Category: United States

IBM, Ford not liable for ‘apartheid claims’ – US court

A Manhattan federal judge has dismissed a 12-year-old lawsuit accusing Ford Motor and IBM of encouraging human rights abuses in apartheid-era SA, reluctantly concluding the case does not belong in US courts.

US district judge Shira Scheindlin said last week the black South Africans who brought the case did not show “relevant conduct” by Ford and IBM within the US to justify holding the companies liable.

The plaintiffs had accused Ford, IBM and other companies of having between the 1970s and early 1990s aided SA’s former apartheid government in abuses such as killings and torture, by having made military vehicles and computers for government security forces.

“That these plaintiffs are left without relief in an American court is regrettable,” Scheindlin wrote. “But I am bound to follow [legal precedent], no matter what my personal view of the law may be.”

The case had been brought under the Alien Tort Statute, a 1789 law that lets non-US citizens pursue some cases in US courts over alleged violations of international law.

In April 2013, the US Supreme Court said that law was presumed to cover only violations in the United States, or violations elsewhere that “touch and concern” US territory “with sufficient force”.

Four months later, the federal appeals court in Manhattan applied that holding, and said the Ford and IBM cases should be dismissed altogether.

In April, Scheindlin nonetheless gave the plaintiffs one more chance, to meet the new standards imposed by those higher courts.

But in Thursday’s decision, she said the bar proved too high, and that any alleged international law violations were by Ford’s and IBM’s South African units, and occurred abroad.

“It has been 12 years. We’re really disappointed, devastated by the decision,” said Diane Sammons, a partner at Nagel Rice in Roseland, New Jersey, who represents some plaintiffs.

“The end result of the ruling is that corporations can act abroad with impunity, even if they’re totally controlling the activities of their foreign subsidiaries,” she added. “I don’t think the Supreme Court’s decision was that narrowly defined.”

She said the plaintiffs had not decided whether to appeal.

Jonathan Hacker, an O’Melveny & Myers partner who represents Ford, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Keith Hummel, a Cravath, Swaine & Moore partner who represents IBM, did not immediately respond to similar requests.

Germany’s Daimler and Rheinmetall were dismissed as defendants in December. – Reuters

‘Black is all that matters’

While the migration of black Africans is not new, the number of sub-Saharan immigrants has grown swiftly, an influx that is shifting the demographic landscape across the country, including in New York City.

Between 2000 and 2010, the number of legal black African immigrants in the United States about doubled, to around one million. During that single decade, according to the most reliable estimates, more black Africans arrived in this country on their own than were imported directly to North America during the more than three centuries of the slave trade.

And while New York State is home to the largest proportion and many have gravitated to ethnic enclaves like Little Senegal in West Harlem or the Concourse Village section of the West Bronx, to live among fellow Ghanaians, black immigrants from Africa have tended to disperse more widely across the country — to California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Texas and Virginia — than Caribbean-born blacks.

About a third of black New Yorkers were born abroad, mostly in the Caribbean. Africans constitute about 4 percent of the city’s foreign-born population, but as much as 10 percent in the Bronx. At last count, according to an analysis of census estimates by the Department of City Planning, from 2000 to 2011 the African-born population increased 39 percent to 128,000, although other estimates suggest that many more are living here without legal residency.

“They’ve been doubling every 10 years since 1980,” said Kim Nichols, an executive director of the African Services Committee, which is based in Harlem. “There’s a more established family and community network here to come to.”

Some come as refugees, some with work visas or special skills, many to stay and others to hone their talents and eventually apply them back home.

“Many black immigrants do not identify with the historical experiences of discrimination encountered by blacks in the United States,” said Kevin D. Brown, a law professor at Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law.

Kobina Aidoo, director of “The Neo-African-Americans,” a documentary, said, “I’ve heard people refer to themselves as everything from ‘African African-American’ to ‘Halfrican American’ to ‘White African-American’ to ‘Real African-American’ to ‘American African” to ‘Just black.’ ”

Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, director of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, recalling the shooting by the police of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed immigrant from Guinea in the Bronx in 1999, and of Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager in Ferguson, Mo., last month, said color still trumped place of origin.

