History > 2014 > USA > African-Americans (I)

 Lesley McSpadden and her husband, Louis Head,

mourning for her son, Michael Brown,

who died in the street on Saturday.

Photograph:

Huy Mach/St. Louis Post-Dispatch, via Associated Press

 Grief and Protests Follow Shooting of a Teenager

NYT

10.8.2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/11/us/police-say-mike-brown-was-killed-after-struggle-for-gun.html

Mr. Brown’s stepfather, Louis Head, left,

his mother, Lesley McSpadden, and an uncle, Charles Ewing

were at the church gathering.

The Rev. Al Sharpton also attended.

Photpgraph: Whitney Curtis for The New York Times

 Amid Protests in Missouri, Officer’s Name Is Still Withheld

NYT

13.8.2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/14/us/missouri-teenager-and-officer-scuffled-before-shooting-chief-says.html 

Timeline for a Body:

4 Hours in the Middle

of a Ferguson Street

 

AUG. 23, 2014

By JULIE BOSMAN

and JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN

FERGUSON, Mo. — Just after noon on Saturday, Aug. 9, Michael Brown was shot dead by a police officer on Canfield Drive.

For about four hours, in the unrelenting summer sun, his body remained where he fell.

Neighbors were horrified by the gruesome scene: Mr. Brown, 18, face down in the middle of the street, blood streaming from his head. They ushered their children into rooms that faced away from Canfield Drive. They called friends and local news stations to tell them what had happened. They posted on Twitter and Facebook and recorded shaky cellphone videos that would soon make their way to the national news.

Mr. Brown probably could not have been revived, and the time that his body lay in the street may ultimately have no bearing on the investigations into whether the shooting was justified. But local officials say that the image of Mr. Brown’s corpse in the open set the scene for what would become a combustible worldwide story of police tactics and race in America, and left some of the officials asking why.

“The delay helped fuel the outrage,” said Patricia Bynes, a committeewoman in Ferguson. “It was very disrespectful to the community and the people who live there. It also sent the message from law enforcement that ‘we can do this to you any day, any time, in broad daylight, and there’s nothing you can do about it.’ ”

Two weeks after Mr. Brown’s death, interviews with law enforcement officials and a review of police logs make clear that a combination of factors, some under police control and some not, contributed to the time lapse in removing his body.

The St. Louis County Police Department, which almost immediately took over the investigation, had officers on the scene quickly, but its homicide detectives were not called until about 40 minutes after the shooting, according to county police logs, and they arrived around 1:30 p.m. It was another hour before an investigator from the medical examiner’s office arrived.

And officials were contending with what they described as “sheer chaos” on Canfield Drive, where bystanders, including at least one of Mr. Brown’s relatives, frequently stepped inside the yellow tape, hindering investigators. Gunshots were heard at the scene, further disrupting the officers’ work.

“Usually they go straight to their jobs,” Officer Brian Schellman, a county police spokesman, said of the detectives who process crime scenes for evidence. “They couldn’t do that right away because there weren’t enough police there to quiet the situation.”

For part of the time, Mr. Brown’s body lay in the open, allowing people to record it on their cellphones. A white sheet was draped over Mr. Brown’s body, but his feet remained exposed and blood could still be seen. The police later shielded the body with a low, six-panel orange partition typically used for car crashes.

Experts in policing said there was no standard for how long a body should remain at a scene, but they expressed surprise at how Mr. Brown’s body had been allowed to remain in public view.

Asked to describe procedures in New York, Gerald Nelson, a chief who commands the patrol forces in much of Brooklyn, said that as soon as emergency medical workers have concluded that a victim is dead, “that body is immediately covered.”

“We make sure we give that body the dignity it deserves,” Chief Nelson said.

St. Louis County police officials acknowledged that they were uncomfortable with the time it took to shield Mr. Brown’s body and have it removed, and that they were mindful of the shocked reaction from residents. But they also defended their work, saying that the time that elapsed in getting detectives to the scene was not out of the ordinary, and that conditions made it unusually difficult to do all that they needed.

“Michael Brown had one more voice after that shooting, and his voice was the detectives’ being able to do a comprehensive job,” said Jon Belmar, chief of the St. Louis County Police Department.

Mr. Brown and a friend, Dorian Johnson, were walking down Canfield Drive at 12:01 p.m. when Officer Darren Wilson of the Ferguson Police Department encountered them. Moments later, Mr. Brown was dead, shot at least six times by Officer Wilson.

Other Ferguson officers were summoned, including Tom Jackson, the chief of police in this town of 21,000 people. While Chief Jackson was en route, he called Chief Belmar of the county police.

It was typical, given the limited resources of the Ferguson Police Department, to transfer a homicide investigation to the St. Louis County police, a much larger force with more specialized officers.

According to police logs, the county police received a report of the shooting at 12:07, and their officers began arriving around 12:15. Videos taken by bystanders show that in the first minutes after Mr. Brown’s death, officers quickly secured the area with yellow tape. In one video, several police cars were on the scene, and officers were standing close to their cars, a distance away from Mr. Brown’s body.

Around 12:10, a paramedic who happened to be nearby on another call approached Mr. Brown’s body, checked for a pulse, and observed the blood and “injuries incompatible with life,” said his supervisor, Chris Cebollero, the chief of emergency medical services at Christian Hospital. He estimated that it had been around 12:15 when a sheet was retrieved from an ambulance and used to cover Mr. Brown.

Relatives of Mr. Brown said they were at the scene quickly after hearing of the shooting from a family friend, who had been driving in the area and recognized the teenager’s body. They said they begged for information but received nothing.

Louis Head, Mr. Brown’s stepfather, said the police had prevented him from approaching the body. “Nobody came to nobody and said, ‘Hey, we’re sorry,’ ” he said. “Nobody said nothing.”

At one point, Brendan Ewings, Mr. Brown’s uncle, is seen in a video walking up to the police tape and staring at Mr. Brown’s body. Mr. Ewings, 39, ducked under the tape and walked slowly toward the body, prompting one officer to yell, sprint toward him and lead him away.

“I went up to it,” Mr. Ewings recalled in an interview on Thursday. “I seen the body, and I recognized the body. That’s when the dude grabbed me.”

Mr. Ewings said he pleaded for information about his nephew. “I said, ‘A cop did this?’ ”

It was not until 12:43 p.m. that detectives from the county police force were notified of the shooting, according to county police records. Officer Schellman, the county police spokesman, said Friday that Chief Belmar did not recall exactly when he had received the call from his counterpart in Ferguson. But, Officer Schellman said, Chief Belmar reported that as soon as he hung up, he immediately called the chief of detectives.

The detectives arrived around 1:30, and an hour later, a forensic investigator, who gathers information for the pathologist who will conduct the autopsy, arrived from the medical examiner’s office, said Suzanne McCune, an administrator in that office.

Mr. Brown’s body had been in the street for more than two hours.

Francis G. Slay, the mayor of St. Louis, whose city did not have a role in the shooting or the investigation, said in an interview that his city had a “very specific policy” for handling such situations.

He continued: “We’ll cover the body appropriately with screening or tents, so it’s not exposed to the public. We do the investigation as quickly as we can.”

Dr. Michael M. Baden, the former New York City chief medical examiner who was hired by the Brown family’s lawyers to do an autopsy, said it was “a mistake” to let the body remain in the street for so long.

“In my opinion, it’s not necessary to leave a body in a public place for that many hours, particularly given the temperature and the fact that people are around,” he said. “There is no forensic reason for doing that.”

The St. Louis County police declined to give details about what evidence investigators had been gathering while Mr. Brown’s body was in the street.

Typically, said John Paolucci, a former detective sergeant at the New York Police Department, crime scene investigators would work methodically.

If there had been a struggle between an officer and a shooting victim, the officer’s shirt would be taken as evidence. The police cruiser would be towed to a garage and examined there.

Detectives would want to find any shell casings, said Mr. Paolucci, who retired in 2012 as the commanding officer of the unit that served as liaison between the detective bureau and the medical examiner’s office.

Usually, the police conduct very little examination of the body at the scene, other than photographing it, he said.

“We might use vehicles to block the body from public view depending on where cameras are and how offensive the scene is, if something like that is starting to raise tensions,” Mr. Paolucci said.

Chief Belmar said that while he was unable to explain why officers had waited to cover Mr. Brown’s body, he said he thought they would have done so sooner if they could have.

As the crowd on Canfield Drive grew, the police, including officers from St. Louis County and Ferguson, tried to restore order. At one point, they called in a Code 1000, an urgent summons to nearby police officers to help bring order to a scene, police officials said.

Even homicide detectives, who do not ordinarily handle such tasks, “were trying to get the scene under control,” said Officer Rick Eckhard, another spokesman for the St. Louis County police.

Sometime around 4 p.m., Mr. Brown’s body, covered in a blue tarp and loaded into a dark vehicle, was transported to the morgue in Berkeley, Mo., about six miles from Canfield Drive, a roughly 15-minute drive.

Mr. Brown’s body was checked into the morgue at 4:37 p.m., more than four and a half hours after he was shot.
 

Alan Blinder and John Eligon contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on August 24, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Timeline for a Body: 4 Hours in the Middle of a Ferguson Street.

    Timeline for a Body: 4 Hours in the Middle of a Ferguson Street,
    NYT, 23.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/24/us/
    michael-brown-a-bodys-timeline-4-hours-on-a-ferguson-street.html

Despite Similar Shooting,

Los Angeles’s ‘Bank of Trust’

Tempers Reaction

 

AUG. 22, 2014

The New York Times

By JENNIFER MEDINA

LOS ANGELES — When Los Angeles police officers shot and killed Ezell Ford, an unarmed 25-year-old black man last week, it took less than 24 hours for Lita Herron to get a phone call from a ranking officer at a nearby station.

“They wanted to check in and gauge our rage,” said Ms. Herron, a grandmother and organizer who has worked to prevent gang violence on the streets of South Los Angeles for years. “They wanted to ask us to quell rumors and hear what we need. We’ve all been through this before — even when we know things are wrong, we aren’t looking for things to explode.”

In Ferguson, Mo., however, angry protests stretched on for nearly two weeks after the police killing of Michael Brown in circumstances that were strikingly similar: an unarmed young black man shot by the police, who some witnesses say was not putting up a struggle.

The killings occurred two days apart. The protests in Missouri were driven initially, in large part, by the police’s refusal to release the name of the officer involved or details of the Aug. 9 shooting. Here, the police are still holding back the autopsy report and the names of the officers involved, citing security concerns.

Yet the reaction in Los Angeles, where clashes between the police and residents have a long history, has so far been much calmer.

While there have been several protests since the Aug. 11 shooting of Mr. Ford, who was mentally ill, including an impromptu march that blocked traffic on city streets, the police have maintained a relatively low profile, relying primarily on a handful of bicycle-riding officers in polo shirts rather than the rifle-carrying officers in riot gear pictured in Ferguson. This week, Chief Charlie Beck and other top-ranking officials showed up for a community meeting at a local church, telling the angry crowd of several hundred that there were still more questions than answers about the shooting.

In the more than two decades since riots erupted after white police officers were acquitted in the beating of Rodney G. King, a black construction worker, relations between law enforcement and their communities here have changed drastically. In many South Los Angeles police precincts, officers routinely check in with organizers like Ms. Herron. Local church leaders have officers’ phone numbers committed to memory. When protests are planned, seasoned organizers let the police know — even when the police are the target of their outrage.

“We have an infrastructure here where there are outlets for people to vent frustration and move into action,” said Marqueece Harris-Dawson, the president of Community Coalition, which runs several programs for residents in South Los Angeles. “This has taken more than 20 years to build and sustain — there’s no question it would not have been this way a generation or two ago.”

