueling versions from Wilson and Dorian Johnson, who was walking with Brown during the Aug. 9 confrontation. Johnson painted Wilson as provoking the violence, while Wilson said Brown was the aggressor. […]

    Another woman testified that she saw Brown leaning through the officer’s window “from his navel up,” with his hand moving up and down, as if he were punching the officer. But when the same witness returned to testify again on another day, she said she suffers from mental disorder, has racist views and that she has trouble distinguishing the truth from things she had read online.

    Prosecutors suggested the woman had fabricated the entire incident and was not even at the scene the day of the shooting.

    Michael Brown’s mother tearful for Thanksgiving without son (autoplay video) –

    Part 1 – Lesley McSpadden, the mother of Michael Brown, talks with Rev. Al Sharpton about her disappointment in the grand jury’s decision not to indict the police officer who killed her son, the family’s next steps, President Obama’s reaction to the decision, what Michael Brown was like, and her first Thanksgiving since Brown’s death.

    Slight shift to Minneapolis, No Charges for Driver Who Plowed Into Protesters in Minneapolis :

    You can see in the above video, captured by a local news crew, that the driver, Jeffrey Patrick Rice of St. Paul, drove directly into a crowd of protesters and ran over the legs of the girl, who reportedly suffered a leg injury. According to news reports, Rice, 40, stopped not far from the scene and called 911.

    Here’s the only information the MPD would offer, from a police report (emphasis ours): “The victim‘s vehicle was damaged by a large group of people. While he was attempting to flee from the mob, he struck a pedestrian.”

    So there you have it. The “victim” in this case was not the 16-year-old girl whose legs were crushed under a car, but the driver of said car. Looking at the video, it seems like the police have scrambled the order of events to exonerate the assailant. A “mob” doesn’t form around the vehicle until after the driver intentionally plowed through people.

    Yes, the victim here, let us all remember, is the driver who decided to plow into protestors. I hope this isn’t a thing that catches on.

    Tweet with comparative photo: This is the epitome of “what the fuck”.

    [VIDEO] Ferguson Makes Black Friday Protests Different This Year

    “Our campaign is separate from the Walmart protest but we stand in solidarity and support their efforts,” wrote Mike Latt* in an e-mail to Colorlines. Latt is president of marketing for Blackout for Human Rights, which is leading a national social media (#BlackOutBlackFriday) and offline campaign to boycott stores this Friday. Latt told Forbes that the nonprofit, formed by “Fruitvale Station” director Ryan Coogler, wants to, “encourage those sick of the status quo to spend their Black Friday doing something more useful than shopping.”

    Audio at the link.

    Nixon: No special prosecutor in Darren Wilson case:

    “It seems clear from the beginning of the proceedings that the prosecution quite unusually adopted a defense stance, injecting the idea of justified homicide into the process well before Wilson testified,” Quinn said. “Prosecutors also served as quasi-witnesses by essentially testifying about facts outside of the existing record and vouching for police processes.”

    Quinn also felt jurors were presented “both inaccurate and confusing information about the law and how it was to be applied to the facts.”

    But Scott Holste, the governor’s spokesman, said Nixon would not bring in a special prosecutor.

    Quinn suggested in the statement that the St. Louis County Circuit Court could appoint a special prosecutor for the case.

    That’s the end of that for Nixon, I suppose – McCullogh did a fine job, no need to prolong things unnecessarily, right???

  333. rq says

    Nice chart here: What do the newly released witness statements tell us about the Michael Brown shooting? Really nice chart.

    We read and analyzed more than 500 pages of witness testimony and compared each statement to those given by Wilson. Below is a chart comparing several key details of the officer’s report to the witness statements. Was Brown facing Wilson when he was shot, or was his back turned to him? Did Brown have his hands in the air, or were they reaching toward his waist? […]

    The chart above doesn’t reveal who was right or wrong about what happened that day, but it is a clear indication that perceptions and memories can vary dramatically.

    Here’s a breakdown of the data we found:

    More than 50 percent of the witnesses said that Michael Brown held his hands up when Darren Wilson shot him. (16 out of 29)
    Only five witnesses said that Brown reached toward his waist during the confrontation leading up to Wilson shooting him to death.
    More than half of the witnesses said that Brown was running away from Wilson when the police officer opened fire on the 18-year-old, while fewer than one-fifth of witnesses indicated that was not the case.
    There was an even split among witnesses who said whether or not Wilson fired upon Brown when the 18-year-old had already collapsed onto the ground.
    Only six witnesses said that Brown was kneeling when Wilson opened fire on him. More than half of the witnesses did not mention whether or not Brown was kneeling.

    Very good link, this one. Just in terms of visible testimony – it helps to clarify and compare and contrast.

    Another one of this type: Prosecutors grossly mishandled the Darren Wilson investigation:

    And while a good grand jury investigation could have given grand jurors all the facts, it wouldn’t have done it in the way St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch’s team did.

    In a proper grand-jury hearing, the grand jury is told from the outset that their job is not to try to determine the truth, once and for all, of what happened. That’s what a subsequent trial is for. But the prosecutors told Darren Wilson’s grand jury that was exactly what they were supposed to do — to “try to figure out what really happened,” as one of McCulloch’s assistants said during the grand jury hearings.
    Jurors should be told at the outset of the investigation that their job is to decide whether there was probable cause that a crime was committed — in the case of a police officer shooting, a grand jury would need to find probable cause that the officer did not “reasonably believe” that the victim posed a threat at the time of the shooting. Instead, as late as November 11 — nearly three months into the grand-jury process — St. Louis County prosecutors told grand jurors that they didn’t know whether probable cause was the standard for evaluating Wilson’s defense, or whether there was a standard more favorable to Wilson, like proving beyond a reasonable doubt that he hadn’t had a reasonable belief of threat. (Jurors were told on November 21, the penultimate day of hearings, that probable cause was in fact the standard.) And their final instructions were muddied with phrases like “we have to prove a negative.”
    In grand jury proceedings, it’s not unheard of for jurors to be presented with evidence that would help the suspect’s case (even though that’s not typical). And grand jurors sometimes have to deal with media leaks. But, when this happens, it’s commonplace for prosecutors to ask grand jurors to ignore the media if possible. Instead of doing this, — and even though McCulloch believed, as he said on Monday, that the media was spreading misinformation about the case — his team encouraged grand jurors to do outside research and share it with the rest of the jury.
    A grand jury doesn’t have to cross-examine or closely question witnesses. And Darren Wilson’s grand jury didn’t do that. But a fair prosecutor would have been honest about that when presenting the grand jury’s findings to the press. Instead, McCulloch’s statement on Monday implied that the grand jury had rigorously questioned all witnesses, and tried to square their accounts with each other when they testified — and that the grand jury’s analysis had led them to conclude that some witnesses were, in McCulloch’s words, “making it up.”

    More at the link.

    Riot as the Language of the Unheard: Ferguson Protests Set to Continue In Fight For Racial Justice – with video, and transcript of video.

    Adam Lee at Patheos – The Fallout in Ferguson, Continued:

    The grand jury proceeding was ludicrously slanted, a rigged system in all its raw and ugly detail. The prosecutor, Robert McCulloch, made an extraordinary decision to not recommend any specific charge, instead dumping thousands of pages of evidence on the jurors and inviting them to figure it out for themselves. The officer who fired the deadly shots, Darren Wilson, was invited to testify in his own defense, which is unheard of for a grand jury; and as if that weren’t enough, the prosecutor helped him out with sympathetic, friendly questions, offering explanations for why his story might have changed and never pressing him to explain the numerous inconsistencies between his testimony and other evidence (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). Other interviews were equally farcical, like the medical examiner who testified that she didn’t take any photos of Mike Brown’s body lying in the street because “My battery in my camera died“, or the prosecutor who referred to Wilson, not Mike Brown, as “the victim“.

    After the grand jury’s decision, McCulloch held a press conference in which he argued for the rightness of the result, sounding more like a lawyer for the defense than the prosecutor he is. Remember, McCulloch was supposed to be trying to get the grand jury to issue charges against someone he wanted to put on trial. Technically, this result means he lost. But you’d never have guessed that from his strutting, triumphal press conference. It’s spectacularly rare for a grand jury not to indict – in 2010, it happened in just 11 out of 162,000 cases – and given the state’s behavior, it’s more than reasonable to conclude that they didn’t get an indictment because they never wanted one.

    Last but certainly not least, there’s Darren Wilson himself. On the stand, he claimed that Mike Brown looked like a “demon“, violently attacked and punched him for no reason, told him “You’re too much of a pussy to shoot me“, then suicidally charged him through a hail of bullets. This wildly implausible story invokes the old, enduring racist specter of animalistic, irrationally violent black men. […]

    I don’t condone the riots and violence that happened in Ferguson, regardless of who’s at fault. But I recognize that the people marching there are human beings. It’s obscene to expect them to be peaceful forever, to be patient forever, to bear the weight of every insult and injustice heaped upon them with passivity and meekness. No less a figure than Martin Luther King Jr. said that riots are “the language of the unheard” – the desperate cry of people who’ve been denied all peaceful avenues for redress, whose calls for justice have been met with scorn and hostility at every turn. It’s the response of those who feel that society has failed them so badly that they have nothing left to lose.

    The police are telling the arrested protesters that they are holding them until the protesting stops (or Monday). We will protest MORE! Whoa, can they do that?

    Albuquerque: Protesters march on Central Avenue, sit in silence

    Albuquerque protesters gathered at Central Avenue and San Mateo Boulevard, blocking traffic beginning at around 6:30 p.m. They took over one lane on Central and headed west, continuing to block traffic, police said.

    The demonstrators sat down on Central near Yale Boulevard for a 4-minute silent vigil for Brown.

    One man burned an American flag.

  334. rq says

    Shift over to Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old ‘young man’.
    12 year old #TamirRice was shot and killed in #Cleveland. and this is how the local media decided to spin it (because a parent’s past run-ins with the police have bearing on the fact that the child is shot by police);

    “He shouldn’t have been playing with a toy gun.” But… Check out the pictures.

    TRIGGER WARNING FOR THE NEXT FOUR
    Tamir Rice Police Shooting

    Published on Nov 26, 2014

    Authorities have released the video of an officer-involved shooting in which 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot and killed outside the Cudell Recreation Center for having a toy gun.

    It’s a 30 second video. Think about that. A 30 second video.
    And here’s the Daily Beast on that: Cop Immediately Killed 12-Year-Old Boy. Yes. They pull up, and he pretty much shoots as he exits the car. I don’t know whether the authorities believe there is anything justified in that shooting. But holy non-existent gods of all that is vengeful.
    And Buzzfeed on the story – Cleveland Police Kill 12-Year-Old Boy Seconds After Responding To Toy Gun Disturbance. Rice family statement:

    “We have seen the video that shows our son, Tamir, being shot and killed by a City of Cleveland police officer. It is our belief that this situation could have been avoided and that Tamir should still be here with us.

    The video shows one thing distinctly: the police officers reacted quickly. It is our hope that the City of Cleveland Division of Police and the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office thoroughly examine the events outside of the Cudell Recreation Center on Nov. 22, 2014.

    Again, we ask for the community to remain calm. Please protest peacefully and responsibly. Your prayers, kind words and condolences have meant so much to us.

    We understand that some of you are hurt, angry and sad about our loss. But let’s use those emotions in a way that will contribute to positive efforts and solutions that bring change to Cleveland, Northeast Ohio and cities across the nation as it relates to how law enforcement officials interact with citizens of color.

    We thank the City of Cleveland Division of Police for making the video public. We will await the results of their investigation.”

    Washington Post – Video shows Cleveland officer shooting 12-year-old Tamir Rice within seconds:

    The video’s release comes after days of protests in Cleveland, centered on Tamir’s death and also responding to the grand jury decision in the shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson by a white officer.

    Loehmann is white, according to public records. Officer Frank Garmback, 46, drove the patrol car. Both have been placed on administrative leave, under department policy.
    This undated photo provided by the family’s attorney shows Tamir Rice. Rice, 12, was fatally shot by police in Cleveland after brandishing what turned out to be a replica gun, triggering an investigation into his death and a legislator’s call for such weapons to be brightly colored or bear special markings. (AP Photo/Courtesy Richardson & Kucharski Co., L.P.A.)
    An undated photo of Tamir Rice. (Courtesy Richardson & Kucharski Co. via AP)

    “The release of this video is in no means an effort to try and explain the actions of the division of police or of the young man,” Deputy Police Chief Edward Tomba said at a news conference Wednesday — hours after about 200 people protesting the fatal shooting blocked traffic on a busy Cleveland street. “We are honoring the wishes of the family in releasing this and also in the spirit of being open and fair with our community.”

  335. rq says

    And to drive the point home, Open Carry Texas Invades Art Festival, Brings Armed Kids!. You know how many kids got shot? NONE!!!
    For those suggesting that a parent’s criminal history somehow exonerates the police shooting a 12-year-old, I say: “Go fuck yourself.”

    Why exactly did the police lie for 108 days about how far Mike Brown ran from Darren Wilson?:

    Privately, I asked every member of the mainstream media I knew to consider covering it and they refused—this includes CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and more. I explained that I didn’t care if they pretended like they came up with the story, that I didn’t want any credit for it, but that such a major discrepancy from what their were outlets were reporting as fact should be addressed.

    Finally, on Wednesday Nov. 1, I found a photo taken on Aug. 10, less than 24 hours after the shooting, of Mike Brown’s family members standing on the blood-soaked concrete where he was killed. In the background of that photo was an indisputable street number on the building directly behind them. Seeing it renewed my desire, two months after first discovering the lie, to give it one last push.

    I asked journalists from Argus News to film themselves making the measurement from where Wilson’s SUV was to where Brown’s family was in the new photo and we discovered that it was 148 feet. After I published the article, we realized that the measurement was incorrectly made from where Brown’s head was, and not his feet. Thus, he was actually probably 154 feet away when he was killed. Still, the police refused to acknowledge or comment on the matter and several members of the St. Louis media wrote me publicly and privately to tell me I was wrong and that Brown was indeed killed 35 feet from Wilson’s SUV. […]

    The lead detective in the case saying he walked “50 times” back and forth from the SUV to Mike Brown’s body,stated to the grand jury that he measured from Darren Wilson’s SUV window to Mike Brown’s feet and that it was actually 160 feet, 4 inches.

    The thing is, though, I don’t really see any of this as vindication. The police still lied about it for 108 days, and they absolutely refused to clarify it for the media as they advanced the lie on their own behalf. The grand jury documents revealed that the medical examiner who arrived on the crime scene didn’t even bother to take measurements or photos because he, literally, thought it didn’t matter. [… – in Wilson’s testimony, he mentions that Michael only runs a short distance – while 100+ feet isn’t far, it’s certainly a lot farther than Wilson would have us believe]

    If Wilson and the police will tell this lie, so boldly and so publicly, we must ask why. If they will tell this lie, one of fact and math, not of opinion, why do they deserve the benefit of the doubt with every other detail they claim to be the truth in this case?

    Ultimately, this case should’ve gone to trial, where these claims could be cross-examined and debunked by a truly concerned attorney. But Brown’s family, and all citizens who care for justice, were denied this opportunity.

    The fight for truth in this case must continue. We cannot allow these lies to be told and for this injustice to be accepted on our watch.

    Another good read from Shaun King.

    Some comic relief. Sneak peek of tomorrow’s New York Times. Ha, ha.

    Canadians rally in solidarity with Ferguson: A list of vigils across Canada. Check it out for a possible location near you, Canadians!

    PHOTOS: Rallies held across Los Angeles to protest Ferguson decision .

  336. rq says

    Internationally, London, England – London is latest city to see protests as Ferguson dismay spreads. Ferguson dismay, yes. :P

    The protests weren’t just in the United States. Some were in Canada, and hundreds turned out Wednesday in London — starting outside the U.S. Embassy before spreading elsewhere in the English city.

    Waving placards that read “Justice for Michael Brown,” “Solidarity with Ferguson” and “Black Lives Matter,” protesters held candles in the chilly November drizzle in Grosvenor Square.

    The speakers included Carole Duggan, whose nephew Mark was shot dead by police in 2011, sparking days of riots in London and other cities across England. Marcia Rigg, whose brother Sean died in police custody in London in 2008, said “institutional racism” was a global problem.

    “We need change,” Rigg said. “There needs to be a political will to change, a political will for justice.”

    There’s also a list of American cities where protesting has occurred.

    Ferguson Protest Brings Parts Of Central London To A Standstill:

    The initial embassy event was organised by the London Black Revs, NUS Black students Campaign, Black Activists Rising Against Cuts (BARAC), and Defend The Right To Protest (DTRTP).

    The organisers stressed their solidarity with demonstrators in Ferguson, saying: “In the same year that Mark Duggan’s murder was deemed lawful, and where the USA’s ongoing war on Black people has been defined by a string of killings of Black men by police, it is as important as ever to affirm solidarity between our people across borders.”
    […]

    After speeches at the embassy demonstration concluded, the protest turned into an unplanned march through central London, blocking traffic as protestors filled the capital’s streets.

    Pictures at the link, and twitter photos here: photo 1, photo 2, photo 3.

  337. rq says

    Rumours and rumours: BackStoppers not associated with Darren Wilson fundraiser

    The outdated information on the BackStoppers site lists St. Louis Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce as board president. She is now the immediate past president of the organization, but worked over the weekend to get Backstoppers to provide an official response.

    “Contrary to recent posts on social media, BackStoppers is not participating in nor has benefited from any fundraising activity involving the Ferguson matter,” BackStoppers stated Monday morning in a release provided by Joyce. “We scrutinize our contributions and if we receive funds involving the Ferguson matter, those funds would be rejected by the Board of Directors.”

    Joyce told The American her office had determined that BackStoppers has received no money from the sale of these T-shirts. She said that Teespring, the site that hosted the fundraising account, would not divulge who set up this account without legal action.

    SURE, rub their faces in it!!! King to Obama: Invite Wilson to White House. Maybe he will, considering his condemnation of the rioting!

    “I think it would be very helpful if President Obama went and met with the police officer, or at least invited him to the White House,” King said on Fox Business Network.

    “And say, ‘you’ve gone through four months of smear and slander and the least we can do is tell you that it is unfortunate that it happened and thank you for doing your job.'”

    Reflecting on Obama’s speech last night, King said he thought the President’s remarks were “lackluster.”

    “I wish he said one good word about the police — one good word about Officer Wilson who had gone through all this,” King said, noting that the controversy affected both the defense and the prosecution. […]

    “I thought it was terrible what happened over the last four months where this narrative was put out by our national leaders and by many in the media presuming that the police officer was guilty,” King said. “And I think if we are going to have peace, I think it’s important for both sides to be honest here.”

    Uh-oh – AR-15 rifle stolen from St. Louis County police car torched by rioters in Ferguson:

    Sgt. Brian Schellman said rioters who torched a county police car about 10 p.m. in the 400 block of South Florissant Road yanked out the high-powered police rifle and the rack in which it was stored. At least one other county police car was set on fire Monday night.

    The rifle was still missing late Wednesday night. Schellman said the rifle is the only county police weapon taken since protests and violence erupted after Monday night’s announcement of the grand jury’s decision in the Michael Brown shooting.

    NBC – Michael Brown’s Parents ‘Taken Aback’ by Darren Wilson’s ‘Clean Conscience’. ‘Taken aback’ is probably mild wording. And have I said how much his face creeps me out? Granted, I’m heavily biased against, but maaan that is one cool cat.

    Benjamin Crump, a lawyer for the Brown family, said today the parents have been doing media interviews in New York and he said it is hard “listening to them break down over and over again” as they discuss Wilson’s comments about their son.

    “It was very hurtful to the parents when he said he had a clear conscience… They were taken back… They thought he had no regard for their child,” Crump said.

    Well guess what, I bet he didn’t, not one little bit of any kind of regard for their child.

    In the interview with ABC News, Wilson said, “I’m sorry that their son lost his life. It wasn’t the intention of that day. It’s what occurred that day. And there’s no … nothing you could say that’s going to make a parent feel better.”

    YOU COULD MAYBE APOLOGIZE THAT YOU FUCKING SHOT HIM. Instead of spitting out stock phrases about parental grief. *spits*

    Dallas – Protesters arrested after marching onto I-35:

    About 200 protesters gathered outside the police department headquarters Tuesday night and then marched north on Lamar Street into downtown Dallas, eventually marching onto the interstate. Eight were arrested, Dallas police said.

    Police closed northbound lanes of I-35 near Commerce as protesters sat down on the road. Just after 10 p.m. police were seen arresting those who refused to leave, using zip ties as handcuffs. Just before 10:30 the protesters left and headed back toward DPD headquarters.

    Donate to the Legal Support Fund for Justice for Mike Brown. Probably going to repeat link this one every now and then.

  338. rq says

    Barack Obama, Ferguson, and the Evidence of Things Unsaid:

    Barack Obama is an earnest moderate. His instincts seem to lead him to the middle ground. For instance, he genuinely believes that there is more overlap between liberals and conservatives than generally admitted. On Monday he nodded toward the “deep distrust” that divides black and brown people from the police, and then pointed out that this was tragic because these are the communities most in need of “good policing.” Whatever one makes of this pat framing, it is not a cynical centrism—he believes in the old wisdom of traditional America. This is his strength. This is his weakness. But Obama’s moderation is as sincere and real as his blackness, and the latter almost certainly has granted him more knowledge of his country than he generally chooses to share.

    In the case of Michael Brown, this is more disappointing than enraging. The genre of Obama race speeches has always been bounded by the job he was hired to do. Specifically, Barack Obama is the president of the United States of America. More specifically, Barack Obama is the president of a congenitally racist country, erected upon the plunder of life, liberty, labor, and land. This plunder has not been exclusive to black people. But black people, the community to which both Michael Brown and Barack Obama belong, have the distinct fortune of having survived in significant numbers. For a creedal country like America, this poses a problem—in nearly every major American city one can find a population of people whose very existence, whose very history, whose very traditions, are an assault upon this country’s nationalist instincts. Black people are the chastener of their own country. Their experience says to America, “You wear the mask.” […]
    What cannot be said is that America does not really believe in nonviolence—Barack Obama has said as much—so much as it believes in order. What cannot be said is that there are very convincing reasons for black people in Ferguson to be nonviolent. But those reasons emanate from an intelligent fear of the law, not a benevolent respect for the law.

    The fact is that when the president came to the podium on Monday night there actually was very little he could say. His mildest admonitions of racism had only earned him trouble. If the American public cannot stomach the idea that arresting a Harvard professor for breaking into his own home is “stupid,” then there is virtually nothing worthwhile that Barack Obama can say about Michael Brown.

    And that is because the death of all of our Michael Browns at the hands of people who are supposed to protect them originates in a force more powerful than any president: American society itself. This is the world our collective American ancestors wanted. This is the world our collective grandparents made. And this is the country that we, the people, now preserve in our fantastic dream. What can never be said is that the Fergusons of America can be changed—but, right now, we lack the will to do it.

    Perhaps one day we won’t, and maybe that is reason to hope. Hope is what Barack Obama promised to bring, but he was promising something he could never bring. Hope is not the naiveté that would change the face on a racist system and then wash its hands of its heritage. Hope is not feel-goodism built on the belief in unicorns. Martin Luther King had hope, but it was rooted in years of study and struggle, not in looking the other way. Hope is not magical. Hope is earned.

    More at the link.

    Police probe man’s death in area near Ferguson protests.

    Okay, and this kind of advice is frightening to the core – Katrina General: If Riots Can’t Be Controlled, ‘Next Step’ is Insurrection Act. Because what the region needs most is more military-like authority, RIGHT?

    Speaking with CNN on Tuesday, retired Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honoré said local authorities’ inability to halt violent protests in Missouri may require military action from the federal government should the civil disobedience continue.

    “I think police are in the city unlike Ferguson and St. Louis that have mobilized National Guard and backup troops, they’re dealing with shift officers who are probably working overtime,” Honoré said. “It takes a lot of patience on the police’s part to understand that civil disobedience by itself is to force the police to take actions. So the people stand in the street, and if it can be done in a safe way, sometimes it’s best to observe that as long as it doesn’t go violent.”

    Honoré said that if a “political conclusion” is not reached soon than the federal government should review possible action.

    Another from London: Huge crowd march with hands up in #London #solidarity w/ #Ferguson #MikeBrown #BlackLivesMatter via @RossalynWarren ;

    Denver: RT @oursmallpetunia: @CoForJustice #DenverForFerguson;

    It’s just America: #Ferguson.

  340. rq says

    Here are the Rangers. Downtown. #Ferguson ;
    THREE SECTIONS OF POLICE IN RIOT GEAR. #Ferguson;
    More National Guards. #Ferguson ;
    Restaurant staff who support the movement just told us that State Troopers have been circling the restaurant since we arrived. #Ferguson (now that’s just plain harrassment).

    And if your blood pressure isn’t high enough, read some Wilson apologetics: A New Series of Posts: Reading the Darren Wilson Transcript (Intro) . I don’t know if I have the emotional fortitude to keep up with that blog, as it’s a mess. Also, I don’t know much about the author, Aaron Worthing (? coudln’t seem to find a proper Author page at the site).

    Anyway, last night we learned that a Grand Jury is not going to indict Darren Wilson, which I live-blogged, here. Riots sprung up immediately afterward, with sad predictability. And Wilson still faces potential legal challenges. The Feds are still looking into Civil Rights charges, although that possibility seems remote. And of course Wilson can be sued for it, too, but I am not sure that will happen. Judging by what I have seen about the Browns, I doubt that they can afford a long lawsuit—really, bluntly, most people can’t. Given the failure to even indict, few lawyers looking at this purely from the standpoint of the odds of victory would be likely to operate on a contingency fee. I could see it being either pro-bono, or “semi-pro-bono” with the possibility of being paid from contingency fees, if a lawyer sees it as a way to become more prominent. But that seems like the only likely way to see a suit filed, and even then, the fact Wilson won before the Grand Jury suggests he would win before a civil jury, too.

    Oh, and here is one other thought. I wonder if Wilson is thinking of defamation suits against any of the people who made false statements about him? There is unlikely to be a civil cause of action for perjury in Missouri, but false statements outside of court that harm a person’s reputation is typically handled as defamation. So if someone said publicly that Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown in the back as he lay on the ground, and it turns out that wasn’t true, Wilson might have a cause of action against that person—although there is still the difficulty of proving that damage was caused by it.

    But, missing from all of that analysis is the vital question: was the Grand Jury correct? Up until now I have ducked the question of Wilson’s guilt or innocence because I haven’t seen the evidence. I mean that is elementary—don’t judge until you see the evidence (although I tend to trust juries and I presume they usually get it right). But now we have the evidence. All of it has been released. The transcript of the Grand Jury proceedings alone is 4799 pages. And there are photos, etc. So I will be reading through that monstrous thing with an eye toward figuring out: is Wilson guilty of any crime, and should he have been indicted?

    Check out photos of Darren Wilson immediately after the encounter. THERE ARE NO INJURIES ON HIS FACE. They take so many pictures at all kinds of angles, and NOTHING is visible. Besides, for actual best photos of bruising, you have to wait 24 – 48 hours for the colour to actually show. At least, that’s what I was taught back in uni, but who knows, times may have changed.

  341. rq says

    Woo, nice break. Here’s more:
    Ferguson explodes– Is America next? (thank you to… actually, I can’t find who I got it from, though it may have been Tony on FB – anyway, thanks!)

    “It is a too often repeated message that your life is worthless in the context of the power of the state versus the individual. You can be exterminated without impunity. There are no repercussions for the state taking the life of a Black person,” said Dr. Wilmer Leon, a political science professor at Howard University in Washington, D.C.

    “Why now are we seeing these increases around the country? Why now? They don’t want you to feel empowered by the election of a Black president. Don’t think you have arrived. Nothing has changed. That’s all I can figure it to be,” he said. […]

    Two days before the Ferguson explosion, the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam warned Ferguson was ready to blow up. The injustices that Blacks have faced are growing intolerable and Black youth are growing as angry as unarmed Palestinians battling heavily armed Israeli soldiers, the Minister said in a Nov. 22 address at Morgan State University in Baltimore.

    Leaders who defend the oppressive White power structure cannot lead Black youth or Black people, said Min. Farrakhan.

    “Because the youth don’t want to hear a damn you say,” he continued. “You can’t feel it? When you talk to young people, you can’t feel that you’re missing them? Parents, you can’t feel when you’re talking to your children that this is a new generation—and they don’t want to hear your compromising talk? Did you hear them in Ferguson tell Jesse [Jackson] ‘Get the hell outta here! You ain’t no leader.’ ”

    Rev. Jackson has worked hard but what was a good tactic yesterday is not a good approach today, the Minister said.

    To reach young people you must reject the old ways and reject taking a pacifist position to please White people, he said.

    “Tonight in Ferguson everybody is on edge. White folks have never been on edge after they killed a Black man. Tonight they’re on edge; so on edge that our president has come out from behind the curtain to ask young Black people: ‘Cool it. That’s not our way.’ I heard you, Mr. President; and I asked myself a question: What brings you out of the shadows? … I said to myself, ‘Mr. President: Why the hell don’t you go to the wicked police department? Why the hell don’t you stand up and tell them that your killing of Black youth and Brown youth is not going to hold no more,” said Min. Farrakhan.

    The president spoke out because there is fear an eruption in Ferguson could inflame the entire country, he said. […]

    “Protesters should be able to exercise their constitutional right peacefully and not be attacked by the police. Because the youth are ready to fight back and die for what they feel is right,” said Spud, a young activist. Emotions were high and the fear of trouble brewed each day in this suburb and others outside of St. Louis.

    Business owners in Clayton, Mo., where the non-indictment was announced, and in Ferguson, Mo., boarded up property. Fear of property damage and rioting caused a 67 percent increase in gun sales, according to the Associated Press.

    But one Black woman complained of being denied the right to purchase a weapon the night of Nov. 24 though she was eligible for a firearm. Rachel Stewart, 36, told The Final Call that at a mall in Bridgeton, Mo., Blacks were told weapons’ purchases were on hold, but Whites were allowed to go in and buy weapons.

    The Final Call received reports of infighting in the county police department, which led to the suspension of several Black officers because of their views on the Brown shooting. Some Black FBI agents also refused to follow some instructions or take certain assignments, sources told The Final Call.

    “As mothers how do we teach our kids to deal with this? What do we tell our sons?” said Twyla Lee, who lives and works in St. Louis. There should be fear this could spread across the country, she said. Officers are getting away with fatal shootings—from the killing of a 12-year-old with a toy gun in Ohio to an 18-year-old in St. Louis. “So it’s just open season and it’s nothing we can do or say. Our children can be walking down the street and doing nothing and get killed,” said Ms. Lee.

    More at the link.

    Again, L.A.: LAPD surrounding about 100 #Ferguson protesters. Declaring unlawful assembly in downtown L.A. Possible mass-arrest.

    He Has A Name: DeAndre Joshua, 20, Dies During Ferguson Protests (DETAILS). No new details.
    But there’s a rumour: Rumors that #DeAndreJoshua was murdered for his alleged grand jury statements seems so far to be only right wing propaganda.

    Oakland, this morning for me: Didn’t think it was possible to kettle & mass arrest CARS. That’s some new sh*t. #Oakland. #Shutitdown.

    Just got a heads-up that there is a Darren Wilson Support Rally in the morning scheduled for 7:30am at Ball Park Village. Crazy. #Ferguson

    And for entertainment, LOL! Protesters BREAK MAN OUT OF COP CAR After He Was Arrested! Providence RI Mike Brown Protest PRE . Protestor gets put into police car, protestors on other side open door for xir to escape. Heh.

  342. rq says

    Dammit, previous in moderation. But I realize I have to thank JAL for the first link in it. Thank you!

    Strange Stains in Ferguson:

    On the first night after Wilson walked free, 82 people were arrested, cars were overturned and buildings were torched. Pictures of burned out cars and hooded, masked men raging against the police led coverage worldwide.

    Ahead of the second night after the decision, the number of national guardsmen deployed in Missouri was trebled to 2200.

    Sky News repeatedly ran a segment called ‘Ferguson in Flames’ and the age old story of anger and fear was retold.

    The images that moved me though were of the people interviewed on the streets of Ferguson.

    These weren’t angry people baying for blood, they were distraught, wrapped in sadness.

    “We just hoped for this one time, that our lives would matter,” one young woman explained with tears streaming down her face.

    “That someone would see that our lives are valuable”

    Another protestor pointed out that Michael Brown’s body was left laying in the street for four hours like a bag of garbage.

    The feeling of powerlessness and frustration that injustice causes was there for everyone to see but the media finds these emotions hard to convey to its viewers. Anger is much easier.

    The anger is self-feeding. Dramatic images of those who have allowed their frustration to turn to destructive anger, will encourage others to react that way.

    It will also feed the fear that is at the very heart of this issue. [… – ah yes, feed the fear, tone it down, don’t scare the white people]

    Comparing the actions of people sworn to protect black communities with those of criminals makes no sense though.

    Black people are regularly jailed for killing other black people, white policemen almost never are.

    I wonder how you persuade black young men that their lives (and the lives of their peers) have value when they are repeatedly thrown away so cheaply and with so little recourse to justice.

    Peaceful, legal protests don’t make good TV though so the cameras are drawn towards the flames like giant metallic moths. […]

    The oppression is very real but black communities are about much more than anger.

    The black anger myth simply nourishes the fear that some people have of black people.

    If racism was born out of the need to disregard our humanity in order to justify greed, it is nurtured by the fear that we are desperate to excise some hideous revenge for what happened.

    Of course there is some anger and of course there are calls for reparations but more than anything, people just want to know that they are valued and truly equal. All humans have a hunger for justice and the need to have a hand in their own fates.

    But fear doesn’t allow this happen.

    Fear is the ebola of emotions, it spreads by touch.

    If some white communities fear black anger, some black communities fear white fear.

    Even without loathing white fear can be fatal. […]

    The fear of black people is completely understandable though.

    Fed on a diet of news coverage and Hollywood saturated and in violent black criminals, and starved of daily personal contact with normal black people, a person can hardly be blamed for subconsciously harbouring the idea that a black face is a dangerous face.

    Officer Darren Wilson said Michael Brown stared at him with the “most intense, aggressive face”.

    “The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that’s how angry he looked.”

    It sounds like he’s describing every angry black man who has ever snarled menacingly out of a TV screen. […]

    Lynchings were designed to bring terror to black communities. They served to remind black people that, though they were no longer slaves, their very lives depended on them behaving in ways that didn’t upset their white neighbours.

    Today’s ‘extra-judicial’ killings by the police work in a remarkably similar way.

    Young black men, are shown repeatedly that if they don’t wear their clothes in the right way or behave in ways which help white people not to fear them, their very lives are in jeopardy.

    In their days both practices are met with a shrug and vague murmurings about ‘deserving and undeserving’ victims by mainstream society. Neither generate any serious concerted effort to stop them.

    …and in both cases black communities are left full of fear, anger and loss.

    Lynching didn’t stop, it just put on a uniform.

    It ends with a re-writing of Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit:

    Strange Stains

    American streets bear strange stains

    Blood on the lawns and blood in the drains

    Black men dying on the city streets

    Strange stains left for their folks to see

    Familiar tale of urban life

    A bitter cop, a scared housewife

    A teenage boy just walking home

    Then the sudden crack of lead on bone

    Here is a stain to boil the blood

    To fuel the marches and unleash the flood

    For the streets to rise, for the heads to roll

    Here is a stain on society’s soul

    So, it’s possible the case of Eric Garner might proceed somewhere into uncharted justice territory: NYPD Officers On The Ground in Ferguson –

    “We have a number of our detectives out there, have had them out there for over a week to help out in terms of intelligence we have on some of the professional agitators who are involved in these types of activity,” Commissioner William Bratton said.

    The NYPD is also hoping to learn from Ferguson’s experience, he added.

    Next month, a Staten Island grand jury is expected to decide whether to indict any NYPD officers in the killing of Eric Garner who was choked to death over the summer during an arrest for selling loose cigarettes.

    It likely won’t be the only grand jury in the next couple months to consider criminal charges against a New York cop. Bratton said he expects Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth Thompson will convene a grand jury to investigate last weeks’ shooting death of Akai Gurley. Rookie Officer Peter Liang killed Gurley in a darkened, public housing stairwell. Bratton was quick to call that shooting a tragic mistake.

    It was a rookie cop shot Akai, a rookie cop shot Tamir. How about not issuing weapons to rookie cops?

