Tag: Ferguson

Grand jury finds white Ferguson police officer not guilty

A St. Louis, Missouri grand jury has found white police officer Darren Wilson not guilty in the death of unarmed African-American teenager Michael Brown who he fatally shot in August, St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCullough has announced.

“After a full, and impartial, and critical examination of all the evidence and the law… they [the grand jury] determined that no probable cause exist to file any charge against officer Wilson,” McCullough told a courtroom of reporters Monday.

McCullough said that the full evidence of the investigation would be released after his announcement, but that it would not provide details on who the grand jury were or how they cast their votes.

He added that the grand jury met 25 times to talk to various witnesses, hearing more than 70 hours of testimony while examining all physical and scientific evidence before making their decision.

“I’m ever mindful that this decision will not be accepted by some and may cause disappointment for others,” McCullough said. “But all decisions in the criminal justice system must be determined by the physical and scientific evidence and the credible testimony corroborated by that evidence not in response to public outcry or for political expediency.”

18-year-old Brown was shot dead by Wilson on August 9, in Ferguson, Missouri, from the officer’s vehicle. The shooting triggered massive race related protests against police brutality in Ferguson and around the country.

“We are a nation built on the rule of law, and so we need to accept that this decision was the grand jury’s to make,” US President Barack Obama said in a statement from the White House, calling on the protesters to remain peaceful.

Prior to jury’s decision, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon declared a state of emergency and signed an executive order, activating the state’s National Guard to prepare for the possibility of a second wave of unrest.

The protesters have used the slogan, “Hands up, Don’t Shoot” to show solidarity with Brown, who, some witnesses say, was killed in a surrender posture. However, officer Wilson told the authorities he acted fearing for his life, while the teenager struggled for his gun.

FBI warns about extremists as Ferguson awaits verdict

As the US waits to hear whether a Missouri police officer will face charges for killing unarmed teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., the FBI is warning law enforcement agencies across the country that the decision “will likely” lead some extremist protesters to threaten and even attack police officers or federal agents.

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.”

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.

The bulletin “stresses the importance of remaining aware of the protections afforded to all U.S. persons exercising their First Amendment rights of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.”

Within hours of the FBI issuing its bulletin, some police departments across the country issued their own internal memos urging officers to review procedures and protocols for responding to mass demonstrations.

Still, the bulletin’s conclusions were blunt: “The FBI assesses those infiltrating and exploiting otherwise legitimate public demonstrations with the intent to incite and engage in violence could be armed with bladed weapons or firearms, equipped with tactical gear/gas masks, or bulletproof vests to mitigate law enforcement measures.”

In its new intelligence bulletin, obtained by ABC News, the FBI says “exploitation” of mass demonstrations “could occur both in the Ferguson area and nationwide.”

In a recent interview with ABC News, Philadelphia Police Chief Charles Ramsey said people in “communities of color” often “don’t view us as people who really have the right to enforce laws or tell them what to do,” and sometimes it’s because of “the way they’ve seen us conduct ourselves in the past.”

In particular, African-Americans are disproportionally represented in crime. According to the FBI, 4,379 blacks were arrested for murder last year, while 3,799 whites were arrested for murder – even though census numbers show there are six times more whites than blacks in the United States.

Source: ABC

Second black teen had gun powder residue on his hands

A black teenager killed by a police officer in St. Louis, coming just two months after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, had gunpowder residue on his hands, jeans and T-shirt, according to crime lab results.

Last Wednesday, Vonderrit Myers, 18, became the second black teenager to be shot and killed by a white officer in as many months. Meyer’s death reignited simmering rage on the streets of St. Louis, which is attempting to recover from the August 9 shooting of unarmed teen Michael Brown.

In scenes becoming all-too-familiar for this Missouri city, protesters took to the streets to speak out against “police violence,” while demanding the arrest of Darren Wilson, the white officer who killed Brown in August. A grand jury is considering the evidence against the officer, but has not yet reached a conclusion.

Meanwhile, the forensics results in the latest shooting incident lends credence to the initial police report that Myers fired at least three times at an off-duty police officer. Myers’ family claims he did not own a gun, but police say they found the weapon he allegedly fired at the crime scene.

The identity of the police officer who shot Myers has not been released.

Source: RT

Ferguson all over again

A white off-duty policeman shot and killed a black teenager in St Louis on Wednesday, officers said, triggering a night of protests just miles from the site of another police shooting of another black youth in the suburb of Ferguson.

Police said the 18-year-old was armed and fired three shots while he was being chased by the officer, and they had recovered a gun at the scene.

The youth was killed almost two months to the day since sometimes violent protests erupted in Ferguson after a white police officer shot dead unarmed black 18-year-old Michael Brown.

In Wednesday’s shooting, the dead man was one of three people who fled after being approached by the officer, a six-year veteran of the department who was working for a private security company, St. Louis Metropolitan Police Chief Sam Dotson said.

The officer, who was wearing his city police uniform, fired 17 shots at the teenager, police added.

A crowd of around 200 gathered at the scene in the south St. Louis neighborhood of Shaw, 11 miles (18 km) south of Ferguson. Many of the protesters marched to a major thoroughfare, partially blocking traffic and chanting “Whose streets? Our streets?” as a police helicopter hovered overhead.

Teyonna Myers, 23, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper that she was the cousin of the suspect and that he was unarmed when he was killed.

“He had a sandwich in his hand, and they thought it was a gun. It’s like Michael Brown all over again,” she told the paper. Police have not named the teenager.

Source: Reuters

Whites see harmony where blacks see racism

Alice Singen had always seen her home town Ferguson, Mo., as an integrated, harmonious place. Like many other white residents, she prided herself on staying here even when others began to leave.

But since the death of an unarmed black teenager at the hands of a white police officer, some African Americans are calling it segregated and racist. Now Singen has found herself talking in terms of “us” and “them,” “we” and “they.”

“I didn’t have any problems with anybody or any color, and all of a sudden it feels like we are being held responsible for something that’s not our fault,” Singen, 70, said as she left Faraci Pizza, a 46-year-old Ferguson business that has become a focal point of racial tension. “I don’t get it.”

That sense of shock is common here among Ferguson whites in the wake of 18-year-old Michael Brown’s death and the explosive protests in the days that followed.

The situation has forced many white Ferguson residents in this majority-black city — from small-business owners to the mayor and police chief — to question their beliefs about the community’s racial dynamics.

They have discovered that blacks and whites here profoundly disagree about the existence of racism and the fairness of the justice system. And now, whites who once believed their town was an exception in a country struggling with racial divisions have to confront the possibility it is not.

Between 2000 and 2010, the white population plummeted from 44 percent to 30 percent, while the black population grew from 50 percent to 67 percent.

In her majority-black neighborhood, a white house-owner staked an “I ♥ Ferguson” sign on her lawn.

Some of her neighbors reprimanded her for it. They interpreted the campaign as another way to mask the city’s injustice. Even the sign had two sides.

A Mexican American woman complained about how horrible it was to witness [black] teenagers getting tear-gassed.

“Well, we don’t know all the facts,” a white woman answered.

“But we do know that [Brown] had stolen those cigars, because we saw the video. And we know that the officer called him aside because he was jaywalking.”

Source: Washington Post

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

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 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.