Still, on the streets of South Los Angeles, a predominantly black and Latino neighborhood, a sense of distrust of the police remains. Mr. Harris-Dawson, who is black, often points out that he has had a gun pointed at him by an L.A.P.D. officer four times and has never carried a weapon. Black and Latino teenage boys rattle off instances where they were pulled over and questioned for what they say was no reason. Still, many local leaders are willing to give the department some leeway to continue the investigation into the Ford shooting before coming to a clear conclusion.
Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story

“The chief also does not make it the job of the department to exonerate the officer,” Mr. Harris-Dawson said. “They do take a minute to have some remorse for the fact that someone is dead.”

When Earl Ofari Hutchinson, a longtime civil rights leader here and a frequent critic of the department, demanded a meeting with top police officials last week, they quickly arranged to discuss the case. They listened to Mr. Hutchinson’s demands for a “fast track” investigation and a quick release of the officers’ names and the autopsy results. Earl Paysinger, an assistant police chief, declined to predict when such information would be available, saying detectives were still canvassing the area looking for witnesses.

Chief Paysinger said in an interview on Friday that the department was “well aware we can’t let it go on indefinitely.”

“We’ve seen this film before — this is ‘Groundhog Day’ for us,” Chief Paysinger said. “What the people are demanding is not unreasonable. We know that whatever we say first will become gospel, and we’d rather deal with some discontent now than putting out information we have to correct later.”

Mr. Paysinger, who has been with the department for nearly 40 years and oversees its day-to-day operations, said that the department had for years now tried to rely on what it called the “bank of trust” among community members. Just more than a year ago, the department was under a consent decree imposed by the Justice Department, after dozens of officers were accused of tampering with evidence and physically abusing and framing suspects.

“We’ve learned that community outreach can’t wait for the day when you’re in trouble and need help,” Chief Paysinger said. Now, he said, the network of community support is so wide, it is a matter of course for officers to call local leaders routinely. And the efforts have expanded along with the importance of social media: Each police station now assigns personnel to monitor websites, Facebook and Twitter almost round-the-clock, watching for everything from signs of gang activity to how people are reacting to political events.

In some sense, Mr. Ford’s death is remarkable for the publicity it has received here — several longtime activists said it would be easy to imagine the shooting getting little attention were it not for the outrage in Missouri.

Officers here have shot and killed 12 people so far this year, compared with 14 such deaths all of last year. In several protests after the Ford shooting, one organization held up a large banner listing the names of more than 300 people who have died during conflicts with law enforcement here in the last seven years.

“This happened just as it became clear that Ferguson was a billboard of what we did not want to do,” said Curren Price, a city councilman who represents South Los Angeles and organized the community meeting this week, which was attended by the police chief, as well as the head of the police oversight board. “We all knew this is another critical juncture for us.”

“There are a lot of deep wounds — L.A.P.D. was a pretty notorious organization not that long ago,” Mr. Price said. “Unfortunately, anytime something like this happens, it brings all that back to the surface. There’s still a long way to go before we can say things are good.”
 

A version of this article appears in print on August 23, 2014, on page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: Despite Similar Shooting, Los Angeles’s ‘Bank of Trust’ Tempers Reaction.

    Despite Similar Shooting,
    Los Angeles’s ‘Bank of Trust’ Tempers Reaction,
    NYT, 22.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/23/us/despite-similar-shootings-steps
    by-los-angeles-police-temper-reaction.html

Constructing a Conversation on Race

AUG. 20, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist

Charles M. Blow

The killing of an unarmed teenager, Michael Brown, by a police officer, Darren Wilson, and the protests that have followed have brought about calls for the much-ballyhooed — or bemoaned, depending on your perspective — conversation about race.

I wish these calls were not so episodic and tied to tragedies. I also wish this call for a conversation wasn’t tied to protests. Protests have life cycles. They explode into existence, but they all eventually die. They build like pressure in the volcano until they erupt. Then there is quiet until the next eruption. The cycle is untenable and nearly devoid of aim and the possibility of resolution.

What we must discuss is best discussed during the dormancy.

The discussion just needs some guidance.

Let’s start with understanding what a racial conversation shouldn’t look like. It shouldn’t be an insulated, circular, intra-racial dialogue only among people who feel aggrieved.

A true racial dialogue is not intra-racial but interracial. It is not one-directional — from minorities to majorities — but multidirectional. Data must be presented. Experiences must be explored. Histories and systems must be laid bare. Biases, fears, stereotype and mistrust must be examined. Personal — as well as societal and cultural — responsibility must be taken.

And privileges and oppressions must be acknowledged. We must acknowledge how each of us is, in myriad ways, materially and spiritually affected by a society in which bias has been widely documented to exist and in which individuals also acknowledge that it exists.

Take the results of a CBS News poll released in July. While three-fourths of respondents believe, rightly, that progress has been made to get rid of racial discrimination, most Americans acknowledge that discrimination against blacks still exists today.

It may come as little surprise that 88 percent of blacks gauged that level of discrimination as “a lot” or “some” as opposed to “only a little” or “none at all,” but 65 percent of whites agree the level of discrimination against blacks rises to “a lot” or “some.”

Yet when asked whether whites or blacks have a better chance of getting ahead today, 63 percent of whites and 43 percent of blacks said that the chances were equal. (By comparison, 28 percent of whites and 46 percent of blacks said whites had a better chance of getting ahead, and only 5 percent of whites and 4 percent of black said blacks had a better chance.)

We have to stop here and really process what we are saying: that even though we acknowledge the existence of discrimination, we still expect those who are the focus of it to succeed, or “get ahead,” at the same rate as those who aren’t. In effect, we are expecting black people to simply shoulder the extra burden that society puts on their shoulders — oppression — while others are free to rise, or even fall, without such a burden — privilege.

Understanding this fundamental inequality, one that trails each of us from cradle to grave, is one of the first steps to genuine, honest dialogue, because in that context we can better understand the choice that people make and the degree to which personal responsibility should be taken or the degree to which it is causative or curative.

And while acknowledging the inequality, and hopefully working to remedy it, we have to find ways to encourage and fortify its targets. I often tell people that while I know well that things aren’t fair or equal, we still have to decide how we are going to deal with that reality, today. The clock on life is ticking. If you wait for life to be fair you may be waiting until life is over. I urge people to fight on two fronts: Work to dismantle as much systematic bias as you can, as much for posterity as for the present, and make the best choice you can under the circumstances to counteract the effects of these injustices on your life right now.

Next, understand that race is a weaponized social construct used to divide and deny.

According to a policy statement on race by the American Anthropological Association, “human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups” and “there is greater variation within ‘racial’ groups than between them.”

The statement continues:

“How people have been accepted and treated within the context of a given society or culture has a direct impact on how they perform in that society. The ‘racial’ worldview was invented to assign some groups to perpetual low status, while others were permitted access to privilege, power, and wealth. The tragedy in the United States has been that the policies and practices stemming from this worldview succeeded all too well in constructing unequal populations among Europeans, Native Americans, and peoples of African descent.”

It ends:

“We conclude that present-day inequalities between so-called ‘racial’ groups are not consequences of their biological inheritance but products of historical and contemporary social, economic, educational, and political circumstances.”

And yet, we have tuned our minds to register this difference above all others, in the blink of an eye. As National Geographic reported in October, “A study of brain activity at the University of Colorado at Boulder showed that subjects register race in about one-tenth of a second, even before they discern gender.” This means that racial registration — and responses to any subconscious bias we may have attached to race — are most likely happening ahead of any deliberative efforts on our part to be egalitarian.

Another step is that we must understand that race is not an isolated construct or consideration. Race and class, education and economics, crime and justice, and family and culture all overlap and intersect. We can’t treat the organ as if it is separate from the organism.

Lastly, some immunity must be granted. Assuming that the conversational engagement is honest and earnest, we must be able to hear and say things that some might find offensive as we stumble toward interpersonal empathy and understanding.

We can talk this through. We can have this conversation. We must. Hopefully this provides a little nudge and a few parameters.

    Constructing a Conversation on Race, NYT, 20.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/21/opinion/
    charles-blow-constructing-a-conversation-on-race.html

Anger, Hurt

and Moments of Hope

in Ferguson

 

AUG. 20, 2014

By JOHN ELIGON

The New York Times

FERGUSON, Mo. — The long, white bus emerged from a dark side street earlier in the week. Through the tinted windows, people on the street could see flashing lights and bodies moving to a beat. It was a party bus.

It crept slowly through an angry crowd of demonstrators and a cluster of armored vehicles and police officers with large weapons threatening to arrest people if they did not disperse. Some in the crowd started dancing.

Eventually, the bus made a U-turn and raced out of the police spotlight’s glare. And the demonstrators returned their attention to the police, shouting, “Don’t shoot me,” and gesturing obscenely.

Ferguson is a strange place these days. Ever since a white police officer, Darren Wilson, fatally shot an unarmed black youth, Michael Brown, two Saturdays ago, this St. Louis suburb has been deeply troubled, but also sometimes hard to fathom. By night, it can seethe with anger and frustration; by day, hope and even celebration can appear.

It is a place where the emotions of young black men run raw and real, where they say their voices are finally being heard. They hope the fallout from the death of Mr. Brown, 18, will change the way the police treat them.

Night after night, the more orderly passions of the day have given way to the actions of a provocative few who have volleyed bottles at the police. Some stick up their middle fingers and fire guns. There have been tear gas, smoke grenades and the National Guard.

On Monday night, police officers in helmets and body armor clutched large weapons. They stood close to armored vehicles parked in a tight cluster in the middle of a dark street, shining spotlights on the taunting crowd around them.

Several men bounded toward the officers with their hands in the air. One of them knelt. “Don’t shoot me!” they yelled.

“You must leave the area in a peaceful manner,” one officer barked over a loudspeaker.

“You are unlawfully assembled,” said another.

People in the crowd only screamed back louder. Some stood tall and squared up to the officers. Before long, a bang rang out. And then fire, smoke, pops, screams and a mad dash. People running every which way, ducking.

By dawn it was all gone, and what seemed to be an ordinary new day broke in Ferguson.

Two of the town’s main retail zones are along West Florissant Avenue and South Florissant Road, parallel north-south streets. At the southern end of West Florissant in Ferguson is the Northland Shopping Center, with a Target, a Schnucks grocery store and smaller retailers. At night it becomes the command post for the riot police and the National Guard troops. Heading north are some strip malls and free-standing stores, including the convenience store that Mr. Brown is said to have robbed minutes before he died, and businesses that were damaged in the week of rioting.

Among these were a looted and burned QuikTrip convenience store, a short distance from Canfield Road, and a cluster of low-rise apartment buildings, occupied largely by low-income black families, including Mr. Brown’s grandmother.
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South Florissant remains a mostly quiet, charming strip of low-slung brick buildings with a diverse offering of mom-and-pop restaurants and bars. Nearby, on residential streets with modest clapboard or brick homes, residents can be found mowing their lawns and playing basketball.

Businesses toe the uncomfortable line between caution and acceptance — many have boarded up their windows but spray-painted the plywood with big black letters that say they remain open.

“I’m just confused — don’t know who to trust,” said Abe, a co-owner of Sam’s Meat Market, who declined to give his last name, while surveying his half-empty store that has been looted twice since Mr. Brown’s death. Since his store opened in 2009, he said, he has made many friends in the community, including Mr. Brown and his family. So while he hates the looting, he also wants to see justice for the dead teenager.

“I’m not happy what they’re doing, kicking all the protesters out,” he said of the police. “I want to see protests.”