  343. rq says

    Via Giliell, Why We Won’t Wait:

    You see, we’ve been waiting for dozens, hundreds, thousands of indictments and convictions. Every death hurts. Every exonerated cop, security guard, or vigilante enrages. The grand jury’s decision doesn’t surprise most Black people because we are not waiting for an indictment. We are waiting for justice—or more precisely, struggling for justice. We all know the names and how they died. Eric Garner, Kajieme Powell, Vonderitt D. Meyers, Jr., John Crawford III, Cary Ball Jr., Mike Brown, ad infinitum. They were unarmed and shot down by police under circumstances for which lethal force was unnecessary. We hold their names like recurring nightmares, accumulating the dead like ghoulish baseball cards. Except that there is no trading. No forgetting. Just a stack of dead bodies that rises every time we blink. For the last three trayvonsgenerations, Eleanor Bumpurs, Michael Stewart, Eula Love, Amadu Diallo, Oscar Grant, Patrick Dorismond, Malice Green, Tyisha Miller, Sean Bell, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Margaret LaVerne Mitchell, to name a few, have become symbols of racist police violence. And I’m only speaking of the dead—not the harassed, the beaten, the humiliated, the stopped-and-frisked, the raped.

    Meanwhile, Governor Jay Nixon, President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, the mainstream press and every state-anointed Negro leader lecture Black people to stay calm and remain non-violent, when the main source of violence has been the police. Mike Brown’s murder brought people out to the streets, where they were met with tear gas and rubber bullets. State violence is always rendered invisible in a world where cops and soldiers are heroes, and what they do is always framed as “security,” protection, and self-defense. Police occupy the streets to protect and serve the citizenry from (Black) criminals out of control. This is why, in every instance, there is an effort to depict the victim as assailant – Trayvon Martin used the sidewalk as a weapon, Mike Brown used his big body. A lunge or a glare from a Black person can constitute an imminent threat. When the suburb of Ferguson blew up following Mike Brown’s killing on August 9, the media and mainstream leadership were more concerned with looting and keeping the “peace” than the fact that Darren Wilson was free on paid leave. Or that leaving Brown’s bullet-riddled, lifeless body, on the street for four and a half hours, bleeding, cold, stiff from rigor mortis, constituted a war crime in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. It was, after all, an act of collective punishment – the public display of the tortured corpse was intended to terrorize the entire community, to punish everyone into submission, to remind others of their fate if they step out of line. We used to call this “lynching.” […]

    But just a quick glance at the decision reveals that the ruling was intended to limit the use of deadly force, arguing that killing a fleeing suspect constitutes an intrusive “seizure” potentially violating 4th Amendment protections against being deprived of life. If a suspect is not armed and dangerous, the use of deadly force is not warranted and thus the seizure of life is not reasonable.

    Whether we call it a war on drugs, or “Operation Ghetto Storm” as the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement dubs it, what we are dealing with is nothing less than permanent war waged by the state and its privatized allies on a mostly poor and marginalized Black and Brown working-class. Five centuries in the making, it stretches from slavery and imperialism to massive systematic criminalization. We see the effects on our children, in the laws that make it easier to prosecute juveniles as adults; in the deluge of zero tolerance policies (again a by-product of the war on drugs); in the startling fact that expulsions and suspensions have risen exponentially despite a significant decline in violent crime. Crisis, moral panics, neoliberal policies, racism fuel an expansive system of human management based on incarceration, surveillance, containment, pacification, lethal occupation, and gross misrepresentation. [..]

    And yet, defenders of the status quo always deflect critiques of state violence by citing the number of intra-racial homicides in low-income Black communities. Who can forget former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s recent quip to Michael Eric Dyson on “Meet the Press”?: “White police officers wouldn’t be there [in black neighborhoods] “if you weren’t killing each other.” Racist bluster, to be sure, but such assertions have succeeded in foreclosing a deeper interrogation of how neoliberal policies (i.e., dismantling the welfare state; promoting capital flight; privatizing public schools, hospitals, housing, transit, and other public resources; investing in police and prisons,) are a form of state violence that produces scarcity, environmental and health hazards, poverty, and alternative (illegal) economies rooted in violence and subjugation.

    Ironically, Giuliani’s vitriol makes a compelling case for the failure of modern law enforcement. If the police are charged with keeping the peace and protecting citizens, but instead have contributed to the “epidemic” of violent deaths, then a case can be made for the complete withdrawal of the police from Black and Brown neighborhoods. The police are trained for combat and often regard the youth in low-income communities of color as potential enemy combatants. This is why the killing of “innocent” Black men in dark stairwells, Black women with kitchen knives, or little boys brandishing toy guns are not accidents. Cops patrol these areas with their weapon close at hand; behind every shadow lurks a suspect, and in war it is kill or be killed. […]

    The young organizers in Ferguson from Hands Up United, Lost Voices, Organization for Black Struggle, Don’t Shoot Coalition, Millennial Activists United, and the like, understand they are at war. Tef Poe, Tory Russell, Montague Simmons, Cheyenne Green, Ashley Yates, and many other young Black activists in the St. Louis area have not been waiting around for an indictment. Nor are they waiting for the much vaunted Federal probe, for they have no illusions about a federal government that provides military hardware to local police, builds prisons, kills tens of thousands by manned and unmanned planes without due process, and arms Israel in its illegal wars and occupation. They have been organizing. So have the young Chicago activists who founded We Charge Genocide and the Black Youth Project, and the Los Angeles-based youth who make up the Community Rights Campaign, and the hundreds of organizations across the country challenging everyday state violence and occupation. They remind us, not only that Black lives matter—that should be self-evident—but that resistance matters. It matters because we are still grappling with the consequences of settler colonialism, racial capitalism and patriarchy. It mattered in post-Katrina New Orleans, a key battleground in neoliberalism’s unrelenting war on working people, where Black organizers lead multiracial coalitions to resist the privatization of schools, hospitals, public transit, public housing, and dismantling public sector unions. The young people of Ferguson continue to struggle with ferocity, not just to get justice for Mike Brown or to end police misconduct but to dismantle racism once and for all, to bring down the Empire, to ultimately end war.

    It’s a dense read, but well worth the entire article.
    That mention of Rudy Giuliani brings me to this: White Police Chief Loses It and Tells the Blunt TRUTH About Black Crime [VIDEO]. The article is shit, but the video is slightly less so, if only because the police chief seems honestly distraught about how people don’t understand his job. Watch that, and that is the sort of defensiveness that most cops probably feel.
    I would only ask him how many black officers does his force have, how have they been welcomed (or not), how do his officers approach people on the street… and whether those people killed by cops have been the much-vaunted criminals, or not. Those in authority must be held to a higher standard, so it’s not entirely right to equate criminals shooting other people with cops shooting the people they’re supposed to protect.

    But anyway, has anyone heard anything about the DOJ investigation??? The civil rights one?

  344. rq says

    Darren Wilson rally about to happen:
    National Guard at the Darren Wilson rally. #Ferguson ;
    Unmarked car just swooped in front of us. Told us to wait. There’s a turkey run it appears. #Ferguson;
    Y’all, the police are going to escort the Darren Wilson supporters as they drive I their rally. America. #Ferguson;
    Then a cop approached Deray, which scared him and his companion. No hostility actually. He just told me he wanted to tease @deray a little bit and referred to him as “brother”. #ferguson.
    The Darren Wilson supporters are still waiting for more people to show up. Only 10 people so far. #Ferguson.
    So that’s nice, there aren’t many of them.

    Earlier in the day, @deray A reporter on @nprnews said “Let’s just be thankful there haven’t been any more deaths since Mike Brown’s.” They don’t actually care. Because Vonderrit and Kajieme Powell didn’t happen.

  348. rq says

    Annnnnd once more – with minor changes. (No, no bad words, but…?) Whew. The DW supporters ain’t got no plan. If it weren’t for Lt. Dan knowing the rhythm of protest, they’d be lost. #Ferguson. Apparently they’re still waiting for more people to show up.

    Stopping the parade in NY: I support the hell out of this. Make people stop and listen! Make history! #stoptheparade #FergusonDecision (with map of a parallel route for protestors);
    @deray the protest in NY #StopTheParade has Police arresting protesters;
    Arrests at stop the parade .

    CNN asks, Is ‘professor’ who helped with Michael Brown autopsy who he says he is? Going over the credentials of the man assisting Dr Baden in Michael Brown’s autopsy.

    Parcells doesn’t claim to have any specific license or certification to do the work he does. He knows how to do autopsies from “on the job training,” watching pathologists and assisting them at various morgues, he said. Sometimes he’s been paid for this work and sometimes he wasn’t, he added.

    “To take out organs and to cut open a body, you don’t need to be a pathologist,” he said. “Come to an autopsy. I think when you see what I do, you’ll realize that I’m not just making this stuff up out of blue, thin air.”

    He certainly sounded knowledgeable and authoritative on August 18 when he presented the findings of the Michael Brown autopsy to a nationally televised news conference.

    Baden, who conducted the autopsy, spoke first, and then introduced Parcells, saying he “has been instrumental in the autopsy evaluation.”

    “First of all, I’m Professor Shawn Parcells,” Parcells said as he stood to address the reporters.

    On his LinkedIn page and to CNN, Parcells said he’s an adjunct professor at Washburn State University in Topeka, Kansas, but a spokeswoman for the university told CNN that’s not true.

    Etc.

  349. rq says

    There we go. Musta been those funny little symbols in the middle there.
    Anyhow, more:
    EXCLUSIVE: Darren Wilson and the violent confrontation with his wife’s ex-lover: Court documents reveal volatile home life of officer who shot Michael Brown – which grand jury never heard about. I believe Darren Wilson’s private life should have no bearing on his professional conduct, most especially if he is a police officer.

    While the Grand Jury considered the evidence, Brown’s family waited for answers and protesters seethed with anger, Wilson married his lover, fellow Ferguson officer, Barbara Spradling, in a secret ceremony in St Louis County.

    The couple are now expecting their first child together.

    Now, court documents seen by MailOnline have revealed the turbulent history of the relationship that ended two marriages, sparked an ongoing custody battle and saw Wilson and Spradling, 37, embroiled in the assault case with her former lover, John Blumenthal, 52.

    And the rest is a timeline of Wilson’s poor, tragic life. Actually he sounds pretty normal.

    From MSNBC (with autoplay video), Shocking mistake in Darren Wilson grand jury

    In the Rewrite, Lawrence looks at a major correction the assistant prosecutors had to make to the grand jury in the Michael Brown case.

    Apparently giving them the wrong information.

  350. rq says

    Sgt. Russo sped up to my window saying that I can’t yell at officers. I didn’t yell at him. I was telling him NOT TO YELL AT ME. #Ferguson;
    Sgt. Russo wanted to write me a warning. But Lt. Dan intervened. I was asking to speak to him when the officer yelled at me. #Ferguson;
    Objectively, this is an weak protest. Their only win is that the police are ESCORTING them and therefore shutting down streets. #Ferguson;
    Darren Wilson supporter parade. #ferguson . It would be funny if it weren’t all so tragic.

    On #StopTheParade, If your Thanksgiving is ruined because of #StopTheParade imagine how Black folks feel when cops stop our lives? Literally.

    And I know it’s a silly movie, but this song really hit me while watching. I’ve mentioned before, music and singing to make a point gets to me pretty much anytime it’s used, but this one jumped out from the screen.

  352. rq says

    More stopping the parade:
    Television stations were told not to show the arrests of the #stoptheparade protestors. So this is why the news is being censored.So be it.;
    Protestors attacked at #ThanksgivingDayParade #stoptheparade THREE ARRESTS! #handsup #dontshoot #mikebrown;
    RT @natmusumeci: Protestors chanting “hands up, don’t shoot!” at the #stoptheparade march @nypmetro ;
    It looks like the Macy’s #Thanksgiving Parade has a big helping of turkey’s this year. #stoptheparade #macysparade;
    Civil Disobedience is a far greater American Tradition than the #MacysParade. #StoptheParade @PeoplesHistory.

    Oh, Macy’s. Macy’s agrees to $650G settlement to end Herald Square store’s racial profiling probe.

  354. Bernard Bumner says

    They pull up, and he pretty much shoots as he exits the car. I don’t know whether the authorities believe there is anything justified in that shooting.

    That is heartbreaking. There was no attempt to assess the risk whatsoever, just an instant, lethal response.

    Why pull the car up so close to a suspect who might be homicidal, if not to provide the opportunity to take him out? Why not position the car at a safe distance, cover, and challenge the suspect? Why assume that the gun must be real? Why not take the time to assess the situation, assess the risk? Why immediate and lethal force?

    How can the response be so fucking incompetent and brutal? Why don’t police officers try to save the lives of suspects?

  355. rq says

    Via Lynna, Police leave holes in Ferguson evidence record

    Wesley Lowery, reporter for The Washington Post, talks with Steve Kornacki about details from the Darren Wilson grand jury evidence, including peculiarities in how police handled evidence from the scene of the shooting.

    A quick analysis of mistakes and errors and omissions in the gathering of evidence.
    Also, a couple of other videos follow in the playlist that are worth watching.

  356. rq says

    Sooo… The media is awesome, right? I don’t have a link to the article itself, but: WOW RT @deray: Today, the Post-Dispatch dangerously used a photo to link two known protestors to serious crimes.
    And again: STL Post Dispatch chose to use THIS photo with this headline. So that we are the ones targeted for said threats.
    The two young women yelling at the police chief? Are two of the peaceful protestors who have been working 100+ days to keep the movement alive and to keep it peaceful, at great cost to themselves. As was said, @bdoulaoblongata old tactics. Reminds me of Angela Davis. Guilty by association, even without association. Just the headline and a picture.
    The newspaper replies: RT @stltoday: We are updating photos as they appear relating to the Arch bombing-plot story. Intent was to show Tom Jackson. and excuses that their intent was to show the chief, and it seemed like a good photo. Intent is not magic. Ha!

    In the humorous category, PHOTO: Protesters in #Ferguson have been leaving ‘Police Traps’ all around the city.

  357. rq says

    NYC Ferguson protesters arrested en route to Thanksgiving Day Parade

    Police held off the mass of demonstrators, who were organized in protest over the lack of an indictment against the white police officer who fatally shot an unarmed black teen on Ferguson, Mo.​
    Seven of the agitators were arrested.

    The ​​protesters marched south from the New York Public Library and turned right on 37th Street toward Seventh Avenue about 9:30 a.m. – but then tried to make a U-turn toward the parade route.

    Police officers told the protesters they couldn’t turn around and the agitators started growing angry, leading some to knock down metal police barricades as paradegoers fled the ruckus. Seven protesters were arrested and will be charged with disorderly conduct, cops said.

    Protesters claimed that they were peacefully marching when cops started pushing them into the barricades.

    I posted some photos above. You decide.

    And HuffPo on the death of DeAndre Joshua: Deandre Joshua Identified As Man Fatally Shot During Ferguson Protests. No new information.

    And it’s not just the US – French black justice minister under fire after slamming Ferguson police brutality

    Justice Minister Christiane Taubira tweeted in French, saying “Michael Brown, racial profiling, social exclusion, territorial segregation, cultural marginalization, guns, fear, fatal cocktail!”

    Then, she published a tweet in English.

    How old was #Mickael Brown ? 18. #TrayvonMartin ? 17. #TamirRice? 12. How old next? 12 month? ‘Kill them before they grow’ Bob Marley ChT

    I am not making a value judgment on United States institutions [but] when the feeling of frustration is so strong, so deep, so lasting and massive, you have to ask yourself about the trust in these institutions,” said the minister.

    “One realizes this only happens to the same people, African American kids. So there is the problem of a certain number of clichés, portrayals, prejudices which can create terrible reflexes,” she added.

    French Government spokesman Stephane Le Foll said, referring to the situation, that “one shouldn’t comment about what’s going on in the US” as the country “has its own rules and procedures.”

    He added that everyone should “turn their thumb 10 times” before tweeting, an expression in French that roughly means holding one’s tongue before speaking.

    Taubira, who took office in 2012, also came under fire from political opponents over her comments.

    The right-wing mayor of the city of Nice criticized Taubira for thinking it “appropriate to judge the American justice system” and said the fact that she remains the French justice minister made him “ashamed for my country.”

    Taubira has been the subject of prejudice and racism scandals for some time: earlier this year, ex-candidate for municipal elections, Anne-Sophie Leclere, known for her far-right leanings, received a nine-month prison sentence and a hefty fine after publishing a photo of Taubira with a monkey.

    “I prefer to see her swinging in a tree than to see her in government,” Leclere said.

    Last year, the right-wing French magazine, Minute, published a cover story bearing the title “Taubira Finds Her Banana.”

    Well, I think she’s qualified to speak out about racism, since racism is not nation-specific. Good for her!

  360. rq says

    So, they changed the picture on the article: Alleged plot included bombing Arch, killing St. Louis County prosecutor, Ferguson chief

    Sources close to the investigation were uncertain whether the men had the capability to carry out the plans, although the two allegedly did buy what they thought was a pipe bomb in an undercover law enforcement sting.

    The men wanted to acquire two more bombs, the sources said, but could not afford to do it until one suspect’s girlfriend’s Electronic Benefit Transfer card was replenished.

    An indictment, with no mention of bombs or killings, was returned in federal court here Nov. 19 and unsealed Friday upon the arrest of Brandon Orlando Baldwin and Olajuwon Ali Davis. Their addresses and Baldwin’s age were not available; Davis is 22.

    they removed the photo so THANK YOU to everyone who helped with getting it taken down. But as she said later, the damage is already done.

    And protestors held their own parade in NY – Scuffles, arrests as pro-Ferguson NYC activists disrupt Thanksgiving parade (VIDEO), pictures also at the link.

    The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is broadcast live on national television, with an audience of millions watching the event throughout the country. There have been reports on Twitter that the NYPD has told news stations not to show the protest. […]

    Some 400 protesters have been arrested over the past three days across the US, with people taking to the streets in over 170 cities throughout the country. New York saw one of the largest rallies on Tuesday, with thousands gathering in Manhattan’s Union Square. On the West Coast, some 200 activists were detained in Los Angeles, as police ordered rallies off the streets.

    Also on the same, NYPD cracks down on Ferguson-inspired Thanksgiving Day Parade protest.

    “There was a lot of pushing,” Katherine Brezler, 32, told the Daily Dot after attending the Thanksgiving Day protest. “We were inside the fencing used to direct pedestrian traffic. They cornered us from both sides. They just pushed the people to the ground and then took them away.”

    Brezler described the intentions of the protesters as peaceful, saying that it wasn’t about targeting the NYPD.

    “We need to have a conversation about racism in America,” said Brezler. “I’m a public school teacher and I work in a marginalized community. We all need to have a big conversation and keep talking about it. That’s what this is about.” […]

    “All we were doing was walking,” Sunshine told the Daily Dot during a phone interview after the parade had ended. “We didn’t break any gates. We didn’t go anywhere we weren’t supposed to go. Nothing crazy. No cursing. Everyone was very, very in tune with the fact that there were kids there. There was no ‘fucking pigs.’ Everyone took it down a notch.”

    “The only thing that any kid saw today that was bad,” he surmised, “was a bunch of cops that were incredibly and unreasonably aggressive.”

    Ferguson Tensions Cool After Grand Jury Decision (subscription-walled).

    And overkill? Florissant PD has police dogs on the parking lot of the police station. For what? Nobody has focused on Florissant in 111 days.

  361. rq says

    Denver- Denver solidarity action #MikeBrown #Ferguson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWv7QD0EK0k … via @AnarchoAnon;
    LA – VIDEO – Tensions escalate when protestors get boxed in by LAPD http://youtu.be/0c2IRG0gPtA;

    More from LA – LAPD chief orders L.A.’s Ferguson protesters released in time for Thanksgiving dinner

    “We have every legal right to keep them until they post bail,” Cmdr. Andrew Smith told the Los Angeles Times, “but in light of the holiday … [Beck] called and said he wants everybody who is eligible for release to be released by dinner time.”

    Before being released from jails in downtown Los Angeles, the San Fernando Valley and South L.A, prisoners will have to sign a promise to appear in court, but they will not have to post any bail money, Smith said. Any protesters with warrants out for their arrest will not be eligible, he added.
    lRelated More than 300 arrested in 3 days of Ferguson protests in L.A.

    L.A. Now
    More than 300 arrested in 3 days of Ferguson protests in L.A.

    See all related
    8

    Almost 150 people were arrested in Los Angeles overnight Wednesday as protests continued over the grand jury’s decision not to indict a police officer in the shooting death of Michael Brown. That brought the three-day total of arrests related to such protests in L.A. to 338, Smith said.

    Most of the people arrested Wednesday night were adults who failed to disperse when ordered to do so by police, Smith said.

    A nice gesture, indeed.

    thisisthemovement, installment #61:

    Bob McCulloch’s Pathetic Prosecution of Darren Wilson This article examines the “grand jury proceeding run under the auspices of McCulloch, the St. Louis County Prosecutor.” This is the fifth time Bob McCulloch has presented evidence to a grand jury and hasn’t received an indictment.

    The Process is Broken A night of anger followed the grand jury decision announcement on Monday night in St. Louis. Hotspots in Ferguson, and the Shaw neighborhood St. Louis County and St. Louis City police both handled protests in an interesting way. The Brown family has not ruled out suing Darren Wilson in a civil suit, and the FBI may bring federal civil rights charges up against him as well.

    Fight the Power Nationwide, protesters in over 170 cities have stood in solidarity with Ferguson since the grand jury decision announcement was made on Monday night. Highway shutdowns, shutting down Times Square, a sit in at Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s office and more demonstrations have taken place.

    The World is Watching Ferguson The grand jury announcement came Monday evening and since then world leaders, as well as protesters in their own homelands have all weighed in on Ferguson. “Russian commentators and state media implied that the disorder in Ferguson was a kind of cosmic payback for the US’s meddling in Ukraine.” interesting read.

    In Minneapolis, Car Drives Through Protest During the Minneapolis protest in support of Ferguson, a driver plowed through the crowd and he has yet to be arrested. Read this and watch the article. Absolute must read.

    A Deep Dive Into the Witness Testimony PBS has put together an incredible chart that explains the witness testimony before the Darren Wilson Grant Jury. Absolute Must read.

    Witnesses Cited Fear In Testifying Several witnesses expressed fear when testifying before the Grand Jury. Interesting read.

    The Fire That Bob McCulloch Started The St. Louis American wrote a strongly worded editorial that aptly highlights the responsibility that McCulloch bears for the unrest. Important read.

    Some interesting stuff on the international response inside.

  362. rq says

    Two more and then I’m calling it a night:
    From The Walrus (love the name!), Down Under Ferguson:

    “Fifty people can peacefully protest, and it takes one ignorant person to cause chaos,” he continues, as Betsy quietly nods along. As for Wilson’s decision to shoot Brown multiple times, Tim believes the officer acted appropriately: “I think the man did his job; he did everything he was supposed to do.”

    People here are doing some last-minute shopping on this Wednesday evening, one day before the United States’ Thanksgiving holiday. In the same plaza, a home décor shop bears the sign: “Store closed due to the safety of our associates and customers.” I ask a police officer parked nearby if she will talk about safety. “Sorry, I can’t,” she replies.

    The unrest in Ferguson is on the minds and lips of many in the area. On South Lindbergh Blvd., four black women seated in the 54th Street Grill & Bar chat about the grand jury decision, and crane their necks to see a breaking news report on a television across the room. It says Ferguson police have no plans to ask for Wilson’s resignation.

    Joan Scaife, who lives in Mississippi but is originally from the St. Louis area, says she is opposed to the looting that has occurred in and around Ferguson. “The businesses have nothing to do with what happened,” she tells me, before adding that she is disappointed with the decision not to indict Wilson. “I think he really should have had his day in court.”

    Linda Anderson says that road closures caused by the protests are inconvenient but acceptable. “I don’t want to go way out in the county to go to Walmart,” she says, “but I understand what happened to them. We all feel like we haven’t had a voice.”

    Maya Greco, who looks to be the youngest of the group, is most critical of the official response to Brown’s shooting. “I think they completely victimized Michael Brown,” she says.

    Greco also takes issue with some of the groups formed in support of Wilson—during a crowdfunding effort launched in August in Wilson’s name, dozens of donors included hateful, racist messages against Brown, and black people in general. […]

    Not all blacks are willing to directly tie Brown’s death to a larger narrative of racialized police brutality. Cab driver Paul Davis, a sixty-four-year-old veteran of the Vietnam War, says race was, at best, one of many factors in the incident. “It’s not so much a race thing—the problem we have in this country is guns, because it’s guns that kill people,” says Davis. He tells me that while he can understand police officers having rifles in their cars, he would prefer if they didn’t carry weapons on their bodies.

    Still, though, the cabbie casts serious doubt on Wilson’s description of his confrontation with Brown—excerpts of a feature interview that the officer had given that morning have already been broadcast on every local TV and radio station. “They was asking him, what was the thoughts on your mind? And I was saying, I can tell you what was in that punk motherfucker’s mind: Ain’t no n*gg*r gonna hit me in the face and get away with it,” Davis says.

    In Minneapolis, Driver Who Plowed Into Ferguson Decision Protesters in Minneapolis Still Not Charged. Possible repeat, but I’m pretty sure they’re never going to charge him.

  364. says

    Here’s a story of one of those near mythical good cops we’ve all heard about-
    NYPD Officer’s Secret Taping Reveals Superior Ordered Him To Stop And Frisk Black Males Ages 14-21

    An NYPD officer gave a powerful assist to a class-action lawsuit against stop and frisk Thursday, according to a New York Daily News article.
    Officer Pedro Serrano (pictured), who also testified in Manhattan Federal Court Wednesday, secretly recorded deputy inspector Christopher McCormack telling him to stop “the right people, the right time, the right location,” at a Bronx precinct.
    “He meant Black and Hispanics,” Serrano testified on the stand Thursday. Serrano can be heard voicing that suspicion on the tape:

    “So what am I supposed to do: Stop every Black and Hispanic?”

    McCormack is heard saying in response:

    “I have no problem telling you this. Male blacks. And I told you at roll call, and I have no problem [to] tell you this, male Blacks 14 to 21.”

    McCormack also told Serrano to mainly focus on the borough’s Mott Haven neighborhood, where “robberies and grand larcenies” are apparently the norm.
    Serrano said he recorded McCormack because he had received unsatisfactory performance reviews for failing to meet an alleged monthly quota: 20 summonses and five stop and frisks. Since speaking out, Serrano says his fellow officers have ostracized him as a “rat.” Serrano also claimed the quotas were backed by the Patrolman’s Benevolent Association.
    Even though the recording lends credence to the argument that stop and frisk targets minorities, city lawyer Brenda Cooke got Serrano to admit that McCormack never told him to stop all Blacks and Hispanics.
    “Those specific words, no,” he said.

  365. says

    Tim Wise says “Most white people in America are completely oblivious

    Long article, and there’s too much good stuff to excerpt, so I suggest reading the whole thing.
    ****
    ‘Racism without racists’: White supremacy so deeply American that we don’t even see it

    Most Americans understand that racism is considered wrong, but many white people fail to see more subtle forms of racial prejudice that are more readily apparent to blacks and other minorities.

    “The main problem nowadays is not the folks with the hoods, but the folks dressed in suits,” Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, a Duke University sociologist, told CNN. “The more we assume that the problem of racism is limited to the Klan, the birthers, the Tea Party or to the Republican Party, the less we understand that racial domination is a collective process and we are all in this game.”

    Bonilla-Silva calls this “racism without racists,” which is also the title of his book on American white supremacy.

    He told CNN that the discussion about the fatal shooting of Michael Brown and the grand jury’s decision not to charge Officer Darren Wilson shows a need for Americans to update their language on race.

    Many whites like to claim they “don’t see color,” often pointing out that they don’t care whether a person’s skin is green or purple – colors not commonly associated with human beings.

    But research shows that’s simply not true.

    Babies show a preference for their own race by about 3 months old, according to the book Everyday Bias, and another study showed white NBA referees call more fouls on black players while black refs call more fouls on white players.

    “Human beings are consistently, routinely and profoundly biased,” said the book’s author, Howard J. Ross.

    Another study he highlights in the book asked participants to look at photographs of a fight between two white men – one armed with a knife and the other unarmed.

    Then the researchers showed a photo of a white man armed with a knife fighting an unarmed black man.

    Most participants correctly identified the white man holding the knife in the first photo, but the study found most people – black and white – incorrectly said the black man had the knife in the second photo.

    “The overwhelming number of people will actually experience the black man as having the knife because we’re more open to the notion of the black man having a knife than a white man,” Ross told CNN. “This is one of the most insidious things about bias. People may absorb these things without knowing them.”

    Another study found job seekers with white-sounding names, such as Brendan, were 50 percent more likely to get invited to interviews than applicants with black-sounding names, such as Jamal.

    Most of the people who called Brendan instead of Jamal would probably deny their decision was racially motivated, said a UCLA researcher who has studied racial bias.

    “They’re not lying — they’re just wrong,” said researcher Daniel L. Ames.

    These unseen biases might even be more destructive than overt racism, he said.

    “They’re harder to spot, and therefore harder to combat,” Ames said.

  366. Saad says

    That’s an amazing piece, Tony.

    I got goosebumps when I finished this part:

    To be the physical representation of what marks a neighborhood as bad, a school as bad, not because of anything you have actually done, but simply because of the color of your skin? Surely that is not an inconsequential weight to bear. To go through life, every day, having to think about how to behave so as not to scare white people, or so as not to trigger our contempt—thinking about how to dress, and how to walk and how to talk and how to respond to a cop (not because you’re wanting to be polite, but because you’d like to see your mother again)—is work; and it’s harder than any job that any white person has ever had in this country. To be seen as a font of cultural contagion is tantamount to being a modern day leper.

  367. Saad says

    CNN is reporting that the dispatcher who radioed the cops about Tamir Rice did not inform them that the caller thinks Tamir could be a minor and that the gun could be a toy.

    I have a problem with the caller calling the cops when they suspected that it’s a kid with a toy in the first place, but the dispatcher decided to leave those important bits out and compounded the problem further. He was shot two seconds after the cops arrived, because they just knew it’s a black male.

  368. rq says

    Saad
    Yep, that was known from the start. It’s not just CNN. The dispatcher refused to pass on that important information, and I hope s/he gets shit for it, too. That’s just doing your job poorly. With tragic consequences.

  369. rq says

    Yesterday/right now (overnight) protestors decided to shut down some local Wal-Marts. Protected Wal-Marts: America. This makes my stomach turn. #Ferguson
    … Though even real shopping meant being followed: Here are our escorts today. Maplewood Walmart. #Ferguson .
    Some cops. Sgt. Martin just asked if I was going to tweet him. He follows me on Twitter. Here’s his pic. #Ferguson
    So that’s the first Wal-Mart. Was at Walmart in Maplewood to see @deray & @Nettaaaaaaaa being followed by police Neta bought some stuff & they left .

    Ferguson: All is calm right now in #ferguson as National Guard trucks roll by. #michaelbrown

    Why can’t American cops do this? Solidarity RT @BlackNerdJade: Police In Thailand Lay Down Vests and Barricades In Solidarity With Protesters “

  370. rq says

    Second Wal-Mart, from what I understand they’re still there: He is in charge here. No badge. He won’t give his last name. Badge #123. He just took my picture too. #Ferguson
    Oop, sorry they were at a target previously. So, now we’ve actually caught up with protestors. Leaving Target. Onto the next location. And no, I can’t tweet it. #Ferguson
    Protest in Wal-Mart: Protest. Walmart. #ferguson;
    @deray every large department store at WeCo mall has a national guard presence. Kirkwood WalMart does too.;
    How not to get thrown out immediately: Yes, I intentionally make a small purchase in every store we enter. I’m a customer. Gotta cut down on the reasons to arrest me. #Ferguson

  371. rq says

    Getting to several Wal-Marts: ENROUTE TO WEST COUNTY MALL WITH 250 MORE PROTESTERS !!!!!! #ShutItDown;
    See, I haven’t actively protested today. That first Walmart, we were shoppers. Not at Target. But he didn’t need to touch me. (see, I can’t get the sequence right. :P );
    The officers form a line. Y’all, they are MAD in Manchester. Yup, we’re coming back here. #Ferguson ;

    I’m assuming the protest has started inside the @Walmart. White people are RUNNING FROM THE STORE YELLING “ITS NOT SAFE!” Yall.;
    YALL!!!! I have never seen ppl run like that in my life. Running with shopping carts and bags. Because of CHANTS.
    I wonder how many of those items are actually paid for, if they’re running from fear. Not that I feel sorry for Wal-Mart.
    The responses are good (read below the tweet): I wish someone could see what I see outside this @walmart!! I’ve never seen people run like that from CHANTING.

  372. rq says

    Y’all, hearing the lead officer yell, “You are NOT welcome in Walmart!” might just be the highlight of the night. Manchester. #Ferguson And then someone commented that employees are barely welcome in Wal-Mart.
    Y’all, @Nettaaaaaaaa heard a woman run out of Walmart screaming, “It’s not safe!” as protestors chanted. Y’all. Manchester. #Ferguson

    Young women, leading everywhere: A protest that was started by the Young Women of Howard University reached over 11,000 people last night! #MYHBCU . I hope when it comes down to it, none of them get pushed out.
    Hands in Ferguson: That’s our fam @FetchedFar RT “@thereaIbanksy: #Ferguson’s street art is having world-wide impact. “

    Court artist’s depiction of Darren Wilson’s Official testimony. Oh man. It’s too tragic to laugh, and yet.

    Similar data has been seen previously: Three quarters of whites don’t have any non-white friends:

    In a 100-friend scenario, the average white person has 91 white friends; one each of black, Latino, Asian, mixed race, and other races; and three friends of unknown race. The average black person, on the other hand, has 83 black friends, eight white friends, two Latino friends, zero Asian friends, three mixed race friends, one other race friend and four friends of unknown race. […]

    There are a number of factors driving these numbers. Simple population counts are one of them: There are more white people than black people in the United States, so it makes sense that the average American is going to have more white friends than black friends.

    Another factor is our tendency to seek out and associate with people who are similar to us in any number of ways – religiously, politically, economically and, yes, racially, too. The polite term for this phenomenon is “sorting,” and it affects everything from political polarization to income inequality to the racial differences in friend networks seen above.

    As PRRI’s Robert Jones writes in the Atlantic, Americans’ segregated social circles have influenced responses to the events in Ferguson, Mo., over the past few weeks. Polls show deep divides between blacks and whites on everything from the role of race in Ferguson to the appropriateness of responses by protestors and police.

    The numbers above offer insight into why so many whites have expressed bafflement over protesters’ responses to the shooting of Michael Brown. The history between many black communities and the police forces that serve them is long, complicated, often violent and characterized by an extreme imbalance of power. But as Robert Jones notes, most whites are not “socially positioned” to understand this history — simply because they know few people who’ve experienced it. […]

    In fact, PRRI’s data show that a full 75 percent of whites have “entirely white social networks without any minority presence.” The same holds true for slightly less than two-thirds of black Americans.

    The implication of these findings is that when we talk about race in our personal lives, we are by and large discussing it with people who look like us. [… – except here, I hope?]

  374. rq says

    A Cliven Bundy Tea Party Terrorist aiming his toy at Law Enforcement. Imagine if a Black man did this in #Ferguson! ;

    Walmart Reflections St. Charles – Police dogs Maplewood – Humvee Rock Road – Composed ofcs Manchester – Unprepared Brentwood Target – Chill;

    Cory Booker wrote a column about Rodney King in 1992. It’s a perfect response to Ferguson – I know I linked to a twitter photo of the article, but it might be more readable here:

    Booker’s refrain was “not guilty… not shocked.” Booker, now a senator from New Jersey, tweeted the column Tuesday as a way of relating to outrage over the Ferguson decision, and it’s still sadly resonant more than 20 years later:

    Not Guilty… Not Shocked.

    I’m a black man. I am 6 feet 3 inches tall and 230 pounds, just like King. Do I scare you? Am I a threat? Does your fear justify your actions? Twelve people believed it did.

    Black male: Guilty until proven innocent.

    Reactions to my kind are justified. Scrutiny is justified. Surveillance is justified. Search is justified. Fifty-six blows…Justified.

    Justice? Dear God…

  375. rq says

    From the CBC: Ferguson protesters take their message to stores on Black Friday;

    Ferguson residents pause on Thanksgiving to reflect on Michael Brown legacy;
    These two are rather positive pieces about depressing situations, speaking with the residents of Ferguson and the wonder that is Thanksgiving.