“Diversity among African-descended communities remains a black box and a mystery to most Americans,” he said. “[Being] Black is all that matters [to blacks].”

Source: NYT

Greening a drought

The spray-paint nozzle was aimed carefully at the edge as the painter stood back a few inches from the flat metal shovel meant to protect other surfaces. After laying down a couple of thin coats, he stepped back to admire his work.

The patch of grass had gone from a flat, yellowing green to a Wizard of Oz shade of emerald.

There are few people who see an upside to the record-setting drought in California, but Drew McClellan sees a path to business. Earlier this summer, when a friend began complaining about his browning front lawn, Mr. McClellan thought back to his childhood in Florida, where he often spotted golf courses using sprays to dye their greens. When a brief Internet search failed to show any local business offering a similar service, Mr. McClellan decided it was a prime opportunity.

And since he opened up shop in July, Mr. McClellan has been taking requests faster than he can keep up.

“No matter how weird people might think it is, everyone is getting to the point of considering something drastic,” Mr. McClellan said, taking a break from his other job working as a hair stylist at a retro-style barbershop.

As he and his wife sprayed down the lawn of Tony Felipe, who has lived in Long Beach for nearly 20 years, Mr. Felipe looked on with nods of approval.

For less than $400 — not much more than a regular water bill these days — he could see his lawn instantly turn green.

But even as browning grass or drought-resistant plants are popping up in front of ever more houses, few things are as alluring as a California green lawn, long a symbol of wealth and vitality.

Source: NYT

Pothead takes Emmy award

Prior to her surprise Emmy win on Monday night, Sarah Silverman made another contribution to this year’s Emmy’s carpet during an awkward interview when she revealed a vaporizer pen for smoking marijuana.

She told an NBC reporter that it contained liquid pot. Silverman was visibly under the influence of the drug during the incoherent interview.

Silverman has long been open about her affection for getting high. During the intro to the nominated show, HBO special “We Are Miracles,” she smokes a joint outside an L.A. comedy club.

She said in a live interview last year, “I have very few vivid memories because I smoke a lot of pot.”

Meanwhile a company in Longview, US is hoping to cash in on legal marijuana by creating a new way to ingest pot.

“So it’s infused with 20 mg of THC,” said Stites.

Adam Stites works for the Longview company, Mirth, which saw a gap in Washington’s new legal marijuana market. They’re hoping pot-infused soda and coffee will fill it.

They’re calling the product “Legal.” The label reads “Couch meet butt.”

No outrage when white unarmed man gets killed by police

On the surface, the cases appear nearly identical: Michael Brown and Dillon Taylor, two young, unarmed men with sketchy criminal pasts shot to death by police officers two days apart.

But while the world knows of the highly publicized situation involving 18-year-old Mr. Brown, whose Aug. 9 death in Ferguson, Missouri touched off violence, protests and an angry national debate, most people outside Utah have never heard of 20-year-old Mr. Taylor.

Critics say there’s a reason for the discrepancy in media coverage: race. Mr. Brown was black and the officer who shot him was white. Mr. Taylor wasn’t black — he’s been described as white and Hispanic — and the officer who shot him Aug. 11 outside a 7-Eleven in South Salt Lake wasn’t white.

The perceived double standard is fueling resentment and talk of double standards on conservative talk radio and social media, where the website Twitchy has compiled a list of Twitter comments asking why Mr. Brown’s death has been front-page news for weeks while Mr. Taylor’s was a footnote at best.

“Black cop kills unarmed white male #DillonTaylor in Utah,” says a Thursday post on Twitter by radio talk-show host Wayne Dupree, who is black. “#LiberalMedia can’t find [their] way to cover the story.”

From Mark Andersen: “Black cop kills unarmed white male #DillonTaylor in Utah. Where is @TheRevAl, @msnbc and @CNN? Is @DOJgov there? Did @BarackObama speak?”

And this: “People need to be just as angry over #DillonTaylor murder by a blk officer in Utah. He wasn’t armed!” said NeeNee in a Friday post.