People pace West Florissant Avenue, the center of the protests, shouting into bullhorns and holding signs with messages like “Black Lives Matter” and “Don’t Shoot.” A man wearing a white tank top bounded down the side of the road, clutching cases of bottled water in each hand, giving bottles away, while another man across the street carried and distributed water from three stacked cases. Conversations with people, from police officers to ministers to protesters, usually end with the send-off, “Be safe.”

A tall, athletic man with a crisp, white shirt circulated through the McDonald’s on West Florissant one afternoon, offering to refill people’s drinks. He owns a McDonald’s in an adjacent town, Jennings, and came here to volunteer. “This is a safe haven; we love being here,” he said, declining to give his name. “I’m proud to be a part of this.”

Michael Parnell, 29, of Ferguson, said that despite the violence, at least people in the community were not directing it toward one another.

“It’s bringing everybody together,” said Mr. Parnell, who has been supportive of the violent clashes with the police. “It’s getting everybody to know one another. It’s getting everybody to love each other and to show we are united. We can come together and not fight amongst each other, but for the right things for the right person.”

There has been a noticeable generational divide since the demonstrations began, with an apparently leaderless group of young people facing off with the police late at night. But in recent days, some older leaders, including local ministers and others representing various civil rights groups, have turned out to provide guidance and to try to bridge the gap.

The Rev. Rodney T. Francis, the pastor of the Washington Tabernacle Missionary Baptist Church and a member of the St. Louis Metropolitan Clergy Coalition, spoke at a vigil last weekend and said he and others were seeking black entertainers and athletes to help communicate with young African-Americans to call for peace.

“We clearly have a group of young people who are just totally disaffected by any appeals for calm that we are making,” Mr. Francis said. “Their disengagement is very deep and they are very hurt, and that certainly doesn’t excuse their actions.”

For some, Ferguson feels like a place they simply have to be.

Martez Davis is only 13, and wisp thin, but he came here by himself from Jennings.

“I just think what they did to that young boy is wrong,” he said, marching with a cardboard sign that said the protests would continue until the officer who shot Mr. Brown was charged.

When James Williams, 23, saw Martez, he extended a hand and said, “You good, little bro?”

For Mr. Williams, all the outrage swirling right now presents a chance to release long-stifled emotions. About 13 years ago, St. Louis County police officers shot and killed his mother after raiding her house for drugs and shooting her on the stairs when, they said, she wielded a shiny object. The object his mother, Annette Green, was holding was a foot-long bolt, the police said.

A grand jury convened under Robert P. McCulloch, the same St. Louis County prosecutor investigating the Brown shooting, declined to charge the officer who shot Ms. Green. Mr. Williams, who was 10 at the time, said he did not remember any major unrest or protest in the wake of his mother’s death. Certainly nothing like what is going on now.

“I do understand where the people are coming from,” said Mr. Williams, who kept a smile one morning as he rode a bicycle around the protest area on West Florissant. Now, Mr. Williams said, Mr. Brown might get the justice that he wanted for his mother.

But emotions can be upended quickly. Later in the day, after Mr. Williams exchanged words with an officer who wanted him to move from where he was standing, he bounded down West Florissant furiously, having to be restrained by a fellow protester. He dared officers to shoot him.
Photo
Joshua Harris at Red’s on West Florissant in Ferguson. Businesses along the road were damaged during the week of rioting. Credit Eric Thayer for The New York Times

“I’ll go meet her,” Mr. Williams, referring to his mother, screamed at officers lining the street. One of the officers appeared to be filming Mr. Williams with his camera phone. The officer shot Mr. Williams a sarcastic smile and wave, which riled him up even more.

“What!” Mr. Williams cried. “You recording? You going to go home and laugh about it?”

This level of disdain for the police in the St. Louis region is common among the black men of Mr. Williams’s generation, who rattle off the times that they say they have been roughed up and disrespected by the police with little provocation.

This collective anger weighs heavily in Ferguson. It pops up in conversations during protest marches, and in moments of reflection next to the memorial in the middle of the narrow residential street where Mr. Brown fell. Brandon and Brian Curtis, 23, stood by their black Pontiac next to that memorial on Monday, saying they fully empathized with the feelings of those who have been skirmishing against the police here. From their car stereo blared a rap song by Lil Boosie that uses derogatory language to insult the police.
Continue reading the main story

If the police fire tear gas, Brian Curtis said, protesters should pick up the canisters and throw them back. The north St. Louis County residents recalled one time in the winter about two years ago when they were returning home from a convenience store with some friends, and police officers stopped them and slammed them into the snow. One of their friends had a broken arm, they said, but the officer still made him put it behind his back.

“It’s to the point like, years and years and years, man, it’s like war with these people,” said Brandon Curtis, who works in retail.

But they said the looting and pre-emptive violence needed to stop. That was like going to your last resort first, they said.

This was such an important moment, Brian Curtis emphasized, that they had to get it right.

History is being made in Ferguson, he said. Then, referring to the police, he added, “St. Louis need to change their ways, though, for real.”

On West Florissant, after the sun had set, Qua Calhoun also felt the magnitude of the moment. But his opinion of how to seize it was much different.

Mr. Calhoun, 21, has been among the relatively small group that comes out at night, relishing a confrontation with the police. He carries an attitude that frustrates most protesters who have remained peaceful. But he does not really care.

On this evening, he had a bandanna tied around his neck. He bounced around and gazed at his surroundings with a giddy smile.

“Never thought I’d live to see hell on earth,” he said. “And this is hell on earth.”

The looting and the fighting with the police is all necessary, Mr. Calhoun said.

Without it, no one would be paying attention, he said, and no way would they get what they ultimately want: the police to stop harassing them.

“Just imagine if the dude gets found not guilty,” Mr. Calhoun said, referring to Officer Wilson. “It’s going to be way more than looting going on.”

Tanzina Vega contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on August 21, 2014,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
Anger, Hurt and Moments of Hope in Ferguson.

    Anger, Hurt and Moments of Hope in Ferguson, NYT, 20.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/21/us/in-ferguson-anger-hurt-
    and-moments-of-hope.html

In Ferguson,

Scrutiny on Police Is Growing

 

AUG. 20, 2014

The New York Times

By JOHN ELIGON

and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

FERGUSON, Mo. — Early one morning in September 2011, an unarmed 31-year-old black man ran down a residential street here yelling at cars while he pounded his hands on them.

“God is good,” the man, Jason Moore, said. “I am Jesus.”

The first officer to approach Mr. Moore told him to raise his hands and walk toward him, according to a police report on the episode. But Mr. Moore, whose family said he was mentally ill, started running toward the officer “in an aggressive manner while swinging his fist in a pinwheel motion,” the officer said in the report. And when he failed to obey commands to get on the ground, the officer took out his Taser gun and fired it at him, the report said.

Mr. Moore fell to the ground, but after he tried to get up, the officer fired the Taser twice more into him. Mr. Moore let out a raspy sound and stopped breathing. He was pronounced dead soon after.

Mr. Moore’s death and how it was handled by the Ferguson Police Department are now receiving renewed scrutiny after one of the department’s officers, Darren Wilson, killed Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year old, on Aug. 9. On Tuesday, relatives of Mr. Moore filed two lawsuits against the Police Department in federal court, saying that the department wrongfully killed him. The suit was one of several filed in recent years that raised questions about excessive use of force or civil rights violations by the Ferguson Police Department.

The police contend that they behaved properly in all of those cases, and none of the lawsuits has yet led to a judgment against the department. But critics assert that the complaints show a pattern of violent behavior or weak discipline within the force — and say that the department’s conduct should be closely investigated by the Justice Department, which has already opened an inquiry into Mr. Brown’s death.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who visited Ferguson on Wednesday, and top Justice Department officials have begun weighing whether to open just such a broader civil rights review of Ferguson’s police practices, according to law enforcement officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal talks. Their discussion has been prompted in part by past complaints against the force, including a 2009 case in which a man said that four police officers beat him, then charged him with damaging government property — by getting blood on their uniforms. That case is now the subject of one of the lawsuits against the department.

During his daylong visit, Mr. Holder met with local and state officials, including Gov. Jay Nixon, but also with a group of residents that included Mr. Moore’s sister, Molyrik Welch, 27, who described her brother’s death. “A lot has happened here,” Ms. Welch said after the meeting. She added that Mr. Holder had promised that “things were going to change.”

Before a briefing at local F.B.I. headquarters, Mr. Holder promised that the investigation into Mr. Brown’s death would be “thorough and fair” and that “very experienced” prosecutors and agents had been assigned. “We’re looking for violations of federal criminal civil rights statutes,” he said. But at another stop, a meeting with residents at a community college, he also spoke in deeply personal terms about his own problems with the police when he was a young man.

Saying he could “understand that mistrust” that many young blacks feel toward the police, Mr. Holder recalled twice being pulled over on the New Jersey Turnpike and having his car searched. “I remember how humiliating that was and how angry I was and the impact it had on me,” Mr. Holder told the group.

He also recounted being stopped by the police in Georgetown, an upscale section of Washington, because he was running to see a film. “I wasn’t a kid. I was a federal prosecutor. I worked at the United States Department of Justice,” he said. “So I’ve confronted this myself.”

Mr. Holder continued: “We need concrete action to change things in this country. The same kid who got stopped on the New Jersey freeway is now the attorney general of the United States. This country is capable of change. But change doesn’t happen by itself.”

For most of Wednesday morning and early afternoon, the stretch of West Florissant Avenue that has been the center of protest and confrontation turned quiet enough to seem like any other commercial thoroughfare — save for the pieces of plywood covering smashed store windows here and there.

As evening came, a sparse crowd milled, caught up briefly in a heavy downpour.

At one point, tensions flared when a couple identifying themselves as Chuck and Dawn showed up along the route with signs supporting Officer Wilson. “Justice is for Everybody — Even P.O. Wilson,” one of the signs read. Some protesters began to crowd around and jeer, while others urged calm.

As the shouting grew louder and a water bottle was thrown, the police stepped in and spirited the couple away from the crowd.

Also Wednesday, the St. Louis County Police Department said that an officer from a local police department had been suspended after he pointed a semiautomatic rifle at a peaceful protester following a verbal exchange on Tuesday night. In a news release, the county police called the officer’s action “inappropriate,” saying that a police sergeant had immediately escorted him away from the scene.

The episode involving Mr. Moore began at 6:46 a.m. on Sept. 17, 2011, when an officer was sent in response to reports that Mr. Moore was running naked through the streets, according to police reports. “I exited my patrol vehicle and advised Jason to put his hands in the air and to walk my way,” the officer said in a statement he filed afterward. Mr. Moore, the officer said, began moving aggressively toward him, and despite several commands to stop, he did not.

“Jason continued to charge, at the time I deployed one five-second burst from the Taser,” the officer said in the report. “The Taser darts made contact with Jason on his left side of his chest and the right thigh.”

The officer said that after the initial shot, Mr. Moore fell to the ground and then tried to get back on his feet. Again, Mr. Moore ignored commands to remain where he was, the officer said. “In fear for my safety and the safety of Jason, I administered a second five-second burst,” the officer said.
Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story

As another officer arrived at the scene and got out of his vehicle, Mr. Moore tried for a third time to get up. Mr. Moore again ignored commands to remain on the ground, and the officer used the Taser gun on him again.

The officer who had just arrived handcuffed Mr. Moore and laid him on his stomach, at which point emergency medical responders were sent to the scene. Another officer tried to speak with Mr. Moore but received no response, according to the police reports.

One of the lawsuits filed by Mr. Moore’s relatives says that the officers left Mr. Moore face down and did not monitor his vital signs.

According to the police reports, about a minute after Mr. Moore was handcuffed, the officer noticed that he was not breathing and removed the handcuffs. The officers rolled Mr. Moore over and began administering CPR for several minutes. “Moore would seem to start to breathe on his own and stop,” one of the police reports said.