    Ferguson shooting: Why police rarely face criminal consequences;

    While policing experts acknowledge that there are legitimate concerns about the use of force by police, they stress that there are a number of factors that make charging an officer with homicide or excessive force in the course of duty difficult to bring about.

    “I understand why people are concerned,” said David Klinger, a Missouri criminologist. “My hope would be, however, that people look at the evidence rather than running to emotion.”

    Criminal proceedings involving police use of force must focus on whether the officer had reason to believe that either the officer or others were at risk of death or serious bodily harm. In these cases, an officer’s belief is often what is key.

    In the U.S., officers can also use deadly force if a dangerous suspect is fleeing.

    Walter Katz, a California lawyer specializing in police oversight, notes that there’s a “great deal of leeway” when it comes to the use of lethal force by police.

    “A police officer can be mistaken with his perception, as long as it was reasonable,” says Klinger, an associate professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

    Officers can only be accountable for what they thought they knew at the moment.

    Rather terrifying, if you ask me.

    Ferguson aftermath: Missouri governor rejects calls for special prosecutor

    The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported Wednesday that a spokesman said the governor would not name a special prosecutor to present the evidence to a new grand jury.

    The day after the decision was released, lawyers for the Brown family called the grand jury system “broken” and said a special prosecutor should have been named.

    “We said from the very beginning that the decision of this grand jury was going to be the direct reflection of the presentation of the evidence by the prosecutor’s office,” lawyer Anthony Gray said. He also suggested St. Louis County prosecuting attorney Robert McCulloch presented some testimony to discredit the process.

    The Brown family’s lawyers still hope a current federal civil rights investigation will lead to charges against Wilson.

  376. Pteryxx says

    from Slate: The Feds Should Charge Darren Wilson

    But they can’t, because the Supreme Court gutted the civil rights law he violated.

    [In 1870] Congress had already passed laws requiring Southern states to recognize their black citizens’ newfound freedoms. But violent groups like the KKK were often aided if not led by local governments and law enforcement. Blacks suddenly had a vastly expanded roster of rights, yet racist officials and crooked cops were colluding to ensure that they couldn’t exercise any of them. So Congress passed the Enforcement Act of 1870, part of which survives today as Section 242. As its title suggests, the act enforced the new amendments by making it a federal crime to deprive any person of his constitutional rights while acting “under color of any law.”

    In addition to voting rights and equal protection, the law’s supporters had a particular right in mind: the Constitution’s command that no person may be “deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.” When a police officer kills or beats a citizen unjustifiably, he’s depriving him of “life” or “liberty” without due process—a clear violation of Section 242.

    For decades, this plain reading of this law was understood, and Congress periodically amended the law to keep it clear and up-to-date. But in 1945, the Supreme Court muddied the waters. The court reviewed the conviction of Claude Screws, a sheriff in Baker County, Georgia. Screws had arrested a black man, Robert Hall, for the alleged crime of stealing a tire, then driven him to the courthouse, accompanied by two other officers. When Hall exited the car, Screws and the officers beat him with their fists and a club for about half an hour. They then dragged his unconscious body into a jail cell and called an ambulance. He died in the hospital soon after.

    Screws was convicted under the law known today as Section 242. He promptly appealed, challenging the constitutionality of his conviction. (While his case was being reviewed, Screws ran for re-election and won by a 3-to-1 margin.) He argued, somewhat ironically, that he, not his victim, had been deprived of due process. The law he had been charged with, Screws claimed, was unconstitutionally vague; in other words, it was so nebulously worded that he couldn’t have known he was violating it.

    The Supreme Court agreed and overturned Screws’ conviction. On its own, the justices held, the statute was too hazy to serve the demands of due process because it contained no “ascertainable standard of guilt.” So, failing to find a standard, the court made one up. In 1909, Congress had added the requirement that one must “willfully” deprive another of rights in order to violate Section 242. With the addition of the “willful” standard, the court decided, the statute now required a specific intent to violate someone’s constitutional rights. Thus, while the prosecutor may have proven that Screws deprived Hall of his constitutional rights, he hadn’t proven that Screws intended to deprive Hall of these rights. Screws was given a new trial under the new standard. The jury let him go.

  377. Pteryxx says

    Also from Slate:
    Shadow Trial

    Prosecutors in Ferguson violated our right to an open criminal justice system.

    In the 1980 case of Richmond Newspapers v. Virginia, the Supreme Court declared that the press and public have a First Amendment right of access to criminal trials. In the words of Justice William Brennan, “Open trials are bulwarks of our free and democratic government: Public access to court proceedings is one of the numerous ‘checks and balances’ of our system, because ‘contemporaneous review in the forum of public opinion is an effective restraint on possible abuse of judicial power.’ ”

    This right of open trials belongs not just to the accused but to all of us. It is, the Supreme Court said in the 1986 case Press Enterprise v. Superior Court, “a shared right of the accused and the public, the common concern being the assurance of fairness.” And while those accused of crimes have a constitutional right to a “speedy and open trial,” they do not, the court has said, have a right to a private trial.

    In discussing the history and need for open trials roughly three decades ago, it was as if the court were imagining this week’s situation in Ferguson rather specifically. The community at large has a massive stake in the criminal justice process, the court said. Whether it is to make sure an innocent person is not imprisoned or a guilty one is not allowed to walk free, “the conduct of the trial is preeminently a matter of public interest.” Think about the closed doors in Ferguson these past months as you reflect on what Chief Justice Warren Burger famously explained: “When a shocking crime occurs, a community reaction of outrage and public protest often follows. Thereafter the open processes of justice serve an important prophylactic purpose, providing an outlet for community concern, hostility, and emotion.”

    The fact that 12 jurors witnessed the proceedings in St. Louis does not cure the constitutional violation. While jurors can function as surrogates for the public and a check on government misfeasance, the court affirmed in Richmond Newspapers that by impaneling a jury, the community did “not surrender its right to observe the conduct of trials” or its ability “to satisfy themselves that justice was in fact being done.” Disclosing results alone, the court declared, will not “satiate the natural community desire for ‘satisfaction,’ ” and “an unexpected outcome can cause a reaction that the system at best has failed and at worst has been corrupted.”

  378. rq says

    Toronto Star: Ferguson-related protests at retail stores planned across U.S. With reinforcements from New York,

    Thursday’s activity was different because it took place in many areas previously untouched by the unrest — suburban, upper-middle class St. Louis. Protesters said it was part of a strategy to expand the reach of the movement to places that have been isolated from it,

    “This needs to come to the suburbs,” said Lucy Randall, a 23-year-old student at Washington University in St. Louis. She marched through the West County Center in Des Peres, Missouri, holding a sign that read: “Silence = Death.”
    […]
    Security was heightened at the Wal-Mart in Ferguson on Friday morning, with military Humvees, police cars and security guards on patrol. The store was busy, but there were no protesters. [… – haha PSYCH]

    A group of about 30 people rode a bus from New York to join in the St. Louis area protests. The group normally focuses on “earth justice” issues, but planned “to stand in solidarity with some of the Michal Brown protesters,” said Nehemiah Luckett, of New York.

    “It’s low-income communities of colour, the poorest of the poor, that get hit by climate change and state violence” through aggressive police forces, said Monica Hunken, another of the New York protesters.

  382. rq says

    Yesterday saw protesting in malls, to stop shopping. Mix’n’match, again, of tweets and articles. Mostly tweets.

    Oh, let’s start with a donation link: Along with many other Ferguson businesses, our office was destroyed Monday. Help us rebuild at http://www.gofundme.com/HealSTL.

    Protestors in the mall: photo 1, Just talked to a woman who was shopping at the mall, saw the protest, & decided to return her stuff and march w/ the protesters #Ferguson; photo 3; Another older white woman just stopped me and said, “Thank you for doing this.” And high-fived me. #Ferguson; photo 5

  384. rq says

    Lost a comment to moderation, but moving on:
    More Chicago – Right now at water tower .

    In addition to Michael Brown protests, Wal-Mart employees also walked out.

    Oh, and the Oathkeepers: KMOV did a story on the Oathkeepers, said they are here indefinitely to stand guard. One of them then pointed a gun at the camera. #Ferguson. Inspiring confidence everywhere.

    .@bdoulaoblongata & @MusicOverPeople leading the protestors in shutting down the intersection! #BoycottBlackFriday ;
    Some reactions to the mall chanting: LOL “@WyzeChef: I don’t think she liked the chants. Lol #brownfriday http://ift.tt/1rESg28 .

  385. says

    In Ferguson, officer defused eruptions as crowds grew tense

    Late Wednesday, two nights after rioting left blocks of this suburban city in smoldering ruin, a small but angry crowd assembled at the police station on South Florissant Road.

    On previous nights, protesters hurled D batteries, bottles of urine and rocks at the police officers and National Guard troops who stood stern-faced behind steel barricades and concrete barriers.

    But around 11 p.m. on Wednesday, an unlikely scene unfolded off to the side.

    A teenage protester whose face had been hidden behind a ski mask lowered his headgear, approached a police commander and gave him a hug.

    “Good to see you, man,” the commander, Lt. Jerry Lohr of the St. Louis County Police, said to the teenager, Joshua Williams. “How’ve you been? How’s your mom doing? I saw her out here earlier.”

    Lieutenant Lohr, 41, had a scratch on his left eyelid from a scuffle that broke out during an arrest the previous night and a wad of chewing tobacco in his mouth. He wore no riot gear — just a standard-issue brown uniform — and held not a baton in his hand but his knit cap.

    “We going to have a good night?” he asked Mr. Williams.

    “Yeah,” Mr. Williams, 19, said.

    Wednesday was indeed a calm night for Ferguson, compared with the looting and arson Monday that came after the announcement that a grand jury had declined to indict the white police officer who fatally shot Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, in August.

    Before, during and after that first night of violence, few law enforcement officials have done more on the ground to ease the volatility of protesters than Lieutenant Lohr, who is white. And few of his white colleagues have been able to connect with the largely black crowds better than he has.

    After embracing the lieutenant, Mr. Williams was back at the barricades, his mask again covering his face. “We were having a conversation one day out here, and he seemed like a pretty decent guy, so I grew to like him,” said Mr. Williams, who is black and lives in Ferguson. “He’s the only one I feel comfortable being around. The rest of them — no, I don’t.”

    Lieutenant Lohr, a Nashville-born former Texan and father of three with an Army-style buzz cut, is one of the commanders overseeing security at the Ferguson police station. He never wears riot gear, even when he wades into a group of protesters to answer questions, resolve disputes or listen to a stream of insults. Protesters at the gates ask for him by name, so they can make complaints, for example, about the use of tear gas or of officers being too aggressive in arresting a woman.

    One night, he approached a woman who led protesters onto the street to block traffic. She looked at her watch.

    “It’s 11:12,” she told him. “Give me to 11:15 with these folks out here.”

    Lieutenant Lohr agreed, set a timer on his wristwatch and helped direct traffic around them.

    Black residents here have long said that their outrage after Mr. Brown’s killing stemmed from the nearly all-white Ferguson police force’s poor community relations and what they said was its abusive and racially targeted practices. Lieutenant Lohr, to many of the protesters, is evidence that law enforcement officials have improved community relations at a divisive time.

    “Allowing people to talk on a one-on-one level does a lot as far as building bridges,” Lieutenant Lohr said. “They may not agree with what I’m doing, but now they at least know my name and my face. I’m human again. They realize that I’m a person. I’m not just a uniform.”

    “We have to bridge this gap,” he continued. “It’s not going to happen overnight. This is going to be a long-term relationship, a long-term commitment, that both sides are going to have to make.”

    On Monday, Lieutenant Lohr helped stop, or at least delay, outbreaks of rioting.

    Shortly before 8:30 p.m., as hundreds of demonstrators learned the officer who fatally shot Mr. Brown was not being charged — and Mr. Brown’s stepfather stomped on the hood of a car, urging the protesters to action — those near the front of the barricades surged forward and objects flew over officers’ heads.

    But after a man knocked the fence over, Lieutenant Lohr rushed in, standing between the riot-ready officers and demonstrators.

    “When I got out there, I said, ‘Please don’t push the barricade down — this isn’t going to help anything,’ ” the lieutenant recalled. “We both picked it up and put it back up.”

    The situation eased. Then it reignited down South Florissant, as protesters vandalized a parked police cruiser and hurled rocks.

    The next night, Tuesday, before the scuffle that led to the scratch on his eyelid, Lieutenant Lohr crossed South Florissant — the only officer to do so — to speak with demonstrators. There was a brief discussion about the use of the street. The lieutenant told them they could have two of the four lanes.

    He was polite to the protesters. His strongest words were reserved for the reporters who stuck microphones at his face and crowded behind him. A protester, Alene Williams, told him she was offended by the presence of the military.

    “You have to protect these buildings,” she said. “You have to protect the citizens. But you also have to protect the people.”

    “I know,” he said, “and I’m trying to do that.”

    The lieutenant’s cellphone rang. “Let me take this call,” he told her. “Thank you.”

    As he walked away, Ms. Williams said of Lieutenant Lohr, “He all right. I give him a little credit, but he ain’t going to get too much, because he’s still the police.”

    (I wouldn’t normally post the entire article, but I know that NYT articles are often behind a paywall)

  386. rq says

    Thanksgiving around Ferguson marked by quiet in aftermath of chaos; no overnight arrests

    Police throughout the evening responded to pop-up demonstrations that peacefully interrupted shopping at Target and Walmart stores in St. Louis and St. Charles counties.

    Communicating via Twitter and other social media sites, protesters hop-scotched from one big-box store to the next to register discontent with the Michael Brown decision.

    The protests on Thursday, with amicable interactions between demonstrators and police, contrasted sharply with the violence that shook Ferguson on Monday.

    In Maplewood one officer even consented to a selfie with Deray Mckesson, a Minneapolis educator active in the Ferguson protest movement.

    That guy, plowing into protestors? Mpls. police: Driver who hit protester was fleeing ‘the mob’ but is considered suspect. So he was ‘fleeing the mob’ by driving right into it. Because the best way to flee a mob is to run over its participants. A suspect.

    His mother said in an interview that Rice was coming home from work and “didn’t even know what was going on” when he encountered the group of several hundred people. The protestors were blocking the intersection as part of a day of demonstrations over Monday’s grand jury decision on the Ferguson, Mo., police shooting. […]

    The Wednesday morning police report listed Rice as a “victim” and the injured girl under a category marked “other.” Later in the day, police changed the listing of Rice to “suspect.” They did not provide additional information or immediately respond to a request for comment.

    Rice’s driving history in Minnesota includes three drunken driving convictions, with the most recent coming in 2003, according to court records. He’s also been convicted of driving with an open liquor bottle, and driving after his license was canceled and in violation of restrictions placed on his license. The most recent of these convictions came in early 2008.

    All of Rice’s convictions have been for misdemeanors or gross misdemeanors. His sentences have included fines and probation along with stints either in jail or the workhouse, court records show.

    Poor guy was confused by seeing so many black (and white!) people in one place all at once.

    Oh! PHOTOS: Walmart Workers Organize Largest Black Friday Protest Ever

    Walmart workers and activists on Friday staged protests throughout the U.S. to call for higher wages, better hours and full-time benefits.

    This year’s Black Friday protests are expected for be the largest ever, held at about 1600 stores throughout the country, according to Mother Jones.

    Lots of photos – more employees for better work conditions than protestors, but hey.

    So I asked about BART, here is more: Activists Halt BART with Human Chain in Act of Civil Disobedience

    In what may have been the most effective act of civil disobedience in the East Bay since the Ferguson grand jury verdict, members of an activist group called the BlackOut Collective, staged a protest on the morning of Black Friday at the West Oakland BART station, shutting down the station and service to San Francisco. At approximately 10:30 a.m., a member of the group used a bike lock to secure himself — by the neck — to a stopped train. Four others then formed a human chain secured by another member locked to a bench on the platform. Police arrived shortly after to clear and lock down the station. […]

    Shortly after noon, police arrested those chained to the train as well as nine other activists on the platform, and service to San Francisco was restarted, although the station remained closed until around 12:30 p.m. Shortly after the arrests, protesters received word that the activists in custody were being taken to the police station at Lake Merritt BART. By the time a group formed there, however, they were informed that those arrested had already been transported to Santa Rita Jail in Pleasanton. Following a group prayer, the gathering dispersed around 1:30 p.m., with some supporters heading to Santa Rita. […]

    The BlackOut collective asked that supporters donate to an online bail fund that will go toward freeing the activists arrested today, if they are not released without being charged.

    Ferguson ruling ignites prairie fire of protest:

    But political courage is even more shocking to the authorities, since they rely on the weight, the majesty of the money and institutions behind them to force submission to their rule. Which, in modern times, means the increasingly onerous rule of big capital — the banks and the corporations — over the vast working class, by means of a state that pretends to be democratic, but more and more betrays its fawning allegiance to the 1%, the enemies of the people.

    Once their political hold over the people has been breached, the rulers can lose control of everything. That is their greatest fear.

    What has been so wonderful about the literally hundreds of demonstrations that hit the streets after the grand jury’s ruling is the solidarity among Black, Brown and white people, mostly young, who are confronting this racist system.

    A new spirit is sweeping across the land. There was a suggestion of it when many whites joined with African Americans and other people of color to elect Barack Obama the first Black president.

    Many, Black and white, are disillusioned now, not just with him, but with the political machine that contains and controls him. But they have not faded away. Each new generation is showing greater understanding that for anything to change for the better, it won’t happen at the ballot box. A fighting movement has to be built that challenges this rotten capitalist system.

    With quick overview of several cities and the mostly-peaceful protests that have so far occurred all over.

  387. rq says

    My blockquotes are failing. Meh.

    bell hooks GIFs via Wil Wheaton.

    Ferguson Protesters Surprise Macy’s Black Friday Shoppers In NYC:

    “Voicing your opinion is not enough,” said Sergio Uzurin, one of the protesters. “You have to disrupt business as usual for this to happen and that’s the only thing that’s ever made change. It’s the real way democracies function.”

    Many protesters waved placards that read “Black Lives Matter,” which has become a rallying cry after officer Darren Wilson shot dead Michael Brown on Aug. 9, igniting sometimes violent protests and renewing a debate on the troubled state of race relations in the United States.

    Some chanted, “Hands up! Don’t shop!,” a play on another commonly heard refrain at protests in Ferguson, “Hands up! Don’t shoot!”

    The protesters temporarily blocked traffic by flooding a busy intersection, but quickly returned to the sidewalk. Many later began marching toward Times Square before eventually returning to Macy’s.

    Police were seen arresting at least one of the protesters after officers had tried to clear a group away from one of the store’s doors, but a department spokesman said they could not confirm the total number of arrests.

    INTERLUDE: Darren Wilson leaving Ferguson police force. That’s not a very flattering photograph of DW.

    “There’s no way in the world [Wilson] can go back to being a police officer,” attorney Neil Bruntrager told CNN this week.

    “It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when. He’s on paid leave, and there are discussions that are going on right now to separate from the department in an amicable fashion,” Bruntrager added. “Realistically, he can’t go back to being a police officer…There’s no illusion about any of this. But it’s the way in which he leaves … that’s important to him on different levels.” […]

    “I think I expressed to him, ‘Do you realize your first call [back on the job] will be to a blind alley where you’re executed?’ He took a pause for a minute, thought about it and said, ‘Oh.’ That is the reality,” Towey said.

    Wilson, who has said he has a “clean conscience” over the events of Aug. 9, has had to realize that resuming life as a cop would likely endanger his life and those of other officers, Bruntrager said.

    “The first day he would be back on the street something terrible would happen to him or to someone that would be working with him,” he said.

    “The last thing he wants is to put other police officers at risk.”

    That’s okay, he can do the talk-show circuit. He’s already a million and more from the fundraisers and that ABC interview.

    Video of Cleveland police shooting of Tamir Rice raises disturbing questions: editorial

    The police said two officers, responding to a 9-1-1 call, went to the park and saw Tamir take what they thought was a pistol from a table under a gazebo in the park and stuff it in his waistband. Police said that the boy was sitting with a group at the time.

    Police also said that the officers told Tamir three times to raise his hands, and that when he reached for what they thought was a real pistol, he was shot.

    The video, however, shows officers in a cruiser pull up within several feet of Rice, who was not with a group, but by himself underneath a gazebo. Immediately, even before the car stops rolling, the cruiser’s passenger side door opens, an officer emerges and fires at Tamir, who drops to the ground.
    About our editorials
    Editorials express the view of the editorial board of The Plain Dealer and Northeast Ohio Media Group — the senior leadership and editorial-writing staff. As is traditional, editorials are unsigned and intended to be seen as the voice of the newspaper.

    Deputy Police Chief Ed Tomba said the officers ordered Tamir to “show your hands” three times from the ajar passenger door, but it’s hard to believe that’s possible based on the video. […]

    Why did the officers drive right up to Tamir? Why didn’t they park further away, climb out of their car and shield themselves with a door or another section of the car, and then order Tamir to drop his weapon?

    End INTERLUDE.

    @deray I have had multiple shoppers since I got to work that have complained about #Blackout protests, THEY BLAME BOB MCCULLOCH #Ferguson;
    I’m still floored that a peacekeeper called me a faggot and all of the other peacekeepers supported her. Floored. #Ferguson. For clarification, the peacekeepers are those supposedly on the side of the protestors, present to defuse any situations with the police.

  388. rq says

    Protesting at Macy’s: Macy’s closed on us HELLA fast #ShutItDown;
    we shut down West Co. mall & Manchester Rd. (with the police help). They called in the military. #ShutItDown;
    Y’all, this is a living movement. And the police are EVERYWHERE. West County. #Ferguson ;
    We protest. We march. #Ferguson ;
    Seattle: Protesters have TAKEN OVER 3 floors of Westlake shopping center in #Seattle, chanting “Black lives matter.” ;
    https://twitter.com/YourAnonNews/status/538481408977944577.

  389. rq says

    In St Louis, they stopped bus traffic to the mall: Rider alert: Until further notice, the #57 Maplewood-Wildwood will not serve West County Mall and instead remain on Manchester Rd.;
    Rider alert: Until further notice, #2 Red will not serve STL Galleria & instead remain on Brentwood due to protests near mall entrance.

    Scared away Santa Claus: This peaceful demonstration was so “dangerous” that Santa himself had to pack up and lea… http://ift.tt/1y0PU3n

    In LA: #LAPDHQ’s says they’ve made 371 arrests related to #Ferguson protests in #LosAngeles. I think we lead the nation in protest arrests.

    One of the actions was singing alternate Christmas carols. Here’s the Protestor’s Caroling for Justice Song Book. For example,

    Life is Hell
    (Song to the tune of Silver Bells)
    Busy racists, busy racists.
    Dressed in KKK style
    In the air
    There’s a feeling of bias
    Bigots laughing
    Racists passing
    Every mile after mile
    And on every street corner you’ll hear

    Life is Hell, Life is Hell
    It’s a racist time in the city
    Ring-a-ling, hear them sing
    Slim hope for justice today

    Taps of Keyboards
    Even keyboards
    With a slur and a meme
    As the trolls troll
    Protestors with hatred
    Feel the gut punch
    From the bad bunch
    This is a racist’s big scene
    And above all of this bustle
    You’ll hear

    Life is Hell, Life is Hell
    It’s a racist time in the city
    Ring-a-ling, hear them sing
    Slim hope for justice today

    More in the songbook, such as Trampled Rights to the tune of Silent Night, and The Justice Song, set to Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire. And of course, A White Christmas. The songbook ends with the statement:

    The carolers of the Mike Brown Movement would like you to know that we fervently believe that there has been a miscarriage of justice in the Mike Brown case. We are a conglomeration of people of all races, hues, and socioeconomic backgrounds who believe that if we sit idly by after such an egregious assault on another human life that we would be failing our duties as human beings of this planet. It awakened in us a desire to eradicate systematic injustices and usher in equity for all people of all kinds in the world. Mike Brown’s death sparked something inside of us that we could not let go dormant, and we would like you to join us in this crusade for justice. We are bonded by peace and love and a steadfast desire to see justice for all.

    With suggestions for practical help.

  390. rq says

    Protests erupt at Midway Wal-Mart and McDonald’s.

    Friday’s Wal-Mart actions were among 1,600 scheduled at stores across the country, though Wal-Mart spokeswoman Kayla Whaling said the company expected protests to reach only 200 to 300 stores nationwide.

    Over the past three years, she said, “many of these scheduled protests never materialize.” Whaling also noted that the majority of “protesters are from paid union groups and not our Wal-Mart associates. These large gatherings often involve hundreds of paid union people and maybe one or two of our associates.”

    Holding a large protest sign above his head outside Wal-Mart, Mike Schrader, from the United Church of Christ, said he was marching to send Wal-Mart and McDonald’s a message. “These workers need a living wage. Not welfare,” he said.

    His friend, retired United Christ minister Bill Albertson, agreed. “These workers are hardly surviving on what they are making. And yet look at what the CEO is making.”

    Alisha Williams said she knows first hand what Wal-Mart’s work policies do to employees’ families. “I am a former Wal-Mart employee. But now I am an organizer,” said Williams, who brought others to protest Friday from the Greater Minnesota Workers Center in St. Cloud. “I was a cashier at Wal-Mart in St. Cloud for a year making $7.65 an hour. It was very difficult being their employee. I didn’t feel like I had a voice.”

    More on Tamir Rice: Police Gunned Down A 12-Year-Old And Somehow Local News Decided To Run This Story

    On Tuesday, police officials announced that they planned to release video of the incident. The next day, Tamir’s family and members of the community, still reeling from the boy’s death as well as the recent events in Ferguson, Missouri, awoke to this headline from the Northeast Ohio Media Group instead:

    Tamir Rice’s Father has history of Domestic Violence

    Hours before the public was to see a video of Tamir’s last moments, editors at the Northeast Ohio Media Group decided that it was important to point out that Tamir’s father and mother both have criminal records. While the domestic violence charges against Tamir’s father are indeed disturbing, it’s hard to see what they have to do with the death of an innocent black child at the hands of a police officer. […]

    This coverage was criticized by many as an attempt to smear the victims’ characters and distract from the issue of police violence — and, more subtly, to suggest that the killing of young black men is somehow acceptable or unsurprising. And it succeeded — these stories were used by some people to explain why Martin and Brown deserved to die, or how they may have somehow invited their own deaths. […]
    UPDATE: 11/28 — After receiving criticism for their original story on Rice’s father, the Northeast Ohio Media Group added an update to “give insight into the motivation to investigate the parents’ background,” claiming that “People from across the region have been asking whether Rice grew up around violence.” Chris Quinn, vice president of content for the Northeast Ohio Media Group, then defended the decision to run the story in a column published Thursday.

    One way to stop police from killing any more 12-year-olds might be to understand the forces that lead children to undertake behavior that could put them in the sights of police guns.

    So our reporters at NEOMG have been looking into Tamir’s background, to see if he lived a life exposed to violence that could explain why it might be normal for him to randomly aim what looks like a real gun in a public place. They have pursued tips about his life from Cleveland to Strongsville and continue to investigate.

    Others still appear offended by the Northeast Ohio Media Group’s apparent belief that it must explore aspects of Rice’s past that might be used to suggest the 12-year-old’s death was somehow his own fault. An employee with the Cleveland Plain Dealer recently sent an email to to all Plain Dealer and Northeast Ohio Media Group staff calling the outlet’s justification “borderline insulting.”

    That ‘justification’ isn’t ‘borderline insulting’, it is insulting. Whether they grow up around violence or not, no child should ever be treated with such automatic violence as Tamir Rice. The police should be scrutinized, not the victim and their family.
    Round Up of Cleveland Reactions to Tamir Rice Shooting. It’s a link-dump,

    We are gathering writing that furthers the discussion of the shooting of Tamir Rice in Cleveland, in addition to the stories Belt has published here, here, here and here.

    Oh, nice one, police! Pregnant St. Louis Woman Loses an Eye After Police Shoot Her With a Bean Bag Round

    Police claim that Conner’s boyfriend drove towards them in his car, the New York Daily News noted, while Conner sat in the passenger seat. Police fired a bean bag round towards the car, shattering Conner’s window and striking her face. Conner challenges the police narrative. She told KMOV that her boyfriend, De’Angelas Lee, was attempting to drive away when police fired the less-than-lethal rounds.

    “They pulled up while we were coming towards the street, De’Anglas was trying to get away, they blocked us from the side, front and back,” Conners said.

    “I will have justice for what they did to me,” Conner wrote on Facebook Thursday. “But I’m happy I’m alive.” Images of her bandaged face have garnered viral attention on social media.

    Is this a repost? Report: Prosecutors may have misled the Ferguson grand jury about the law for two months. Just more on that silly law they told jurors to ignore to come to a decision.

  391. rq says

    A couple more comments and then I go catch up on the overnight stuff, hope everyone’s keeping up! :)

    PETITION: Bring justice to Michael Brown by federally charging and prosecuting Darren Wilson for first-degree murder.

    On August 9th, Michael Brown, an unarmed 18 year old black male, was shot and killed by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. On November 24th, a grand jury failed to indict Darren Wilson on any charges. While Michael Brown, a college-bound teenage boy, no longer has a future, Darren Wilson has pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations & can live his life freely.

    Bring justice to Michael Brown and the hundreds of other black boys killed for the color of their skin by federally charging & fully prosecuting Darren Wilson. The grand jury decided not to indict Darren Wilson because of “conflicting evidence”, which is why a trial is necessary to guarantee the legitimacy of our justice system. Darren Wilson must held accountable for the murder that he committed.

    And from the UN, U.N. torture watchdog urges U.S. crackdown on police brutality:

    The panel’s first review of the U.S. record on preventing torture since 2006 followed racially-tinged unrest in cities across the country this week sparked by a Ferguson, Missouri grand jury’s decision not to charge a white police officer for the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager.

    The committee decried “excruciating pain and prolonged suffering” for prisoners during “botched executions” as well as frequent rapes of inmates, shackling of pregnant women in some prisons and extensive use of solitary confinement.

    Its findings cited deep concern about “numerous reports” of police brutality and excessive use of force against people from minority groups, immigrants, homosexuals and racial profiling.

    The panel referred to the “frequent and recurrent police shootings or fatal pursuits of unarmed black individuals.”

    “We recommend that all instances of police brutality and excessive use of force by law enforcement officers are investigated promptly, effectively and impartially by an independent mechanism,” said panel member Alessio Bruni, noting “reported current police violence in Chicago especially against African-Americans and Latino young people”.

    The U.S. delegation reported that 20 investigations had been opened since 2009 into systematic police abuses and that more than 330 police officers had been prosecuted for brutality.

    “We have certain concerns about whether investigations are thoroughly completed and whether punishment of law enforcement (officers) when they have crossed the line are effectively put in place,” committee member Jens Modvig told reporters.

    More at the link on terrorism suspects and immigrants.

    Protesters disrupt Black Friday shopping at Galleria, with video.
    Ferguson protest in LA: 8 arrested Friday night.

    A closer look at the incidents of arson and looting, and the (lack of) police protection involved: Burning Ferguson
    One street has boutiques. Another has dollar stores. Guess which one the police protected?

    “Together, we are all focused on making sure the necessary resources are at hand to protect lives, protect property and protect free speech,” he declared.

    By the end of the night, all three promises were broken. Arsonists destroyed buildings on the small commercial strip in Ferguson where protests had taken place since August. The body of 20-year-old DeAndre Joshua, a friend of Michael Brown’s friend Dorian Johnson, was found the next day. Demonstrators practicing their right to free speech found their safe houses raided by police firing tear gas, including an incident where police burst into a coffeehouse that had long been a protester sanctuary.

    But the resources Nixon touted were certainly at hand. Since early November, St. Louis has been host to 1,000 extra police officers, 100 extra FBI agents and an unknown number of officials from the Department of Homeland Security, FEMA, and other government agencies. On November 17, Nixon declared a “state of emergency” and called in the National Guard, who parked their hulking vehicles in places like Dairy Queen and the Galleria mall. Some in St. Louis condemned the employment of military power as a prejudicial reaction to over one hundred days of largely peaceful protest. (During the comparatively brief period of violent protests this summer, public outrage was focused as much on the overreaction and militarization of the responding police as it was at rioters.) In recent days, the now ubiquitous armor was terrifying in its own right, indicative of the brutal force that could be employed in the name of protection.

    On Monday, Ferguson got the worst of both worlds: militarized police who brutalized protesters and still did not protect a vulnerable business community. In both cases, black citizens disproportionately suffered.

    No piece of property compares to a human life. No loss of a business compares to the loss of a son. But whose property is protected says a lot about whose life is valued. […]

    Though falsely characterized as a ghetto, Ferguson is a small, economically diverse suburb, in much better shape than its decaying St. Louis county neighbors. The two main avenues where protests are held, West Florissant and South Florissant, run parallel to each other, but cater to different publics. South Florissant has a historic district with quaint shops and restaurants. It is the kind of place the city decorates with holiday decorations (under which police officers tear gas visitors).

    West Florissant, in contrast, is a commercial strip of dollar stores, nail salons and beauty parlors that were owned by and catered to a majority black low-income community. On Monday, many of these stores burned to the ground, along with the headquarters of Heal STL, a civic organization whose West Florissant location was intended as a symbol of hope for an area that had witnessed turmoil. By Tuesday, a multi-block stretch of West Florissant was declared a crime scene and blocked to traffic. The police chief said Tuesday that there was “nothing left” on West Florissant. Meanwhile, South Florissant, with the exception of a torched shopping plaza that held an antique shop and a Little Caesars, remained largely intact.

    Given the sheer number of law enforcement officials and the prolonged police planning that preceded the grand jury decision, Ferguson business owners wonder why they were left unprotected. “We were told all of that policing was going to take place,” Kaye Mershon, the owner of a West Florissant barbershop, told St. Louis Public radio. “But when I arrived they were standing out here. No one was doing anything; they weren’t policing.”

    And for the Bay Area, legal fund for the donation to of.

  392. rq says

    Silencing protestor media: #FreeBassem: Let Ferguson Report. From the intro:

    Note: On the night of the grand jury decision Bassem had 90,000 viewers and did a fantastic job reporting what was occurring. Later that night he had his phone stolen and then was arrested for driving on a suspended license (while he was a passenger). He has been in jail since the 25th because of a $15,000 cash-only bond.

    I think they’ve raised enough to get him out at this point, though – but that was only last night.

    Bassem Masri is one of the staunchest activists on the ground in Ferguson, MO during this trying time for our country. He has been our eyes and ears for what’s really happening in the community. His courageous “citizen-journalism” has been getting more attention than the mainstream media outlets that have been portraying inaccurate and sensationalist images of events taking place.

    According to protesters around him, he’s been getting harassed by St. Louis police as a way to silence his powerful voice, has had his phone stolen from him as he was livestreaming Ferguson events to an audience of 90k viewers, and yesterday was held at gunpoint by undercover police and taken into custody for no clear reason.

    The charge brought against him is for driving with a suspended license, though he was in the passenger seat of his friend’s vehicle when he was apprehended. [LIKE HOLY SHIT!!!]

    We just received word that they are demanding an outrageous $15k cash-only bond to release him. If you care about the freedom and justice that these protests represent, then help us raise the funds to let him free. […]

    I’m so grateful to have been exposed to everyone that is a part of this journey. Every single person that has donated or shared this page or mentioned it to a friend, whether they’re in Ferguson or not, gets to say that they share a piece of history. We’re playing a role in a major moment for our country. And — in whatever modest way this is — we’re doing what we can to contribute to a movement that will last generations.

    We’re not done. We’re almost there. We have less than $5K to go to meet our initial goal (I can’t believe I’m saying that so soon… Wait, yes I can.) I’m looking forward to seeing how we can all surprise ourselves once again. You all inspire me. Let the haters hate. We’re making history.

    Ugh wanted to put this one with the others: Ferguson Black Friday Shuts It Down. Some excellent pictures in there.

    This action had to have significant impact on the shopping mall’s Black Friday profits. (I learned after we left that the protest organizers moved from the Galleria Mall to other stores in the metro area.) The local business community has to be feeling the pressure as these protests spread from the streets into the economic zone of the St. Louis metropolitan region.

    The best thing about this action was knowing that most of the mall customers would never dream of attending one of these Michael Brown solidarity protests. They would be too afraid to ever go near such an action but here today they suddenly were right in the middle of the whole event. They had to see the spirited non-violent protest was in fact not nearly as dangerous as corporate media keeps telling them.

    The media, gathered here in St. Louis from around the world, was all over this protest today. The young black men and women leading these events are doing themselves proud.