Critics of the disparity in coverage and outrage said that it is actually the Brown case that is the outlier: Statistics indicate that black-on-black crime is far more common than the case of a white-on-black crime. For homicide, for instance, the FBI in 2012 found that of the 2,648 black murder victims, some 2,412 were killed by fellow blacks and only 193 by whites. (Whites also were likely far more likely to be killed by fellow whites than by members of other races, according to the data.)

Talk-show host Rush Limbaugh blamed the discrepancy between the two cases on “the liberal world view” that portrays whites as oppressors and blacks as victims.

“[I]n the current climate in the United States, a black person can never be the oppressor, and a white person can never be a victim,” said Mr. Limbaugh on his national radio show last week.

Rev. Al Sharpton, speaking at Monday’s funeral service for Mr. Brown, attacked local policing methods in the case and the militarization of local police forces, but also noted that American blacks also must learn from Ferguson.

“Some of us act like the definition of blackness is how low you can go,” the civil rights activist and MSNBC host said. “Blackness has never been about being a gangster or thug. … Blackness was, no matter how low we were pushed down, we rose up anyhow.”

Another difference between Missouri and Utah was that Mr. Taylor’s death didn’t result in riots. There were peaceful protests a week ago outside the Salt Lake City police headquarters covered by local media, but no outbreaks of violence as happened nightly on the streets of Ferguson.

CNN news host Jake Tapper acknowledged the disparity in coverage of the Brown and Taylor cases in the mainstream media, noting that the press often undercovers such topics as inner-city violence and the high rates of black-on-black crime. But Mr. Tapper said Monday that media “critics fail to see” that the greater context of a story such as the Michael Brown shooting, including the reaction it sparked in the St. Louis, in the black community nationwide, and with local authorities and the Obama administration.

Source: www.washingtontimes.com

FBI, DHS says ISIS no threat

The FBI and Homeland Security Department say there are no specific or credible terror threats to the U.S. homeland from the Islamic State militant group.

An intelligence bulletin, issued to state and local law enforcement, says while there’s no credible threat to the U.S. as a result of recent American airstrikes in Iraq, officials remain concerned that Islamic State supporters could attack overseas targets with little warning.

U.S. law enforcement has been trying to identify Islamic State sympathizers who could help export the group’s brand of violent jihad to the United States.

U.S. airstrikes against the Islamic State group intensified after militants appeared to behead American journalist James Foley. The group called Foley’s killing revenge for previous strikes against militants in Iraq.

It is not sure if the decapitation was real or faked.

A Western intelligence agency has been assisting the Syrian government of Bashar al Assad fight militants of Isis (now called the ‘Islamic State’), by providing details on the location of militant leaders for targeted air strikes.

The information was passed to Assad’s government by German intelligence service Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), which acted as an intermediary, a source told the Independent.

Source: www.local12.com/ibitimes.com

California hit by largest quake in 25 years

Over 80 people were treated at hospital and massive power outages were reported in North Bay area of San Francisco and around the city of Napa, after California was shaken by a 6.0 magnitude earthquake.

The 6.0 quake struck at 3:20 am (10:20 GMT), the US Geological Survey said. Its epicenter was 6 kilometers from American Canyon and 9 kilometers from the city of Napa, at a depth of 10.8 kilometers from the surface.

Residents of the cities of San Francisco, some 40 miles away, and Davis, just over 70 miles away, quickly took to Twitter reporting feeling the quake.

Three people – two adults and one child – sustained critical wounds. At least 87 people were treated for minor injuries at Napa hospital after the earthquake, the spokesperson told AP. Most patients have cuts, bumps, bruises, said Vanessa DeGier, spokeswoman for the hospital in Napa.

The quake caused six significant fires including a blaze at the Napa Valley mobile home park, where 4 trailers were completely destroyed, according to local firefighters.

“There’s collapses, fires,” said Napa Fire Capt. Doug Bridewel. “That’s the worst shaking I’ve ever been in.”

The city government said there were 50 gas main breaks and 30 water main leaks. Three historic buildings in Napa were also damaged, including the county courthouse, and at least two downtown commercial buildings were severely damaged.