Mr. Moore was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

In one of their lawsuits, the family asserts that Mr. Moore was unarmed and “suffering from a psychological disorder and demonstrated clear signs of mental illness.” A lawyer for the family declined to comment, or to explain why it had taken three years to file the lawsuit.

But in an interview posted on YouTube last week, Mr. Moore’s sister said the family had been unable to find a lawyer willing to handle the case until recently.
 

John Eligon reported from Ferguson, and Michael S. Schmidt from Washington. Reporting was contributed by Mosi Secret, Joseph Goldstein and Dan Barry from Ferguson, Matt Apuzzo from Washington, and Kitty Bennett from Seattle.

A version of this article appears in print on August 21, 2014,
on page A15 of the New York edition with the headline: Scrutiny on the Police Is Building in Ferguson.

    In Ferguson, Scrutiny on Police Is Growing, NYT, 20.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/21/us/
    in-ferguson-scrutiny-on-police-is-growing.html

Calling for Calm in Ferguson,

Obama Cites Need

for Improved Race Relations

 

AUG. 18, 2014

The New York Times

By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS

WASHINGTON — President Obama called for calm and healing in Ferguson, Mo., on Monday even as he acknowledged the deep racial divisions that continue to plague not only that St. Louis suburb but cities across the United States.

“In too many communities around the country, a gulf of mistrust exists between local residents and law enforcement,” Mr. Obama said at the White House. “In too many communities, too many young men of color are left behind and seen only as objects of fear.”

“We’ve made extraordinary progress” in race relations, he said, “but we have not made enough progress.”

Mr. Obama’s comments were a notable moment for the first African-American president during the most racially fraught crisis of his time in office, set off by the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, by the police. Mr. Obama and his administration are working to restore peace in Ferguson and ensure an evenhanded investigation into the shooting all while responding to anger — in Missouri and elsewhere — among blacks about what they say is systemic discrimination by law enforcement officials.

“To a community in Ferguson that is rightly hurting and looking for answers, let me call once again for us to seek some understanding rather than simply holler at each other,” the president said in his first extended comments on the chaos there.

Mr. Obama took pains to make clear that he was not issuing a blanket indictment of either the protesting crowds or the law enforcement officers responding to the demonstrations. He criticized both the “small minority” of protesters who he said were exploiting the anger over Mr. Brown’s death to loot Ferguson stores as well as the police who used violence of their own against demonstrators.

“While I understand the passions and the anger that arise over the death of Michael Brown, giving in to that anger by looting or carrying guns and even attacking the police only serves to raise tensions and stir chaos,” Mr. Obama said during questioning by reporters.

Still, he emphasized, “there’s no excuse for excessive force by police or any action that denies people the right to protest peacefully.”

Mr. Obama has mostly avoided speaking about himself or his agenda in explicitly racial terms, but he has increasingly been less reticent to do so.

“I’m personally committed to changing both perception and reality,” Mr. Obama said, making explicit reference to the $200 million, five-year initiative known as “My Brother’s Keeper” that he started in February to address the plight of black youth.

It was inspired in part by the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, another unarmed black teenager, in 2012 in Florida and the acquittal of the man who killed him, George Zimmerman.

“If I had a son,” Mr. Obama said after Mr. Martin’s death, “he’d look like Trayvon.”

The president’s aides have said the situation in Ferguson has affected him in similar ways.

“You have young men of color in many communities who are more likely to end up in jail or in the criminal justice system than they are in a good job or in college,” Mr. Obama said on Monday. He said part of his job was to “to get at those root causes.”

The president spoke after receiving a formal briefing from Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on the situation in Ferguson.

Mr. Holder announced Sunday that a federal medical examiner would conduct an independent autopsy of Mr. Brown.

The Police Department in Ferguson has been harshly criticized for refusing to clarify the circumstances of the shooting and then escalating tensions by responding to protests using military weapons and gear.

The president announced that Mr. Holder, who has made civil rights a cornerstone of his tenure, will travel to Ferguson on Wednesday to monitor the situation.

Mr. Obama, when asked, did not say whether he would make a personal visit.

A version of this article appears in print on August 19, 2014,
on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline:
Calling for Calm in Ferguson, Obama Cites Need for Improved Race Relations.

    Calling for Calm in Ferguson, Obama Cites Need for Improved Race Relations,
    NYT, 18.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/19/us/
    calling-for-calm-in-ferguson-obama-cites-need-for-improved-race-relations.html

National Guard Troops

Fail to Quell Unrest in Ferguson

 

AUG. 19, 2014

The New York Times

By MONICA DAVEY,

JOHN ELIGON

and ALAN BLINDER

FERGUSON, Mo. — Violence erupted here once more on Monday night, even as Missouri National Guard troops arrived, the latest in a series of quickly shifting attempts to quell the chaos that has upended this St. Louis suburb for more than a week.

In the days since an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, was shot to death by a white police officer here on Aug. 9, an array of state and local law enforcement authorities have swerved from one approach to another: taking to the streets in military-style vehicles and riot gear; then turning over power to a State Highway Patrol official who permitted the protests and marched along; then calling for a curfew.

Early Monday, after a new spate of unrest, Gov. Jay Nixon said he was bringing in the National Guard. Hours later, he said he was lifting the curfew and said the Guard would have only a limited role, protecting the police command post.

Although the tactics changed, the nighttime scene did not.

Late Monday night, peaceful protests devolved into sporadic violence, including gunshots, by what the authorities said was a small number of people, and demonstrators were met with tear gas and orders to leave. Two men were shot in the crowd, officials said in an early morning news conference, and 31 people — some from New York and California — were arrested. Fires were reported in two places. The police were shot at, the authorities said, but did not fire their weapons.

“We can’t have this,” said Ron Johnson, a captain of the State Highway Patrol, who stood near a table that held two guns and a Molotov cocktail that had been seized. “We do not want to lose another life.”

Captain Johnson, who is coordinating security operations, gave no sense of whether the police may change their tactics again on Tuesday, but he urged peaceful protesters to demonstrate during daylight so as not to give cover to “violent agitators,” and he pledged, despite the repeated nights of tumult, “We’re going to make this neighborhood whole.”

Adding to the turbulence was confusion over the curfew. Although it was no longer in force, around midnight the police demanded that the crowd disperse, a fact the authorities attributed to increasingly unsafe conditions.

Also Monday, more details emerged from autopsies performed on Mr. Brown’s body. One showed that he had been shot at least six times; another found evidence of marijuana in his system.

In Washington, President Obama said Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. would go to Ferguson on Wednesday to meet with F.B.I. agents conducting a federal civil rights investigation into the shooting. He seemed less than enthusiastic about the decision to call in the National Guard.

Mr. Obama said he had told the governor in a phone call on Monday that the Guard should be “used in a limited and appropriate way.”

“I’ll be watching over the next several days to assess whether in fact it’s helping rather than hindering progress in Ferguson,” said Mr. Obama, who emphasized that the State of Missouri, not the White House, had called in the Guard.

He again tried to strike a balance between the right of protest and approaches to security.

“While I understand the passions and the anger that arise over the death of Michael Brown, giving in to that anger by looting or carrying guns and even attacking the police only serves to raise tensions,” Mr. Obama said.

As darkness set in, along West Florissant Avenue, one of the city’s main thoroughfares and a center of the weeklong protests, demonstrators were required to keep moving.

After more of than an hour of peaceful protests, some in the crowd began to throw bottles at the police, who brought out armored vehicles and tactical units. But many peacekeepers in the crowd formed a human chain and got the agitators to back down.

At another point, as protesters gathered near a convenience store, some of them threw objects; the police responded with tear gas.

And at nearly midnight, the police began announcing over loudspeakers that people needed to leave the area or risk arrest after what the police say were repeated gunshots and a deteriorating situation.

A few blocks away, at the police command post, National Guard members in Army fatigues, some with military police patches on their uniforms, stood ready but never entered the area where protesters were marching. State and local law enforcement authorities oversaw operations there.

Residents seemed puzzled and frustrated by the continually changing approaches, suggesting that the moving set of rules only worsened longstanding tensions over policing and race in the town of 21,000.

“It almost seems like they can’t decide what to do, and like law enforcement is fighting over who’s got the power,” said Antione Watson, 37, who stood near a middle-of-the-street memorial of candles and flowers for Mr. Brown, the 18-year-old killed on a winding block here.

“First they do this, then there’s that, and now who can even tell what their plan is?” Mr. Watson said. “They can try all of this, but I don’t see an end to this until there are charges against the cop.”

The latest turn in law enforcement tactics — the removal of a midnight-to-5 a.m. curfew imposed Saturday and the arrival of members of the Guard — followed a chaotic Sunday night. Police officers reported gunfire and firebombs from some among a large group, and they responded with tear gas, smoke canisters and rubber bullets.

By Monday, the police seemed intent on taking control of the situation long before evening and the expected arrival of protesters, some of them inclined to provoke clashes. The authorities banned stationary protests, even during the day, ordering demonstrators to continue walking, particularly in an area along West Florissant, not far from where the shooting occurred. One of those told to move along was the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson.

Six members of the Highway Patrol, plastic flex-ties within easy reach, stood guard at a barbecue restaurant that has been a hub of the turmoil. Just north of the restaurant, about 30 officers surrounded a convenience store that was heavily damaged early in the unrest. Several people were arrested during the day, including a photographer for Getty Images, Scott Olson, who was led away in plastic handcuffs in the early evening.

Explaining his decision to call in the National Guard, Mr. Nixon recounted details of the unrest on Sunday night, and he described the events as “very difficult and dangerous as a result of a violent criminal element intent upon terrorizing the community.”

Yet Mr. Nixon also emphasized that the Guard’s role would be limited to providing protection for a police command center here, which the authorities say came under attack. Gregory Mason, a brigadier general of the Guard, described the arriving troops as “well trained and well seasoned.”

“With these additional resources in place,” said Mr. Nixon, a Democrat in his second term, “the Missouri State Highway Patrol and local law enforcement will continue to respond appropriately to incidents of lawlessness and violence and protect the civil rights of all peaceful citizens to make their voices heard.”

While Mr. Obama and other leaders called for healing and more than 40 F.B.I. agents fanned out around this city to interview residents about the shooting, emotions remained raw, and the divide over all that had happened seemed only to be growing amid multiple investigations and competing demonstrations.

A recent survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press showed that Americans were deeply divided along racial lines in their reaction to Mr. Brown’s killing. The report showed that 80 percent of blacks thought the case raised “important issues about race that need to be discussed,” while only 37 percent of whites thought it did.

Blacks surveyed were also less confident in the investigations into the shooting, with 76 percent reporting little to no confidence in the investigation, compared with 33 percent of whites.

Supporters of Darren Wilson, the Ferguson police officer who fired the fatal shots, gathered outside a radio station over the weekend in St. Louis.

Mr. Brown is now the subject of three autopsies. The first was conducted by St. Louis County, the results of which were delivered to the county prosecutor’s office on Monday. That autopsy report showed evidence of marijuana in Mr. Brown’s system, according to someone briefed on the report who was not authorized to discuss it publicly before it was released.

Another, on Monday, was done by a military doctor as part of the Justice Department’s investigation.

On Sunday, at the request of Mr. Brown’s family, the body was examined by Dr. Michael Baden, a former New York City medical examiner.

The findings showed that he was shot at least six times in the front of his body and that he did not appear to have been shot from very close range because no powder burns were found on his body. But that determination could change if burns were found on his clothing, which was not available for examination.

In a news conference on Monday, family members and Dr. Baden said that the autopsy he had performed confirmed witness accounts that Mr. Brown was trying to surrender when he was killed.