    And for some other positive action, here’s a list: 101 Independent Black Owned Businesses to Support for Blackout Friday. Kinda missed Friday, but I’m sure it’s a useful list for any other time shopping needs to be done. With internet links.

    And on a slightly darker note, Boycott for Justice: 6 Lessons Black People Should Consider

    The idea of using our dollars as a form of protest is particularly appealing during the holiday season.

    Hashtags like #NotOneDime, #BlackOutBlackFriday & #ShopBlack (among others) have been circulating with increasing frequency. The message is a simple one: American businesses depend on “Black Friday” to make enough money to carry them through the next year. They make more money today than any other day of the year. More importantly they depend on money from the Black community to make that happen. Meanwhile Black people are catching hell all over the damn place. All while our dollars are helping to fund the system that thrives on our oppression. […]

    Black people spend over a trillion dollars annually. That’s just the Black people in America. As a group we have more spending power than many countries. So if you are considering participating in the boycott then there are some things I think we need to consider.
    1. Boycotts are Inconvenient. So is Racism. […]
    It took a lot of planning. It took effort. It took commitment. It took sacrifice. It also took the willingness to be inconvenienced.

    That last one is a biggie. Boycotts can be incredibly inconvenient. It is inconvenient to not take part in the biggest sales of the year. It is inconvenient to intentionally stay home and talk to your kids about why we are doing things differently this year. It can be inconvenient to find enough Black owned businesses to get the items you need in some neighborhoods.

    But you know what else is inconvenient?

    Racism. Police brutality. Explaining to your kids that the world sees them as menacing adults incapable of being innocent children. The risk of being killed for walking, talking, breathing or being Black. So when you get irritated with the inconvenience of participating in a boycott remember why it is that we’re having this discussion in the first place.

    2. Planning & Executing Plans are Luxuries that Slaves Did Not Often Have.

    During and after slavery White people employed rules that limited the number of Black people who could associate together in a group. There were rules against too many Black people congregating in churches, on streets corners or engaging in lengthy meetings without a White person present. […]

    Well, while we were sneaking into the woods in the dead of night under the threat of death to learn how to read, the rest of the country was learning how to come together and create new towns in the middle of open plains. They were learning how to plan their own schools, build their own stores and transportation systems. While we could be whipped to death for speaking out of turn, everyone else was learning how to control and direct the streams of money and investment in their communities; they were learning how to set up governments and businesses that work to further their own interests. They were learning how to defend themselves as a unit.

    While they were learning how to build and sustain community we were forced to whisper in secret. […]

    So it is important for us to build in organizational capacity because collectively we may lag behind in the art and science of planning and organizing for the purpose of building community.

    Let us be sure to use this time in the aftermath of Ferguson to expand our knowledge of the how-to of community organizing. The organizers in Ferguson have been methodical in taking classes and learning the science of sustaining a movement. We need to follow that example.

    It takes more than just passion to organize something beyond a protest march. It takes more than just passion to sustain a movement and to build a healthy community. There are books on how to organize. There are classes one can take on how to organize. There are elders one can speak with who can teach us effective organizing strategies. Lets use these resources to our advantage.

    3. Slaves Were Not Allowed to Own. […]

    What if instead of giving racist bus owners their transportation dollars going back to business as usual, Black patrons decided to keep their money circulating in their own community? What if during the boycott, the Black community created and maintained its own bus companies, met its own transportation needs and circulated those dollars within its own borders?

    What if instead of celebrating the fact that racist bus owners could no longer openly discriminate, the Black community rejoiced—and then decided it neither needed nor wanted to spend its money with those companies? What if instead, those boycotters chose to take their hard earned money and give it to Black owned bus companies that respected them and their humanity?

    Yes it is appropriate for us to boycott businesses that align with value systems that don’t value us.

    But it is more important that we learn how to meet our own needs for the long term. I am interested in owning our own communities and being able to meet our own needs. I am not interested in forcing people who literally despise the air that I breathe to take my money and service me in their restaurant. […]

    4. Be Intentional About “Yes and…”

    We may not see eye to eye on how to (or even if we should) boycott or otherwise protest this racist system. We may fundamentally disagree on which method is most likely to ease the pressure and eradicate the evils of racism.

    But we should also agree that neither of us has the blueprint to freedom so both of us should implement our ideas to the best of our ability.

    The issues we are dealing with are so pervasive, so twisted and so intertwined with the legacy of slavery that it is going to take more than just “I’m right, you’re wrong” types of analyses.

    Yes you and your idea may be correct. And yes, me and my idea may also be correct. We may not agree on how to get to freedom (see lesson number one), but neither of us has to be 100% correct in order to contribute our solutions.

    We are all in an “all hands on deck mode.” So be intentional about thinking of how to create and implement your solution. Find ways to work with others by focusing on areas of agreement. Then move on from there.

    5. Know That This Conversation Ain’t Normal. But it Must Be Had.

    This one is important. I saw a Facebook post recently where an Asian businessman explained that the Black community’s notion of “buy Black”, did not make any sense in his culture; there was no translation for it. Because for him the very idea of not buying from one’s own culture was ludicrous. The very idea of not being able to meet your own communities’ needs was ludicrous. Because he and his people are healthy.

    There are some communities where this conversation is as basic as teaching five-year-olds how to tie their shoes. It is important that we know that it is not normal for a people to be as dysfunctional as our community seems to be. It is also important that we know that we would not be this dysfunctional but for the very present and constant impact of a slave reality. […]

    While it’s not our fault, we are the only ones who can fix us. But we can’t fix us if we go back to business as usual. It is uncomfortable to deal with racism. But we have to be willing to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. Otherwise what we see is what we get.

    6. We Won’t Heal Overnight. But Giving Up Is Not an Option.

    One of the issues related to the first lesson (inability to plan), is that our timeframe for when things should happen may be a bit skewed. We often hear the terms “protracted struggle,” but few of us understand what that means in practical experience.

    The levels of hatred and evil that white America had to sink to in order to justify the enslavement and racial abuse of Black people does not have a match or parallel in other current social groupings.

    We have to contend with that because at the same time that White people were being taught to despise us for being less human, we were surrounded with messages that taught us the same thing. Not only were our own ethnic cultures stripped from us, but the White supremacist culture that replaced our ethnic cultures saw us as diabolical, less valuable, less beautiful, less smart, less human. […]

    However, as Black people who are trying to figure out a way out of this mess, we have to recognize that there is a “long term” element to this struggle. There is no quick fix. We have to commit ourselves to being committed to our own healing—no matter how long it takes.

    We have to study our history. We have to learn what happened to us—what they did to us. We have to understand the diseases of racism and internalized White supremacy. Because in studying the disease we may be able to find a cure.

    So as you boycott or try to decide what form of resistance is right for you, try to remember the myriad lessons we can learn from our ancestors and from our historical experiences with White people & white supremacy. If race truly is the omni-present fabric of this society then knowing how racism was perfected is imperative. Our lives may depend on figuring this thing out.

    Until then, #ShopBlack.

    Stuff to think about.

  393. says

    One way to stop police from killing any more 12-year-olds might be to understand the forces that lead children to undertake behavior that could put them in the sights of police guns.

    There is room for discussion of the gun culture in the US which fetishizes firearms to the point that children are raised to think of them (and facsimiles such as BB guns) as cool toys and playthings rather than deadly weapons, but I seriously doubt Northeast Ohio Media Group had that in mind when they ran the story about Tamir’s father.

    Also, how about they explore the forces that lead police officers to draw their weapons on children?! It’s like they’re starting from the position of “The cops were right to shoot Tamir. Now let’s somehow justify that conclusion.”

  394. rq says

    Okay, it’s going to be a lot of tweeting again, which might go backwards chronologically.
    The FBI decimated The Black Panther Party but the KKK is still strong because they’re not a threat to white America;

    ANNOUNCEMENT PROTESTORS: @GovJayNixon wants a special session to give more $$ to National Guard. Sounds like a field trip to Jefferson City!;
    Another on that: It’s official: Gov. Nixon to call special legislative session to provide critical funding for ongoing #Ferguson-related security measures. More money tossed to the military machine.

    Seattle: Seattle PD in riot gear are guarding the entrance to Westlake center. Protesters disrupted Christmas tree lighting.
    San Diego: My city does it again. #SanDiego protesters shut down Horton Plaza Mall! http://bit.ly/1ynvcK9 #BlackoutBlackFriday

  395. rq says

    Washington: STL Washington st NOW #FergusonAction #Ferguson ;

    San Francisco: This is from the San Francisco protests. And this is crazy. Wow.;
    #ShutItDownForMikeBrown march heading down Market St. from downtown SF to the Mission. “#Ferguson is everywhere.”;
    I had a good one showing San Francisco streets being shut down, but it seems to have been lost in the fray. This one wasn’t it, but it will do (it was an aerial shot): #ShutItDownForMikeBrown march heading down Market St. from downtown SF to the Mission. “#Ferguson is everywhere.”

  396. rq says

    More from Seattle: VIDEO: #Seattle protesters storm into Pacific Place shopping center chanting “Hands up, don’t shoot.” #Ferguson http://youtu.be/XTWE9KWqKLs ;

    Downtown St Louis: Washington Ave at 11th Street shut down. Downtown St. Louis. #Ferguson #MikeBrown via @cgagneASN @argusnewsnow ;

    Los Angeles: There were five confirmed people taken in police custody tonight in Los Angeles. We don’t know what the charges are. #FergusonToLA;
    Protestors blocked by police at Beverly and Alvarado and begging “let us go”. #Ferguson #DTLA .

    Found lost SF: RT @OOSomebody: #BlackLivesMatter #AllLivesMatter #Ferguson #SF Nov. 28, 2014 #BlackFridayBlackout #BlackFriday.

  397. rq says

    A couple more from the mall protests: Foot Locker employees show support for Chesterfield Mall protesters. Stores shuttered. #Ferguson #BlackFriday;
    “@deray: Die In. Chesterfield Mall. #Ferguson ” this is amazing.

    Carolling: We carol. Central West End. Protest. #Ferguson
    Art: Did our thing in #Ferguson today. Goin back Sun #MalcolmX #HealSTL #mural #streetart #expandyourcircle #paintforpeace.
    A comment on LA: If #LosAngeles is acting like this behind #Ferguson, I wonder what will happen when the #LAPD releases #EzellFord’s autopsy.

  398. rq says

    Musical tribute to Trayvon, applicable here: “Made You Die” Trayvon Martin Tribute.

    Al-Jazeera: Ferguson protests target retailers across US ,

    After a quiet Thanksgiving Day, protesters were out in force on Friday to vent their anger at Monday’s decision by a grand jury not to indict Officer Darren Wilson in the August 9 shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown in the St Louis suburb.

    Activists around the country said they were encouraging a boycott of Black Friday sales to highlight the purchasing power of African Americans, and to draw links between economic and racial inequality. […]

    About 100 protesters marched up and down the road outside the Ferguson police department late on Friday.

    As National Guard troops in camouflage and combat helmets looked on, the crowd chanted: “Soldiers, turn your guns around! Shoot this racist system down!”

    One Walmart store near Ferguson decided to cancel Black Friday sales, and merchandise was moved to other locations in the St Louis area, employees said.

    More than 200 people in New York City sought to disrupt shopping on Friday with a protest in front of the Macy’s flagship store in Herald Square and marched into the ground floor as staff and shoppers looked on in apparent surprise.

    Demonstrators later marched through the streets of New York, and a police spokesman said officers arrested seven protesters for disorderly conduct.

    Similar protests were staged in other cities, including Chicago, Seattle and San Francisco and Oakland in California, on Black Friday, when many retailers offer deep discounts and shoppers traditionally turn out in droves.

    Hundreds of protesters marched through San Francisco’s commercial centre on Friday night packed with shoppers, the Associated Press news agency said. […]

    In Oakland, about 16 people were arrested after chaining themselves to a train during a demonstration at a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) rail station, a BART spokeswoman said.

    In Los Angeles, where more than 300 people have been arrested in Ferguson-related demonstrations this week, about 120 protesters marched through the streets.

    Some reports of vandalism, but relatively few, compared to the peaceful shutdowns.

    The LAPD’s New Catch, Violate and Release Policy:

    Going forward, as witnessed this evening in the Westlake District where some 8 to 15 people were arrested on Beverly and Alvarado Boulevards, after the Department declares a protest an unlawful assembly, they will corral protesters into an area, box them in, and then detain them. Prior to being released, the Department has ordered officers to read each person a dispersal order, complete a field interview card (FI card), and run each protester’s name through the system to check for warrants. Those who choose not to leave after the order is read to them are going to be subject to arrest and those found to have warrants are going to be arrested. A process that is going to keep demonstrators and cops alike tied up for hours. But unlike the cops, protesters won’t be getting paid time and half.

    All of this I am told is the new CYA for the Department after it was repeated by hundreds of Angeleno’s that the LAPD arrested protesters and bystanders alike without ever giving a dispersal order at previous demonstrations.

    This new policy could be seen as a way to intimidate people from coming together to call attention to the issue of police brutality on the heels of the Ferguson grand jury’s decision not to indict a white police officer who killed a Black teenager. It will also likely come into play when the Department releases the autopsy report of Ezell Ford, a 25-year-old Black man killed by the LAPD in August, as more protests are bound to take place.

    Related – remember how black women are also shot by the authorities? “We want to know: Why? What happened?”

    So many questions, so much we still don’t know about the case of the woman shot to death by the Secret Service and the U.S. Capitol Police on Oct. 3, 2013, after a car chase from the White House to Capitol Hill. Her 13-month-old daughter survived in a car seat. As they say, her name was Miriam Carey:

    Barbara Nicholson is asking. The office manager of a dental practice in Ardsley, N.Y., is standing in the hygiene room, remembering the woman who used to clean teeth at this chair. Miriam Iris Carey — that was her name. She was one of the best dental hygienists and “one of the nicest people” Nicholson ever hired.

    “We’re left with a void and no answers,” Nicholson says. “It’s like she was wiped off the face of the earth.

    Nicholson’s voice catches. She pauses and looks away. “She’s missed. She’s very missed.”

    Do you remember Miriam Carey? Her remarkably public death at 34 mesmerized us for a couple of news cycles. Then we moved on pretty quickly. I had to look up her name when I first started puzzling over this case. The main thing I remembered was that incredible video — the one showing the two-door black Infiniti surrounded by Secret Service officers with guns drawn near the Capitol Reflecting Pool. The car looks trapped. Suddenly the driver backs into a squad car and accelerates away. There’s the sound of gunfire while tourists take cover on the West Lawn. The Infiniti reappears, making a loop around a traffic circle, and proceeds up Constitution Avenue to what would be the fatal encounter outside the Hart Building.

    What an afternoon. We were told that Carey “rammed” White House and Capitol “barriers.” That she tried to breach two security perimeters. That she had mental problems.

    District Police Chief Cathy Lanier said federal officers acted “heroically.” The House of Representatives offered a standing ovation.

    It was easy to call this a tragedy and turn the page. […]

    The gunfire — 26 bullets in all — sets the Carey case apart. Shootings by officers on these two forces are rare. White House guards didn’t resort to their weapons in September, when fence-jumper Omar Gonzalez, who had a knife in his pocket, ran far into the executive mansion before being tackled. Carey was unarmed.

    “There was no indication she ever had issues,” Nicholson continues. “You couldn’t ask for a more professional person than her. No one ever complained about her, and that’s highly unusual. She was the sweetest person you ever want to know.”

    Nicholson looks out the window to the parking lot where Carey used to park the Infiniti. “You could see the [child’s] car seat in the back of that car,” she says. […]

    By the time Carey got to town, Washington was already “on edge,” as more than one commentator would say. Two weeks before, a government contractor named Aaron Alexis had smuggled a sawed-off shotgun into the Washington Navy Yard. He murdered 12 people before being shot to death by D.C. police and U.S. Park Police officers.

    Six months after that rampage, the Department of Defense released three reports, totaling 280 pages, by internal and independent investigators who took a critical look at how such a thing could happen. In July, the Metropolitan Police Department issued its own 83-page “After Action Report.”

    The sum is 363 pages of narrative, timelines, diagrams and analysis of the attack and response, including recommendations for improvement.

    The two incidents are, of course, vastly different in many ways, but in both cases, someone was killed by police. Yet in the Carey shooting, just one document has been shared with the public. Dated July 10, it is titled, “Press Release: U.S. Attorney’s Office Concludes Investigation into the Death of Miriam Carey.” It runs 21/2 pages. […]

    Machen’s report offers a tight narrative of Carey’s actions during her last seven minutes — the time elapsed from her arrival at the White House checkpoint to her mortal wounding on Capitol Hill. Absent is any explanation for why officers resorted to deadly force, what threat Carey presented beyond alleged reckless driving, and whether officers followed their agencies’ policies.

    Shortly before this story went to press, Machen’s office released one more sentence to The Washington Post: “There is more than sufficient evidence to show that under all of the prevailing circumstances at the time, the officers were acting in defense of themselves and others at the time they fired their weapons.” A spokesman said the office would not detail what that evidence is.

    The Secret Service and the Capitol Police have declined to comment since the day of Carey’s death. D.C. Police Chief Lanier declined an interview request, and the city denied a request for the police department’s findings in support of Machen’s report. […]

    Now, four months after completion of the criminal probe, the department maintains silence about the case, it says, because the Carey family has filed a $150 million wrongful-death civil claim. The Capitol Police officers who discharged their weapons have been returned to active duty while an internal review continues. […]

    Miriam attended a high school outside the neighborhood where she could study for a health field. She got an associate’s degree from Hostos Community College in 2002 and began working as a dental assistant. Then she earned a bachelor’s from Brooklyn College, qualifying her to pursue a license as a registered dental hygienist.

    “It was ‘Miriam I. Carey, RDH,’ ” says Timica Roach, a friend who is a college financial aid counselor. “She wanted to be addressed in that status.”

    Miriam had ambitions to go further — to become a dentist or an instructor, or to write a book on the field. She started a placement agency for dental office personnel while working as a hygienist. […]

    In Connecticut, Miriam met Eric Francis, who was 21 years older. He owned a heating and air conditioning business in the Hartford area. Valarie thinks they might have met over the computer, “which is so unlike Miriam, but, you know, she was in Connecticut. She wasn’t around us; she was by herself.”

    Miriam did not share many details of her relationship with Francis, according to Valarie and Miriam’s colleagues at work. Miriam learned she was pregnant when she was hospitalized after she hurt her back in a bad fall.

    Erica’s birth in August 2012, a week after Miriam’s 33rd birthday, opened a chapter of untold joy, and also challenge, for her mother. […]

    One day in late November 2012, Carey called the Stamford police to report male neighbors loitering outside her window. They had been stalking her for months, she told the 911 operator. “They’re trying to videotape me through my window,” she says on a recording of the call.

    The operator said police would be right over, but there is no record of the outcome.

    About two weeks later, shortly after midnight on a Monday, Carey locked herself in the bathroom with her daughter and wouldn’t come out, according to a call Francis made to the Stamford police. “It’s been going on for a week now,” he says on the recording. “She needs help.”

    The episode was resolved — police records don’t say how — but before noon Francis summoned officers again. “She just went outside and I can’t get her back in,” he tells the emergency operator. “The baby doesn’t have no coat or anything.”

    Four officers arrived and found Carey inside the condo, pacing with her daughter, according to the written police report. “She stated that the residence was hers and she wanted Francis removed,” said the report.

    Asked why, “she replied it was because Stamford and the state of Connecticut [are] on a security lock down,” the report continued. “She stated that President Obama put Stamford in lockdown after speaking to her because she is the Prophet of Stamford. She further stated that President Obama had put her residence under electronic surveillance and that it was being fed live to all the national news outlets.”

    An officer asked to hold the baby. “She replied no it was her Baby.”

    Officers “grabbed” her arms, handed the child to Francis and handcuffed Carey. She slipped off the right cuff. “After a brief struggle” she was handcuffed again and transported to a location that is redacted. […]

    Officers pried the baby from her hold and gave her to Francis. After Carey was handcuffed, she tried to kick an officer whose colleagues “brought her to the ground,” the report said. She was taken to Stamford Hospital for an evaluation. We don’t know the outcome. Family members declined to share details.

    For all their blunt precision, the Stamford police reports can’t explain Carey’s fateful trip, because the last encounter with officers took place more than nine months before events unfolded in the capital. […]

    Why did Miriam Carey come to Washington?

    The moment a possible mental health angle surfaces in a violent episode like this, we’re tempted to conclude that we know the full story.

    Just after Carey’s death, her mother, Idella Carey, and sister Amy told reporters that, in the months after Erica’s birth, Miriam informed them that she suffered post-partum depression with psychosis, including a “momentary breakdown” that required hospital care. Amy added that she seemed better after receiving counseling and medication, and was tapering off the medication in accordance with a one-year treatment plan. She was “not delusional,” Amy said.

    Reducing the medication for such a condition must be a controlled process, according to experts. Quitting too soon can trigger a relapse.

    The U.S. attorney’s report doesn’t address Carey’s mental health because it isn’t relevant to the legal analysis of the officers’ actions, a spokesman said.

    That same December of the police visits, Carey brought 4-month-old Erica to the Christmas party at the Bronx dental office, where Carey worked for eight years.

    “When she had the baby, she did tell us that she had some post-partum, but she was on medication for that. She was fine,” says Marra, the office manager at the Bronx practice, where patients brought baby gifts for their favorite hygienist. “She wouldn’t be working here if she wasn’t stable.” […]

    “I wasn’t there, but what I do know is that, as a young mother, if you have a mate who is the other part of that child, sometimes a woman needs a break,” says Valarie Carey, who never met Francis. “And for him to call the police because she’s in the bathroom and the baby is crying, that was uncalled for. You’re not capable of soothing a baby, and you have to call the police?”

    “One of those calls,” Valarie continues, referring to when Francis said he hadn’t heard from Miriam, “came from the night that my sister was here [in Brooklyn], and she left here late, and then she went home, and he’s calling the police? … He didn’t call my mother. He didn’t call us.”

    The relationship between Francis and Miriam was over by summer 2013, and Francis had little further contact with Erica while Miriam was alive, Valarie says. […]

    Add it all up, and “no one knows why she went to Washington,” Valarie says. “Only Miriam knows.”

    Even granting the proposition that she was not in her right mind when she came to Washington, does that make her fate more acceptable?

    “I don’t know why Miriam went to D.C. that day,” Valarie says. “But what I do know is that she was killed in D.C. that day. … The emphasis shouldn’t be on why was she there. The emphasis should be what those officers did. Were their actions proper?” […]

    In the first of three still images the U.S. attorney released from security videos of this encounter, at precisely 2:13:13 p.m., a uniformed Secret Service officer seems to be trying to rap the Infiniti to get Carey’s attention. He and another uniformed officer direct her to stop, according to the U.S. attorney’s report. Carey doesn’t. She makes a U-turn and drives past the kiosk again on her way out.

    She is crossing back into public space, at 2:13:30 p.m., when a man not in uniform, wearing a dark short-sleeve shirt, is seen pushing a section of portable fencing against the front of Carey’s Infiniti. At the same time, he’s trying to hang onto what looks like a cooler and a plastic shopping bag.

    The man is an off-duty Secret Service officer, according to the report. The U.S. attorney, the Secret Service and the Capitol Police have declined to name any officer involved.

    The off-duty officer is not trying to block Carey from entering the restricted area; he is trying to keep her from exiting back onto 15th Street.

    According to a tourist bystander quoted at the time, Carey tries to steer around the fence section, but the officer repositions it in front of her. This is the only security barrier Carey ever rams. […]

    Eric Sanders, a civil rights lawyer and retired New York City police officer who is representing the Carey family in the wrongful-death claim, cites D.C. code to argue that an element of the crime of unlawful entry is the refusal to leave, making the act intentional. Carey did not refuse to leave. She refused to stop leaving.

    Why didn’t Carey halt at the officers’ direction? Valarie Carey thinks her sister was scared.

    “What I see is a plainclothes person, not in uniform, not easily identifiable as law enforcement, who’s in front of her car, leaning against her car in an aggressive way,” she says. “ ‘Who is this crazy man? Let me get away from him.’ ”

    “If you’re an officer, I don’t believe that’s in the protocol of how you stop someone,” she adds, referring to her NYPD training. The Secret Service wouldn’t comment. “I don’t think you were trained that way. To take a barrier and place it against somebody’s car while you’re holding a cooler? ‘I’m confused. Who are you?’ ” […]

    The U.S. attorney reported that she drove “at speeds estimated [by officers on the scene] at 40-80 mph, while weaving through traffic, and ignoring red lights.”

    Garfield Circle is 1.3 miles from the White House checkpoint. The U.S. attorney’s investigation determined that Carey covered the distance in four minutes. If Carey arrived in four minutes, her average speed was 19.5 mph in a 25-mph zone. […]

    At least four Secret Service vehicles pull up seconds behind the car. Four uniformed officers leap out and surround the Infiniti, aiming pistols with urgent two-handed grips at the interior. A fifth officer, also taking aim, is wearing plain clothes, with a dark short-sleeve shirt. (The officer with the cooler?)

    “Get out of the car!” officers can be heard shouting. Two of them peer through the passenger and driver windows, their faces close to the glass.

    “Then she did something you only see in the movies,” Farkas says, referring to the way Carey backed into a cruiser, seemingly to get room to maneuver. “Is that a trained stunt driver in there?”

    Carey pulls forward on the sidewalk, forcing an officer to sprint out of the way, and continues between the wall of the Lawn and the tree boxes. […]

    Eight rounds are fired by two Secret Service officers and one Capitol Police officer, according to the U.S. attorney. Investigators “do not believe” any rounds fired at this encounter hit Carey, the U.S. attorney reported, without stating the basis for that belief.

    Alhurra’s footage is the only video evidence the public has seen. Capitol Police says it can’t release video of what will be the fatal finale for security reasons. The Secret Service declines to release video of the checkpoint encounter, without explanation. […]

    Police standards prohibit officers from firing at moving vehicles except in rare circumstances.

    “To successfully fire at a vehicle, let alone a moving one, is something that only seems to work well in the movies,” observed a D.C. police training manual from the late 1990s.

    Police tacticians frown on shooting at moving vehicles because the practice often results in stray bullets spraying public space, speeding cars being turned into unguided missiles if their drivers are incapacitated, or unarmed drivers being killed before questions can be asked. […]

    The D.C. police policy echoes the model: “A moving vehicle is not considered deadly force.”

    The Secret Service and the Capitol Police will not disclose their current policies, but past policies give a clue.

    A Capitol Police order dated 1989 barred shooting at moving vehicles except to defend against an attack that could cause death or serious injury; or to prevent the escape of a person whom the officer has witnessed commit a felony. A former Capitol Police officer says those principles were still in effect as of several years ago. A 2004 Department of Homeland Security memo to the Secret Service and other enforcement agencies within DHS said “deadly force may not be used solely to prevent the escape of a fleeing suspect.”

    Early last month, Capitol Police Chief Dine sent a department-wide bulletin highlighting a recent Supreme Court decision in a case involving local police from Arkansas who fatally shot a driver and passenger just over the border in Tennessee. The driver exceeded 100 mph and posed a deadly threat to motorists, hence officers were justified in firing 15 rounds to stop the driver, the court ruled.

    “When the totality of the circumstances indicates that there is a grave risk to public safety … it is advised that it remains reasonable to use deadly force to end that risk,”Dine’s bulletin said. […]

    While Gainer agrees that standard police training is not to shoot at moving vehicles, he says the vigilance against bomb attacks within the target zone around the White House, Capitol and Supreme Court complicates the calculus.

    “Capitol Police and the Secret Service … do have a different responsibility, different theory and different challenges than one might in a normal police responding to a robbery situation,” Gainer says.

    “There’s a combination of [Capitol Police] orders about suicide bombers, improvised explosive devices, communication tactics, use of force,” he says. “It’s not as if you can just pull out one page, memorize it and you’ve got everything covered. It is a very complicated situation for those officers.”

    Gainer recalls the White House intruder, at whom Secret Service officers did not open fire. He notes that some commentators have said officers showed too much restraint in that case, and not enough in the Carey case.

    “If anything, the analogy between the two should be instructive as to how difficult it is to protect the buildings, the institutions and the people, and make those split-second decisions these guys and gals have to make,” Gainer says. […]

    As closely as officers stared into the two-door car, maybe they didn’t see baby Erica. Maybe they did. Should it have made a difference?

    It’s such a natural question, Gainer says. “If one knew there was a child in the car, should one have used deadly force? I’ve spent a lot of time over the years trying to analyze this. … Do you shoot down a plane that you think is going to crash into the World Trade Center knowing that it’s full of passengers? That doesn’t mean do it or don’t do it. Jesus, it just makes it a pretty hard frigging question.

    “If a whole set of circumstances are unfolding, and I thought the person was a suicide bomber, and I saw the baby in there, I can tell you I wouldn’t say to myself, ‘Oh, they get a free pass.’ But I would say to myself it would be the most terrible, terrifying decision I’d have to make. But I gotta make it.” […]

    She travels on public streets. Since leaving the White House checkpoint, she never attempts to cross another restricted security perimeter.

    Capitol Police raises embedded mechanical barriers across Constitution at Second Street NE, blocking Carey’s departure from the Capitol zone. She makes a U-turn across a curbed median, as if to return down Constitution. But in that direction are a Supreme Court police vehicle, which she hits, and officers approaching with guns drawn. She shifts into reverse, backing toward Second Street again, away from the Capitol and the Supreme Court. A Capitol Police officer on foot has to scramble out of her path.

    That officer and a Secret Service officer now fire nine rounds each at the car. The Infiniti comes to rest back upon the median, next to a Capitol Police kiosk. It’s 2:20 p.m., seven minutes after she arrived at the White House checkpoint.

    The rear windshield is demolished. Carey is unconscious, according to the U.S. attorney. […]

    Carey is pronounced dead at a hospital at 3:08 p.m. There is no trace of illegal drugs or alcohol in her system. (The toxicology report did not test for some prescription drugs.) She has been struck by five rounds — three times in the back, once in the left arm, once in the left side of the head.

    And the family is left dealing with a lot of unanswered questions.

  399. rq says

    Wow, that was a long article. :/ You get a wall of text. Whew.

    Last few things, from Ferguson itself:
    Cops have come from behind the gate in riot gear #Ferguson ;
    An officer in riot gear just told @Nettaaaaaaaa to “shut the hell up. This is my neighborhood now.” That was wild. #Ferguson;
    Bruh, intense scene at the #Ferguson PD. Police and National Guard blocking residential streets.;
    Now that a lot of the cameras have gone, it appears that the police are back to business as usual. And that is deadly. #Ferguson;
    Protests. #Ferguson ;
    16 arrests in front of #Ferguson police department tonight, according to police statement.

  402. says

    Petition asking the Department of Justice to bring charges against the cop who killed John Crawford III

    On August 5, 2014, our lives changed forever. Our unarmed son John Crawford III was killed by police while shopping at a Walmart in Beavercreek, Ohio. On this tragic day, John was shopping like any other customer in the store. He was looking at a few items on the shelf, holding a toy BB gun he might buy and talking on his phone with the mother of his two children. Other customers shopped near our son, showing no sign that John was any kind of threat while he shopped. Everything was normal until Officer Sean Williams suddenly began shooting him without any warning. In the video above, you can see this was a heinous and unjustifiable killing.

    We fought for months to get Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine to release that surveillance footage to the public. And while the video shows our unarmed son being ruthlessly killed, Mr. DeWine’s office delayed the grand jury and then presented a half-hearted case against Officer Williams. So we were not surprised that the grand jury declined to bring charges against Williams, the reckless and dangerous officer who was also involved in a 2010 fatal shooting for which he was never prosecuted.

    We may be delayed, but we won’t be denied. We won’t stop until we receive justice for our son. The US Justice Department is currently conducting a civil rights investigation into John’s case. We believe that the video footage clearly demonstrates that it is time for the federal prosecutor to bring charges against Officer Williams.

    This may be our last chance to do so, and we need your help as we seek justice for our son. Please sign our new petition demanding that U.S. Attorney Carter M. Stewart bring justice to John and our family. We are grateful for your continued support.

  403. rq says

    So many people to keep track of, so little justice for them. :(

    Let’s start with something scary: Mysterious ‘Oath Keepers’ guard rooftops in downtown Ferguson

    “I opened the window and said, ‘Hey, can I help you?’” said Hildebrand, 35, a website developer.

    The man said he was security and would be up there at night with others to protect the pocket of second-story apartments and lower-level storefronts near the Ferguson Police Department. A day earlier, rioters had broken out windows below Hildebrand’s apartment in the 100 block of South Florissant Road and torched a nearby beauty supply store. […]

    Puzzled and alarmed protesters have wondered, too — some accusing the mysterious guards in military fatigues of being in the Ku Klux Klan.

    In fact, they are volunteers affiliated with a 35,000-member national organization called Oath Keepers. Yale Law School graduate and libertarian Stewart Rhodes said by telephone from Montana that he founded the group in 2009 to protect constitutional rights, including those of protesters confronted by what he described as overly militarized police.

    But Rhodes, who said he is Mexican-American, was quick to assure that Oath Keepers is not anti-government. He said those pulling rooftop security in Ferguson are current or former government employees and first responders, many who have intense military, police and EMS training.

    “We thought they were going to do it right this time,” Rhodes said of government response to the grand jury decision released Monday night in the Darren Wilson case. “But when Monday rolled around and they didn’t park the National Guard at these businesses, that’s when we said we have got to do something.

    “Historically, the government almost always fails to protect people,” he added. […]
    Oath Keepers boarded up a bunch of the storefronts and started night rotations on several rooftops. Sam said he vetted volunteers to ensure there weren’t any “racists” or “people with an ax to grind.” He said he picked volunteers who “have seen the elephant and are calm under fire.”

    Fearing more arsonists, Oath Keeper volunteers have buckets of water, fire extinguishers and other nonlethal weapons on the rooftops. Some are also armed with rifles that aren’t available at Walmart and Cabela’s.

    The volunteers are well aware of the grave risk to life that arson can play and the legal right to stop it from happening.

    Police are aware of their presence and have questioned some of the group’s volunteers. But police haven’t ordered the Oath Keepers to leave.

    Some spooky pictures at the site, too. Now imagine that they were visibly black.

    Quick youtube video, police and National Guard going for protestors.

    The Brown family’s pastor tries to make sense of the fire that gutted his church

    No one would blame Lee — who is the Brown family pastor — if it was a bit difficult to be thankful this year. With the whole family watching his crestfallen face, Lee took a deep breath, and began: “This last couple days had just been crazy. . . . Since August the ninth, it’s been real crazy.” Still, he said, “I’m thankful for life, and for my wife, my children, our parents. . . . If I lose everything that I have, but I still have my joy, I have enough to build it all over again.”

    Protesters in Ferguson Are Arrested After Blocking Traffic

    Demonstrators marched in front of the same shops whose windows were shattered during protests this week after a grand jury declined to indict a white police officer, Darren Wilson, in the shooting death of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager. They also walked past the very spot where two parked police cruisers had been hit with rocks and set on fire.

    The protesters marched on Friday evening along South Florissant and briefly halted traffic at an intersection as National Guard soldiers looked on with blank expressions. Some demonstrators approached the soldiers and screamed: “This is America!” […]
    But later, after repeated standoffs in the street, the police lost patience and swarmed onto South Florissant to make arrests. Glass shattered onto the road, and officers angrily ordered people to the sidewalks. A police spokesman said 16 people had been arrested.

    Only one was from the St. Louis area, the authorities said. Nine were from New York, three from the Chicago area, two from California and one from Iowa.

    The police said that most of those arrested were charged with disturbing the peace, but that one had assaulted an officer and resisted arrest. One officer injury was reported.

    After the arrests, protesters loudly criticized the police as overly aggressive.

    Riot-damaged Dellwood vows to rebuild

    The mayor said he reached out to Gov. Jay Nixon on Tuesday — the morning after rioters devastated Dellwood businesses, franchises and family-owned alike. Jones lamented that Nixon had, as of a Friday afternoon news conference, yet to respond to his calls for state assistance. In an interview later Friday, Jones said representatives of the governor’s office had reached out to him after the news conference and promised to help.

    Businesses in this city of 5,000 were also burned and looted in the disruptions that flared in August after Brown was fatally shot by Wilson.

    The damage, Jones said, is exacting both a psychological and economic toll on a community that — unlike its neighbor to the south — is not universally recognized by a Twitter hashtag.

    “It’s kind of frustrating when a mayor sees news crews in the middle of his city saying they are in Ferguson,” Jones said.