At least 15,000 customers were left without power across Northern California, the utility provider Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s map showed following the massive quake.

The USGS initially measured the tremor as “moderate,” but then it was upgraded to “violent.” The immediate hours after the event saw at least five aftershocks measuring at 1.6 magnitude. Aftershocks of up to 5.0 magnitude may continue throughout the next week.

Source: RT

Chinese fighter jet makes ‘dangerous’ pass at US Navy aircraft

The United States charged Friday that a Chinese war plane made a “dangerous intercept” of a US Navy aircraft over international waters this week in the South China Sea.

The US has registered “strong concerns” with the Chinese government about “unsafe and unprofessional” conduct by its air force that put the safety of the US crew at risk, said Rear Admiral John Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman.

The incident happened Tuesday, within 220 kilometres east of China’s Hainan Island, Kirby said.

The Chinese war plane made several passes around the US Navy’s Poseidon 8 plane, coming at one point within 9 metres of the P8’s wing.

The Chinese plane passed the nose of the P8 at a 90-degree angel, showing its belly and most likely its weapons load, Kirby said, and conducted a barrel roll over the top of the P8 at 15 metres.

“This kind of behaviour is not only unprofessional. It’s unsafe,” Kirby said. “It undermines efforts to continue developing military to military relations with the Chinese military.” Kirby said he was not aware of any radio communications from the Chinese plane before the intercept.

“The message we are sending back to China is that it is unacceptable,” Kirby said.

Deputy White House national security adviser Ben Rhodes said the move was a “deeply concerning provocation”.

“We have communicated directly to the Chinese government our objection to this type of action,” Mr Rhodes said.

Source: DPA

New law proposed to ban body armour sales in US

A new law that has been introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives “would prohibit the sale, transfer or possession of military-level body armor by civilians”.

In other words, private citizens all over the entire nation would be permanently banned from owning body armor if this bill gets passed and signed into law. The bill that I am talking about is H.R. 5344 (The Responsible Body Armor Possession Act).

The driving force behind this new law is Democrat Mike Honda from California. To Honda, it doesn’t matter that large numbers of very responsible Americans have purchased body armor to protect themselves and their families in a society that is rapidly decaying.

Instead, it makes perfect sense to Honda to ban body armor because “access to military-grade body armor emboldens criminals and mass shooters to act.” And Honda wants to make possession of body armor a criminaloffense with a penalty of up to 10 years in prison. This is absolutely crazy, and it is yet another example of the “police state mentality” that is so prevalent among our politicians these days.

When I first learned about this new law, I could hardly believe it. But it is actually true. The following is an excerpt from a news story about the introduction of this new bill…

Rep. Mike Honda, D-San Jose, has announced legislation that would block civilians from accessing military-grade body armor to prevent criminals from using them in gun battles with law enforcement.

Honda, speaking at a news conference in San Jose Wednesday morning with police chiefs and the district attorneys and sheriffs from Santa Clara and Alameda counties, said his proposal would discourage criminals from wearing enhanced body armor to commit mass shootings.

“This bill will keep military body armor out of the wrong hands,” Honda said. “It would ensure that only law enforcement, firefighters and other first responders would be able to access enhanced body armor.”

Source: Michael Snyder

We are above the law declares county attorney

Habersham County, Georgia, U.S., the jurisdiction that allowed intentionally or through negligence a SWAT team to break into a home with violent force in the middle of the night and throw a stun grenade into a baby’s face sending him to a hospital for weeks where he was in life support, has ruled that it would be illegal for the county to pay the baby’s medical bills.

The negligence of the police, and thereby the county, is a triple dose. It was the wrong house. A SWAT team was unnecessary in order to exercise a search warrant for a drug suspect. There was no excuse for throwing a stun grenade into a baby’s crib.

But the county attorney has ruled that the county is not liable for these massive incidences of unbridled negligence.

However, the unjustifiable SWAT team assault on the family in the home was legal.

As the saying goes, “a fish rots from the head.” The rot in government accountability that began in Washington has now reached the local level.