Daryl Parks, a lawyer for the family, said the autopsy proved that the officer should have been arrested. The bullet that killed Mr. Brown entered the top of his head and came out through the front at an angle that suggested he was facing downward when he was killed, Mr. Parks said. The autopsy did not show what Mr. Brown was doing when the bullet struck his head.

“Why would he be shot in the very top of his head, a 6-foot-4 man?” Mr. Parks said. “It makes no sense. And so that’s what we have. That’s why we believe that those two things alone are ample for this officer to be arrested.”

Piaget Crenshaw, who told reporters that she had witnessed Mr. Brown’s death from her nearby apartment, seemed unsurprised by the eruptions of anger, which have left schools closed and some businesses looted. “This community had underlying problems way before this happened,” Ms. Crenshaw said. “And now the tension is finally broken.”

For businesses here, the days and long nights have been costly and frightening. At Dellena Jones’s hair salon, demonstrators had tossed concrete slabs into the business as Ms. Jones’s two children prepared for what they had expected to be a first day back to school.

“I had a full week that went down to really nothing,” she said of her business, which has sat mostly empty. “They’re too scared to come.” As she spoke, a man walked by and shouted, “You need a gun in there, lady!”

In his news conference, Mr. Obama said that most protesters had been peaceful. “As Americans, we’ve got to use this moment to seek out our shared humanity that’s been laid bare by this moment,” Mr. Obama said.
 

Frances Robles and Tanzina Vega contributed reporting from Ferguson, and Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Matt Apuzzo from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on August 19, 2014,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
Fitful Night in Ferguson as National Guard Arrives.

    National Guard Troops Fail to Quell Unrest in Ferguson, NYT, 19.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/20/us/ferguson-missouri-protests.html

Frustration in Ferguson

AUG. 17, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist

Charles M. Blow

The response to the killing of the unarmed teenager Michael Brown — whom his family called the “gentle giant” — by the Ferguson, Mo., police officer Darren Wilson — who was described by his police chief as “a gentle, quiet man” and “a gentleman” — has been anything but genteel.

There have been passionate but peaceful protests to be sure, but there has also been some violence and looting. Police forces in the town responded with an outlandish military-like presence more befitting Baghdad than suburban Missouri.

There were armored vehicles, flash grenades and a seemingly endless supply of tear gas — much of it Pentagon trickle-down. There were even officers perched atop vehicles, in camouflage and body armor, pointing weapons in the direction of peaceful protesters.

Let me be clear here: Pointing a gun at an innocent person is an act of violence and provocation.

Americans were aghast at the images, and condemnation was swift and bipartisan. The governor put the state’s Highway Patrol in charge of security. Tensions seemed to subside, for a day.

But then on Friday, when releasing the name of the officer who did the shooting, the police chief also released details and images of a robbery purporting to show Brown stealing cigars from a local convenience store and pushing a store employee in the process.

The implication seemed to be that Wilson was looking for the person who committed the convenience store crime when he encountered Brown. But, later in the day, the chief said Wilson didn’t know Brown was a robbery suspect when they encountered each other.

Something seemed off. The police chief’s decision to release the details of the robbery and the images — without releasing an image of Wilson — struck many as perfidious. In a strongly worded statement, Brown’s family and attorneys accused the chief of attempting to assassinate the character of the dead teen.

Some also deemed it an attempt at distraction from the central issue: An officer shot an unarmed teenager who witnesses claim had raised his hands in surrender when at least some of the shots were fired, which the family and its attorneys called “a brutal assassination of his person in broad daylight.”

The Justice Department is even investigating whether Brown’s civil rights were violated. This would include the excessive use of force. As the department makes clear, this “does not require that any racial, religious, or other discriminatory motive existed.”

It’s impossible to truly know the chief’s motives for his decision to release the robbery information at the same time as the officer’s name, but the effect was clear: That night, a fragile peace was shattered. There was more looting, although peaceful protesters struggled heroically to block the violent ones.

On Saturday, the governor issued a midnight curfew for the town. A small band of protesters defied it and some were arrested.

The community is struggling to find its way back to normalcy, but it would behoove us to dig a bit deeper into the underlying frustrations that cause a place like Ferguson to erupt in the first place and explore the untenable nature of our normal.
Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story

Yes, there are the disturbingly repetitive and eerily similar circumstances of many cases of unarmed black people being killed by police officers. This reinforces black people’s beliefs — supportable by actual data — that blacks are treated less fairly by the police.

But I submit that this is bigger than that. The frustration we see in Ferguson is about not only the present act of perceived injustice but also the calcifying system of inequity — economic, educational, judicial — drawn largely along racial lines.

In 1951, Langston Hughes began his poem “Harlem” with a question: “What happens to a dream deferred?” Today, I must ask: What happens when one desists from dreaming, when the very exercise feels futile?

The discussion about issues in the black community too often revolves around a false choice: systemic racial bias or poor personal choices. In fact, these factors are interwoven like the fingers of clasped hands. People make choices within the context of their circumstances and those circumstances are affected — sometimes severely — by bias.

These biases do material damage as well as help breed a sense of disenfranchisement and despair, which in turn can have a depressive effect on aspiration and motivation. This all feeds back on itself.

If we want to truly address the root of the unrest in Ferguson, we have to ask ourselves how we can break this cycle.

Otherwise, Hughes’s last words of “Harlem,” referring to the dream deferred, will continue to be prophetic: “does it explode?”
 

A version of this op-ed appears in print on August 18, 2014,
on page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: Frustration in Ferguson.

    Frustration in Ferguson, NYT, 17.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/18/opinion/
    charles-m-blow-frustration-in-ferguson.html

Around St. Louis, a Circle of Rage

AUG. 16, 2014

The New York Times

By TANZINA VEGA and JOHN ELIGON

FERGUSON, Mo. — Garland Moore, a hospital worker, lived in this St. Louis suburb for much of his 33 years, a period in which a largely white community has become a largely black one.

He attended its schools and is raising his family in this place of suburban homes and apartment buildings on the outskirts of a struggling Midwest city. And over time, he has felt his life to be circumscribed by Ferguson’s demographics.

Mr. Moore, who is black, talks of how he has felt the wrath of the police here and in surrounding suburbs for years — roughed up during a minor traffic stop and prevented from entering a park when he was wearing St. Louis Cardinals red.

And last week, as he stood at a vigil for an unarmed 18-year-old shot dead by the police — a shooting that provoked renewed street violence and looting early Saturday — Mr. Moore heard anger welling and listened to a shout of: “We’re tired of the racist police department.”

“It broke the camel’s back,” Mr. Moore said of the killing of the teenager, Michael Brown. Referring to the northern part of St. Louis County, he continued, “The people in North County — not just African-Americans, some of the white people, too — they are tired of the police harassment.”

The origins of the area’s complex social and racial history date to the 19th century when the city of St. Louis and St. Louis County went their separate ways, leading to the formation of dozens of smaller communities outside St. Louis. Missouri itself has always been a state with roots in both the Midwest and the South, and racial issues intensified in the 20th century as St. Louis became a stopping point for the northern migration of Southern blacks seeking factory jobs in Detroit and Chicago.

As African-Americans moved into the city and whites moved out, real estate agents and city leaders, in a pattern familiar elsewhere in the country, conspired to keep blacks out of the suburbs through the use of zoning ordinances and restrictive covenants. But by the 1970s, some of those barriers had started to fall, and whites moved even farther away from the city. These days, Ferguson is like many of the suburbs around St. Louis, inner-ring towns that accommodated white flight decades ago but that are now largely black. And yet they retain a white power structure.

Although about two-thirds of Ferguson residents are black, its mayor and five of its six City Council members are white. Only three of the town’s 53 police officers are black.

Turnout for local elections in Ferguson has been poor. The mayor, James W. Knowles III, noted his disappointment with the turnout — about 12 percent — in the most recent mayoral election during a City Council meeting in April. Patricia Bynes, a black woman who is the Democratic committeewoman for the Ferguson area, said the lack of black involvement in local government was partly the result of the black population’s being more transient in small municipalities and less attached to them.

There is also some frustration among blacks who say town government is not attuned to their concerns.

Aliyah Woods, 45, once petitioned Ferguson officials for a sign that would warn drivers that a deaf family lived on that block. But the sign never came. “You get tired,” she said. “You keep asking, you keep asking. Nothing gets done.”

Mr. Moore, who recently moved to neighboring Florissant, said he had attended a couple of Ferguson Council meetings to complain that the police should be patrolling the residential streets to try to prevent break-ins rather than lying in wait to catch people for traffic violations.

This year, community members voiced anger after the all-white, seven-member school board for the Ferguson-Florissant district pushed aside its black superintendent for unrevealed reasons. That spurred several blacks to run for three board positions up for election, but only one won a seat.

The St. Louis County Police Department fired a white lieutenant last year for ordering officers to target blacks in shopping areas. That resulted in the department’s enlisting researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, to study whether the department was engaging in racial profiling.

And in recent years, two school districts in North County lost their accreditation. One, Normandy, where Mr. Brown graduated this year, serves parts of Ferguson. When parents in the mostly black district sought to allow their children to transfer to schools in mostly white districts, they said, they felt a backlash with racial undertones. Frustration with underfunded and underperforming schools has long been a problem, and when Gov. Jay Nixon held a news conference on Friday to discuss safety and security in Ferguson, he was confronted with angry residents demanding to know what he would do to fix their schools.

Ferguson’s economic shortcomings reflect the struggles of much of the region. Its median household income of about $37,000 is less than the statewide number, and its poverty level of 22 percent outpaces the state’s by seven percentage points.

In Ferguson, residents say most racial tensions have to do with an overzealous police force.

“It is the people in a position of authority in our community that have to come forward,” said Jerome Jenkins, 47, who, with his wife, Cathy, owns Cathy’s Kitchen, a downtown Ferguson restaurant.

“What you are witnessing is our little small government has to conform to the change that we are trying to do,” Mr. Jenkins added. “Sometimes things happen for a purpose; maybe we can get it right.”

Ferguson’s police chief, Thomas Jackson, has been working with the Justice Department’s community relations team on improving interaction with residents. At a news conference here last week, he acknowledged some of the problems.

“I’ve been trying to increase the diversity of the department ever since I got here,” Chief Jackson said, adding that “race relations is a top priority right now.” As for working the with Justice Department, he said, “I told them, ‘Tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.’ ”

Although experience and statistics suggest that Ferguson’s police force disproportionately targets blacks, it is not as imbalanced as in some neighboring departments in St. Louis County. While blacks are 37 percent more likely to be pulled over compared with their proportion of the population in Ferguson, that is less than the statewide average of 59 percent, according to Richard Rosenfeld, a professor of criminology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

In fact, Mr. Rosenfeld said, Ferguson did not fit the profile of a community that would be a spark for civil unrest. The town has “pockets of disadvantage” and middle and upper-middle income families. He said Ferguson had benefited in the last five to 10 years from economic growth in the northern part of the county, such as the expansion of Express Scripts, the Fortune 500 health care giant.

“Ferguson does not stand out as the type of community where you would expect tensions with the police to boil over into violence and looting,” Mr. Rosenfeld said.

But the memory of the region’s racial history lingers.

In 1949, a mob of whites showed up to attack blacks who lined up to get into the pool at Fairground Park in north St. Louis after it had been desegregated.

In the 1970s, a court battle over public school inequality led to a settlement that created a desegregation busing program that exists to this day.

A Ferguson city councilman caused a stir in 1970 when he used racially charged language to criticize teenagers from the neighboring town of Kinloch for throwing rocks and bottles at homes in Ferguson. The councilman, Carl Kersting, said, “We should call a black a black, and not be afraid to face up to these people,” according to an article in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat.