    And yeah, those emergency funds – Nixon announces special session to call for additional emergency funds for Ferguson

    “This is of the essence,” Nixon said in the statement. “It is vital that we act quickly so that we can fulfill our obligation to the men and women who are so bravely and capably serving their fellow citizens.”

    The 2015 fiscal year budget approved by the legislature included $4 million for National Guard state emergency duty response costs at $3.4 million for State Emergency Management Agency (SEMA) costs.

    “This was a productive discussion,” said Nixon regarding tonight’s call with legislators. “It’s clear these legislators share our commitment to public safety and understand the need for prompt action.”

    Yeah, because more and more intense police / guard presence is what the city needs. How about you listen to the people, Mr Mayor?

  404. rq says

    More on the HealSTL office, for donation: While we are disappointed by the destruction of our office, we are not deterred. We have work to do — with your help.

    Protest Halts Traffic on NB I-5 in La Jolla. But no arrests or citations, which is nice.

    The students wanted to shut down the highway to force everyone to pay attention to the recent grand jury decision in Ferguson, Missouri, Livingston said.

    “People of color, students of color, often times we don’t have a voice,” she said.”This is our way to demand that ya’ll listen.” […]

    They held signs demanding accountability and proclaiming the message “Hands Up Don’t Shoot.”

    As a result, thousands of cars were stuck stopped with the gridlock reaching several miles south to downtown San Diego.

    The frustration was apparent as drivers got out of their vehicles and began taking images and video of those holding up traffic. Some took the red cones put up in front of the line of protesters and threw them to the side of the highway.

    One man appeared to be screaming and threatening several protesters including one holding a bullhorn. He then wrangled the bullhorn away.

    As a motorcycle drove past the protest, the rider held up a fist in solidarity.

    California Highway Patrol officers arrived approximately 15 minutes after the protest began and intervened between the group and the drivers who were delayed.

    After several minutes, the line of protesters walked to the side of the highway and were escorted to the highway off ramp.

    A couple of videos at the link, one of which is AUTOPLAY!

    Internationally: @deray There were protest in several foreign countries: Japan; Canada, London and France come to mind. No pics of Canada or London or France, though, unfortunately – at this time.

    And because Wal-Mart, Black Friday protests hit 1,600 Walmart stores across the U.S.. That’s a lot.
    Twitter: #BlackFridayProtests #WalmartStrikers New Orleans pics via @swervinervin23 #NOLA #WalmartElves.

  406. A. Noyd says

    Did anyone link the video of Lawrence O’Donnell’s evisceration Witness 10’s testimony and McCulloch’s reliance on it? I only see it being described a bit above, so here it is.

  407. rq says

    A. Noyd
    Don’t read the comments. :(

    +++

    Ooh, are the police participating? Police have shut down eastbound lanes of Eager Rd. by Brentwood Pointe. Protesters chant “Black lives matter.”
    Protesters chanting “If you’re going to be a cop, do it right.” St. Ann police van takes arrested individual away.

    YESTERDAY at the Ferguson Police Department before they said “You will be subject to injury or death.” #Solidarity

    TODAY: a large crowd protesting store-to-store in Ferguson Into Bed, Bath & Beyond we go;
    Being asked to leave Trader Joe’s.

  408. rq says

    Another view of San Francisco last night: San Francisco Protesters Vs. The SFPD

    During a protest against police violence on black Friday in San Francisco, police used violence as their main tactic. So a few protesters fought back.

    Aren’t cops supposed to be more emotionally stable than the average person? Off-Duty Cop Allegedly Shoots Woman In Head During Road Rage Incident.

    On Darrien Hunt: New video emerges of black cosplayer running for his life from cops who then shot and killed him

    The footage shows that he was dressed as a samurai. His family says he was carrying a non-sharp replica sword, and was an anime fan who was cosplaying as a samurai character from a popular anime series. The cops shot him 6 times in the back while he was fleeing for his life. The video contradicts earlier statements by police that Hunt swung the sword at the police officers before they began shooting him.

    Another shooting, another contradictory video.

    Diagram showing police opinion on their own use of force and its portrayal in the media:

    61% admitted that they do not always report serious criminal violations that involve the abuse of authority by fellow officers;
    79% are not satisfied with the way that the justice system deals with the indivicuals that thay arrest;
    67% surveyed reported that officers who report incidents of misconduct are likely to be given a “cold shoulder” by fellow officers;
    84% surveyed have witnessed other officers use more force necessary to make an arrest;
    79% feel that reports in the news media have caused the public to distrust law enforcement.

  409. rq says

    Protests continue: photo 1; photo 2; photo 3.

    Protestor Demands 2014, updated but yet to be revised. They’re accepting suggestions right now.

    More on the Oath Keepers, keep that positive spin going, media! <a href="Group protects Ferguson businesses from looters, arsonists

    The group, which is mostly made up of men with military or law enforcement backgrounds, is offering protection for people who cannot afford security at their business.

    Members of the group have traveled as far away as Iowa to help protect businesses in Ferguson.

    The group says they plan to be in the area indefinitely.

    No word on which businesses they’re protecting, or who is sanctioning their assistance in law enforcement. Funny, that, eh?

  410. says

    rq @409:
    You’ve a borked link there.

    ****

    The one word that kept Darren Wilson out of jail

    In the aftermath of the Ferguson grand jury’s decision, many commenters and reporters noted that the law made it very difficult for Darren Wilson to be found guilty of murder or any crime, under the circumstances.
    If you are upset with the outcome of the case, the argument goes, don’t blame the prosecutor or the grand jury, blame the law.
    There is an element of truth to the argument. Self-defense laws in Missouri, and throughout the country, are robust and police officers, in particular, are given a wide degree of latitude.
    But ultimately, it’s just a way to pass the buck. Darren Wilson did not escape accountability for shooting Michael Brown dead because of the law. He escaped accountability because, as a society, a majority of us are OK with that outcome.
    There are many conflicting accounts of what happened the night Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown. Wilson was able to present his account, with little scrutiny, to the grand jury.
    But even if you accept Wilson’s account word-for-word, he only gets off because enough people found his actions “reasonable” under the circumstances. Since Wilson used lethal force, he acted “reasonably” if he “reasonably” believed his life was in danger.
    What does “reasonable” mean? It means whatever we say it means. Ultimately our answer of what reasonable conduct entails is not defined by law, but a reflection of society’s majoritarian norms. These norms can and do change. For example, women asserting self-defense against their husbands used to be prohibited from discussing prior acts of violence by their husbands in court. Such acts were not viewed as relevant when determining whether a woman’s actions were reasonable under the circumstances. But over time, that changed and prior acts of violence by the husband can be used as part of a successful self-defense claim by a battered spouse.
    Was Wilson acting reasonably? He testified that Brown looked like a demon. A demon is a supernatural being associated with the devil. Is it reasonable for Wilson to perceive Brown, who was actually an 18-year-old human, in this manner? Is it reasonable for such a perception to contribute to fear that ultimately justified taking Brown’s life?

    Overall, I like the article, but that headline…man. He didn’t escape jail. He escaped a trial. Even if he’d been charged with a crime, a conviction would not be a slam dunk. That headline contributes to the confusion many people have over the grand jury deliberations.

  413. Saad says

    rq, #405

    Police presently pre-empting protest: THE POLICE HAS ALREADY SHUT DOWN THE ACTION SPOT AT 170 & Eager Rd. MEET AT TRADER JOE’S across from Target!!!

    Where are all the Second Amendment fetishists now?

    This seems to violate the First. Or if not violate directly, it certainly seems like a loophole-y way of denying it.

  414. Saad says

    carlie, #412

    Thank you for that! I’m in the middle of on-going multi-front discussions with family and friends about this topic. It’s frustrating and disheartening to see so much prejudice and misinformation out there. That certainly helps tons.

  416. HappyNat says

    79% feel that reports in the news media have caused the public to distrust law enforcement.

    Clearly the problem is with the media portrayal not the documented actions of the officers themselves. It reminds me of the arguments of Grothe/Nugent/ et al., that talking about sexism and harassment hurts “the movement” so we should shut up. If people don’t widely know about the problem it’s not a problem then is it?

  417. rq says

    carlie
    Just reading through that link of yours via Twitter, and that is one giant linkdump of all kinds of awesome stuff we didn’t have here! Nice!

    Tony
    Yeah, that link is borked but I closed the tab and the quote is more or less the article. I think there was a video, but it was an awesomely short article.

    +++

    Oh my gosh! This would be awesome! Ferguson Protesters Take Lead in TIME’s Person of the Year Poll

    Unrest in Ferguson and around the country focused attention on race and policing, helping to lift Ferguson protestors into first place in the TIME reader poll with 10.7% of the vote. Thousands of demonstrators marched in solidarity with the family of Michael Brown, an unarmed black man who was shot by the police, disrupting Black Friday shopping in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Seattle and other cities.

    Protests cropped up all across the United States in the wake of a grand jury’s decision in Ferguson Monday not to indict the white police officer who fatally shot Brown.

    Not that anyone else on that list is particularly undeserving (though hopefully ‘Person of the Year’ in a negative way – lookin’ at you, Putin!), I think putting the Ferguson protestors front and centre would be a huge and significant move for the movement.

    In the meantime, more malls closed down, more meetings happening. So amazing to see such a response still going on.

    More from one of today’s die-ins: photo 1, photo 2.

    And I like this one: How not to shoot civilians, nine lessons on community policing.

    1) Don’t recruit cops by promising violence and adventure

    “You have to be thinking, as a police administrator, about what kind of folks you want to attract to your department, and how you do that. You look at some departments’ recruiting materials, and you see guys jumping out of trucks in SWAT gear and people armed with every imaginable weapon. There are clearly situations where that is a necessary and appropriate part of police work. But having said that, that is by far and away not the norm. […]

    2) Train officers not just in what they can do, but in how to make good decisions

    “It’s important that officers have training that involves more than just being proficient in the use of a firearm. Obviously that’s something they need to be able to do, but a big part of our training around use of force, specifically with use of firearms, is training in decision-making under stress. How and when do you consider the use of deadly force? What are the other options that were available to you? […]

    3) Give cops extra training in interacting with mentally-ill people — and teenagers

    “We’ve done quite a bit of training, with our school resource officers and our juvenile detectives, about some of the better ways to communicate with youth — what approaches might be most appropriate if you have to use force. Some of that’s really about brain development, and we’re learning that young people really do respond differently than adults do.”

    “We do a lot of training dealing with the mentally ill. We have officers on all of our shifts who have gotten even more detailed and involved training — crisis intervention training — dealing specifically with mentally-ill individuals. That covers understanding what the signs are that someone may be in a mental-health crisis, understanding about medications and the impact of those medicines that a lot of folks might be on, understanding what happens when they’re not taking their medication, and getting better knowledge on how to interact or engage with people who are in crisis.”
    4) Training doesn’t stop when you get out on the street

    “Our officers go through what is anywhere between six and eight months of additional training once they hit the streets. That involves being teamed up with other officers who are trained as trainers, and who provide them with ongoing and regular evaluation about what they’re doing and help them learn from their mistakes in a more controlled setting.”

    5) Remember that you can kill someone with a Taser

    “Part of the problem with Tasers out in the community is, perhaps, this particular piece of law enforcement equipment has been misrepresented to suggest that it always can guarantee a good, less-than-lethal outcome. And that’s not true. People have complicated health histories which you can’t possibly know, most of the time, when you’re dealing with them. There may be a lot of circumstances that complicate the use of a Taser that you couldn’t know in advance. […]

    6) Be proactive in addressing officers who use a lot of force — before they become a problem

    “We have a database in which we track each officer’s history in terms of how they use force. If we see an officer who seems to be using force more than somebody else, we take a more careful look at that. That doesn’t always mean that the officer is doing something wrong or that they’re just predisposed to use force. It might have to do with the area that they’re working, the incidents they’ve been dealing with. But it still never hurts that we look more carefully and try to be as proactive as possible in addressing a situation before it becomes, potentially, a problem.”

    7) Don’t be afraid to fire someone who’s not cut out to be a police officer

    “It’s hard when you’ve invested as much as a year or more into training somebody. But there are clearly some folks who can’t multitask, they can’t make good decisions under stress, they’re not effective communicators. For whatever reasons, they’re not cut out to be police officers. Part of the challenge of a professional police department is to make sure those folks are separated from service early on. So you have to be willing to do that — and to have the local political support within your city to do that.”

    8) When force really is needed, a little community trust goes a long way

    “The use of force is something that, when people see it, they’re horrified by it. Even though it may be completely legitimate and appropriate in a larger scheme, it’s not easy to watch, and it’s even more difficult to have to be part of. […]

    9) Police departments can’t do sufficient training without resources

    “It’s totally appropriate and important that we have this national conversation about use of force. But I hope along with that is a commitment to the idea that it takes resources and financial support to do this kind of training. A lot of departments don’t even have the personnel that they need to handle many of these situations. They certainly don’t have the resources to commit to that type of training and equipment. So then you have cops that are really left with a knowledge gap and a resource gap. And I’ve worked in some smaller departments, where I’ve seen that it’s very tough.”

    I would say some of those police departments out there have a hell of a lot of resources – they just seem to be spent more on dangerous toys than the appropriate kind of community policing.

  418. rq says

    HappyNat
    It’s the old ‘ignorance is bliss’ argument. It’s all fine and good, just don’t shine a light under the bed. Or in the corners. Or heck, don’t turn the light on at all!

    +++

    In Cleveland, for Tamir: Cleveland marching now #TamirRice #MikeBrown #Ferguson | #ShutItDown | Live feeds #DC & Ohio;

    See more protestors: “If you won’t come to Ferguson, Ferguson will come to you!”, addressing Nixon – Just spoke with @pastortraci. She is planning to take buses to Jefferson City on Jan. 7. Meanwhile, people march: Sun is shining as protesters finish first mile of 135-mile #JourneyforJustice march from #Ferguson to Jeff City.

    The reasons they do this: photo.

    Ferguson Protesters Chain Mall Doors Shut In Seattle: Cops

    More than 120 people were marching when a group broke off, went through Pacific Place mall and chained shut two doors, Seattle Police Department spokesman Patrick Michaud said.

    Seattle police later said on Twitter that a total of five people were arrested in the protests.
    […]

    In a protest targeting another Seattle mall, about 200 demonstrators entered the Westlake Center downtown and marched to a balcony where they chanted. They also disrupted a Christmas tree-lighting ceremony at the mall, with demonstrators setting off two fireworks during the event.

    Spectators who came to see the Christmas tree outnumbered protesters, and while the ceremony was cut short there was little friction between the two groups.

    I haven’t heard of any major friction between shoppers and protestors, actually – anyone? I’ve heard mostly positive, supportive reactions, though not always people are pleased. Confirmation bias at work, most likely.

  419. says

    HappyNat @416:

    Clearly the problem is with the media portrayal not the documented actions of the officers themselves.

    That was my thought too. I wonder how those complaining would like the media to portray them (and why do I think some would like for the media to NOT portray police activities).

  421. says

    And here’s something else I think is important (man that link is like a treasure trove). If you go to neuronbomb, you’ll see the links they’ve included in the following (there were too many for me to include in this post):

    Q: How can I help the people in Ferguson? What can I do now in general?

    Register for the National Conference for White People on Ferguson, happening this Saturday, November 29th online.
    Check out these links to lists with tangible, direct actions you can take to continue supporting the movement:
    What can I do from where I’m sitting?
    7 Ways To Demand Change If You’re Feeling Hopeless and Helpless After Ferguson Decision
    12 Things White People Can Actually Do After the Ferguson Decision
    Act Locally: 5 Things White People Can Do to Combat Racist Police Violence
    10 Ways You Can Help The People Of Ferguson, Missouri
    12 Things white people can do now because Ferguson
    Stay up to date with #FergusonNext, “a solution-based collaboration between Guardian US Opinion, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch Editorial Page, Ebony.com, Colorlines, The St. Louis American and The St. Louis Riverfront Times.”
    Watch or privately screen the film “White Like Me” to continue the conversation on privilege and race. You can use the code BLACKLIVESMATTER to get it for free on Vimeo for a limited time.
    Donate to the Ferguson Defense Fund via the Indiegogo campaign started by Donna Dragotta and Talib Kweli. The campaign states that “Ferguson protesters need money for jail, bail, and life” -leaders from Ferguson October will ensure money goes where it is needed to support protesters and continue the movement.
    Make sure “Black women, girls, and femmes aren’t left out of national dialogues around state-santionced, anti-black violence.” ALSO make sure that in the “Black women’s lives matter” you include, and/or specifically note and uplift Black trans women, and trans women of color in general.
    Continue reading and learning about how we ended up here, as written and told by black people. Autostraddle posted a collection of essays, interviews and articles to get your started.
    Stay alert and informed on related events taking place, such as the grand jury hearing evidence in the case against NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo for the murder of Eric Garner, and the U.S. Department of Justice’s developing investigation into the murder of 12 year-old Tamir Rice by Cleveland police.
    Send letters to LGBTQ prisoners in support of Black & Pink’s work towards the abolition of the prison industrial complex.
    In the words of Steve Locke: “There are libraries full of books, interviews, essays, lectures, and symposia. If people want to learn about their own country and its history, it is not incumbent on black people to talk to them about it. It is not our responsibility to educate them about it. Plus whenever white people want to talk about race, they never want to talk about themselves. There needs to be discussion among people who think of themselves as white. They need to unpack that language, that history, that social position and see what it really offers them, and what it takes away from them.”

    (bolding mine)
    I’m glad for they included this in their tips.

  423. rq says

    This has been making the rounds: Encounter at protest leads to hug for boy, officer

    A day after the decision on officer Darren Wilson in the shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown, the Harts went downtown “with the intention of spreading love and kindness” by holding signs such as “You Matter” and “Free Hugs,” Jennifer Hart said. The family then joined the nearby Ferguson rally.

    Barnum, who works for the traffic division, had been dispatched to a downtown intersection to help with traffic and crowd control. In the middle of the block, hundreds of protesters listened to speeches about the relationship between police and black residents. […]

    A couple days later, Devonte Hart stood on the outskirts of the Portland rally, about 10 feet away from Barnum. He was trembling, his mom said. Tears were rolling down his cheeks.

    “Devonte was struggling. He wouldn’t speak. He was inconsolable,” his mother wrote. “My son has a heart of gold, compassion beyond anything I’ve ever experienced, yet struggles with living fearlessly when it comes to the police… He wonders if someday when he no longer wears a ‘Free Hugs’ sign around his neck, when he’s a full-grown black male, if his life will be in danger for simply being.”

    Barnum told The AP he noticed the boy and wondered what was wrong. So he motioned for him to come up to his motorcycle.

    The officer asked for his name and shook his hand. He also asked Devonte where he went to school (he is homeschooled), what he did this summer (he traveled around the U.S. with his family), and what he likes to do (art). The tears stopped.

    Barnum has two teenage sons and has worked for Portland’s police force for 21 years. While continuing to talk to Devonte, he looked at the “Free Hugs” sign on the ground and asked if he might get a hug as well.

    Devonte put his arms around the officer.

    “Knowing how he struggled with police, his bravery and courage to catch my eye and approach me were impressive,” Barnum said. “And it’s a blessing for me that I didn’t miss an opportunity to impact this child.”

    Hart said the moment was about “listening to each other, facing fears with an open heart.”

    It’s been going around with the addendum that it’s not necessarily the individual cops who are the problem, but the inherently racist, power-tripping system of which they are members.

    Canfield Drive.
    Die-in at Frontenac mall in St Louis.

  427. Pteryxx says

    From rq’s #424, Wesley Lowery posting that excerpt from 1997. Here’s the full 85-page report from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: PDF link It’s about the Pierce Report for the economic and civic future of St. Louis in general, with race and equality as significant factors.

    Text of the excerpt, from page 27, that Lowery posted as an image:

    Race pervades every St. Louis regional issue. It feeds the sprawl and all the costs of sprawl as people run from inner-city minorities. It explains the disparities in school funding and the extraordinary percentages of private and parochial school enrollments. It limits the geographic appeal of the new rail system because far-out suburbs don’t want too easy a connection to the core.

    No one even bothers to deny that race relations in the St. Louis region are a tough, seemingly intractable problem. Some African-Americans say it’s a “volcano destined to erupt,” that the apparently calm racial atmosphere masks a seething cauldron of resentment that will inevitably explode when today’s black leaders, nurtured in the hopefulness of the civil rights revolution, yield to a next, less patient generation.

    What If The Lid Comes Off?

    St. Louis’ aura of racial calm may indeed be part of the problem. When Detroit and Cleveland were burning with race riots in the late 1960s, St. Louis black leaders kept the lid on. It’s still on, even tighter, say some. And, wonder some blacks, what’s the reward?

    “This black leadership deserves something in return for its desire to get along,” a prominent African-American told us. “We ought to get something out of this. We smile a lot, go along a lot. We asked to have a seat on the (St. Louis) 2004 board. When the inner circle was looking at the list of potentials, I understand they said: ‘There’re no radicals on here. What are we so worried about?’ ”

    So there’s peace – but at what price? And what happens to stability when these stewards of steam control retire? When the lid comes off?

    One has to ask: Wouldn’t it be better to rip away the pretenses now, deal with the issues directly, openly?

  428. Pteryxx says

    Thanks to carlie at #412 for the Ferguson masterpost at neuronbomb. Here’s another sampling of links with explanations:

    SF Public Defender’s Statement on Grand Jury Decision

    One of San Francisco’s Public Defenders points to four of the major flaws that effectively undermine the grand jury’s decision. [Added 11/29/14: A commenter notes: “It’s actually better than that; the statement is not merely from “one of San Francisco’s Public Defenders”, but from San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi himself, i.e. the Public Defender. Therefore, this is not simply an opinion from somebody who happens to be a Public Defender, but is an official statement from the Public Defender’s office.”]

    MSNBC: Shocking mistake in Darren Wilson grand jury from Wednesday the 26th

    Watch this video of The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell [a white guy], where he explains how the assistant district attorney gave the grand jury a copy of a 1979 Missouri law that had been ruled unconstitutional since 1985—the law stated a police officer is “justified in the use of such physical force as he or she reasonable believes is immediately necessary to effect the arrest or to prevent the escape from custody” (chapter 563.046) meaning that, “it is legal to shoot fleeing suspects simply because they are fleeing.” The grand jury was led to believe this law was still in effect, legally protecting Wilson’s actions within the story they’d been given.

    A bunch of links in the next note, which I didn’t copy over:

    This is part of a pattern. See who else they’re not indicting: the officers involved in the Ohio murder of another Black man, John Crawford. If you want to watch the security camera footage of what happened there yourself, you can do so here, but be aware it is a graphic video. Now contrast that with this video of two men carrying AR-15 (the gun most commonly used in mass shootings throughout the US) and how the police literally have NRA liaison print out the law to prove to these armed two men that open carry of AR-15s is unlawful where they are, two photos of white people open carrying at Target and this white guy and his gun at Walmart. And for added details, read about how the person who catalyzes this entire police brutality incident actually lied about what was happening during his 911 call, the call that led to events resulting in John Crawford’s murder and the death due to heart attack of Angela Williams, a 37 year-old mother who was there with her children.

    and from a commenter, bolds mine:

    [Added 11/29/14] As someone noted in the comments: “The evidence was presented in a skewed and unfair manner–I believe the evidence was completely one-sided, and the fact that photos of Wilson were shown but that photos of Brown weren’t shown is an obvious sign of lack of rigor from the prosecutor–there’s not a single prosecutor who wouldn’t want to show photos of the victim and what happened to them (if the prosecutor wants an eventual conviction).”

  429. Pteryxx says

    just saw this one at the Masterpost:

    [Added 11/29/14: Someone emailed in to also note that ABC apparently paid Wilson a “‘mid-to-high’ six-figure payment to give his first and only public interview on the network.”]

    citing a GotNews.org source via Alternet:

    ABC offered Darren Wilson a “mid-to-high” six-figure payment to give his first and only public interview on the network, according to the website Got News. An unnamed source from NBC reportedly told the website that both networks engaged in a bidding war to score the first interview with Wilson but NBC backed out after its rival “upped the ante.”

  430. Pteryxx says

    More on the burning of the Brown family’s church, which Pastor Lee spent his life savings to open. WaPo:

    As chaos engulfed several Ferguson streets Monday, [Pastor] Lee tried unsuccessfully to chase away looters and put out fires along West Florissant Avenue. Then his phone rang.

    The officer on the other end of the line told him that he needed to get to his church right away. By the time Lee arrived, the cinder-block structure had been gutted by flames.

    […]

    Although other buildings were burned during the violence that consumed much of Ferguson on Monday, the flames at Flood Christian Church were different. The church building, purchased in March by the 31-year-old Lee, sits well outside the area where things were violent, far from the riots. The glass storefronts on each side remain unscathed.

    An arson unit with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is investigating the fire, which Lee and other community members are convinced was a targeted attack.

    […]

    In September, when it seemed less likely with each passing day that police Officer Darren Wilson would be charged, [Pastor Lee] broke his silence. He signed up to be a regional representative for Al Sharpton’s National Action Network. He declared publicly, for the first time, that he believed Wilson should be arrested.

    That’s when hateful messages and death threats started — from Wilson supporters, from white supremacist groups and from Internet bigots.

    “Seventy-one death threats. But I’ll never forget what one man said to me: ‘I’m going to come pick you up with all you other hateful n—– preachers and put you all in your church and burn you straight to hell.’ ”

    A DailyKos contributor adds:

    Naturally, his insurance company is refusing to pay for damages. They informed Pastor Lee that his policy did not cover damages because it was located in “an area where riots and civil disobedience occurred.” The fact that the church is no where near the area where the other buildings were burned and that there were no demonstrations or protests in its vicinity apparently does not matter to the whoever denied the Flood Church’s claim.

    Anyone wishing to donate funds to rebuild the Flood Christian Church can go to their Go Fund Me site here: Mike Brown Church The Flood

  431. Pteryxx says

    via a very insightful DailyKos contributor, this commentary from WaPo deputy editor and Pulitzer-winner Colbert King:

    Deep South Justice in Ferguson

    Of course, the story of blacks not getting justice didn’t start with Michael Brown or Trayvon Martin. That history is long, thus the outrage. Sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, writing in the 1940s, described what communities such as Ferguson encounter: a “weak man with his strong weapons — backed by all the authority of white society — [who] is now sent to be the white law in the Negro neighborhood. There he is away from home.”

    “The white policeman in the Negro community . . . feels himself in danger.” Written in the 1940s.

    Listen to Wilson’s grand jury testimony, in which he characterizes the Ferguson community that he patrolled:

    Wilson: “It is an antipolice area for sure.”

    Prosecutor: “And when you say antipolice, tell me more?

    Wilson: “There’s a lot of gangs that reside or associate with that area. There’s a lot of violence in that area, there’s a lot of gun activity, drug activity, it is just not a very well-liked community. That community doesn’t like the police.”

    The essay really should be read in its entirety.

  432. Pteryxx says

    Another via DailyKos, Kristof’s column in Sunday’s New York Times: When Whites Just Don’t Get It, Part 5

    This “When Whites Just Don’t Get It” series is a call for soul-searching. It’s very easy for whites to miss problems that aren’t our own; that’s a function not of being white but of being human. Three-quarters of whites have only white friends, according to one study, so we are often clueless.

    What we whites notice is blacks who have “made it” — including President Obama — so we focus on progress and are oblivious to the daily humiliations that African-Americans endure when treated as second-class citizens.

    “In the jewelry store, they lock the case when I walk in,” a 23-year-old black man wrote in May 1992. “In the shoe store, they help the white man who walks in after me. In the shopping mall, they follow me.”

    He described an incident when he was stopped by six police officers who detained him, with guns at the ready, and treated him for 30 minutes as a dangerous suspect.

    That young man was future Senator Cory Booker, who had been a senior class president at Stanford University and was a newly selected Rhodes Scholar. Yet our law enforcement system reduced him to a stereotype — so young Booker sat trembling and praying that he wouldn’t be shot by the police.

    My sense is that part of the problem is well-meaning Americans who disapprove of racism yet inadvertently help perpetuate it. We aren’t racists, yet we buttress a system that acts in racist ways. It’s “racism without racists,” in the words of Eduardo Bonillo-Silva, a Duke University sociologist.

    This occurs partly because of deeply embedded stereotypes that trick us, even when we want to be fair. Researchers once showed people sketches of a white man with a knife confronting an unarmed black man in the subway. In one version of the experiment, 59 percent of research subjects later reported that it had been the black man who held the knife.

    Much more in the column and series.

  434. Pteryxx says

    and this, unfortunately, is relevant.

    The Guardian: Ohio Republicans push law to keep all details of executions secret

    Republican lawmakers in Ohio are rushing through the most extreme secrecy bill yet attempted by a death penalty state, which would withhold information on every aspect of the execution process from the public, media and even the courts.

    Legislators are trying to force through the bill, HB 663, in time for the state’s next scheduled execution, on 11 February. Were the bill on the books by then, nothing about the planned judicial killing of convicted child murderer Ronald Phillips – from the source of the drugs used to kill him and the distribution companies that transport the chemicals, to the identities of the medical experts involved in the death chamber – would be open to public scrutiny of any sort.

    Unlike other death penalty states that have shrouded procedures in secrecy, the Ohio bill seeks to bar even the courts from access to essential information. Attorneys representing death-row inmates, for instance, would no longer be able to request disclosure under court protection of the identity and qualifications of medical experts who advised the state on their techniques.

    “This bill is trying to do an end run around the courts. When things aren’t going well, the state is making its actions secret because they don’t want people to see them screwing up,” said Mike Brickner, senior policy director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in Ohio.

    The draft legislation, framed by Republican state lawmakers Jim Buchy and Matt Huffman, has passed the state House of Representatives and now goes before the Senate. Republican leaders, backed by Ohio’s attorney general, Mike DeWine, want to ram it through no later than 17 December.

    The move to erect a wall of secrecy is particularly alarming in Ohio, a state that has experienced no fewer than four botched executions in the past eight years. The most recent was the 26-minute death of Dennis McGuire in January, using an experimental two-drug combination.

    Happy Holidays.

  435. rq says

    Cross-posted to the Lounge: Everyone does drugs, but only minorities are punished for it

    1) Black and white populations use drugs at similar rates

    White and black people report using drugs at similar rates, according to the latest data from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. There’s some variance from drug to drug: White people report more often using cocaine, heroin, and hallucinogens, while black people report more marijuana and crack cocaine use. […]

    2) Once convicted, black drug offenders get longer sentences than white drug offenders

    Drug sentences for black men were 13.1 percent longer than drug sentences for white men between 2007 and 2009, according to a 2012 report from the US Sentencing Commission.

    That disparity has been true for most recent history. Black men received 9.1 percent longer drug sentences between 2005 and 2007 and 9.2 percent longer drug sentences between 1998 and 2003. There was no statistically significant difference in drug sentences for black and white men in 2003 and 2004.

    3) Mandatory minimum sentences target a drug more often used by black people

    Mandatory minimum sentences were established in the 1980s when politicians touted the so-called crack epidemic to show off tough-on-crime stances. But these sentences are set in a way that could target black drug offenders more than white drug offenders. […]

    4) SWAT team raids disproportionately target black neighborhoods

    SWAT raids are much more common in black neighborhoods than white neighborhoods, according to a new report from the American Civil Liberties Union.

    Ferguson a defining moment for race relations in USA

    “This is 2014, and we are still confronting the problems that our mothers and fathers confronted back in the civil rights era,” said Daniels, who is affectionately called Mama Cat by the protesters. “My generation came along, and we fed off what they did. We didn’t fight and keep the fight going. Now, because we didn’t keep the fight, our children have to fight.”

    The anger in the African-American community over a grand jury’s decision last week not to indict Darren Wilson, the white police officer who killed 18-year-old Michael Brown, hasn’t subsided. […]

    On Saturday, NAACP members began a 120-mile walk that will take them from Brown’s neighborhood to the governor’s mansion in Jefferson City. The point of the effort is to draw attention to activists’ calls for a change in leadership in the Ferguson Police Department and broad reforms in how police departments across the country conduct themselves. […]

    “This decision does not stand alone,” Bently-Edwards said of the grand jury’s decision not to indict Wilson. “The reality is for a lot of African Americans, they don’t need to see statistics to know that they are being targeted. They know they are being stopped multiple times and that this is not the reality for white Americans.”

    The divide goes beyond the issue of police brutality. In a 2013 Gallup poll about affirmative action, 22% of whites said race should be considered to promote diversity on college campuses, while 48% of blacks and 31% of Hispanics believed race should be taken into account. […]

    Daniels says Wilson not being indicted sends a clear message that black life in America doesn’t carry the same value as white life. He called the grand jury’s decision “blatant disrespect” and said the criminal justice’s unfair treatment of blacks must be examined.

    As he stood among hundreds of protesters at the Ferguson police station last week, Daniels shared an ominous message.

    “Some people are going to have to die for the cause,” the financial consultant said. “It’s sad to say, but this is the new civil rights movement for our generation, and there will be casualties and there should be bloodshed.”

    Video: Michael Brown’s mother: “They killed my child. They’re never going to pay.”

    Darren Wilson referred to choosing to resign as the hardest thing. Killing an 18 year old is apparently not too hard.

    Another person just said that the police told her to not let protestors go down by the train because they cannot protect us there. #Ferguson

    The police are in the CUT. And they shined their lights on us. Both sides got a laugh. #Ferguson

  437. rq says

    Darren Wilson resigns from Ferguson police department “of his own free will”.

    Wilson told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper he was stepping down out of his “own free will” after the police department told him it had received threats of violence if he remained an employee.

    “I’m not willing to let someone else get hurt because of me,” he told the newspaper. [THE IRONY OH WAIT HE’S TALKING ABOUT SOMEONE WHITE NEVER MIND – …]

    Several protesters in Ferguson shrugged their shoulders or expressed disinterest in the news of Wilson’s resignation.

    “We were not after Wilson’s job,” Rev. Al Sharpton, a civil rights activist, said in a statement to The Associated Press. “We were after Michael Brown’s justice.”

    Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson didn’t immediately return a message left on his cellphone seeking comment.
    [which is kind of the same ‘meh’ way I feel about it – …]

    Asked whether the encounter would have unfolded the same way if Brown had been white, Wilson said yes. [Liar. – …]

    “Here we are a century later trying to bring about an end to another form of racialized violence: racial profiling,” said Brooks, who said he considered the Brown case, at bottom, an example of racial profiling.

    And the CBC on Wilson’s resignation. Funny, I get the feeling I’m seeing more articles on Darren Wilson and his interviews and decisions than I am about protestors and their actions.

    Ferguson protests: 7-day march to Gov. Jay Nixon’s home begins. Check out the picture they use for the headline. Right. Nothing better, right? No peaceful picture of people actually walking along a road. Nothing. Yeesh.

  438. rq says

    Via a comment from the indomitable Maureen Brian comes an excellent summary of Ferguson events as a defense of the most recent looting, and the root causes behind it (I have edited slightly, as the comment is addressed to a commenter in specific):

    1. Going around shooting people dead and pretty well at random is actual mob violence. The fact that the gunmen are wearing police uniforms or that the shootings tend to happen one at a time does not change that.

    2. On the day the Grand Jury decision was announced – at the worst possible hour and after the maximum possible build-up of tension – the places which were burnt out were mainly African-American owned businesses and the #HealSTL store-front office, suggesting that at very least the people doing it were not locals. Oh, and the Brown family’s church after 70-odd death threats to the pastor there.

    3. One hundred days plus of overwhelmingly peaceful protests produced what? A couple of mentions by the President and absolutely no attempt by local officials to calm or to negotiate a modus operandi with the local people. Or rather there were couple of ineffectual attempts which were promptly blown out of the water by the very next action of the state.

    4. On day one – the day of the killing of Michael Brown – when his neighbours and family expressed concern, the police arrived to monitor the demonstrations, something they are perfectly entitled to do, but dressed and equipped for World War 47 The Movie. Ramping up tension, no?

    5. In the course of all this members of the press have been arrested on the flimsiest of pretexts, designated safe spaces have been attacked by police and Amnesty International observers were tear gassed. [Isn’t there] a First Amendment lying around somewhere?

    […]

    7. If you don’t want to discuss what is happening in Ferguson, why it is happening, what can be done about it – fair enough. Then go away.

  439. Pteryxx says

    Wilson told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper he was stepping down out of his “own free will” after the police department told him it had received threats of violence if he remained an employee.

    “I’m not willing to let someone else get hurt because of me,” he told the newspaper.