Special Ops contracter deploys to St Louis

Missouri-based private security contractor Asymmetric Solutions, which employs elite former U.S. military special operators, tweeted Tuesday afternoon that the company is deploying a “high threat team in our own city”.

When responding via Twitter to a request for information, a spokesperson said “we cannot professionally hand out that information, regardless of client or location. We put a security team of former SOF personnel into the STL area at the request of a client.”

The entire tweet reads “We’ve been to Baghdad, Kabul, KL, Manilla, Peshwar, Bogata. Never guessed we would deploy a high threat team in our own city. #furgeson” (sic).

Asymmetric Solutions employs former U.S. Navy SEALs and Army special operators.

Pentagon hands Guantanamo to G4S

A British private security company that has been accused of numerous human rights violations has been handed a $118 million deal by the Pentagon to provide “operating support services” for the Guantanamo Bay naval base that houses the U.S. military’s notorious prison.

The Department of Defense announced earlier this week that G4S has been granted the contract to provide services that include “family housing, facility management, facility investment, other (swimming pools), custodial, pest control, integrated solid waste management, grounds maintenance and landscaping, base support vehicles and equipment, electrical, wastewater, water, and limited facilities support functions.” The statement did not mention any duties relating to the Guantanamo Bay prison, which currently holds 149 men without charge or trial.

But Kat Craig, legal director for UK-based legal charity Reprieve, told the Independent that “G4S must make clear exactly what the nature of its work at Guantanamo is.”

“Any company which associates itself with the legal black hole which is Guantanamo Bay has serious questions to answer,” she added. “Guantanamo has been the site of detention without trial and brutal mistreatment for over a decade—even now, Reprieve’s clients are being subjected to torturous force-feedings in response to their peaceful protests.”

British authorities are currently investigating G4S for fraud, following evidence that the company over-charged for the electronic monitoring of incarcerated people, including alleged prisoners who were actually dead.

The largest “private security” company in the world, G4S became the target of a global boycott campaign following revelations of its role in Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian people. G4S signed a deal with the Israeli Prison Authority in 2007 to provide “security” for five prisons that hold large numbers of Palestinians—many of them children—who are denied due process. These facilities have proven track records of at times deadly torture and abuse. Palestinian prisoner Arafat Jaradat was tortured to death at Israel’s Megiddo prison in February 2013—where G4S provides security and surveillance systems.

The company fell under international criticism when 46-year-old Angolan man Jimmy Mubenga died in 2010 while in the custody of G4S guards while being deported from Britain. Witnesses say the guards used excessive force as Mubenga cried for help approximately 50 times.

G4S also faces numerous allegations that people detained in its Mangaung prison in South Africa face widespread torture, including forced injections and electric shocks.

“G4S has a horrible human rights track record,” Ramah Kudaimi of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation told Common Dreams. “It would be much better if the U.S. did not award contracts to companies with horrendous track records and itself stopped human rights abuses at Guantanamo.”

Source: commondreams.org

Pentagon accused of fueling Ferguson confrontation

The Pentagon might not have boots on the ground in Ferguson, Mo., where 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot by police on Saturday, but it does have wheels on the street.

Michelle McCaskill, media relations chief at the Defense Logistics Agency, confirms that the Ferguson Police Department is part of a federal program called 1033 that distributes hundreds of millions of dollars of surplus military equipment to civilian police forces across the United States. The materials range from small items, such as pistols and automatic rifles, to heavy armored vehicles such as the MRAPs used in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“In 2013 alone, $449,309,003.71 worth of property was transferred to law enforcement,” the agency’s website states.

According to McCaskill, the most recent transfer of military equipment from the Department of Defense to small Ferguson was in November and included two vehicles as well as a trailer and a generator. Details on the vehicles and their intended uses have not been released by the Pentagon. Information on any prior transfers is also unavailable.

A state public safety official told USA TODAY that the Pentagon does not allow detailed information on “tactical” equipment to be released at a police force level, only at a county level. According to a document provided by the official, police forces in the same county as Ferguson received advanced rifle sights and night vision equipment between 2012 and 2014.

There is no evidence that any such equipment has yet been used in the Brown case and its aftermath. But such “police militarization” is just one element of an often toxic relationship between minority communities and local police.