Eventually blacks broke down the barriers in the inner ring of suburbs, and whites fled farther out. But whites fought hard to protect their turf.

In the mid-1970s, Alyce Herndon, a black woman, moved with her family to what was then the mostly white town of Jennings in St. Louis County. She said some of their white neighbors stuck an Afro pick in their front lawn and set it on fire. Ms. Herndon also recalled tensions flaring between black and white students at her school after the television mini-series “Roots” first aired in 1977.

For all its segregation and discrimination, St. Louis did not have the major riots and unrest during the 1960s that was seen across the country.

St. Louis’s black leaders “were able to pressure businesses and schools to open their doors to black people and employers to hire black workers,” Stefan Bradley, the director of African-American studies at St. Louis University, wrote in an email. “These concessions may have been enough to prevent St. Louis from taking what many believed to be the next step toward redress of injustice: violent rebellion.”

But the fatal shooting of Mr. Brown has brought submerged tensions to the surface.

“St. Louis never has had its true race moment, where they had to confront this,” said Ms. Bynes, the Democratic committeewoman. Without that moment, she added, blacks have been complacent when it comes to local politics. “I’m hoping that this is what it takes to get the pendulum to swing the other way.”

Ms. Herndon, 49, said she moved her family to Ferguson in 2003 because she felt it was a good community, safer than the unincorporated portion of the county where they lived previously and with better schools for her children.

The town, she said, offers everything — places to shop, eat and drink. There is a farmers market on Saturdays. She frequents a wine bar across from a lot where a band plays on Fridays. She has white and Asian neighbors on either side of her, and there are other black families on her block. She has not experienced the racial tensions of her childhood in St. Louis County, she said, but she understands that the younger generation is living a different experience than she is.

“I understand the anger because it’s psychological trauma when you see so many people being shot or people being falsely accused,” said Ms. Herndon, who over the past week has avoided the streets that have been filled with tear gas and rubber bullets in clashes between police and protesters.

But now, a population of young black men who often feel forgotten actually feel that people are finally listening.

“If it wasn’t for the looting,” said one man, who declined to give his name, “we wouldn’t get the attention.”

Mr. Moore went one step further. He does not condone the violence that erupted during some of the protests, he said, but he does understand the frustration. And if he were younger, he said, he probably would have joined them.

Tanzina Vega reported from Ferguson, and John Eligon from Kansas City, Mo. Serge F. Kovaleski contributed reporting from New York, and John Schwartz from Ferguson. Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on August 17, 2014,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Deep Tensions Rise to Surface After Shooting.

    Around St. Louis, a Circle of Rage, NYT, 16.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/17/us/
    ferguson-mo-complex-racial-history-runs-deep-
    most-tensions-have-to-do-police-force.html

Emotions Flare in Missouri

Amid Police Statements

 

AUG. 15, 2014

The New York Times

By TANZINA VEGA,

TIMOTHY WILLIAMS

and ERIK ECKHOLM

FERGUSON, Mo. — One day after roiling tensions over the police shooting of a black teenager here began to subside, emotions flared anew on Friday as the police identified the officer involved but also released evidence that the victim was a suspect in a convenience store robbery moments before being shot.

The manner in which the police here released the information, which included a 19-page police report on the robbery but no new details about the shooting, led to the spectacle of dueling police news conferences, one led by a white officer who seemed ill at ease and defensive, and the other dominated by a charismatic black officer who expressed solidarity with the crowd even as he pleaded for peace.

The white officer, Thomas Jackson, the police chief in Ferguson, gave a series of incomplete accounts that sowed confusion about whether the officer who shot the teenager knew he was a suspect in the robbery. The black officer, Capt. Ronald S. Johnson of the Missouri State Highway Patrol, expressed his displeasure with how the information had been released.

“I would have liked to have been consulted,” he said pointedly about the pairing of the shooter’s identity with the robbery accusation.

All week, community members had demanded the name of the officer who killed Michael Brown, 18, last Saturday, but when it finally came, it was accompanied by surveillance videotapes that appeared to show Mr. Brown shoving a store clerk aside as he stole a box of cigarillos.

Mr. Brown’s family, their lawyer and others in the community expressed disgust, accusing the police of trying to divert attention from the central issue — the unexplained shooting of an unarmed young man.

“It is smoke and mirrors,” said Benjamin L. Crump, a lawyer for the Brown family, of the robbery allegations. “Nothing, based on the facts before us, justifies the execution-style murder by this police officer in broad daylight.”

The videotapes seemed to contradict the image portrayed by Mr. Brown’s family of a gentle teenager opposed to violence and on his way to college.

Captain Johnson, who grew up in the area and had been brought in by the governor on Thursday to restore peace after days of confrontations between demonstrators and the police in riot gear and military-style vehicles, said he had not been told that the authorities planned to release the video of the robbery along with the name of the officer. But he sought to calm people down, saying, “In our anger, we have to make sure that we don’t burn down our own house.”

Captain Johnson won over many but also faced skepticism over his role along with anguished questions about who the police really represent and the lack of educational and economic opportunities in Ferguson.

“I find it utterly disgusting,” one man shouted at him. “What am I supposed to tell my people? It looks like you’re a figurehead.”

Gov. Jay Nixon, a Democrat, stood next to Captain Johnson at their news conference and emphasized that the details released Friday were not “the full picture.” He added, “I think the focal point here remains to figure out how and why Michael Brown was killed and to get justice as appropriate in that situation.”

The day began when Chief Jackson said at a news conference that the officer who shot Mr. Brown was Darren Wilson, who has served four years in Ferguson and two in another local department and had no disciplinary charges. Officer Wilson, who is white, has been placed on leave, and his location is unknown.

But the release of his name was overshadowed by the simultaneous announcement of the robbery allegations, leading to questions about timing and motives.

In a later news conference, on Friday afternoon at Forestwood Park, a sports complex in Ferguson, Chief Jackson said that Officer Wilson had not been aware that Mr. Brown “was a suspect in the case” and instead had stopped him and a companion “because they were walking down the street blocking traffic.”

But that only highlighted the central issue: How did an officer’s interaction with an unarmed young man escalate into a deadly shooting?

The videotapes, from an unidentified convenience store, show a tall burly man, identified by the police as Mr. Brown, shoving aside a clerk as he left the store with an unpaid-for box of Swisher Sweets cigarillos. According to a police report, Mr. Brown was accompanied at the store by his friend Dorian Johnson, who was also with him when he was shot.

Mr. Johnson has admitted being in the convenience store with Mr. Brown and told investigators from the F.B.I. and St. Louis County that Mr. Brown did “take cigarillos,” Mr. Johnson’s lawyer, Freeman Bosley Jr., a former mayor of St. Louis, told MSNBC.

Standing near a store that was vandalized during protests this week, Mark Jackson, who has participated in the demonstrations, expressed skepticism about police motives in describing the robbery. “They just want to make the case seem more reasonable on their side,” he said. “But at the end of the day, the man didn’t have a gun, so they didn’t have to shoot him.

In his afternoon appearance, Chief Jackson sought to explain why the information was released on Friday. “All I did was release the videotape because I had to,” he said. “I had been sitting on it.” He said his hand was forced by requests by the news media under public records laws. He acknowledged that he had not alerted the other police departments about the tape. “I should have done that,” he said.

Chief Jackson described Officer Wilson as “a gentle, quiet man” and “a distinguished officer.”

Greg Kloeppel, a lawyer for the union representing the Ferguson police, said Officer Wilson received an award for “extraordinary effort in the line of duty” in February.
Continue reading the main story
Document: Ferguson Police Department Incident Report

The police have not released the official report on the shooting because it is now the subject of federal and local investigations. In the robbery report released Friday, an officer wrote that “it is worth mentioning that this incident is related to” the fatal shooting of Mr. Brown.

After seeing Mr. Brown’s body and reviewing the surveillance video, “I was able to confirm that Brown is the primary suspect” in the robbery, the officer wrote.

Any suggestion that Officer Wilson sought out Mr. Brown and Mr. Johnson because they were robbery suspects, however, was dispelled by the police chief at the afternoon news conference. Adding to the day’s confusion, Chief Jackson told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch later on Friday that while Officer Wilson did not originally approach the two youths as suspects, he was aware of the nearby store robbery.

The officer has said that once he saw cigars in Mr. Brown’s hand, he “realized that he might be the robber,” Chief Jackson said.

After the revelations of the day, the atmosphere in Ferguson on Friday night remained peaceful, though boisterous. Cars clogged streets as horns blared and music played. Hundreds of demonstrators clutched signs and chanted slogans, but many others danced to music. On one street, six people danced atop a white delivery truck.

The police presence was limited. But among the officers on the street was Captain Johnson, who walked among the crowds, posing for pictures and shaking hands.

“I’m pleased with how it’s going,” he said.
 

Tanzina Vega reported from Ferguson, and Timothy Williams and Erik Eckholm from New York. Serge F. Kovaleski contributed reporting from New York, and Brent McDonald from Ferguson.

A version of this article appears in print on August 16, 2014,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Dueling Police Statements as Anger Rises in Missouri.

    Emotions Flare in Missouri Amid Police Statements, NYT, 15.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/16/us/
    darren-wilson-identified-as-officer-in-fatal-shooting-in-ferguson-missouri.html

Ferguson Police Identify

Darren Wilson as Officer in Fatal Shooting

and Link Teenager to Robbery

 

AUG. 15, 2014

The New York Times

By ALAN BLINDER

and TIMOTHY WILLIAMS

FERGUSON, Mo. — The police in Ferguson broke their weeklong silence on Friday and identified the officer involved in the fatal shooting of an unarmed African-American teenager. At the same time, they released videotape and photographs to show that the young man, Michael Brown, was suspected of taking part in a robbery at a convenience store shortly before the shooting.

The manner in which Ferguson officials released the information, which included a police report on the robbery but no new details about the fatal shooting last week, set off renewed anger among residents. Gov. Jay Nixon and Captain Ronald S. Johnson of the Missouri Highway Patrol, an African-American who is heading the security efforts in Ferguson, tried to defuse their frustration and to address broader concerns about the lack of racial diversity among police forces in the area and problems in local schools.

After a peaceful night on Thursday, which had followed several nights of violent confrontations, concerns grew on Friday that the release of information about the robbery would stoke more disorder.

Pleading for calm, Captain Johnson said, “In our anger, we have to make sure that we don’t burn down our own house.” He added, “That does not prove a point.” Captain Johnson said he had not been told how the authorities planned to release the information. “I would have liked to have been consulted,” he said.

Earlier Friday, Ferguson’s police chief, Thomas Jackson, identified the officer who fatally shot Mr. Brown, 18, as Darren Wilson, a six-year veteran of the department who had no disciplinary actions taken against him. Chief Jackson did not disclose any other information about the officer. He has been placed on administrative leave.

Greg Kloeppel, a lawyer for the union representing the Ferguson police, said Officer Wilson had received an “extraordinary effort in the line of duty” award in February, but it was not immediately clear what that case involved.

Chief Jackson said that Officer Wilson had been alerted to the robbery on Saturday shortly before the encounter with Mr. Brown, who was walking home from a store when he was shot.

The Ferguson police released security camera videotape after the news conference that showed a confrontation inside the store about 15 minutes before Saturday’s shooting. The images show a man, identified by the police as Mr. Brown, who appears to be pushing a store clerk.

The police said that Mr. Brown, who was in the store with a friend, had stolen a box of Swisher Sweets cigars. When confronted by the clerk, Mr. Brown “forcefully pushed him back into a display rack” before leaving, the police report said.