    I’d just like to point out that I’ve seen article after article about Wilson resigning, often with mentions of protests or violence or threats, and not a single article has mentioned Wilson’s previous job in a police force that was disbanded for brutality and corruption. Salon:

    According to officials interviewed by the Post, Wilson maintained a clean record, but the Post reports that his first job “was not an ideal place to learn how to police.” He entered the police force in 2009, joining a nearly all-white, 45-member task force that patrolled Jennings, Missouri, a small, impoverished city of 14,000 where the residents were 89 percent African-American. The racial tension was high, and the police were accused of using excessive force against its residents: […]

    The department also endured a corruption scandal. In 2011, city council members voted 6-1 to shut down the force and start over, bringing in a new set of officers. Everyone was let go, including Wilson, but he soon found a job at the Ferguson police department, where he has been since.

    Lt. Jeff Fuesting, who took over command of the Jennings force, assessed the problems of the former task force like this:

    “There was a disconnect between the community and the police department. There were just too many instances of police tactics which put the credibility of the police department in jeopardy. Complaints against officers. There was a communication breakdown between the police and the community. There were allegations involving use of force that raised questions.”

  440. Pteryxx says

    From Thinkprogress, comparisons of the hapless frightened white person versus rampaging black animal narratives given by Wilson and Zimmerman: In the eyes of their killers, Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown were the same person (title from HTML)

    Wilson, who shot the unarmed Brown a total of 12 times, told a grand jury that the high schooler immediately provoked a violent confrontation.

    The description is eerily similar to another lethal confrontation with an unarmed black teen in broad daylight: the death of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida. George Zimmerman, the man who shot and killed Martin, told police that the teen “jumped out from the bushes” and punched him in the face, knocking him down. “I started screaming for help. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t breathe,” he said. “He grabbed my head and started hitting it into the sidewalk. My head felt like it was going to explode.”

    Zimmerman also claimed Martin put his hand over Zimmerman’s mouth and nose and told him, “You’re going to die tonight.”

    Both Zimmerman and Darren Wilson told officials that the young men they killed had their hands in their waistbands—suggesting they feared the presence of a weapon when there was none.

    Further exploration in WaPo: In America, black children don’t get to be children

    Black America has again been reminded that its children are not seen as worthy of being alive — in part because they are not seen as children at all, but as menacing threats to white lives.

    America does not extend the fundamental elements of childhood to black boys and girls. Black childhood is considered innately inferior, dangerous and indistinguishable from black adulthood. Black children are not afforded the same presumption of innocence as white children, especially in life-or-death situations.

    Note officer Darren Wilson’s description of his confrontation with Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, in Ferguson, Mo. In his grand jury testimony, Wilson described Brown as a “demon,” “aggressive,” and said that Brown had taunted him by saying, “You are too much of a p—y to shoot me.” (Similarly, George Zimmerman told police that teenager Trayvon Martin threatened him during their fight: “You’re gonna die tonight.”)

    The 6-foot-4, 210-pound Wilson told the jury, “I felt like a 5-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan. . . . That’s how big he felt and how small I felt just from grasping his arm.” Wilson claimed that Brown charged at him through a hail of bullets before he shot him in the head. The history of that night paints Wilson as an innocent white child so threatened by a big, black beast that his only option was to use lethal force.

    […]

    In 1955, after 14-year-old Emmett Till was beaten and killed by a group of white men, one of his killers said Till “looked like a man.” I’ve found this pattern in news accounts of lynchings of black boys and girls from 1880 to the early 1950s, in which witnesses and journalists fixated on the size of victims who ranged from 8 to 19 years old. These victims were accused of sexually assaulting white girls and women, stealing, slapping white babies, poisoning their employers, fighting with their white playmates, or protecting black girls from sexual assault at the hands of white men. Or they were lynched for no reason at all.

    […]

    This played out again in the fatal shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice on Nov. 22. The boy, who was reported as being “tall for his age,” was playing outside a recreation center in Cleveland when he was seen sitting on a swing playing with a BB gun. In a 911 recording, a witness said: “The guy keeps pulling it in and out. . . . It’s probably fake, but he’s pointing it at everybody. He’s probably a juvenile.”

    It’s unclear whether the dispatcher relayed to the responding officers that they might be dealing with a child playing with a BB gun. But when the officers found Tamir, they said he did not put up his hands when ordered to do so. Instead, he allegedly reached for the gun in his waistband and was shot.

    […]

    Regardless of the case, the police officers’ actions in these cases are consistent and predictable: This was not a child. He was a threat. I was afraid and had to defend myself. The child, stripped of childhood, is framed as a menace that overrides probable cause.

    The dangers black children face — from being profiled and targeted for arrest and incarceration — are firmly rooted in history.

  441. rq says

    Goign to try to stick to few tweets today, lots of articles. I think. Haven’t sorted mixed and matched yet.
    First, protestors attending Ram’s game:
    Seems like Ram’s fans can walk in the street but we can’t. America. #Ferguson;
    Ram’s fans cross the street with their hands up. #ferguson;
    Many Ram’s fans leave. We protest. #ferguson . Of course, there was a lot of hate, too. But peaceful. And this: Rams Players Enter Field With “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” – watch that video, it is great. Truly.

    St. Louis Rams players recognized this week’s Ferguson protests with an emphatic gesture during player introductions when several members of the team’s receiving corps entered the field in the “hands up, don’t shoot” pose.

    Stedman Bailey, Tavon Austin, Jared Cook, Chris Givens, and Kenny Britt came out with their hands up, before being joined by the rest of the team to start the game.

    That is exactly the recognition the movement needs. Keep it going.

    Elsewhere, in DC: @deray Protestors in D.C. have shut down I-395 near D Street exit. “.

  443. rq says

    From the New York Times, Pain Is Colorblind

    And I certainly have never bought into the hackneyed argument that inevitably arises when black people are in an uproar over the shooting of blacks by white police officers or civilians. The argument usually goes something like this: “Why aren’t black people this outraged over black-on-black killings?”

    On cue, the morning after the shooting at the bar I heard Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York mayor, raise the question on “Meet the Press.” I’d heard it before in the wake of similar violent incidents, like the killing of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager shot to death in Florida by a man who was white and Hispanic.

    “That is just as offensive as if somebody from a foreign country asked, ‘Why are you guys so outraged by the attack on the World Trade Center when Americans kill far more Americans than Al Qaeda ever has?’ ” said Antonio D. French, a St. Louis alderman who has been active in the Brown protests. “It’s just as offensive.”

    Those who make that argument, he added, are typically the ones who ignore what goes on in black neighborhoods in the first place.

    “We talk about it nonstop,” Mr. French, himself black, said of the crime problem. […]

    Still, to even compare the response to violence within the black community with the uproar over Mr. Brown’s killing is to compare apples with oranges, according to community leaders.

    When blacks kill blacks, there is an expectation that if the suspect is found, he or she will be prosecuted vigorously. For many blacks, though, that certainty is not always there when the shooter is a police officer or someone of a different race.

    “The complaint and the anger is about the system, not just the death itself,” Mr. French said.

    It is especially jarring when police officers are the killers, Mr. Ahmed said, because “they are an entity of the state itself, so when the state shows a lack of sensitivity, community members feel it is an obvious example of abuse.”

    What I experienced after the bar shooting provided an emotional reminder of the anger and grief that accompany killings among blacks.

    After running out a rear exit, I saw a sobbing woman who had been inside being comforted by another patron. As word spread on social media that it was a security guard who had been shot, the reaction was pointed.

    “Idiots everywhere,” one woman wrote on Facebook. […]

    “The sense of overwhelming loss just washed over me,” Mr. Perkins recalled. “And I knew the void, the pain that was going to cause this entire family was going to be almost unbearable.”

    What I heard from Mr. Perkins was the same pain that I heard from Mr. Brown’s parents, and the same strong desire for justice. And there was no less outrage because the killer was black.

    About 24 hours after the killing, the police arrested a suspect, Jamal T. Martin, who, in a cruel twist, was a client of Mr. Perkins in another case.

    The police had interviewed about 100 witnesses, Mr. Perkins said a detective told him, and a portrait emerged of a victim whom many people loved.

    “That made it easier for us to do our job,” Mr. Perkins said the detective told him, “because he certainly deserves justice.”

    That sentiment goes a long way in bolstering the justice system’s credibility with blacks, and in quelling open dissent.

    Wilson’s resignation: Ferguson mayor: No severance pay for Wilson, with autoplay video.
    (Pteryxx – a while ago I think I and someone else posted on Wilson’s previous job and what happened to that PD, but it was last thread, hasn’t been re-hashed in media, but I’m really questioning his ‘own free will’ part, since the pressure for him to resign has come from all over and, probably, has been intense – to pretend otherwise is a pure, self-serving lie on his part.)

    Defending Justice: How Does Law & Order Play Out in Racial Terms? Read this one for the illustration – the logic goes like this: he’s black because he was born that way; he’s suspicious because he’s black; he’s pursued because he’s suspicious; he’s defensive because he’s pursued; he’s shot because he’s defensive; he’s dead because he’s black.
    The rest of it is a rather dense read on law, order, conservatives and race.

    Dammit, this should be with the Ram’s game: protestors heading towards the march.
    And this one, officers in riot gear.

    Nashville is a lesson on how to respond to protest – Instead of Reacting Militarily, Nashville Police Welcomed Protests: No Violence or Looting, perhaps the whole movement can…? No? Okay then:

    Different police departments have handled the protests in their own manner, and in each city they have varied in size and intensity. But for the most part, police forces are heavily militarized and have acted aggressively with protesters.

    However, in Nashville, Tennessee, the local police department has decided to welcome the protesters and allow them to peacefully gather and express themselves.

    “In Nashville, if you want to come to a public forum and express your thoughts, even if they’re against the government, you’re going to get your First Amendment protection, and you’re going to be treated fairly by the police officers involved. That’s what we do here in Nashville,” Metro Nashville Police Chief Steve Anderson told WKRN-TV 2.

    Instead of facing off with protesters Chief Anderson has decided to provide security for their marches, and not interfere with what anyone is doing, so long as they are not being violent or damaging property, which there have not been any reports of in Nashville.

    “We had people that took to the streets, took to the forums to express their thoughts, their ideas, and they were extremely well-behaved. We had no incidents of any vandalism of any violence of any type. What I noted is that people were even picking up the trash that they had left behind at the scene,” Anderson said. […]

    Anderson’s peaceful response to these protests adds credence to the notion that most of the protesters are peaceful and it is the police who choose to escalate the situations into violence.

    Yes! This! More!

    Just a picture.

  444. rq says

    Going to repost previous because I missed a tag, and too many links.

    From the New York Times, Pain Is Colorblind

    And I certainly have never bought into the hackneyed argument that inevitably arises when black people are in an uproar over the shooting of blacks by white police officers or civilians. The argument usually goes something like this: “Why aren’t black people this outraged over black-on-black killings?”

    On cue, the morning after the shooting at the bar I heard Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York mayor, raise the question on “Meet the Press.” I’d heard it before in the wake of similar violent incidents, like the killing of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager shot to death in Florida by a man who was white and Hispanic.

    “That is just as offensive as if somebody from a foreign country asked, ‘Why are you guys so outraged by the attack on the World Trade Center when Americans kill far more Americans than Al Qaeda ever has?’ ” said Antonio D. French, a St. Louis alderman who has been active in the Brown protests. “It’s just as offensive.”

    Those who make that argument, he added, are typically the ones who ignore what goes on in black neighborhoods in the first place.

    “We talk about it nonstop,” Mr. French, himself black, said of the crime problem. […]

    Still, to even compare the response to violence within the black community with the uproar over Mr. Brown’s killing is to compare apples with oranges, according to community leaders.

    When blacks kill blacks, there is an expectation that if the suspect is found, he or she will be prosecuted vigorously. For many blacks, though, that certainty is not always there when the shooter is a police officer or someone of a different race.

    “The complaint and the anger is about the system, not just the death itself,” Mr. French said.

    It is especially jarring when police officers are the killers, Mr. Ahmed said, because “they are an entity of the state itself, so when the state shows a lack of sensitivity, community members feel it is an obvious example of abuse.”

    What I experienced after the bar shooting provided an emotional reminder of the anger and grief that accompany killings among blacks.

    After running out a rear exit, I saw a sobbing woman who had been inside being comforted by another patron. As word spread on social media that it was a security guard who had been shot, the reaction was pointed.

    “Idiots everywhere,” one woman wrote on Facebook. […]

    “The sense of overwhelming loss just washed over me,” Mr. Perkins recalled. “And I knew the void, the pain that was going to cause this entire family was going to be almost unbearable.”

    What I heard from Mr. Perkins was the same pain that I heard from Mr. Brown’s parents, and the same strong desire for justice. And there was no less outrage because the killer was black.

    About 24 hours after the killing, the police arrested a suspect, Jamal T. Martin, who, in a cruel twist, was a client of Mr. Perkins in another case.

    The police had interviewed about 100 witnesses, Mr. Perkins said a detective told him, and a portrait emerged of a victim whom many people loved.

    “That made it easier for us to do our job,” Mr. Perkins said the detective told him, “because he certainly deserves justice.”

    That sentiment goes a long way in bolstering the justice system’s credibility with blacks, and in quelling open dissent.

    Wilson’s resignation: Ferguson mayor: No severance pay for Wilson, with autoplay video.
    (Pteryxx – a while ago I think I and someone else posted on Wilson’s previous job and what happened to that PD, but it was last thread, hasn’t been re-hashed in media, but I’m really questioning his ‘own free will’ part, since the pressure for him to resign has come from all over and, probably, has been intense – to pretend otherwise is a pure, self-serving lie on his part.)

    Defending Justice: How Does Law & Order Play Out in Racial Terms? Read this one for the illustration – the logic goes like this: he’s black because he was born that way; he’s suspicious because he’s black; he’s pursued because he’s suspicious; he’s defensive because he’s pursued; he’s shot because he’s defensive; he’s dead because he’s black.
    The rest of it is a rather dense read on law, order, conservatives and race.

    Dammit, this should be with the Ram’s game: protestors heading towards the march.
    And this one, officers in riot gear.

    Nashville is a lesson on how to respond to protest – Instead of Reacting Militarily, Nashville Police Welcomed Protests: No Violence or Looting, perhaps the whole movement can…? No? Okay then:

    Different police departments have handled the protests in their own manner, and in each city they have varied in size and intensity. But for the most part, police forces are heavily militarized and have acted aggressively with protesters.

    However, in Nashville, Tennessee, the local police department has decided to welcome the protesters and allow them to peacefully gather and express themselves.

    “In Nashville, if you want to come to a public forum and express your thoughts, even if they’re against the government, you’re going to get your First Amendment protection, and you’re going to be treated fairly by the police officers involved. That’s what we do here in Nashville,” Metro Nashville Police Chief Steve Anderson told WKRN-TV 2.

    Instead of facing off with protesters Chief Anderson has decided to provide security for their marches, and not interfere with what anyone is doing, so long as they are not being violent or damaging property, which there have not been any reports of in Nashville.

    “We had people that took to the streets, took to the forums to express their thoughts, their ideas, and they were extremely well-behaved. We had no incidents of any vandalism of any violence of any type. What I noted is that people were even picking up the trash that they had left behind at the scene,” Anderson said. […]

    Anderson’s peaceful response to these protests adds credence to the notion that most of the protesters are peaceful and it is the police who choose to escalate the situations into violence.

    Yes! This! More!

  445. rq says

    Just a picture.

    Protestors march, riot police follow (that’s the black line in the distance); There are a TON of Ram’s fans here. The world would end if they tear-gassed the Ram’s fans. #Ferguson. So… stick to the fans?

    On Ferguson: The system isn’t broken, it was built this way

    I’ve been trying to figure out over the past few months how white people can be so blindly outraged over the events that have unfolded in Ferguson. It’s honestly baffling that they can argue that it’s fine for a police officer to fire six shots at an unarmed man because he maybe stole some cigars and also wasn’t walking on the sidewalk. I’m in awe at the vast mental gymnastics required to believe that there’s nothing wrong with a cop shooting an unarmed man six times in “self-defence.” The same goes for white reactions to the cases of Trayvon Martin, John Crawford III, Tamir Rice, and countless other young Black men who have been murdered for no reason. I’ve lived a privileged enough life that the white responses to these crimes still shock me; I know that for Black folks, these responses are just par for the course. I can’t even wrap my head around what it would feel like for this spew of racist hate to just be part of another average day — and that’s my privilege showing right there.

    White people have been taught for their entire lives to believe in the system. The system is civilization; the system is democracy, the courts of law, the way the state cares for and supports us. We’ve been told over and over that the system is what allows us to live safely, free from fear. But every time something like Ferguson happens, we white folks see glimpses of how completely fucked the system is. And those glimpses terrify the shit out of us, because they shake the foundation of every bit of patriotic jingoism that’s been crammed down our throats since day one. […]

    We — and by “we”, I mean white people who want to be allies — need to take action. We need to de-centre ourselves, and start promoting Black voices. We need to, in the parlance of social justice circles, take a fucking seat. We need to take a whole goddamn chair factory’s worth of seats. We need to listen, and then we need to turn around and share what we’ve learned with other white people. We need to let Black people lead, and we need to learn to be good followers. We created this broken system, and now we need to humbly help build a better, fairer system.

    Because maybe even right now my friend is sitting her three year old son down and telling him that he can’t always trust the police. And that is both incredibly fucked up and also exactly how this machine was designed to run.

    Blah blah, Darren Wilson resigns in wake of shooting Michael Brown – attorney.

    Leonard Pitts Jr.: Let’s talk about black-on-black violence

    There followed a sharp exchange with another panelist, author and professor Michael Eric Dyson, which produced this parting shot from the mayor: “The white police officers wouldn’t be there if you weren’t killing each other.”

    Somehow, he managed not to call Dyson “you people.” In nearly every other respect, Giuliani’s words reeked of a paternalistic white supremacy unworthy of a former mayor of America’s largest city — or even a sewer worker in its remotest Podunk. But again, this has become the go-to “reasoning” for those on the right — Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs, Rush Limbaugh — when asked to give a damn about the killings of unarmed black boys and men. […]

    In the first place, being concerned over the shooting of unarmed black men hardly precludes being concerned over violence within the African-American community. Giuliani and others suggest a dichotomy where none exists.

    In the second place, they ignore the obvious: When black people commit crimes against black people, they face prosecution, but when police officers (or certain neighborhood watchmen) commit crimes against black people, they face getting off with little if any punishment.

    In the third place, what exactly is “black on black” crime?

    Do black people kill one another? Sure they do. Ninety percent of black murder victims are killed by black assailants.

    But guess what? White people kill one another, too. Eighty-three percent of white victims are killed by white assailants. See, the vast majority of violent crime is committed within — not between — racial groups. Crime is a matter of proximity and opportunity. People victimize their own rather than drive across town to victimize somebody else.

    So another term for “black on black” crime is, crime.[….]

    It is touching that Giuliani and others are so concerned about black on black crime. But African Americans have also been long oppressed by what might be called “America on black” crime.

    When do you suppose they’ll be ready to talk about that?

    Read the bits I skipped. Excellent.

  446. says

    For no particular reason other than the fact that’s it’s a while since I’ve said it:

    Thanks for doing this. I don’t have the time to go digging up all these things myself and it’s a great help to have it all served up like this. I’m still reading, so as long as you have the energy, please keep it up.

  447. rq says

    Ta-Nehisi Coates strikes again: African Americans Have ‘Right to Be Skeptical’ of Lectures about Nonviolence

    “That’s just American history,” Coates explained. “People have this idea that the American Revolution — like the tea party was an actual party, that it was somehow nonviolent. The roots of this country are very, very violent. Enslavement, which is at the root of this country…that’s at the basis of who we are. The theft of the land from Native Americans, that’s at the basis of who we are. So when talk about all the things that we love about America — democracy, freedom — I don’t think that we should lose sight of the foundation on which those things were built. They were not built nonviolently.”

    “That is not to say that looting is right, that looting is correct,” he added. “But when the government, which often acts violently towards African Americans, then turns around and lectures black people about nonviolence, we have right to be skeptical of that.”

    Video clip at the link. That man.

    Once again, those Rams players.

    Nnnng. I want to keep y’all abreast of protesting actions, but I gotta learn to sort the tweets a bit. This one’s a bit out of context: Our group is smaller than a high school classroom, and NG showed up. Kill me. #STL #Ferguson.
    Then this, from last night: National Guard out in #Ferguson tonight with machine guns. Protesters armed with chants, signs and love. I sure feel safe.

    Worrying: @PDPJ @deray @kodacohen here’s video evidence of flash bangs being used Monday in Ferguson.; and Concussion grenades thrown at Oregon #Ferguson protesters live stream: I omit the link because that livestream is down, obviously. But in Oregon.

  448. rq says

    LykeX
    I don’t know if I can let myself get tired of doing this, but I always know that I can. Privilege. And you’re welcome.

    +++

    A focus on the current Ram’s protest (it’s the only one to which I have twitter updates tonight due to the people I follow).
    Ram’s fans join the movement. #ferguson;
    Wow. DOTSON ARRESTED SOMEONE. #ferguson.

    In Ferguson, West Florissant still closed 5pm-7am. #Ferguson, but they say it’s a crime scene and not a curfew. So there’s that (a bit more on the crime scene aspect in a moment).

    Shift to Cleveland, Internal Backlash After Cleveland.com’s Coverage of Tamir Rice’s Father’s Criminal Record

    Response to the article was quick and harsh: this was victim blaming — as we’ve seen time and time again in cases of African American victims and white shooters, be they police or the George Zimmerman persuasion — except this was still somehow worse. What the hell did Rice’s parents’ criminal record have to do with his being shot 1.5 seconds after a police car pulled up to the recreation center, folks from around the world asked.

    Reporter Brandon Blackwell eventually added an update to the story to attempt to answer that question. “People from across the region have been asking whether Rice grew up around violence. The Northeast Ohio Media Group investigated the backgrounds of the parents and found the mother and father both have violent pasts.”

    Some folks at NEOMG were on the public defense for Blackwell and whatever editor decided this garbage was worth publishing, including Mark Naymik, who tweeted: “Gives small window into this young boy’s life. A frame of reference, perhaps for why he had toy gun?” Um, huh?

    Others, however, not only saw the article for what it was, but chose to voice that opinion publicly. The following email was sent from a Plain Dealer employee to all PD and NEOMG staff. It relays the concerns as well or better than we or anyone else has, so we’ll just let them take over:

    This is shameful. And that update does not change that fact.

    Is this really the type of news organization NEOMG wants to be known as?

    Who are the “people from across the region” asking that question? More importantly, how is it relevant to Tamir Rice’s death?

    It isn’t. It simply isn’t. And adding a paragraph after-the-fact to try to justify your actions is borderline insulting.

    Some in the region also have said race was a factor. So shall we scrutinize the officers’ parents? Perhaps one of their parents belongs to the Klan. Maybe the officer who fired on Tamir was taught as a child to fear all black men. That might be why the officer was quick to fire, “some in the region” might wonder.

    Do we all realize that the WORLD is watching this story unfold?? Not just our readers, not just “some in the region,” and not just in North America. The WORLD is watching us. So again I ask, is this what NEOMG stands for?

    I am not simply criticizing the reporter. Good journalism is achieved not just through years on the beat or getting clicks. A reporter becomes a good journalist through guidance from his or her editors, the example set by more-experienced peers, and most importantly, through the standards of the organization he or she works for.

    So, along with scrutinizing this dead child’s parents and the household he grew up in for 12 years, maybe the leaders of NEOMG should examine their own house and the quality of the journalism coming out of it.

    Folks, we’re better than this.

    Here’s hoping we’re better than this. Evidence speaks otherwise.

  449. rq says

    Because this is so unconfirmed, I’m a bit wary of the information within, but Did Police Set Autos On Fire During Ferguson Protests? There’s a 10-minute video at the link, if anyone has the energy to watch it (you try taking three kids swimming and then try to digest this stuff near midnight :P), but from the text:

    This video captures images worthy of investigation. The video seems to show military-clad police setting fire to a car outside of auto parts store. The store and the one next to it burned down. In other videos where fires were started or stores had windows broken you can hear protesters saying ‘leave that store alone’ or ‘don’t start a fire’. We know organizers in Ferguson trained 600 people in nonviolent resistance tactics. Burning cars and looting building is not part of that training, indeed typically people are taught that the idea is to grow the movement into a larger movement and that looting and rioting is counterproductive. We are not saying that all the fires were started by police, but this one raises questions that deserve investigation — were fires started by police?

    Ferguson residents don’t care about their community? I bet you wrong. Lots of talent out there.

    Ram’s protest, protestors surrounded: We are blocked in on all sides. #ferguson; but at least they’re letting medics through – EMS. The real heroes. #ferguson

  452. says

    St Louis police officers group demand Rams players disciplined for “Hands Up Don’t Shoot”

    In a statement released Sunday evening, the St. Louis Police Officers Association condemned the display, calling it “tasteless, offensive and inflammatory.”

    Prior to player introductions before Sunday’s game, five players — Stedman Bailey, Tavon Austin, Jared Cook, Chris Givens, and Kenny Britt — came out onto the field first with their hands in the air prior to being joined by their teammates.

    Responding to the display, the statement reads, “The St. Louis Police Officers Association is profoundly disappointed with the members of the St. Louis Rams football team who chose to ignore the mountains of evidence released from the St. Louis County Grand Jury this week and engage in a display that police officers around the nation found tasteless, offensive and inflammatory.”

    “Five members of the Rams entered the field today exhibiting the “hands-up-don’t-shoot” pose that has been adopted by protestors who accused Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson of murdering Michael Brown. The gesture has become synonymous with assertions that Michael Brown was innocent of any wrongdoing and attempting to surrender peacefully when Wilson, according to some now-discredited witnesses, gunned him down in cold blood.”

    While the gesture was first attributed to the shooting death of Brown by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, the display has grown as a symbolic gesture applied in protests over multiple shootings of young black men by police officers.

    In the statement, SLPOA Business Manager Jeff Roorda is quoted saying, “now that the evidence is in and Officer Wilson’s account has been verified by physical and ballistic evidence as well as eye-witness testimony, which led the grand jury to conclude that no probable cause existed that Wilson engaged in any wrongdoing, it is unthinkable that hometown athletes would so publicly perpetuate a narrative that has been disproven over-and-over again.”

    The letter goes on call “.. for the players involved to be disciplined and for the Rams and the NFL to deliver a very public apology. ”

    Roorda said he would be reaching out to other police departments around the country, enlisting their aid in pressuring the team and the league.

    Roorda warned, “I know that there are those that will say that these players are simply exercising their First Amendment rights. Well I’ve got news for people who think that way, cops have first amendment rights too, and we plan to exercise ours. I’d remind the NFL and their players that it is not the violent thugs burning down buildings that buy their advertiser’s products. It’s cops and the good people of St. Louis and other NFL towns that do. Somebody needs to throw a flag on this play. If it’s not the NFL and the Rams, then it’ll be cops and their supporters.”

    Roorda is deluding himself if he thinks “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!” only applies to the death of Michael Brown. It began with him, but it applies to all the police killings of black people.

  453. says

    http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/11/florida-gop-official-tweets-use-big-fire-hoses-to-knock-those-ferguson-thugs-over/

    (the headline is misleading, bc she is an unpaid GOP volunteer)

    “A suggestion for Ferguson- fire hoses. Grt big fire hoses, serious water pressure. Kn0ck those thugs over. They probly need a shower anyway [sic],” Duval County Republican Party secretary Kim Crenier tweeted on Monday night.

    She also reportedly described Obama as “President Race-Baiter” while he was addressing the Ferguson decision, and tweeted from @JaxGOP: “Ferguson, MO. No true bill! May God bless and protect Officer Darren Wilson and his family. Facts are facts.” The profile is not an official Republican Party account.

    “When you put it into context there is nothing sinister,” Crenier told Fox 30 Action News.

    After a grand jury declined to indict police officer Darren Wilson in the fatal shooting of black teen Michael Brown, some angry protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, smashed shop windows and set businesses and cars ablaze. Crenier said she was just suggesting ways to control the unruly protesters.

    “There’s no malice, I’m not a racist,” Crenier said.

    Pastor R.L. Gundy, however, disagreed.

    “That’s insensitive, it’s racist,” Gundy said of Crenier’s tweet. “To make a comment like ‘thugs’ you might as well call somebody a n*****.”

    Gundy has called on the Florida Republican Party to fire Crenier over the “insensitive” and “racist” tweet.

    But Crenier said she is just a volunteer, and has apologized for the tweet.

    “I’m not paid, taxpayer funded or anything,” she told News 4 Jax. “I’m a volunteer. Enough is enough. Why is this news? I have apologized for the insensitivity of the fire hose comment.”

    Crenier claimed she was having a conversation on Twitter about the rioting, and that other people were suggesting police use teargas and rubber bullets. Her “why not use a fire hose?” response was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, she said.

    Oh yeah, it’s so funny. Ha Ha Ha. Aim those fire hoses on the black folks. Hurr Hurr.

    She’s an asshole.

  454. toska says

    Per Tony’s article in 452 (thanks for sharing),

    In a statement released Sunday evening, the St. Louis Police Officers Association condemned the display, calling it “tasteless, offensive and inflammatory.”

    Only in an authoritarian state is a sign of surrender and asking not to be killed offensive. It’s so disgusting that anyone would even say that. If it hurts cops’ feelings when people show a sign of solidarity with those defenseless who were murdered by police, than it’s up the cops to stop fucking killing defenseless human beings. FUCK that pisses me off so much. Excuse me if I go ahead and DON’T throw a pity party for the feelings of the people with the power to kill with impunity.

  455. says

    NYPD gathered intel on professional agitators in Ferguson to prepare for chokehold death decision

    On July 17, Eric Garner went into cardiac arrest and died after police placed him in a chokehold for allegedly selling illegal cigarettes.

    In a video of the confrontation, Garner can be heard saying, “I didn’t sell anything, I’m minding my own business.” Officer Daniel Pantaleo is then seen putting him in a chokehold as other officers help tackle him. While on the ground, Garner can be heard shouting, “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe” until he lost consciousness.

    Police stated that Garner had multiple arrests for selling untaxed cigarettes, and that he was due in court in October on charges related to one of those arrests. Witnesses at the scene insisted that Garner was attempting to break up a fight when police arrived, and his family claimed that he had no cigarettes on his person or in his car at the time of his death.

    In an interview with the Associated Press, Garner’s mother, Gwen Carr, said that “you’d have to be blind to not see what happened. I can’t see why it should take so long to reach a decision.”

    It will be up to the grand jury to decide whether Officer Pantaleo should face criminal charges for his role in Garner’s death, but Police Commissioner William Bratton wants to be sure that the violence that accompanied the release of the Missouri grand jury’s decision not to indict Darren Wilson does not repeat itself in his city.

    To that end, the commissioner sent detectives to Ferguson to learn about the tactics of “professional agitators.” During the Occupy protests in 2012, the NYPD circulated “wanted posters” featuring mugshots of agitators that informed protesters to “be aware that subjects are known professional agitators” whose “MO” is to videotape officers “performing routine stops and post them on YouTube.”

    Bratton added that the detective’s trip was routine. “We’re always and constantly networking and trying to make ourselves accessible and reaching out,” he said.

  456. rq says

    I just saw that article, and can I say my dislike and disgust of Roorda went up another several notches. (This is the article I read). Here’s the entire statement:

    St. Louis, Missouri (November 30, 2014) – The St. Louis Police Officers Association is profoundly disappointed with the members of the St. Louis Rams football team who chose to ignore the mountains of evidence released from the St. Louis County Grand Jury this week and engage in a display that police officers around the nation found tasteless, offensive and inflammatory.

    Five members of the Rams entered the field today exhibiting the “hands-up-don’t-shoot” pose that has been adopted by protestors who accused Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson of murdering Michael Brown. The gesture has become synonymous with assertions that Michael Brown was innocent of any wrongdoing and attempting to surrender peacefully when Wilson, according to some now-discredited witnesses, gunned him down in cold blood.

    SLPOA Business Manager Jeff Roorda said, “now that the evidence is in and Officer Wilson’s account has been verified by physical and ballistic evidence as well as eye-witness testimony, which led the grand jury to conclude that no probable cause existed that Wilson engaged in any wrongdoing, it is unthinkable that hometown athletes would so publicly perpetuate a narrative that has been disproven over-and-over again.”

    Roorda was incensed that the Rams and the NFL would tolerate such behavior and called it remarkably hypocritical. “All week long, the Rams and the NFL were on the phone with the St. Louis Police Department asking for assurances that the players and the fans would be kept safe from the violent protesters who had rioted, looted, and burned buildings in Ferguson. Our officers have been working 12 hour shifts for over a week, they had days off including Thanksgiving cancelled so that they could defend this community from those on the streets that perpetuate this myth that Michael Brown was executed by a brother police officer and then, as the players and their fans sit safely in their dome under the watchful protection of hundreds of St. Louis’s finest, they take to the turf to call a now-exonerated officer a murderer, that is way out-of-bounds, to put it in football parlance,” Roorda said.

    The SLPOA is calling for the players involved to be disciplined and for the Rams and the NFL to deliver a very public apology. Roorda said he planned to speak to the NFL and the Rams to voice his organization’s displeasure tomorrow. He also plans to reach out to other police organizations in St. Louis and around the country to enlist their input on what the appropriate response from law enforcement should be. Roorda warned, “I know that there are those that will say that these players are simply exercising their First Amendment rights. Well I’ve got news for people who think that way, cops have first amendment rights too, and we plan to exercise ours. I’d remind the NFL and their players that it is not the violent thugs burning down buildings that buy their advertiser’s products. It’s cops and the good people of St. Louis and other NFL towns that do. Somebody needs to throw a flag on this play. If it’s not the NFL and the Rams, then it’ll be cops and their supporters.”

    Here’s a tweet highlighting Roorda’s response, @deray This is good. “Roorda said he planned to speak to the NFL and the Rams to voice his organization’s displeasure tomorrow. As someone else on Twitter responded, in other words, ‘NFL, get your slaves in line’. But: Keep running out of that tunnel with your hands up until THEY apologize @STLouisRams
    After touchdown Britt has hands up. Look close, he has “Mike Brown” written on his right wrist – zoom pic to follow. And Britt, he even put it on his instagram: S/o to the @STLouisRams WR core, especially @KennyBritt_18 for their support of #MikeBrown. Keep standing strong guys.

  457. rq says

    Protest at Target;
    Clergy Bishop Robinson @derrb As He’s Being Arrested In St Louis For Peacefully Protesting #Ferguson;
    The police lie? Nooooo… Contrary to what the police have said and what some news sources seem to be repeating, Dotson DEFINITELY participated in an arrest.#Ferguson;
    The police misbehaving? Noooo… Law enforcement in #Ferguson #StL are now arresting activists when they are alone & away from protest sites. #BeSafe #CheckIn #NewTactics;
    AND THE IMPLICATIONS: Once again St. Louis police have shown up in grieving neighborhood in riot gear. This time Bosnian neighborhood in south #STL. #Ferguson.

  458. says

    http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/11/30/1348422/-Officer-Darren-Wilson-resigns-Ferguson-mayor-says-some-reforms-are-on-the-way

    Obviously the bit about Wilson we knew about, but I wanted to link to this article bc it talks about reforms in the Ferguson PD.

    Word spread on Saturday night that Officer Darren Wilson had resigned from the Ferguson, Missouri, police department days after a grand jury failed to indict him for shooting and killing an unarmed teenager in August. On Sunday, Ferguson Mayor James Knowles said in a press conference that Wilson will not get a severance package, though Wilson’s unemployment will be cushioned by hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from people expressing their support for his actions. Because racism.
    Knowles also outlined some plans to improve relations between the mostly white Ferguson police force and the city’s mostly black residents, including a citizen review board on police procedures, an increased stipend for police officers who actually live in Ferguson, and police academy scholarships for African Americans who would then work for the city. In the same press conference, Ferguson’s police chief said he did not intend to resign.

    ****

    http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/11/30/1347405/-Angry-about-Ferguson-Good-Join-the-Brown-family-in-fighting-for-the-Michael-Brown-Law

    So it is in Rialto, Calif., where an entire police force is wearing so-called body-mounted cameras, no bigger than pagers, that record everything that transpires between officers and citizens. In the first year after the cameras’ introduction, the use of force by officers declined 60%, and citizen complaints against police fell 88%. […]
    Michael White, a professor of criminology at Arizona State University and, as the sole author of the Justice Department’s report on police and body-mounted cameras, says the cameras, now a curiosity, could soon be ubiquitous. It has happened before: Taser’s guns went from introduction to use by more than two-thirds of America’s 18,000 police departments in about a decade. “It could be as little as 10 years until we see most police wearing these,” says Dr. White. […]
    In the U.K., where tests with them began in 2005, studies have shown that they aid in the prosecution of crimes, by providing additional, and uniquely compelling, evidence. In the U.S., in some instances they have shortened the amount of time required to investigate a shooting by police from two-to-three months to two-to-three days.