Since the creation of the 1033 program by Congress in the early 1990s, the program has distributed $4.3 billion of excess equipment, ranging from innocuous office supplies to bomb-disposing robots and other advanced technology. The flood of military supplies — along with the continuing drug war and grant programs from other federal agencies that provide military-style equipment — has pushed the culture of police forces far from its law-enforcement roots.

Indeed, the motto of the 1033 program is “From Warfighter to Crimefighter.”

So it is not a surprise that police officers often seem prepared for war. In Ferguson, that change is most dramatically revealed in the images of camouflage-wearing police officers with assault rifles, body armor and multiple extra magazines facing unarmed protesters with their hands preemptively raised in the air.

The disturbing trend of police militarization permits law enforcement agencies to view people in their communities as threats, rather than as citizens with rights, reports TheWashington Post’s Radley Balko, who has covered the militarization of the police extensively.

Elsewhere in Missouri, agencies participating in the 1033 program have acquired “aircraft (both fixed wing and rotary) and four-wheel drive vehicles (such as pickup trucks, blazers, ambulances and armored personnel carriers),” according to the state’s Department of Public Safety.

If there’s one thing a community in turmoil does not need is for anyone to turn up the heat as protesters and police face off and tempers simmer. But before a local police officer fired his first shot at the unarmed teen, the U.S. military helped make sure there was plenty of fuel to bring things to a boil.

Source: USA TODAY

Ferguson police force ‘too white’

When an unarmed black teenager was shot by a white police officer recently, it cast a “blinding” spotlight on a small police department “struggling for authority and relevance” in a “changing” demography, the Washington Post writes.

Since the shooting, the department has been criticized for how police have handled the response to the incident and for not disclosing key details, including the name of the officer involved.

The department bears little demographic resemblance to the citizens of this St. Louis suburb, a mostly African American community whose suspicions of the law enforcement agency preceded Saturday afternoon’s shooting of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old who this week had been headed to technical college.

But while the racial disparity between the public here and its protectors has come to define the violent aftermath of Brown’s death, the department’s problems stretch back years and include questions about its officers’ training and racial sensitivity.

The office of Missouri’s attorney general concluded in an annual report last year that Ferguson police were twice as likely to arrest African Americans during traffic stops as they were whites.

Demonstrations, social media and talk shows swirled with anger aimed at both Michael Brown’s death and the violent protests that followed the shooting of the unarmed teen Saturday night

The white NAACP however noticed the opportunity to heighten racial tension again.

And late last year, the state chapter of the NAACP filed a federal complaint against the St. Louis County police department, whose officers are now assisting Ferguson’s force since the shooting, over racial disparities in traffic stops, arrests and other actions.

Tensions between residents and the police have shaped the aftermath of Brown’s death in unpredictable and alarming ways. Those include the nightly clashes between young residents, most of whom are African American, and a predominantly white police force dressed in full riot gear and armed with tear gas and rubber-coated bullets.

Early Wednesday morning, a St. Louis County police officer shot and critically wounded a man who pointed a gun at the officer, a police spokesman said. Police had responded to calls regarding four men armed with shotguns and wearing ski masks in St. Louis as well as calls about shots fired in the area. People fled the scene when police arrived, but one person pointed a handgun at an officer, who shot the man, spokesman Brian Schellman said.

Police officials have provided little information about Brown’s shooting and have withheld the name of the police officer involved, citing security reasons. The vacuum has been filled by social media, which has displayed in real time street confrontations between police and demonstrators, documenting the fraught interactions in images, videos and short dispatches.

On Wednesday, Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson acknowledged the problems facing his department and asked the community for help in restoring its trust.

“Apparently, there has been this undertow that has bubbled to the surface,” Jackson said at a news conference. “It’s our priority to address it and to fix what’s been going wrong.”

St. Louis is among the most segregated metropolitan areas in the nation. Ferguson, one of the 91 municipalities in largely white St. Louis County, has seen its population shift in recent years. About two-thirds of the city’s 21,100 residents are black. That’s a significant increase from 2000, when blacks made up just over half of the population. White residents, who had accounted for 44 percent of the population, now make up just under 30 percent.

Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery was detained by police on Wednesday while reporting on the unrest. Lowery, a colored wrote the hit piece against whites with Mark Berman, a reporter on the WP National staff. Berman anchors an online site tellingly called “Post Nation”.

“I’ve been trying to increase the diversity of the department ever since I got here,” Jackson said Wednesday. He pointed out that he had promoted two black superintendents.

“Race relations is a top priority right now,” Jackson said. He said his force is working with the Department of Justice’s community relations office to improve how police interact with the citizens. “I’ve told them, ‘Tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.’ ”

Residents have described Brown’s death as a breaking point that finally pushed years of tension to the fore.

“People here are angry, frustrated,” said Corey Crawford, 36. “There needs to be justice. If you can find a single person in this community who trusts the police, that is like finding a four-leafed clover.”

It has been “very hostile” for years, said Anthony Ross, 26, who lives nearby. He called the relationship between residents and police nonexistent.

“Everybody in this city has been a victim of DWB [driving while black],” he said.

For at least a decade, there have been complaints about racial tensions between police and black communities in the St. Louis County area. Communities, some residents say, can have less-experienced, poorly-equipped police departments and highly uneven levels of protection.

This year, St. Louis County invited researchers from the University of California at Los Angeles to help study complaints that county police had engaged in racial profiling and to help them improve protocols for matters ranging from traffic stops to neighborhood monitoring.

This came after a former lieutenant with the county police who had been accused of ordering officers to target black people at stores was fired. An investigation determined that he had made “inappropriate racial references.”

A St. Louis Post-Dispatch investigation in 2003 found that dozens of small police departments in the region suffered from poor training owing to a lack of funding, leading to inadequate investigations of complex crimes and an uneven use of force. The newspaper further found that this led to problematic officers moving easily between one city’s force to another without punishment.

As attention has shifted to the protests and nightly standoffs on Ferguson’s streets, key details regarding the shooting remain unclear. Authorities have yet to say how many times Brown was shot or where he was struck. Earlier in the week, St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar said that Brown was shot multiple times but did not elaborate.

But on Wednesday, Jackson, Ferguson’s police chief, would not say how many times Brown was shot. The only update regarding the confrontation came Wednesday, when Jackson said that the officer’s “face was swollen” after the encounter, so he required medical treatment. Police have said that Brown was shot after a physical confrontation with the officer, including a struggle over the officer’s gun, which witnesses have disputed.

During a separate news conference Wednesday, Robert P. McCulloch, the St. Louis County prosecuting attorney, also declined to say how many times Brown was shot.

“We want to test the veracity and accuracy of anybody who comes to us with a statement and says they saw something,” McCulloch said.

Jackson said in an interview Wednesday that he was driving with his children to lunch Saturday when a sergeant called him about the shooting. Before even arriving at the scene, Jackson called county police to take over the investigation.

But as protesters from the community and neighboring city flooded Ferguson’s streets for both prayer vigils and tense standoffs, Ferguson again called on the county for help. Hundreds of officers from St. Louis County police, the city of St. Louis and the Missouri State Highway Patrol arrived to help deal with the looting that had broken out.

Clearly hoping this will make the black-on-black violence in Chicago go away, Anonymous also featured.

In audio recordings released Wednesday by the hacking collective Anonymous, a voice identified as belonging to a county police dispatcher indicated that Ferguson police were unaware that one of their officers had been involved in Saturday’s shooting.

The female dispatcher noted that she had received two calls about an “officer-related shooting” on Canfield Drive.

“We just got another call about an officer-involved shooting . . . there,” she said. “This came from the news, so [unintelligible] don’t know.”

A few seconds later, the dispatcher, apparently frustrated that the information appeared to be coming from news accounts, said she couldn’t get confirmation from the police in Ferguson.

“We just called Ferguson back again, and they don’t know anything about it,” she said.

County police did not respond to a request for comment regarding the dispatch tape’s veracity.

Anonymous became widely known for its cyberattacks on government Web sites and credit card companies.