Benjamin L. Crump, a lawyer for the Brown family, said that “Nothing, based on the facts before us, justifies the execution-style murder by this police officer in broad daylight."​

Mr. Crump said that he and the Brown family were “flabbergasted” that the police would release security camera photos, which police say show Mr. Brown, but none of Officer Wilson. ​

“The police are playing games here and the parents are beyond incensed with the way that the police are handling the distribution of information,” Mr. Crump said. “The police are not being transparent and they are strategically trying to justify this execution-style murder."​

Mr. Brown’s death had ignited several days of protests that have been quashed by police officers shooting rubber bullets and tear gas at groups of demonstrators.

Earlier, Chief Jackson said the authorities had agreed that Friday was an appropriate time to identify the officer.

“A lot of the stakeholders had a big meeting conversation yesterday, and then yesterday evening,” Chief Jackson told a St. Louis television station, “and we made the determination that today is the day.”

“Nothing specific went into that decision, but we feel that there’s a certain calm. There’s a huge outcry from the community,” he said, as well as a number of legal requests for the information.

The initial refusal of Chief Jackson to reveal the officer’s name had galvanized demonstrators and prompted civil rights groups to go to court to force its release. Chief Jackson had said that his unwillingness to disclose the name had been based on safety concerns after death threats against the officer and his family were posted on social media.

On Thursday, Governor Nixon ordered the Missouri Highway Patrol to take control of security and crowd control in Ferguson, replacing the St. Louis County Police Department, which has been criticized for its heavy-handed tactics against protesters. Wednesday night’s protests ended with the police firing tear gas and rubber bullets into the crowd.

The difference in tactics and tone was apparent Thursday night. The armored vehicles and police cars were gone, and the atmosphere was celebratory. A street barricaded on previous nights was filled with slow-moving cars blasting their horns. There were few signs of police officers, let alone a forceful response.

Clashes between the heavily armed police officers and furious protesters in Ferguson have defined the aftermath of Mr. Brown’s death on Saturday, and the latest moves came as federal and state officials scrambled to quell the growing crisis. Alarm had been rising across the country at images of a mostly white police force, in a predominantly African-American community, aiming military-style weapons at protesters.
 

Serge Kovaleski contributed reporting from New York.

    Ferguson Police Identify Darren Wilson as Officer in Fatal Shooting
    and Link Teenager to Robbery, NYT, 15.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/16/us/
    darren-wilson-identified-as-officer-in-fatal-shooting-in-ferguson-missouri.html

Hackers’ Efforts to Identify Officer

Create Turmoil

Ferguson Case
Roils Collective Called Anonymous

AUG. 14, 2014

The New York Times

By NICOLE PERLROTH

They urged the citizens of Ferguson, Mo., to confront the police in the streets. They caused the city’s web servers to crash, forcing officials to communicate by text. They posted the names and address of the county police chief’s family. And then on Thursday they released what they said was the name of the police officer who killed Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old black man, on Saturday.

Members of Anonymous — the shadowy, snide international collective of hackers and online activists — have played a key role in the growing confrontation outside St. Louis over Mr. Brown’s death, goading and threatening the authorities, and calling the effort Operation Ferguson.

Operations in the collective’s decade-long history have included taking down the World Cup website to protest poverty, helping identify assailants in a rape case in Ohio, cheering on the Occupy Wall Street movement and carrying out coordinated cyberassaults on repressive foreign governments. But this one ran into trouble faster than most.

The St. Louis police said on Twitter that the name given out was wrong, and that the man was not even a police officer. Within Anonymous there was an unusual amount of dissent. In interviews, in private chat channels and on Twitter, members accused those who had initially posted details of producing faulty information and putting one another in harm’s way by openly chatting about their methods online.

On Thursday, Twitter suspended @TheAnonMessage, the account that had posted the dubious information about the officer, although Twitter officials declined to say why. Those behind the account said in an email that they would post information from a backup account, @TheAnonMessage2, while other Twitter accounts affiliated with Anonymous tried to distance themselves from the post.

“But for the record, one last time. Operation Ferguson has NOT, repeat NOT released the name of Mike Brown’s killer, nor have we claimed to,” the individual behind the Operation Ferguson account said on Twitter.

Gabriella Coleman, an anthropologist who studies Anonymous and teaches at McGill University in Montreal, said she was taken aback that members of Anonymous would be so quick to release unverified information, and would speak so openly about their methods in online chat channels.

“My jaw was dropping,” Ms. Coleman said, reading members’ communications. “I was surprised because what I was seeing was suggestive but not definitive. Anonymous tends to care about its image quite a bit, and if they were wrong, it would be really bad.”

In private chat channels early Thursday, she said, members argued about the release of a photo of a man who resembled one of the officers at the scene of Mr. Brown’s shooting.

Some of it was reminiscent of past Anonymous campaigns, such as that prompted by a rape case in Steubenville, Ohio, and another three years ago in Manhattan, when hackers identified a high-ranking police officer who pepper-sprayed Occupy Wall Street protesters.

In the Ferguson case, many were drawn to the Anonymous campaign after Tef Poe, a St. Louis rapper, began posting live video and news updates to his Twitter, Vine and Instagram feeds this week. By Monday, the Operation Ferguson Twitter account had been set up, and prominent members of Anonymous had joined the effort.

Members assert that the organization is not a group but a loose collective working to advance similar ideals — but sometimes contradictory ones. While Anonymous espouses privacy, its members also use the release of others’ personal information as a tactic in cases where they believe the authorities are not acting in the public interest, or the news media has not released pertinent information. Members are quick to condemn any individual who claims to speak for the entire collective, and dissent and infighting are common.

Members also sought to explain the internal bickering and uncoordinated communications.

“For those new to Anonymous, it’s a global collective of millions of autonomous individuals and groups,” an Operation Ferguson post on Twitter said. “Each is responsible for themselves only.”

Since a prominent Anonymous hacker, Hector Xavier Monsegur, became a federal informant more than two years ago, members of the collective have taken great pains to use Internet security and anonymity software tools.

Some members were desperate in their pleas this week that the man’s photo not be released until more definitive information had been gathered. Ultimately, some members held a vote and decided to release the photo.

But within hours, many had backtracked. Some openly said the “dox” — a hacking term for the release of an individual’s personal information — had been wrong. “The original dox were faulty, it happens, an excess of zeal,” one Anonymous member said in a direct message on Twitter.

The infighting seemed to have taken its toll. Those behind the @TheAnonMessage2 account, who were behind the initial disclosures, had grown considerably more circumspect.

“ANNOUNCEMENT: We are ceasing any future dox releases until further notice,” they posted on Twitter.
 

A version of this article appears in print on August 15, 2014,
on page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: Hackers’ Efforts to Identify Officer Create Turmoil.

    Hackers’ Efforts to Identify Officer Create Turmoil, NYT, 14.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/15/us/
    ferguson-case-roils-collective-called-anonymous.html

Ferguson Images Evoke Civil Rights Era

and Changing Visual Perceptions

 

AUG. 14, 2014

The New York Times

By RANDY KENNED

and JENNIFER SCHUESSLER

Danny Lyon, one of the photographers whose work came to define the civil rights upheaval in the South in the 1960s, said he was struck on Thursday when he saw a news image from the racially torn suburb of Ferguson, Mo., showing four police officers arrayed in a phalanx.

In part, it was because Mr. Lyon had taken a picture in 1963 in Birmingham, Ala., that looked very much like it: four officers standing in front of a police car with rifles and helmets, in a city where highly publicized clashes between protesters and the police helped turn the tide of public opinion toward the civil rights movement. But the image from Ferguson, for all its formal similarities, could not have been more different. Today’s riot police officers were wearing military-style camouflage and carrying military-style rifles, their heads and faces obscured by black helmets and gas masks as they stood in front of an armored vehicle.

“It didn’t look like America. It looked like Soweto,” Mr. Lyon said, referring to the South African township that was a hotbed of protests against apartheid. “It looked like soldiers. And soldiers’ job isn’t to protect. Their job is to kill people and to be ready to die.”

The photographs that have emerged during several days of unrest in Ferguson after the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a police officer have drawn mournful comparisons to pictures of the Deep South in the 1960s or of more recent racial unrest, like the 1992 Los Angeles riots. But they have also prompted a flood of commentary about the differences half a century has made in the visual economy.

They have raised questions about whether photos have the same power now to sway public opinion and political will; about the increasingly sophisticated ways an image-saturated public reads a picture’s racial and political subtext; and about the rapid transformation of the protests, even more so than the Los Angeles riots or the Occupy movement, into a war of images. The war pits what appears to be a large-scale paramilitary police presence against crowds of African-American protesters walking with their hands raised in surrender — or people throwing things and looting.

The Philadelphia Daily News was a case in point in the speed with which 21st-century image parsing can occur. In the wee hours of Thursday morning — in response to readers’ comments on Twitter about a photo the newspaper had planned to run on its front page, showing an African-American protester in Ferguson about to hurl what looked like a firebomb — editors changed their minds and instead used a photograph of an African-American woman standing in front of police officers, holding a sign urging answers in the death of the teenager, Michael Brown.

An assistant city editor wrote on Twitter to those objecting to the first picture that they would be able to understand the whole story, in a “sympathetic treatment,” if they opened the paper. But a reader responded, “Yes, in ten-point font I can see the fine print, which is completely overwhelmed by the picture.”

In the civil rights era, the visual stamp of the movement was determined by newspapers and the nightly news. Today, the imagery one sees depends on the filters one uses. One person’s Twitter feed may be full of footage of police firing tear gas or of peaceful protesters with their hands up. But David J. Garrow, a historian at the University of Pittsburgh’s law school and the author of several books on the civil rights movement, noted that when he searched for images of Ferguson on Google, roughly half showed what appeared to be looting.

Such images look “more like Watts in 1965 or Newark in 1967, not Birmingham in 1963 or Selma in 1965,” Dr. Garrow said. And historically, he said, such photos were “deadly when it came to white public opinion.”

In Ferguson, the police seem to be just as worried about the dominance of certain imagery. The city’s police chief, Thomas Jackson, said during a news conference Thursday that officials were meeting “to talk about not only the tactics but the appearance” of the police force, whose resemblance to American soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan has quickly become a social media theme.

Some visual echoes of the 1960s, like the Ferguson police’s use of dogs, may be unintentional. (During the 1963 March on Washington, President John F. Kennedy forbade the use of dogs for crowd control, knowing how badly it would play.) But on the protesters’ side, there have been deliberate efforts to evoke the nonviolent protests of the civil rights era, like T-shirts with the slogan “I Am a Man,” borrowed from signs carried during the 1968 Memphis sanitation strike.

Diane McWhorter, the author of “Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution,” said she also saw echoes of those signs in the protesters’ hands-up gesture, an instantly recognizable cue that seems to be both born of the quick-read Internet news cycle and able to shape it.

“In one case, it’s a kind of mass witness of personhood,” Ms. McWhorter said of the “I Am a Man” signs, “and in the other case, a mass witness of innocence. Those images are very powerful.”

Some historians see dangers in those visual echoes. Martin A. Berger, a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author of “Seeing Through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography,” said that while images of a protester throwing a firebomb or of the police spraying tear gas may start conversations, the historical associations can also distort public understanding.

“We can look at these pictures and say that Ferguson is the same as Los Angeles or Birmingham, because it looks the same,” Dr. Berger said. “But we have to ask not just, ‘What is the same?’ but also, ‘What are the ways in which America has changed?’ To just have another conversation that stops at the level of police brutality doesn’t really get us very far.”

A version of this article appears in print on August 15, 2014,
on page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: Ferguson Images Evoke Civil Rights Era and Changing Visual Perceptions.