    The Brown family seeks to honor their son’s death by pushing for the Michael Brown Law, which would mandate body cameras for police described above. After Brown’s killing in August, they organized a petition drive that culminated in the submission of over 150,000 signatures to the White House. I expect more details about the Brown family’s campaign will follow this week’s statement.
    I have tremendous respect for what they are doing here. They hope that their efforts will result in some other families not suffering losses like theirs. I am fortunate and profoundly grateful that I have never had to suffer the pain of losing a child. I can’t imagine what that would be like, I can’t imagine how the Brown family feels having lost their child, in particular in the way that they did, and to have suffered again with the injustice of not seeing their child’s killer even face a trial.

    Furthermore, I am fortunate that I can expect the police will, in all likelihood, give my children the benefit of the doubt if they ever happened to do something as stupid as openly wave a gun around while clearly intoxicated, like police did in Kalamazoo, Michigan, earlier this year when confronted with a 63-year-old white man who did just that. In that case, the first officer on the scene didn’t even draw his own gun. He simply asked, politely, for the man to turn over his weapon. When he refused to do so, or even to comply with requests to identify himself, and then angrily asked the officer, “Why don’t you fucking shoot me?” here is how the officer answered: “I don’t want to shoot you; I’m not here to do that.” Exactly. He’s not there to do that.

    That should be the mindset of all police, no matter the skin color or age of the person with whom an officer is interacting. I expect officers to treat my children that way. Such an expectation should not be a privilege conferred by skin color. It should be a right guaranteed to all in the United States. That it is not so enrages me. That it is not so motivates me.

    So I return again to the question I asked above. Angry about Ferguson? Good. Let’s take that anger and use it to fight for change, to fight for justice. As the Brown family said, “Let’s not just make noise, let’s make a difference.” And, as the successes we’ve won in the fight against stop-and-frisk have shown, activism on behalf of racial justice can absolutely accomplish a great deal, even in today’s America.

    Michael Brown’s family has given us a cause for which to fight. I can’t think of a better way for us to honor his death than by following their wishes and joining them.

    ****

    I’m sure this was probably linked to in the Good Morning America thread, but it’s definitely worth reposting.
    http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/08/08/1320164/-Why-Black-Men-Don-t-Open-Carry

    A Colorado teen, stopped by the police for toting a loaded shotgun on the streets of Aurora, Colorado where James Holmes killed 12 and wounded seventy in a packed movie theater in 2012, claims he is doing it to make the public feel more “comfortable” around guns.
    Steve Lohner, 18, was recently stopped by police responding to 911 calls alerting them about the teen. When asked to provide ID proving his age, Lohner refused to do so, while videotaping the encounter (seen below) on his phone. The teen subsequently posted the video online, according FOX13.

    In the video, Lohner explains to an officer that he is the process of returning home after buying cigarettes. When asked why he’s carrying a shotgun, Lohner replies, “For the defense of myself and those around me.”

    …

    Lohner then proceeds to argue with the officers, refusing to show them ID or hand over the shotgun insisting he hasn’t committed a crime before being cited by the officer on a misdemeanor obstruction charge for refusing to show his identification

    According to Lohner, who says he’s been stopped multiple times and never had to show ID, he’s on a mission to make people more comfortable about guns.

    “If enough people were to lawfully open carry in those areas and do it in a safe and lawful manner then these people would end up feeling comfortable around it,” he explained.

    And remember, he’s doing this in Aurora Colorado, home of the Holmes Theater Shooting, [and not far from Littleton where Columbine High is located] – and his goal is to make people feel “more comfortable” about people walking around with long guns, cuz somewhere – somehow – that’s a “Good Thing”.
    Then you have another kid – well 22 year-old man – with a TOY in his hands who gets barely a warning before he gets shot down like a dog in the aisle at Target Walmart when he happens to look like this…

    He’s talking about John Crawford III.

    The mother of Crawford’s children said she was speaking to him by cell phone when he was confronted by police in the store.
    “He said he was at the video games playing videos, and he went over there by the toy section where the toy guns were,” said LeeCee Johnson. “The next thing I know, he said, ‘It’s not real,’ and the police start shooting, and they said ‘Get on the ground,’ but he was already on the ground because they had shot him.”

    “I could hear him just crying and screaming,” Johnson said. “I feel like they shot him down like he was not even human.

    One of these things is not exactly like the other – can you guess what the difference is?
    Both times someone had a weapon and 911 was dialed in response. In one situation you have a kid walking around with a actual loaded weapon who refuses to comply with the police lawful requests, and he gets to go along his way with a citation while keeping the weapon – in the other situation we have a young man who didn’t actually have a legitimate weapon – he had a toy – and although they say he didn’t comply with requests to “drop the weapon” I think a legitimate argument could be made that as far as he was concerned He Didn’t Have a Weapon, he had a TOY!

  459. rq says

    Missouri Lt. Governor: Michael Brown’s stepfather should be arrested for inciting a riot

    “When you heard that sound-bite from the stepfather of Michael Brown,” Ingraham said, “what was your reaction?”

    “That he should be arrested and charged with inciting to riot,” Kinder replied.

    “Why hasn’t that already happened?” Ingraham asked, but before allowing him time to respond, she told a story about how her father had hung a sign in her house that said, “We shoot looters.”

    “Nothing quite says ‘civil rights outrage’ like a fifth of Jack Daniels,” she then said.

    “Or a new plasma [television],” Kinder interjected.

    “That really speaks to the great legacy of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King,” Ingraham replied. “This is an outrage!”

    Video at the link.

    Alderman French calls for more resignations in the Ferguson police force. I don’t know how much that will solve, if most members remain, and especially if the attitude remains.

    Alderman Antonio French says: “I think the Ferguson Police Chief. I think it’s impossible for this community to move forward with him still in that role. I think that the Saint Louis County Police Department level. I think there’s some people to give answers to how the police responded to peaceful protests in August which really escalated the situation. Frankly, the thing we haven’t seen is a lot of government accountability. Not many people have taken responsibility to what happened and people are still waiting for answers and change.”

    Also, video at the link.

    Eight Arrested as Ferguson Protesters Briefly Block D.C. Highway. Video at the link, but I had a picture for this.

  461. says

    And now for something I really didn’t want to read, bc argh! Hulk Smash!

    http://www.policestateusa.com/2014/increase-public-approval-police-state/

    The Ferguson saga will be nationally remembered as a police officer using justified force to remove a bad guy from the streets using textbook self-defense. The public will remember that people rallied behind a robber, bemoaned police brutality with little to no evidence, then burned their own city to the ground. Ferguson will be pointed out as a reason why police should be decked out with armored vehicles and elaborate measures to disperse crowds.

    From a purely consequential perspective, Ferguson was gift to supporters of the police state — wrapped and tied with a bow. While a legitimate case against police brutality can certainly be made, its presentation in Ferguson was an utter failure. This speaks to the importance of carefully choosing political battles and vetting the evidence before taking action. Unfortunately, in this case, the picking the wrong battle will ultimately leave people biased more toward police power than they were before, and the righteous opponents of actual misconduct will be lumped in with violent maniacs who have no respect for the rights of others.

    The article angers me bc it focuses so much on the WHAT.
    Yes, rioting, looting, arson, vandalism…all of that is wrong. You’ll get no argument from me on that. But when people decide to tut tut about that without paying attention to the reasons WHY this is being carried out (and yes, I’m sure there are opportunists among the looting vandals), that is frustrating. They’re focusing on the WHAT, as if the WHY is not important. The WHY is extremely important bc it’s a sign that people feel there is nothing else to lose. They’ve been stripped of every recourse. They can’t expect justice from the police. They can’t expect justice from the justice system. They can’t expect change from protests. What more can they lose? Their lives? The police already don’t value their lives.

  462. says

    http://thefreethoughtproject.com/united-black-gun-owners-protect-white-owned-business-ferguson-riots/

    A group of Ferguson residents who happened to have dark skin, armed with pistols and AR-15 rifles, descended upon a business which happened to be owned by a person with light skin.

    These four men stood outside of this business, which was a Conoco gas station, to protect it from rioters and looters who burned other businesses to the ground over the past week in the St. Louis area.

    The reason these four brave men protected this business had nothing to do with their skin color nor the skin color of the owner of the store.

    These men were protecting the Conoco gas station owned by Doug Merello, because Merello has employed them over the years. They had mutual interests in the store’s survival as well as respect for one another.

    “We would have been burned to the ground many times over if it weren’t for them,” Merellol, whose father first bought it in 1984, told the Review Journal.

    “He’s a nice dude, he’s helped us a lot,” said one of the men, a 29-year-old who identified himself as R.J.

    The Review Journal Reports that R.J. said they had to chase away several groups of teenagers who wanted to loot the store.

    They also had a run in with soldiers from the Missouri National Guard, who mistook them for looters, R.J. said. The guardsmen had their rifles raised and had handcuffed one man before Merello came outside the store to explain that the residents were trying to help, not hurt.

    This story should be on news media outlets across the country, but unfortunately it won’t be, for two reasons.

    First reason being that it’s a story about transcending prejudice and racial stereotypes which breaks down the propped up charade that humans must be divided based on skin color and other “us vs. them” tactics.

    The second reason is that it shows the true power of people policing themselves. Responsibly arming themselves and practicing their second amendment rights, these 4 men were able to do what thousands of national guardsmen, police and FBI were unable to do, prevent looting and damage to property.

  463. rq says

    @MusicOverPeople Overheard @drbec say to cop on Saturday: “Yeah I know you like this music…Caughtcha ass marchin to that BEAT!” Cop laughs. The power of music?

    Learning lessons: Today, several new protestors saw the unwarranted intensity of the police. And they were shocked. Goal is to turn shock to action. #Ferguson.

    Check out Chief Dotson’s reaction to a white man’s brutal murder by two teenagers: Bosnian community upset after brutal murder –

    Before leaving the scene, Chief Dotson thanked the group for bringing up their concerns.

    “The whole idea of standing out in the street is to get our attention, you got my attention,” Chief Dotson said.

    HEY! DOTSON!! THERE’S SOME OTHER PEOPLE OUT IN THE STREET TRYING TO… oh, you meant white people. Never mind.

    Also, keeping in mind that policing is already not among the top 10 most dangerous jobs, it’s not even getting more dangerous: Number Of Officers Killed In The Line Of Duty Drops To 50-Year Low While Number Of Citizens Killed By Cops Remains Unchanged. See that? Less officers killed, while citizens killed unchanged.

    The annual report from the nonprofit National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund also found that deaths in the line of duty generally fell by 8 percent and were the fewest since 1959.

    According to the report, 111 federal, state, local, tribal and territorial officers were killed in the line of duty nationwide this past year, compared to 121 in 2012.

    Forty-six officers were killed in traffic related accidents, and 33 were killed by firearms. The number of firearms deaths fell 33 percent in 2013 and was the lowest since 1887.

    This statistical evidence suggests being a cop is safer than its been since the days of Sheriff Andy Griffith. Back in 2007, the FBI put the number of justifiable homicides committed by officers in the line of duty at 391. That count only includes homicides that occurred during the commission of a felony. This total doesn’t include justifiable homicides committed by police officers against people not committing felonies and also doesn’t include homicides found to be not justifiable. But still, this severe undercount far outpaces the number of cops killed by civilians. […]

    Efforts have been made over the past several years to make things safer for police officers. The ubiquitous use of bulletproof vests has contributed to this decrease in firearms-related deaths, as has a variety of policies aimed at reducing high-speed chases. But very little effort has been made to decrease the number of people killed by law enforcement. (Notably, Seattle’s police chief attributes the high homicide numbers to not “effectively managing” interactions with people with mental health issues.) Some deaths are nearly impossible to prevent, but there are others where the situation has been allowed to deteriorate far too quickly or a shoot-first mentality has prevailed. The escalating adoption of military equipment and tactics has also contributed to the steady “justifiable homicide” count.

    I’m aware that statistical aggregation isn’t the same thing as moment-to-moment reality. Just because you’re less likely to be shot today than at any other time in the past 100+ years doesn’t mean today isn’t your day. But the narrative push by officers to present their job as persistently deadly doesn’t jibe with the death totals. The First Rule of Policing (“get home safe”) is a crutch for bad cops. Cops are getting home safe now more than ever. It’s those on the other side of the blue line that haven’t seen their chances improve.

    That last paragraph – ties in well with the perception that cops actually need all those military toys for their own protection. When the reality is quite different. Some protection is required, I can go with bulletproof vests and non-firearm weapons for defense, but those tanks and high-powered rifles do more to upset the community than to make it feel safe. And I think it contributes to cops not feeling safe, because ‘if they were safe, why would they need that equipment’?

  465. rq says

    Black Girl Dangerous on the difference between violence and looting and more

    In the wake of the Darren Wilson decision and the ensuing protests, I’ve been hearing the word “violence” thrown around by journalists and social media commentators alike. It’s strange to me, because when these people use the term violence, they’re not talking about what happened to any of the people named above. The brutal and unnecessary killing of unarmed Black women, children and men by police officers isn’t called “violence” by any of these people. They’re also not talking about protestors of this police violence being tear-gassed or shot with rubber bullets by police for exercising their right to peaceably assemble. That, to these journalists and Twitter trolls, isn’t “violence,” either. What is “violence” to these people? Property damage. Looting. The destruction of things.

    Let me say that again, louder, for the people in the cheap seats:

    The killing of unarmed Black people, including children, by police: not violence.

    The destruction of white people’s things: violence.

    I don’t think that word means what you think it means.[…]

    Violence is something that living beings experience. People and animals experience and inflict violence against other people and animals. The violence that’s inflicted on us has an impact on our bodies, minds, spirits. Buildings don’t have bodies, minds, or spirits. Buildings can neither inflict nor experience violence. That’s why stealing a TV from a Walmart isn’t the same as taking a human life. Whatever it is, it isn’t violence. And if you really believed that Black people are fully human, you wouldn’t be equating our lives with your things.
    [… – note, one of the comments to the groundhog day video mentioned that people need resources to live and that this is why life can be equated with resources (“things”) because we fight over resources… but I’m not convinced by that argument, not one bit]

    Despite what white and other non-Black people think, though, we are fully human. We really, really, are. We feel just as much pain as everyone else. Being shot by police officers is very, very painful for us. It’s painful for our families. For our friends. For our communities. It’s violence, and we feel it. It has a tremendous impact on our bodies, our minds, our spirits. Which we have. Because we’re not buildings. We’re people. And we are victimized by police violence at higher rates than anyone else. […]

    Your revisionist history is violence. It inflicts harm on the individual Black people onto whom you vomit it and on our communities and movements as a whole. Translation: Keep Martin Luther King, Jr.’s name out of your mouth. You obviously haven’t bothered to read anything the man wrote or study anything he did. If you had, you wouldn’t be invoking his name only to tone-police and silence Black people who refuse to be “nice” to you about racism and police violence (seriously, I never hear these people mention King at any other time). “MLK wouldn’t approve of what you’re doing!” is cried by white people anytime Black people do anything they don’t like. Really? Hmm. Let’s ask King what he thinks. Oh, wait, we can’t because white people shot him in the face. And, seriously, where’d you get your info about King, anyway? I’m guessing Fox News? Or absolutely nowhere? If you did read about him, you might found out that while MLK didn’t approve rioting, he did understand where it comes from:

    I think we’ve go to see that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the negro poor has worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.

    But you wouldn’t know that. Because reading history isn’t even required before revising it to suit your half-assed, oppressive arguments.

    Further, not every Black person in the Civil Rights Movement agreed with Martin Luther King or his methods. Many, many, many people, including other civil rights leaders (the ones you NEVER mention), did not. Any and all assertions that the Civil Rights Movement was exclusively non-violent are revisionist nonsense. The Civil Rights Movement was both non-violent and violent. Violent uprisings, such as the Watts Rebellion of 1965, as well as uprisings all across the country, were just as instrumental in bringing about change as were non-violent protests. In fact, the attention garnered by violent protest was often what forced the hands of those in power to finally yield to demands. Revising history so that it suits your oppressive agenda is an insult to everyone who fought in the Civil Rights Movement, in all the different ways they fought, and it’s harmful to the people fighting for justice now in Ferguson and all over the country. It is emotional and psychological violence. […]

    Despite what you’ve been led to believe by the coddling narratives of privilege that assure you that you is kind, you is smart, you is important, and that you get a gold star and a box of cookies just for trying to be anti-racist, even if you’re failing miserably at it, your ignorance actually isn’t benign. […]
    Your ignorance, when you have plenty of resources for learning, for understanding, for seeing, isn’t harmless. It’s violence. Real violence. Not a smashed store window or a car on fire or a stolen Xbox. But violence that impacts the bodies, minds and spirits of human beings who have been crushed under the weight of your ignorance, and the ignorance of others like you, for centuries.

    I have to think about this, because I always thought that violence against things was still violence – not nearly the same kind of violence as any of that against people, but still violence. This is an interesting re-definition.

  466. says

    I went and looked up the Watts Riots (I was completely ignorant of them):

    On August 11, 1965, Los Angeles’s South Central neighborhood of Watts became a scene of the greatest example of racial tension America had seen.

    A Los Angeles police officer pulled over motorist Marquette Frye [who was with his brother Ronald]; he suspected Marquette of driving drunk. While officers questioned them, a crowd of onlookers had begun to form. When Rena Frye, the boys mother showed up, a struggle ensued which led to the arrest of all 3 members of the Frye family. More officers had arrived on the scene and had hit the brothers with their batons. The crowd had grown and by this point had become angry. After the police left the scene, the crowd & tension escalated and sparked the riots, which lasted 6 days. More than 34 people died, 1000 wounded, and an estimated $50 – $100 million in property damage.

    After the Watts Riots, then Governor Pat Brown named John McCone to head a commission to study the riots. The report issued by the Commission concluded that the riots weren’t the act of thugs, but rather symptomatic of much deeper problems: the high jobless rate in the inner city, poor housing, and bad schools. Although the problems were clearly pointed out in the report, no great effort was made to address them, or to rebuild what had been destroyed in the riots.

    Somehow I don’t see Governor Nixon naming someone to head a commission to study the Ferguson civil unrest.
    It’s no wonder incidents of civil unrest (I will no longer refer to them as “riots”) don’t occur more often. Police brutality and systemic racism are embedded in our culture and have been ongoing since our country was formed.
    http://www.pbs.org/hueypnewton/times/times_watts.html

  467. says

    I have to think about this, because I always thought that violence against things was still violence – not nearly the same kind of violence as any of that against people, but still violence. This is an interesting re-definition.

    I think it makes sense. If you take a hammer and smash a car window, this could be because somebody is stuck in the car in a deadly heat and you get them out. Nobody would classify this as violence. Or you smash a wall because you want a bigger room. Or you blow up an entire building because you want to build a new one. All these actions yould occur in a different context. When the window is broken to steal the car, the wall is torn down in vandalism, when the building is blown up in a terrorist attack (even the old European style attacks where they used to call in advance so people could clear the premises). Clearly, it cannot be the action itself that makes us classify one event differently from the other.
    But as soon as you get the human body into it, things change. If you smash a skull with a hammer it is violence. There’s a slim chance that it is justified, but there’s no way for this to resemble “smashing in the car windocause you lost your keys”

  469. rq says

    Giliell
    It definitely makes sense, it just doesn’t quite fit with the definition of (all) violence from my childhood. Yes, context matters, and adding people to the situation absolutely makes it violence. It’s the bit about things =/= violence at all part. But I think this is a personal, internal issue, and a matter of conditioning.

  470. rq says

    I just remembered two items I have lost that I wanted to post: one was another photo of the latest all-white panel on Ferguson (from Fox, I think) and an article about Nixon family property in that bit of Ferguson that actually got NG protection that first night after the announcement.

  471. rq says

    Taking the intersection. Beautiful, action yall. #WUSTL #HWinthestreets, and NYC #HANDSUPWALKOUT – NO School NO Work NO Business As Usual #SHUTITDOWNNYC https://m.facebook.com/events/883809118325838/ … @GlobalRevLive , because today was Walk Out for Ferguson Day.

    Ashley Miller and five points on Ferguson we need to understand. It’s a bit lengthy, but a good read.

    Via Giliell’s twitter, Ferguson Shows How the Police Can Kill and Get Away with It

    In America, the justice system is anything but just. Courts are conduits for the caging of (mostly black or brown) humans. The police feed people into the courts, and if they sometimes kill those they are arresting it’s regarded as a cost barely worth mentioning. And though they kill a lot of people—in Utah, police shootings are the second most common type of h​omicide—they are rarely punished. From the fellow officers who write reports and testify on the behalf of killers to the prosecutors who seem determined to let murderers get away, the very system that claims to monitor the police protects them. Police kill. They get away with it. They kill again. Eventually, you realise that this process is not a bug in the system but a feature. […]

    For many people, Ferguson is just another thing that happened on TV. But the closer you get, the more real, and the more awful, the shooting and the aftermath become.

    When she heard the grand jury’s decision, Mike Brown’s mother, Leslie McSpadden, screa​med. “Everybody wants me to be calm. Do they know how those bullets hit my son?” she shouted at a rally, choking back tears. “What they did to his body as they entered his body?” […]

    After the prosecutor announced the verdict, Ferguson’s streets grew cloudy with tear gas. Protesters burned police cars. Local businesses were ransacked despite some protesters’ attempts to protect them. In New York, protesters shut down three bridges and someone squirt-gunned fake blood onto NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton. In Chicago, young activists staged a sit-in at City Hall. There are more actions planned for tonight around the country. If protesters so much as throw a bottle, there will be the usual tut-tutting and calls for “patience” from people who will never have to worry about being killed by an agent of the state.

    Meanwhile, the police continue to kill. In Cleveland, the cops sho​t 12-year-old Tamir Rice because he had a toy gun at a playground. In New York, officer Peter Liang shot Akai Gurle​y while Gurley and his girlfriend were walking down the stairwell of her apartment building. Any gun owner knows you only point at what you mean to kill, but Liang claimed it was an accident—that he was merely wandering through dimly lit stairwells, weapon drawn, finger on the trigger, safety off.

    Maybe all this will change someday. Maybe the young people of colour marching in the streets of New York, Ferguson, and Oakland will force it to change, dismantle the system from without. If anyone can do it, they can. They are too clear-eyed to accept courts rigged in favour of murderers. They do not believe that victims must only respond with passive grace.

  472. rq says

    Also via Giliell, In Conversation ChrisRock (for which I had this excerpted article).

    Rock explains that he’d interview only white people in Missouri. “We know how black people feel about Ferguson—outraged, upset, cheated by the system, all these things.” He continues:

    Here’s the thing. When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it’s all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they’re not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.

    RICH: Right. It’s ridiculous.

    ROCK: So, to say Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president. That’s not black progress. That’s white progress. There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years. If you saw Tina Turner and Ike having a lovely breakfast over there, would you say their relationship’s improved? Some people would. But a smart person would go, “Oh, he stopped punching her in the face.” It’s not up to her. Ike and Tina Turner’s relationship has nothing to do with Tina Turner. Nothing. It just doesn’t. The question is, you know, my kids are smart, educated, beautiful, polite children. There have been smart, educated, beautiful, polite black children for hundreds of years. The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let’s hope America keeps producing nicer white people.

    So “it’s about white people adjusting to a new reality?” Rich asks. “Owning their actions,” Rock explains. “Not even their actions. The actions of your dad. Yeah, it’s unfair that you can get judged by something you didn’t do, but it’s also unfair that you can inherit money that you didn’t work for.”

    Lots more at the first link, some more at the second.

    This morning, in Washington: Protesters snarl D.C. traffic

    Protesters opposing the Ferguson, Missouri, grand jury decision closed roads around D.C. Monday morning causing delays and frustrating commuters.

    The protesters disbanded by about 9:45 a.m. after they blocked streets and caused major delays through D.C. […]

    The protests remained peaceful and nonviolent.

    Also on Monday, protesters plan to demonstrate at the Department of Justice. Protesters opposing the Ferguson, Missouri, grand jury decision from last week plan to meet at the Department of Justice located at 950 Pennsylvania Avenue in Northwest at 1:01 p.m.

    “On Monday, Dec 1st people around the country will be walking out of their schools and places of work in solidarity with Ferguson communities across the country effected by police violence,” the event’s website says.

    I’m sure that mention of non-violent protests is necessary, considering that, if they weren’t, the media would be all over it. :P

    Rather tangentially, Thanksgiving Weekend Sales, at Stores and Online, Slide 11 Percent. I wonder how much of that is due to the Ferguson and Wal-Mart employee protests.

  473. rq says

    Police behaving like police: Cleveland cops who killed unarmed black suspects claim racial discrimination over suspensions, article in full because it’s short:

    Nine Cleveland police officers involved in the fatal 2012 shootings of two unarmed African-Americans are suing the police department claiming racial discrimination.

    The eight white officers and one Hispanic officer filed the federal lawsuit against the city on Friday, claiming the department treats non-black officers involved in shootings of blacks more harshly than African-American officers, reports Cleveland.com.

    The nine were part of 13 officers involved in the shooting deaths of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams in a hail of bullets following a high speed chase in 2012. The chase, which involved 104 officers, ended when police fired 137 times upon the duo after their car came to a halt in a schoolyard. Russell was shot 23 times, with Williams hit 24 times.

    Police officers claimed the suspects fired upon them, but no gun was found on them or in their vehicle.

    The city of Cleveland recently settled with the families of the pair for $3 million.

    The lawsuit by the police officers alleges they were allowed back on regular duty and then placed back on restricted duty in a move they argue was “politically expedient.”

    The officers who fired their weapons were placed on three days of administrative leave and then a period of restricted duty, which is typically 45 days for officer-involved shootings. In the suit the police officers allege the department violated protocol by ordering the officers back to restricted duty after being allowed to return to the streets in June and July 2013.

    The suit claims the punishment has damaged the officers’ professional reputations and caused “emotional distress and mental anguish,” as well as depriving them of overtime and promotions, while relegating them to “boring, menial tasks.”

    “A serious dichotomy exists as a result of the defendants’ longstanding practices and procedures which place onerous burdens on non-African American officers, including the plaintiffs, because of their race and the race of persons who are the subjects of the legitimate use of deadly force,” reads the suit.

    The lawsuit comes at a bad time for the Cleveland police department in the wake of shooting death of Tamir Rice by a white police officer last week

    The 12-year-old African-American boy was shot while holding a toy gun in a playground.

    Massachusetts governor: I wanted indictment in FergusonPatrick told NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday that the transparency of a trial would be good because so many people assume police officers are “not going to have to answer for the shooting of unarmed, young black teenagers.”

    Patrick pointed to what he said was “the anxiety so many black people have about encounters with law enforcement, the anxiety that some in law enforcement have about their encounters with black people, and the startling lack of understanding between the two.”

  474. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

    Obama to hold meetings to discuss Ferguson

    President Barack Obama will discuss the situation in Ferguson, Missouri, Monday with his Cabinet, civil rights leaders, law enforcement officials and others.

    The White House says Obama’s Cabinet meeting will focus on his administration’s review of federal programs that provide military-style equipment to law enforcement agencies.

    The White House says the president will also meet with young civil rights leaders to discuss the challenges posed by “mistrust between law enforcement and communities of color.” He’ll then meet with government and law enforcement officials, as well as other community leaders, to discuss how to strengthen neighborhoods.

  476. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

    We need more Ferguson grand juries

    Many observers have noted that the grand jury result in Darren Wilson’s case is highly unusual. Federal grand juries indict in more than 99 percent of cases; state grand juries aren’t quite at that level, but still indict in an overwhelming number of cases. The grand jury deck is heavily stacked to favor prosecution. For instance, prosecutors have no obligation to present all of the evidence in a case, just enough evidence to get an indictment. The old adage is that if a prosecutor asked them, a grand jury would indict a ham sandwich.

    Other than sandwiches, who are grand juries indicting, and how? They disproportionately indict young African-American men, and they usually do it very quickly. Grand juries often hear dozens of cases in a single day, and may hand down an indictment based on ten minutes or less of testimony. As one news article notes, “Prosecutors present as many as 40 cases a day to grand juries,” who in turn “indict most suspects in less time than it takes to brew a p ot of coffee.”This is why the grand jury in Darren Wilson’s case was so unusual. It isn’t just that the result was out of the ordinary— the process was also unique. The grand jury heard an incredible 70 hours of testimony from 60 witnesses over a three month period. In another unusual move, the grand jury considered not only the basic elements of the crime, but also affirmative defenses. Ashby Jones writes at the Wall Street Journal blog that “It’s not disputed that Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed 18-year old Michael Brown on August 9. The question jurors were likely asked to consider went beyond that: whether Mr. Wilson was justified in shooting Mr. Brown.” And in yet another atypical move, prosecutors presented this grand jury not just a cherry-picked case for prosecution but “absolutely everything … Every scrap of paper that we have. Every photograph that was taken.”

  478. rq says

    Every scrap of paper that we have. Every photograph that was taken.

    Until, you know, camera batteries ran out.
    Or something.

  479. rq says

    On KSDK live video, watch the Ferguson Commission meet for the first time.

    Short video: #handsupwalkout protest at WUSTL, Brown School

    #Handsupwalkout peaceful protest at WUSTL, Brown School, 12/1

    In the Missouri Senate, Senator Chappelle-Nadal Introduces Legislation
    Governing Police Conduct

    The legislation requires all police to wear body cameras, among many other provisions.

    “Audio and video from cameras do not lie. Too often the police tell one story, while the people tell another. Cameras with both audio and video will assist in settling controversial disputes,” said Sen. Chappelle-Nadal.

    The wearing of body cameras by police officers has recently become part of a national discussion, but activists warn against limiting reform to just one change. While having audio and video evidence is important, reformers are studying systematic and institutional discrimination that began immediately after slavery ended. This history is why this bill is more broadly focused on law enforcement accountability, instead of a singular solution.

    The senator continued, “Police brutality is real, and causes emotional harm to citizens already experiencing social, economic and educational challenges. The lack of sensitivity and lack of cultural competency by some police officers and certain government officials has injured the community I represent beyond immediate repair.”

    The bill also includes citizen protections and officer professional standards:

    The bill scales back the current “use of deadly force” laws in Missouri, allowing officers to use deadly force only in instances where a suspect poses a clear danger to the officer or the public.
    If a police officer shoots an unarmed citizen, or a police officer kills an unarmed citizen by any other means, a special prosecutor will automatically be appointed.
    When law enforcement is deployed to a protest situation or a scene of civil unrest, all officers will be required to wear accurate and visible identification with their full names clearly displayed.
    Law enforcement officers shall not be allowed to “hog-tie” citizens or verbally degrade or make derogatory comments toward any peaceful protestors.
    If the governor declares a state of emergency due to civil unrest, the governor shall immediately reassign and mobilize a sufficient number of state social workers, counselors, and psychologists to the area.
    The deployment of tear gas shall not be allowed unless the governor has declared a state of emergency and a neutral third party agency (such as Amnesty International) is on the scene to certify that the tear gas will be deployed in a humanitarian manner.
    If the governor declares a state of emergency due to civil unrest, the governor shall concurrently contract with a neutral third party agency (such as Amnesty International) to immediately report any abuses of human, civil, and constitutional rights to the Missouri and United States attorney generals.
    All law enforcement agencies in Missouri must be accredited by July 1, 2016.

    “This is the 21st century. Police training and tactics from the 1930s have become outdated. As society evolves, so too must our protectors,” concluded Sen. Chappelle-Nadal.

    For any Ferguson actions near you, check out fergusonaction.com.

  480. rq says

    This is again on football, via St louis local news: Police group wants Rams players disciplined for ‘Hands Up’ gesture; NFL declines

    The group consisted of Tavon Austin, Stedman Bailey, Kenny Britt, Jared Cook and Chris Givens. They hatched the idea before the game.

    “Kenny Britt told me he was doing it, and some of the other guys were doing it,” Cook said. “So we all just hopped on the bandwagon and came up with the idea of how we were going to do it.”

    Coach Jeff Fisher said he didn’t see the gesture and was unaware of it.

    “I didn’t know anything about it. I was still in the tunnel,” Fisher said.

    Britt said he didn’t want to bother Fisher before the game by telling him of the plans. […]

    “No, not at all,” Britt told reporters. “ … We just wanted to let the (Ferguson) community know that we support them.” […]

    NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy gave a one-sentence response. “We respect and understand the concerns of all individuals who have expressed views on this tragic situation,” he said in an email Monday.

    Cook, of the Rams, said something has to change in terms of relations between police officers and African-Americans.

    “Whatever happened from both sides, there has to be some kind of change,” Cook said. “That’s not cool, you know. I think President (Barack) Obama said it best: People aren’t coming up with these complaints for no reason. People aren’t saying these things just to make it up.” […]

    Several Rams players indicated during the week that they hoped to “win one for Ferguson” against the Raiders. The response Sunday was a 52-0 victory, the second-most lopsided victory in Rams franchise history.

    “I think that the store owners that were looted, you feel for them and what they’re going through,” linebacker James Laurinaitis said. “You feel for the kids that had school canceled. You just want things to get back to normal as soon as possible.

    “However long that road is, hopefully today for three and whatever hours was kind of a little bit of relief so people could just take their minds off of the situation and enjoy some Rams football.”

    What freaks me out most is Roorda’s actual reaction:

    “I know that there are those that will say that these players are simply exercising their First Amendment rights,” Roorda said. “Well, I’ve got news for people who think that way, cops have first amendment rights too, and we plan to exercise ours.”

    Tell me that isn’t in some way threatening.

    Ferguson nightmare widens: Rudy Giuliani, the NFL and cops doubling down on their “right” to kill

    Hundreds of politicians and pundits are criticizing the most disruptive Ferguson protesters, including President Obama, but almost no one is talking to the police about the way they consistently escalate these controversies – in the street, with young black men, but also in their dealings with communities afterward, when they tolerate no criticism.

    That trademark arrogance has been taken to an extreme by the St. Louis Police Officers’ Association’s demand that the NFL discipline five St. Louis Rams players who participated in a pre-game “Hands up, don’t shoot” protest of Mike Brown’s killing Sunday night. Appropriately, the NFL says no such discipline will be forthcoming; the cops also want an apology.

    That a local police association thinks it is somehow bigger than the NFL, and that it has the power to curtail the First Amendment rights of football players, is just another example of the preemptive, aggressive self-defense that keeps police officers unaccountable for their transgressions.

    Prosecutor-in-chief Rudy Giuliani set the tone for the Ferguson debate a day before the grand jury’s decision was announced. Giuliani minimized the problem of white police killing young black men on “Meet the Press,” telling Michael Eric Dyson “the white police officers wouldn’t be there if you weren’t killing each other 70-75% of the time” and asking “why don’t you cut it down so so many white police officers don’t have to be in black areas?” […]

    Predictably, Rudy Giuliani escalated his rhetoric this past Sunday on Fox, telling Chris Wallace that it’s black people who bear responsibility for the outsized, and occasionally excessive, police presence in their communities.

    “I think just as much, if not more, responsibility is on the black community to reduce the reason why the police officers are assigned in such large numbers to the black community,” He added: “It’s because blacks commit murder eight times more per capita than any other group in our society. If I’d put all my police on Park Avenue instead of Harlem, thousands more blacks would have died during my time in office.”

    When it comes to controlling the public debate over these killings, the police lobby consistently uses excessive force — and gets away with it. Their outsized response to peaceful protest by the St. Louis Rams is only the latest example, and here’s hoping the NFL and the team don’t back down.

    Judging from the NFL’s official ‘don’t want to talk about it’ response, I think they won’t back down but won’t be particularly loud in their open support for players choosing to show their support for Ferguson.

    Oh, yay? Ferguson protest leaders to meet with President Obama at the White House Monday

    Monday will mark the second time that Ferguson activists have met with administration officials at the White House. In September, two protesters, a clergy member, and two local residents traveled to Washington to speak with White House aides. […]

    Massive marches and protests are planned throughout Washington Monday, and activists in St. Louis have planned a protest at the Department of Justice building there.

    Protest leaders have said they plan to push for legislation to require all officers to wear body cameras, as well as measures that would require all departments to report details of any officer-related shootings and that would make police personnel files public records, though they remain skeptical that these reforms will be enacted. […]

    Many of these activists had interpreted Holder’s early comments about ensuring justice to mean that the Justice Department would bring civil rights charges against Wilson. A series of media reports has since revealed that civil rights charges against Wilson are viewed as highly unlikely.

    “Where has [President Obama] been all of these months?” said one Ferguson activist Monday. “And now he wants to have a meeting? Please.” […]

    “They told us they wanted to know how they could help,” said one attendee. “But after that they did nothing. They sent one email.”

    If they can’t even get any civil rights charges on Wilson, at the very least based on his testimony and the horrendous language that he uses…

    The next two focus on Obama again, and are somewhat contradictory. Possibly. Maybe.
    Obama announces funding for 50,000 police body cameras

    The new funding push is substantial, but 50,000 cameras will cover only a fraction of the more than 750,000 police officers currently employed in America. Camera proposals have also run into trouble with public records laws in states like Washington, which require the release of all police records not actively tied up in an investigation. With hundreds of hours of video generated by police cameras every day, that would present serious problems for both privacy and simple logistics.

    White House: We Don’t Have A “Specific Position” On Police Militarization

    The administration is keeping its hands off the bipartisan militarization debate, which imploded after a brief surge in interest on Capitol Hill. Administration officials noted repeatedly that “the vast majority” of surplus military equipment sent to local police forces is not former combat equipment and said they could not alter programs created by Congress.

    Asked about proposed legislation to limit the availability of military equipment to local police, proposed by Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate, the official said the White House had not reviewed the bills.

    “I don’t have a specific position for you,” the official said.

    “Our assumption is Congress has an intent here to support local law enforcement with the use of this kind of equipment,” the official said on a conference call with reporters Monday. “Our focus is on what kind of protections are in place to make sure it’s used properly and safely.” […]

    Several agencies across the federal government provide the grant funds to local police forces, while the Department Of Defense oversees the surplus program. Obama’s executive order will push localities to add civilian review boards that would approve police requests for military equipment. The order also focuses on boosting training programs for local police who use the equipment.

    Changes to the programs suggested by the White House would also provide an increase in data collection on how military equipment is used by local cops. Demilitarization advocates have complained that police aren’t required to keep track of when exactly military-grade equipment like MRAPs and M-16s are deployed, making it difficult to study. A 2014 ACLU state-by-state study of the use of military hardware found it is most often deployed as part of the drug war and against people of color.

    Maybe not so contradictory: don’t take a firm stance, throw out a few band-aid solutions and some funding assistance (but by no means all), continue all militarization programs under the supposed auspices of greater supervision from civilians. While, probably, making sure that civilian oversight is as difficult (or biased) to maintain as possible.

  481. toska says

    At the very least, it seems the NFL is not going to punish Kenny Britt, Tavon Austin, Stedman Bailey, Jared Cook and Chris Givens, the players who made “Hands up, don’t shoot” gestures in support of Ferguson.
    http://www.latimes.com/sports/sportsnow/la-sp-sn-rams-gesture-20141201-story.html
    There is one thing I’m a bit disappointed about. The Rams coach, Jeff Fisher, decided to play ignorant about the whole situation, and he made a worthlessly vague statement.

    Asked about the gesture after the game, Rams Coach Jeff Fisher said he didn’t see it and was unaware of it.

    “I didn’t know anything about it,” he said. “I was still in the tunnel.”

    While I don’t doubt that the players didn’t consult Jeff Fisher beforehand, I would have preferred him to make a supportive comment. Even one like, “I didn’t know they were going to do that, but as their coach I support their rights to show solidarity with the people of Ferguson and the victims of police violence.” Or even one way more vague like, “I didn’t know they were planning to do that, but they are certainly allowed to express their 1st ammendment rights on my team.”

  482. rq says

    An antidote for low blood pressure, here’s Roorda: Police rep: Ferguson unrest “not a problem with the police”.
    He, also, has an annoying face. It’s the lack of expression more than anything else.

    “Whatever has happened in America to cause these feelings of resentment, it’s not a failure of law enforcement,” St. Louis Police Officers Association business manager Jeff Roorda told CBS News correspondent Vladimir Duthiers. “It’s a political failure, and it’s an economic failure and we don’t feel that should be pinned on the chest of Darren Wilson or law enforcement, more broadly.”

    Roorda said it’s not on police to fix the problems that led to the resentment.

    “If we spend this time in the wake of Michael Brown’s killing trying to change law enforcement to fix this problem, it’s going to be a betrayal to his legacy because that’s not why Michael Brown ended on the street confronting a police officer,” Roorda said. “It’s decades of racial disparity, and economic disparity. It’s not a problem with the police.”

    You know, because the police exist in a vaccuum where racial and economic disparity is suddenly cast aside for JUSTIIIICE. And the law.

    Missouri State Sen. Maria Chappelle-Nadal released this statement to CBS News reacting to Roorda’s comments, saying, “Mr. Roorda seems like a very angry man. Perhaps it is because he lost his Senate race in a Democratic district this last November.”

    “Furthermore, it is interesting that Mr. Roorda wants to limit the free speech of professional football players, when he and I both strongly support police officers and fire fighters having the right to free speech while off duty,” Chapelle-Nadal said. “Mr. Roorda is bitter. Instead of limiting free speech he should give more hugs to people that are not as privileged as himself. The world needs more love and hopefully America will join me in praying for the man to become more compassionate.”

    A quick note on that law in the Missouri senate I mentioned above, Mo. lawmakers pre-file Ferguson-related bills

    Under the legislation, law enforcement would be required to wear body cameras and, when responding to civil unrest or a protest, accurate and visible identification. Officers also could not “hog-tie or make derogatory comments toward peaceful protesters.

    The measure also only would allow officers to use deadly force if a suspect poses a clear danger to the officer or the public. Under current Missouri law, officers can use deadly when they believe it is “immediately necessary to effect the arrest” or if there is reasonable belief that the person committed or tried to commit a felony, is trying to escape by using a deadly weapon or could endanger life or inflict injury unless they’re arrested immediately.

    Other provisions in the bill include:

    • A special prosecutor immediately would be appointed if an officer shoots or kills an unarmed resident.

    • Social workers, counselors and psychologists immediately would be deployed when the governor announces a state of emergency.

    • Tear gas only could be used in a state of emergency and if a third party, like Amnesty International, is in the area to make sure it is humanely deployed.

    • All law enforcement agencies would need to be accredited by July 1, 2016.

    “This is the 21st century. Police training and tactics from the 1930s have become outdated,” Chappelle-Nadal said. “As society evolves, so too must our protectors.”

    NFL won’t discipline Rams players for Ferguson demonstration, with this link within: NFL says it won’t discipline Rams players for Ferguson protest. Has more on the thoughts of the players themselves

    Wide receiver Stedman Bailey said he and his teammates decided to make the gesture shortly before the game, and intended it to be something positive.

    “Violence should stop. There’s a lot of violence going on here in St. Louis. We definitely hear about it all, and we just want it to stop,” Bailey told reporters after the game.

    Tight end Jared Cook said he and his teammates wanted to show solidarity with protesters, because they had not been able to physically join them since the grand jury’s announcement was made last week. Cook said his family members went to Ferguson last week and reported back to him what they saw.

    “It’s dangerous out there. None of us want to get caught up in that. We wanted to come out and show our respect to the protesters that have been doing a heck of a job,” Cook said.

    Cook said he didn’t consider his teammates’ actions a distraction, and wide receiver Kenny Britt took issue with the notion that Rams players were choosing sides in a heated community issue.

    “We are here making sure something positive comes out of it,” Britt said. “I’m not here for the police. I’m here for a great cause that could come out of this if people come together.”

  484. toska says

    Former GOP congressman and host of Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough, goes on an idiotic rant.
    http://uk.businessinsider.com/joe-scarborough-just-went-on-an-epic-tirade-about-ferguson-2014-12

    Scarborough said he agreed with the protesters that the justice system racially discriminated against young black men, but he insisted that Brown’s case was not necessarily the ideal example.

    Well, first of all, if the issues exist, who cares whether Mike Brown is the best example? Fight against the issues anyway! And second, of course, fuck him for implying that Mike Brown deserved to die for allegedly shoplifting beforehand. If you don’t think that is an example of a young life taken too soon for petty, racially motivated reasons, fuck you, Joe Scarborough.

    “If I’ve offended anybody offended anybody by saying what I’ve said, trust me, 95% of America thinks just like me. Just because there are cowards that won’t say that on TV — that’s your problem, it’s not mine,” he said.

    Seriously, Joe? What are you basing that off of? Black people make up more than 5% of the country, and I doubt many of them ‘think just like you’ on this issue, and they aren’t the only ones. Maybe, just maybe all those people who aren’t joining their voices with yours aren’t scared, maybe they actually disagree with you.

    For some reason, this segment is trending (probably mostly among conservative types). I’m not sure why. He doesn’t say anything new or interesting about the topic except everyone secretly agrees with me

  486. rq says

    toska
    What a notpology. And I think his estimate of 95% is rather high, considering the decently-appearing turnout protests have been seeing.
    And that bit about ‘racial issues exist but he shoplifted’ is the basic narrative for which I unfriended that last friend. It’s like the fact that Michael Brown is dead doesn’t even matter. At all.

  487. rq says

    Prosecutor hasn’t dropped case against Detroit police officer for Aiyana Jones killing

    Two juries, one in June of 2013 and a second in October, failed to reach a unanimous decision in the case resulting in mistrials.

    Judge Cynthia Gray Hathaway dismissed the most serious charge against Weekley, involuntary manslaughter, during the second trial .He still faces a charge of misdemeanor careless discharge of a weapon causing death, which carries a punishment of up to two years in prison.

    Two years for shooting a seven-year-old.

  488. toska says

    rq

    And that bit about ‘racial issues exist but he shoplifted’ is the basic narrative for which I unfriended that last friend. It’s like the fact that Michael Brown is dead doesn’t even matter. At all.

    Well, we all know shoplifting (and jaywalking too! Lord have mercy!) is such an egregious offense that it can only be punished by death. Except for all the white people who do it. That’s different because . . . reasons.

  491. rq says

    This one’s via Lynna: Police organizations in St. Louis have separate predominantly white and black organizations. Yup, that’s right, two separate police organizations for white and black cops:

    Although it doesn’t say so in its name, the St. Louis Police Officers Association, which has staunchly defended Darren Wilson, defamed Mike Brown, and recently called for the suspension of St. Louis Rams football players who showed solidarity with Ferguson, is actually the (White) St. Louis Police Officers Association. African-American officers in St. Louis have their own separate organization that advocates for their needs.

    Called the St. Louis Black Police Officers Association until 1975, African-American officers continue to organize separate from their white counterparts in what they now call the St. Louis Ethical Society of Police.

    In a strange twist of irony, the head of the African-American police union in St. Louis is a black man named Darren Wilson. In a recent letter he stated:

    Our motto is “We are the conscious [note: I’ve been seeing a lot of this typo lately, shouldn’t that be conscience?] of the St. Louis Police Department.” We did not come to this motto lightly. We believe that someone has to be willing to stand up and hold our Police Department to the oaths of service that we all have taken.
    In fact, our motto is almost like another type of oath. It is a promise—a promise to you that we will be working every day to be the conscious of the St. Louis Police Department.

    Considering that the spokesperson for the (white) St. Louis Police Officers Association, Jeff Roorda, was fired as a police officer himself for misconduct and falsifying reports, it makes sense that the black police union feels the need to make ethical policing its focus. […]

    Despite the enormous racially driven challenges thrust upon the African American Community by the City of St. Louis, Black men continued to seek out and serve as Law Enforcement Officers. They realized that they had to force themselves into this institution in order to provide some measure of protection for their community.
    ​
    Unfortunately, the life experience of African American police officers in St. Louis was not unique. African American police officers all over the country were being subjected to the same types of racist whims and lawless actions by their fellow white officers. So, thirteen African American police associations, representing: New York, Michigan, California, Ohio, Illinois, Pennsylvania New Jersey, Connecticut, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland and Colorado met in St. Louis and out of that meeting, a National Black Police Association was chartered in 1972. […]

    The Ethical Society of Police believes that as an African American organization, the E.S.O.P. is obligated as well as uniquely qualified to monitor and rectify the racial and ethical challenges that confront the St. Louis Police Department.

    Interestingly, this (ethical) Darren Wilson came up at the very beginning of everything, when the murdering Darren Wilson hadn’t been IDed properly yet. Googling ‘Darren Wilson’ brought up this guy.

    Picture for solidarity.

    Wonkette on football (there will be more on the football, too, but mostly via tweets): St. Louis Rams Hurt Cops’ Feelings By Reminding Them Ferguson Happened

    Roorda warned, “I know that there are those that will say that these players are simply exercising their First Amendment rights. Well I’ve got news for people who think that way, cops have first amendment rights too, and we plan to exercise ours. I’d remind the NFL and their players that it is not the violent thugs burning down buildings that buy their advertiser’s products. It’s cops and the good people of St. Louis and other NFL towns that do.”

    [I quoted the first part of that yesterday… I had no idea that THAT was the second half… OH HO HO, indeed. What a racist fucker.]

    OH HO HO, Jeff Roorda will tell you how the First Amendment operates, put that in your pipe ‘n smoke it, etc. Also, regarding all the hippity-hop thugs and how they’re not buying things, Roorda is probably right: Lord knows no poor black person has ever bought a Gatorade, or a pizza, or batteries, or McDonald’s. The very thought is beyond the proverbial pale. […]

    This run-on sentence in particular deserves some kind of award:

    Our officers have been working 12 hour shifts for over a week, they had days off including Thanksgiving cancelled so that they could defend this community from those on the streets that perpetuate this myth that Michael Brown was executed by a brother police officer and then, as the players and their fans sit safely in their dome under the watchful protection of hundreds of St. Louis’s finest, they take to the turf to call a now-exonerated [seriously? exonerated? he still killed that poor boy.] officer a murderer, that is way out-of-bounds, to put it in football parlance.

    Do you see what Jeff Roorda did there, with the sportsball thing? Because out-of-bounds is a thing in football, and it is also a thing people say! Check yr petards, liberals, you done been hoisted from ‘em. […]

    We hate to burst Jeff Roorda’s bubble (mostly because we’re afraid that a bunch of race-war slash fic is going to come spilling out) but the Rams players weren’t doing what Roorda thought they were doing. Imagine that! A white St. Louis-area cop assigning erroneous motives to the actions of black men, who’da thunk?

    Wide receiver Stedman Bailey said he and his teammates decided to make the gesture shortly before the game, and intended it to be something positive.

    It’s funny, I didn’t fixate on it as much yesterday – but Roorda honestly believes the gesture is being made against police, as opposed to in support of the movement, which are two slightly different things. The fact that he sees it as a provocation says a lot.

    Oh oh and this, it’s via public Facebook, St Louis County statement on the NFL and the gesture (full text):

    Regarding statements on an “apology” from Rams COO Kevin Demoff:

    Chief Belmar was contacted today by St. Louis Rams COO Kevin Demoff. The Chief never asked for anyone from the Rams to contact him. He said the conversation was pleasant. The Chief sent an email to his police staff and used the word “apologized.” Mr. Demoff is quoted in the St. Louis Post Dispatch story saying “I expressed to both of them that I felt badly that our players’ support of the community was taken as disrespectful to law enforcement.” He further stated “I regretted any offense the officer’s may have taken.”

    Even though Mr. Demoff stated he never apologized, the Chief believed it to be an apology and the Chief sent the email to police staff to let them know about the call, after he told Mr. Demoff he would share his sentiments with his staff.

    Check out that totally appropriate notpology right there: “I regretted any offence the officers may have taken”. Thank you, Demoff. Some people, not so excited: The Ram’s leadership failed today. The players, amazing. Leadership, disappointed. Meeting with Roorda is a deal-breaker. #Ferguson, but others a bit more forgiving: I actually applaud Demoff for coming out and correcting the police union on what he said. He didn’t have to do that.

  492. rq says

    What got out as an ‘apology’ from the Rams was the following article: County police chief says Rams apologized for ‘Hands up’ gesture; team’s VP says otherwise

    “This morning, I had phone conversations with both Chief Dotson and Chief Belmar regarding yesterday’s events,” Demoff said. “I expressed to both of them that I felt badly that our players’ support of the community was taken as disrespectful to law enforcement.

    “Later in the afternoon I had a positive meeting with Chief Dotson, Jeff Roorda, and Gabe Crocker at St. Louis city police headquarters to discuss with them how the Rams’ organization and law enforcement could build upon the positive relationship we already have. We began a good dialogue but recognize there is work to be done to strengthen our relationship.

    “In none of these conversations did I apologize for our players’ actions. I did say in each conversation that I regretted any offense their officers may have taken. We do believe it is possible to both support our players’ First Amendment rights and support the efforts of local law enforcement as our community begins the process of healing.

    “Chief Belmar’s assertion that our conversation was heartfelt is accurate, and I would characterize our conversation as productive. Our organization wants to find ways to use football to bring our community together.” […]

    St. Louis Police Officer Association business manager Jeff Roorda said the group will continue to meet in hopes of reaching some solution.

    “We feel strongly that they better understand our perspective and the perspective of the law-abiding citizens that support law enforcement,” Roorda said. “We’re going to continue these conversations later this week and … we’re going to hold off on any further public comments in the hopes that fruitful talks continue.” […]

    Meanwhile, at his regular Monday media session, coach Jeff Fisher declined to take questions on the “Hands Up” gesture made by the players.

    “It’s my personal opinion, and I firmly believe, that it’s important that I keep sports and politics separate,” Fisher said. “I’m a head coach. I’m not a politician, an activist, or an expert on societal issues. So I’m gonna answer questions about the game.”

    Fisher said all questions on the topic should be directed to Rams vice president of football operations Kevin Demoff. Demoff could not be reached immediately for comment.

    Fisher said he has not spoken with the five players who made the “Hands Up” gesture, but will. He said the players “made the choice to exercise their free speech (Sunday).”

    Fisher also said he will not discipline any of the players. [… – but does ‘not discplining them’ include telling them not to do it again…?]

    To be clear, “At no time in any of the conversations did I apologize for the actions of our players.” — Kevin Demoff to me just a moment ago.
    Funny how one little thing at the start of one football game can become such a huge, huge deal. The statement from the Rams:

    We had positive discussions today with St. Louis Metropolitcan Police Department Chief Sam Dotson, St. Louis County Chief of Police Chief Jon Belmar and representatives from the St. Louis Police Officers’ Association and St. Louis County Police Association during which we expressed our respect for their concerns surrounding yesterday’s game. What has transpired over the past four months is a tragedy that has impacted our entire community. Together we are beginning a healing process that will require time, energy and honest dialogue. The Rams will continue to build on what have always been strong and valued relationships with local law enforcement and the greater St. Louis community as we come together to help heal our region.

    This article has nothing new, except the picture at the bottom from 1968: Police angry at ‘hands up’ gesture by St. Louis Rams players, very strong, that.

    Meanwhile, in Seattle.
    Relatedly, more on yesterday’s walk-outs:
    High School Students Around The Country Are Walking Out Of Class For Ferguson

    Monday’s protests took place at 12:01 Central Time, the time the unarmed teen was killed on Aug. 9. According to the Ferguson National Response Network Tumblr, students from about 10 high schools confirmed that they would participate in the protest. Pictures on social media show that students from other schools also left class to protest.

    Awesome photos from all over at the link.
    CU-Boulder students stand in silence for Ferguson’s Michael Brown

    Despite below-freezing temperatures, about 150 students, faculty and community members participated in the walk-out outside the CU student center on the Boulder campus.

    Similar events took place at roughly 30 college campus around the country on Monday, a national protest that bore the #HandsUpWalkout hashtag.

  493. rq says

    Previous in moderation but I won’t repost, it’s more on the football, and here’s to hoping that PZ will just pull it out quickly. :)

    Moving on!
    There was a huge event in Atlanta (well, I don’t know if ‘huge’ but it got a good response via twitter), where they distributed this flyer, which is a list of changes the protestors want to see in Atlanta and nationwide, weird and impossible things like respect for human rights and other unicorns.

    Ferguson fallout: Protesters interrupt Holder, with autoplay video (the link name is weird):

    A group of chanting protesters interrupted a speech by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church on Monday, but Holder said the group shouldn’t be criticized.

    “There will be a tendency on the part of some to condemn what we just saw, but we should not,” Holder said. “What we saw there was a genuine expression of concern and involvement. And it is through that level of involvement, that level of concern and I hope a level of perseverance and commitment, that change ultimately will come. And so let me be clear, let me be clear, I ain’t mad atcha, all right?”

    Demonstrators were escorted out of the church after about 30 seconds and continued to protest outside. They pumped their fists in the air, chanting, “No justice, no peace” and “We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

    Holder’s response drew a standing ovation from many in the crowd.

    In the speech, Holder also said he plans to announce “rigorous new standards” for federal law enforcement “to help end racial profiling, once and for all.” […]

    Holder has opened two civil rights investigations in Missouri — one into whether Wilson violated Brown’s civil rights, the other into the police department’s overall track record with minorities.

    Audience members applauded and cheered as he told the crowd Monday night that those investigations were ongoing.

    “These twin investigations have been rigorous and they have been independent from the beginning. Now, while federal civil rights law imposes an extremely high legal bar in these types of cases, we have resisted prejudging the evidence or forming premature conclusions,” Holder said. “And as these investigations proceed, I want to assure the American people that they will continue to be conducted thoroughly and in a timely manner, following the facts and the law wherever they may lead.” […]

    He’s been in hiding for most of the 3 1/2 months since the shooting. And now Darren Wilson is no longer a Ferguson police officer.

    But what’s next?

    “That’s a million dollar question,” said Greg Kloeppel, one of Wilson’s attorneys.

    “He’s probably going to go back to school. He’s probably going to have to pursue other areas of employment, because I think it’s quite obvious a job in law enforcement is highly unlikely at this point in time,” Kloeepel told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Monday.

    Wilson is considering possibly studying business, finance or accounting, attorney Danielle Thompson said. [… – funny, a million dollar question is right, seeing as how much money was donated to him during this whole time and still is being donated by racists everywhere]

    More on students walking out by Al-Jazeera, #HandsUpWalkOut: Students across US join Ferguson strike. More great photos from all over.

    On Chris Rock, Chris Rock is right: White Americans are a lot less racist than they used to be. (But they’re still more racist than you might think.)

    The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let’s hope America keeps producing nicer white people.

    Those last two sentences are at once sad, hilarious and quantifiably true. If Barack Obama had been born fifty years earlier, for instance, he would literally have had zero chance of becoming president – in 1958, only 38 percent of Americans said they would vote for a black presidential candidate, according to Gallup. By 2012, that number was 96 percent.

    That 58 percentage point change didn’t happen because blacks somehow became smarter and more qualified relative to whites during that period, but rather because many — although by no means all — white Americans abandoned the overt prejudices that kept talented blacks from getting ahead.

    The General Social Survey, a massive public opinion poll conducted since 1972, documents some of these changes in white attitudes. In 1972, for instance, nearly two-thirds of whites said homeowners should be able to discriminate against blacks when selling their homes. That number fell to 28 percent by 2008. […]

    [lots of graphs, good ones]

    It’s hard to look at these numbers and conclude that we somehow live in a “post-racial” society, or to believe, as a majority of whites do, that racism against whites is as big a problem as racism against blacks. We often speak of racism now as an “implicit” rather than an explicit problem — that the subconscious biases we all hold have created a society of “racism without racists.” (Don’t believe this? Go take an implicit bias test and let me know how you do).

    But numbers like the 25 percent of white Americans who would be upset by an interracial marriage in the family show that racism is still a very explicit phenomenon. Since we know that people have a tendency to tell pollsters what they think they want to hear, these numbers are likely undercounts, and potentially large ones.

    “Let’s hope America keeps producing nicer white people,” Chris Rock says. It’s not going to be easy.

  494. rq says

    Black Caucus lawmakers condemn Ferguson decision on House floor

    In a series of House floor speeches on the first day back in session since the Thanksgiving recess, lawmakers said the grand jury’s conclusion that there wasn’t enough evidence to indict Ferguson, Mo. police officer Darren Wilson suggested African Americans didn’t receive the same treatment from the criminal justice system.

    Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio), the CBC’s chairwoman, said it was an “embarrassment” the U.S. still has issues with race relations in 2014.

    “The Ferguson grand jury’s decision not to indict Officer Wilson was another slap in our face,” Fudge said. “If we are to learn anything from the tragic death of Michael Brown, we must first acknowledge that we have a race issue we are not addressing.”

    Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said the outrage over the shooting and the grand jury’s decision not to indict Wilson was due to an apparent pattern of white police officers using lethal force against unarmed African American men.

    “People are fed up all across America because of the injustice involved in continuing to see young, unarmed African American men killed as the result of a gun shot fired by a law enforcement officer,” Jeffries said. “People in America are fed up with a broken criminal justice system that continues to fail to deliver accountability when law enforcement officers engage in the excessive use of police force.”

    Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) said the events in Ferguson demonstrated that the U.S. still struggles with race relations despite electing the first African American president in 2008.

    “Although we’ve elected President Barack Obama here in the United States, I’ve heard some say we were in a post-racial America,” Meeks said. “No, we are not. For racism is still alive and well in the United States of America. We’ve got work to do.”

    Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) urged approval of requiring police officers to wear body cameras in order to hold them accountable. President Obama announced Monday that the administration would provide law enforcement agencies with $263 million for purchasing body cameras.

    “They’re not a cure-all, they’re not a panacea. But they are a positive step in the right direction,” Green said.

    In a statement immediately following the grand jury’s decision last week, Fudge said the outcome was a “miscarriage of justice” suggesting that “Black lives hold no value.”

    Members of the CBC also spoke on the House floor on the first day back in session after the August shooting.

    “This much cannot be disputed: Across America today, we have too many Michael Browns. We have too many unarmed black men who interact with police and wind up dead,” Rep. Lacy Clay (D-Mo.), whose district includes Ferguson, said at the time.

    Was this already posted? “No Justice, No Respect”: Why the Ferguson Riots Were Justified

    The police assaulted the largely peaceful crowd with tear gas after their vehicles were set on fire. My three younger brothers, ages 27, 21, and 19, accompanied me to Ferguson, and one of the tear gas canisters hit my 21-year-old brother on the leg. Being a young reporter anxious to “get the story,” I ignored the pleas of one of my other brothers to wrap a cloth around my face. How stupid of me. The smoked engulfed me and triggered my asthma. My eyes burned and my lips felt as if my Chapstick had been contaminated with Wasabi paste. As people scattered, someone in the crowd fired a gun into the air. When I heard the shots. I instinctively hit the ground and cowered behind a car. Being raised in West St. Louis, I was taught to always kiss the floor when I hear the “pop, pop, pop” of a gun.

    A young man passing by told me, “Get your scary ass up. You ain’t got nothing to be scared of.” After my brother argued with him, he warned us, “I got those things,” where “things” meant firearms. But I couldn’t bring myself to be angry with that guy; the violence he threatened to inflict upon my brothers and me is a grim legacy of America’s long history of violence toward black people. And so the condemnation of the Ferguson protestors and rioters, by those who gained and sustained their power through violence, is the worst sort of rank hypocrisy. […]

    White acquaintances, who told me in high school that I acted and talked white, now tell me I am racist toward white folk because I dare mention the idea fueling the tumult in Ferguson: white supremacy. They grow defensive when those two words are spoken. It appears my white acquaintances, and many other white Americans, agree with Oscar Wilde that such debates—about the ghastly effects of racial supremacy— “are to be avoided because they are always vulgar and often convincing.” Yet, try as they might, what transpired in Ferguson was never just about Michael Brown. His death was certainly a spark, but the frustrations have been there since black people were brought to this continent and denied full access to American citizenship. In August, a friend shared a video on Facebook that captured Ferguson residents assembled on Canfield Drive, where the Brown shooting occurred, in the days after Brown’s killing. One person in the video said, “We fed up with these people, man. Don’t expect the courts to help.” Another, through a pained and angry voice, yelled, “We keep giving these crackers our money, staying in they [apartment] complexes, and we can’t get no justice! No respect!”

    No justice. No respect. […]

    Four years ago, my step-father and brothers were rehabbing a house in a white neighborhood in Ferguson when someone called the police and reported a potential burglary. Police officers, in multiple cars, rolled up on them with guns drawn. They ordered my family to the ground, spread eagle. “I almost peed on myself,” my little brother told me. No justice. No respect.

    On the way home from Ferguson, after the Monday night protests, a Pagedale City police officer pulled over my rental car. The officer who stopped me apparently called for backup, as two other cruisers eventually joined him. He asked to see my license and, as I reached in the back for my bag, I heard the officer grunt an alarmed “Whoa.” I should have known better than to reach for any concealed object, considering what happened in South Carolina. Fear gripped me and sweat drenched my new Uniqlo shirt. I apologized even though I was only going five miles over the speed limit. No justice. No respect.

    Critics of the Ferguson rioters and protestors are quick to label them part of an irrational, greedy, criminal element. But such a facile analysis is an insult to the generations long struggle of black Americans. The Ferguson demonstrators are sharp political actors offering a giant “fuck you” to a political and business establishment that long ago told black Americans to fuck off. One of the most telling scenes from Monday night came when a small group of rioters set their sights on a restaurant purportedly owned by a black woman. “Don’t do this! We gotta protect black businesses. Go after those other motherfuckers!”, a woman screamed. Missouri Highway Patrol Captain Ron Johnson said, during a press conference after the first night of rioting, “Change is brought about by our voices, not the destruction of our community.” That assertion is a profound misreading of the mood in Ferguson. A lot of the black citizens of Ferguson simply do not view the community as theirs. […]

    Last week I was sitting in a coffee shop in St. Louis’ midtown neighborhood filing a story about Ferguson when St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay walked in. He was chomping, quite loudly, on a green apple. But his noisy chewing didn’t deter me. “Can you understand the response from the people of Ferguson? Even the rioting?”, I asked. He put down his apple and grew tense. “No. Absolutely not”, he barked. “But the hurt and anger is genuine. A white supremacist police state is responsible for all this, yes?” Slay was pissed at that point. “No. A Criminal element is the cause of this”.

    The Mayor then babbled on, about all the supposed good he is doing or has done for the city’s beleaguered black population, before scampering off for an interview with NPR. But any person who looks at Ferguson and does not recognize the root cause of it is not the least bit interested in confronting America’s institutionalized racism. He or she is committed to maintaining the current social order that was built to oppress and degrade black life. He or she is an opponent of justice and a proponent of white supremacy.

    Michael Brady, 32, witnessed a part of the 90-second confrontation between Brown and Wilson in August. We met, before the grand jury announcement, in his apartment on Canfield Drive, mere feet from Brown’s killing, as the November rain fell outside. “I don’t expect Wilson to be indicted,” Brady told me as his baby boy played at his feet, “The system ain’t built for that.” His fiancé added that, “All we can do is be black, continue to speak up for what’s right, and live our life.”

    Shift over, to Eric Garner in NY: Is the Cop Who Murdered Eric Garner About to Be No-Billed?

    Several days ago the public was advised that the Grand Jury was about to reach a decision, but DA Daniel Donovan had no comment, and the media fell back to the ‘the decision might be released by the end of the year’ formula.

    Curious, I poked around online and found several things that contributed to my belief that Officer Daniel Panteleo would not be indicted, the most important being that the Grand Jury for his case was empaneled on Sept. 27, meaning they have met for two months hearing evidence. The other was that it seems Panteleo testified for almost two hours on Nov. 21 according to NY.cbslocal.com, ‘giving his account of the videotaped death of Garner’, which seemed to as the signal that they were about to wrap up and vote. They also quote Panteleo’s attorney as saying that he was glad the jurors listened so intently to his testimony.

    Now this is especially egregious to hear, given that it’s extremely rare for a defendant to appear before a Grand Jury, and may mean that those of us who feared that McCulloch’s similar shenanigans in the Darren Wilson case would become the standard for not wanting a cop indicted.

    And isn’t that a scary, scary thought?

  495. toska says

    rq
    May I ask for suggestions on who to follow on twitter? I don’t have a twitter account myself, but I still periodically check in on certain accounts that have provided useful info/insights on Ferguson. If you mostly follow the #Ferguson, you are a brave soul! I tried that when everything started back in August, and I found the racist posts to be more than I can handle on a daily basis, so I’ve tried to stick to a little network of awesome posters.

  497. rq says

    toska
    I don’t follow #Ferguson, that was SCARY.
    I follow (or keep an eye out for) people:
    @elonjames
    @antoniofrench
    @deray
    @Nettaaaaaaaa,
    @bdoulaoblongata
    @brownblaze
    @MusicOverPeople
    @sarahkendzior
    @tchopstl
    @WyzeChef
    That would be a short list of people to follow, who would also be retweeting others worth watching out for. List made with suggestions from carlie and HappyNat, above.

  498. rq says

    Ferguson Won’t Heal

    It’s too soon to turn the page. from Sarah Kendzior.

    But Ferguson is not “over,” because Ferguson never really “began.” Ferguson did not “start” on August 9th when Darren Wilson approached Michael Brown; it did not “end” on November 24th when the grand jury results were announced. As media vacate the smoldering wreckage of West Florissant Avenue, as pundits and politicians talk about “healing” and “closure,” St. Louis is being left to struggle with the same problems it always had. There has been no healing, only deeper wounds. There has been no closure, only a desire to move on. St. Louis wants to move forward, but it is driving blind.

    This should have been a year of celebration. This is the 250th anniversary of the founding of St. Louis, and across the metropolitan area, cakes were planted to mark important sites in the region’s history. Each cake is unique, beautiful, hand-painted by a local artist, often reflecting the landmark on which it lies. All year long, families in St. Louis have gone “caking”, posting pictures of themselves at each site. In late November, a gap-toothed child posed in front of a police barricade, the celebratory cake behind yellow tape and metal bars. That night, her city burned. This is St. Louis’s reality, 250 years in. This is what St. Louis’s children will remember. […]

    But the promise of St. Louis was one never meant—or kept—for all. Racial animosity predates the death of Michael Brown by centuries, structuring the city’s geography in good times and bad. By 1916, St. Louis had become a region of decadence and development: the fourth-largest city in the U.S, the envy of the world. That same year local magazines ran ads decrying blocks “ruined by Negro invasion” and asking residents to vote for segregation. In 1917, neighboring East St. Louis burned in some of the worst race riots in U.S. history. Today, impoverished East St. Louis is one of the many areas in the metro region St. Louisans encourage people to avoid. They will tell you it is dangerous but they will not say it is suffering. The region’s wounds are visible, unseen by choice.

    St. Louis County, where Ferguson lies, is divided into 90 municipalities. This makes it difficult to govern but easy to avoid responsibility. As the months of unrest wore on, the leaders of Ferguson blamed the county police. The county blamed the government of Ferguson. St. Louis city leaders distanced themselves from the county even as they contended with the cases of Kajieme Powell and Vonderrit Myers, young black men killed by St. Louis city officers after Brown. Everyone looked to leadership from Missouri Governor Jay Nixon, who responded with a pre-emptive state of emergency that made no one feel safer expect possibly prosecutor Bob McCulloch. Streets burned, anguished citizens cried. Same as in August, same as it ever was. […]

    On November 30, the lead op-ed in St. Louis Post-Dispatch called for St. Louisans to work together to heal. It was titled “The grand jury says no. Now St. Louis must make the most of it.” How does one make the most of the killing of a black teenager, unpunished by law and profitable in practice? How does one make the most of lost businesses, lost trust, lost lives? How does one heal when those who wound walk free, aided and abetted by the power structure that is supposed to protect?

    In order to “heal”, St. Louis has been asked to have “a conversation on race.” This conversation has already been happening, and it is angry and uncomfortable.

    The conversation on race is whispered between panicked mothers on the playground, shouted by racists in the night, chanted by protesters on the street. The conversation on race happens every time white families explain they are moving out of a black neighborhood because “it’s different when it’s your own kids,” every time investors announce a gentrification scheme, every time a black man is pulled over on the highway, every time officials tell a grieving community to “calm down.” Michael Brown and Darren Wilson had a conversation on race. Brown’s last words were allegedly: “I don’t have a gun, stop shooting.”

    Or maybe they were something else entirely—this city won’t have a chance to settle these questions in an open courtroom. […]

    It is a conversation that won’t bring “healing” quickly. It is a conversation that will continue long after the last news van leaves West Florissant.

  500. toska says

    rq
    Thanks for the list! A few of those are on my list already, but many were not. I really appreciate it :)