    Ferguson Images Evoke Civil Rights Era and Changing Visual Perceptions,
    NYT, 14.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/15/us/
    ferguson-images-evoke-civil-rights-era-and-changing-visual-perceptions.html

For Missouri Governor,

Test at an Uneasy Time

 

AUG. 14, 2014

The New York Times

By ALAN BLINDER

and JOHN ELIGON

BELLERIVE, Mo. — When Gov. Jay Nixon of Missouri stepped to the lectern at a university here on Thursday afternoon, he confronted one of the toughest challenges of his political career: the police killing of an unarmed black teenager in suburban St. Louis and the violent unrest that followed.

As he announced that he had ordered the State Highway Patrol to take over command of the police in the troubled city of Ferguson, he was by turns defensive and resolute, sentimental and personal.

He pushed away broad questions about healing by saying, “We’re a little focused right now on operational specifics.” At another point, when asked about his relationship with the black community, he spoke of the relationships he had with “so many of my friends over so many years” and went on to say, “I don’t think this is a time to divide.”

Mr. Nixon, 58, has had a successful political career by most measures. He is finishing his second and final term as a Democrat in a solidly Republican state. But when he first ran for national office, seeking a Senate seat in 1988, he was trounced by the incumbent Republican, Senator John C. Danforth. Mr. Nixon rebounded, serving for years in the State Senate, then as attorney general, and winning the race for governor in 2008.

As governor, he has constantly sought a middle ground, sometimes vetoing tax cuts and abortion restrictions from the Republican-led legislature, sometimes allowing certain abortion restrictions to go into effect.

But there has been a history of strain between Mr. Nixon and the black community that dates to the 1990s, when he was attorney general. He fought to end a school desegregation program that bused children from St. Louis schools to surrounding communities with better districts. The program, which was the result of the settlement of a court case, continues to this day.

Even on Thursday, as he was joined by black public officials during the nearly 40-minute news conference, and even though he appeared with black clergy members earlier in the day, some black leaders in Missouri criticized him as being insensitive to their community.

“I truly believe,” said State Senator Jamilah Nasheed, a former leader of the Legislative Black Caucus, “the governor hasn’t been in touch with the black community like he should.”

Mr. Nixon has been criticized as being slow to respond to the shooting and unrest in Ferguson, where the police are still investigating the death of Michael Brown, 18, on Saturday. Mr. Nixon did issue a statement calling for a federal investigation into the shooting two days after it happened. And he did appear this week at a St. Louis County church.

On Thursday, he took his boldest steps yet, canceling an appearance at the Missouri State Fair to come here to announce changes in the police command in Ferguson. Under St. Louis County police supervision, chaos had broken out in Ferguson over several nights, with officers firing rubber bullets and unleashing tear gas on protesters.
Continue reading the main story

Still, some have seen Mr. Nixon’s actions as too little, too late.

“I think his historical lack of authentic connections and engagement with the black community is apparent in this situation by what I consider to be a tardy response to what is happening in Ferguson,” said Gwendolyn Grant, the president and chief executive of the Urban League of Greater Kansas City.

Critics say the governor has a habit of responding to pressing issues for black residents only after he faces great public pressure.

Mr. Nixon said during the news conference that he refused to inject race into the situation.

Over the past year, members of the state’s Legislative Black Caucus have openly feuded with the governor over policy proposals that they said would have deprived the needy of food stamps and taken away housing tax credits for low-income Missourians. Leaders in Kansas City were frustrated when he did not meet with them recently to discuss the city’s struggles with a school district that lost its accreditation a couple of years ago.

Mr. Nixon met with members of the Legislative Black Caucus in January, but they said it had taken a year for them to get him to come to the table.

Before that meeting, Ms. Nasheed, a Democrat, who led the caucus at the time, held a news conference with the lieutenant governor, Peter Kinder, a Republican, to denounce the governor’s threat to eliminate the low-income housing tax credit. When Mr. Nixon walked into the meeting, Ms. Nasheed recalled, “the first thing he said was, ‘I don’t like the fact that the chair of this caucus stood alongside a Republican attacking me.’ ”

Mr. Nixon also has been criticized for the lack of diversity in his administration. In his sixth year in office, the governor has appointed one African-American to direct an executive department. This in a state whose two major cities, Kansas City and St. Louis, have large black populations.

But a spokesman for the governor noted that he had received strong support from black residents for efforts like his push to expand Medicaid and a veto of legislation that would have eliminated important provisions from the Missouri Human Rights Act. The governor has also appointed blacks to state boards and commissions, as well as the state’s Supreme Court, Court of Appeals and Board of Education.

“It appears to me that he’s working more closely with the African-American community, putting African-Americans in key positions in state government and supporting issues that are important to us,” said Harold Crumpton, a former president of the St. Louis N.A.A.C.P., who now leads a community development organization in the city.

Alan Blinder reported from Bellerive, Mo., and John Eligon from Kansas City, Mo.

A version of this article appears in print on August 15, 2014,
on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline:
For Missouri Governor, Test at an Uneasy Time.

    For Missouri Governor, Test at an Uneasy Time, NYT, 14.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/15/us/politics/
    for-gov-jay-nixon-of-missouri-test-at-an-uneasy-time.html

Missouri Unrest

Leaves the Right Torn Over Views

on Law vs. Order

 

AUG. 14, 2014

The New York Times

By JEREMY W. PETERS

WASHINGTON — When the police bring the hammer down, whether on Occupy Wall Street in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park in 2011 or outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, the response from conservatives tend to be fairly consistent: The protesters got what they had coming.

But demonstrations this week over the shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager, by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., and the overwhelming law enforcement response that followed have stirred more complicated reactions, with many on the right torn between an impulse to see order restored and concern about whether the crackdown is a symptom of a state run amok.

With broadcasts from Ferguson showing the streets engulfed in smoke as officers looked on wearing military fatigues and carrying high-powered rifles, some prominent conservative commentators and leading Republican politicians began questioning whether the police had gone too far.

These reactions point to a larger debate inside the conservative movement today as Republicans struggle with how enthusiastically to embrace an ascendant strain of libertarianism within their ranks. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, a likely candidate for president in 2016, starkly laid out one side of the argument in an op-ed published on Time.com on Thursday.

“There should be a difference between a police response and a military response,” he wrote. “The images and scenes we continue to see in Ferguson resemble war more than traditional police action.”

Other conservatives have focused on instances in which chaos has broken out in the streets. Images and headlines on The Drudge Report and Breitbart.com have singled out acts of violence among demonstrators and shown looters breaking store windows.

In one segment broadcast on Fox News on Thursday, a reporter walked down the street with demonstrators who he said were members of the New Black Panther Party, a radical group.

Since Richard M. Nixon made cracking down on crime a central issue of his 1968 presidential campaign, Republicans have held themselves up as the alternative to a Democratic Party they have derided as soft on issues of law and order. But an appetite for changes in the criminal justice system has been building among Republicans, many of whom believe the tough-justice approach has run its course.

Mr. Paul, Senator Rob Portman of Ohio and Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin are among those who say that the federal and state governments need to rethink the way convicts are sentenced and imprisoned, arguing that the current system is inhumane and too costly.

Mr. Paul’s remarks on Thursday were similar to those of other leading conservatives who have weighed in on the events in Ferguson.

“Reporters should never be detained — a free press is too important — simply for doing their jobs,” Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, wrote on his Facebook page on Thursday, reacting to news that journalists from The Washington Post and The Huffington Post had been held by the police. “Civil liberties must be protected, but violence is not the answer.”

Many conservatives were unsettled by the militaristic response from law enforcement officials in Ferguson — a show of force that they said dangerously resembled the actions a police state would take.

Mr. Paul, quoting from research by the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute and the conservative Heritage Foundation, noted the trend of police departments’ buying military-style vehicles and weapons, condemning “the cartoonish imbalance between the equipment some police departments possess and the constituents they serve.”

“When you couple this militarization of law enforcement,” he added, “with an erosion of civil liberties and due process that allows the police to become judge and jury — national security letters, no-knock searches, broad general warrants, preconviction forfeiture — we begin to have a very serious problem on our hands.”

But that attitude was not universally shared. In much of the conservative news media, the protesters in Ferguson are being portrayed as “outside agitators,” in the words of Sean Hannity, the Fox News host.

Mr. Erickson said, “The natural reaction of conservatives, I think, has always been in defense of law and order.”

But lately, he added, there has been an awakening among many on the right. Many see an increasingly disproportionate response to crime as a sign of a larger problem that should rattle the consciences of conservatives who are wary of centralized authority, he said.

“As more and more people become aware of how overcriminalized the law and regulatory system of the United States is, they become aware of just how easily it is for them to be carted off to jail for innocuous behavior,” Mr. Erickson said. “That necessarily increases distrust of the system over all.”

Another question raised by the unrest in Ferguson — one that poses far more discomfort for Republicans — is how race plays into unequal treatment under the justice system.

On this delicate issue, Mr. Paul went a step further than many other conservatives this week. With a system so broken, he wrote, it is no wonder black people in Ferguson feel singled out.

He added a personal aside. “If I had been told to get out of the street as a teenager, there would have been a distinct possibility that I might have smarted off,” Mr. Paul wrote. “But I wouldn’t have expected to be shot.”
 

A version of this article appears in print on August 15, 2014,
on page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: Missouri Unrest Leaves the Right Torn Over Views
on Law vs. Order.

    Missouri Unrest Leaves the Right Torn Over Views on Law vs. Order,
    NYT, 14.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/15/us/politics/
    seeing-missouri-unrest-views-begin-to-shift-among-conservatives.html

The Search for Calm in Missouri

Abusive Police Tactics in Ferguson
Will Only Delay Justice

 

AUG. 14, 2014

The New York Times

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Higher authorities wisely stepped into the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Mo., on Thursday after a night that startled the nation with images of police overkill: flash grenades, rubber bullets and huge clouds of tear gas fired at demonstrators protesting the police shooting Saturday of an unarmed black teenager.

Gov. Jay Nixon — after keeping a low profile for too long — made an urgent tour of the town and replaced local police officers with the Missouri State Highway Patrol. He gave the Highway Patrol an order that should have been given over the weekend: Let protesters who are angry about the shooting protest peacefully, without aggressive demands to disperse, as is their constitutional right.

It’s time to make sure, he said, “that we allow peaceful and appropriate protests, that we use force only when necessary, that we step back a little bit and let some of the energy be felt in this region appropriately.”

Earlier in the day, President Obama denounced tactics of “excessive force” by the police and the “bullying” and arrest of journalists trying to cover the news. He said the federal investigation into the incident, which began earlier this week, must determine exactly what happened to Michael Brown, the 18-year-old shooting victim.

Local authorities, including the police, have “a responsibility to be open and transparent about how they are investigating that death and how they are protecting the people in their communities,” Mr. Obama said, noting the “violent turn” in street confrontations that have been seen on screens around the world.

The two executives conferred and acted after anger and frustration in the streets had descended into widespread looting by some protesters earlier in the week, countered by aggressive street policing by officers outfitted in war gear who too often veered toward provocation more than protection. “The police response has become part of the problem,” Senator Claire McCaskill told residents during a visit, saying authorities had to “demilitarize” the force, which has aimed sniper rifles at innocent protesters and sent tear gas into people’s backyards.

Chief among the transparency issues for protesters has been local authorities’ adamant and inexcusable refusal to identify the police officer who shot Mr. Brown, saying the officer faced death threats. Residents have a right to know whether the officer has a record of reckless behavior, and whether the officer lives in the community among the residents being patrolled, or in a very different neighborhood.

Other communities across the nation have safely demonstrated greater openness in similarly tense situations by eventually identifying and protecting an officer as a matter of the public’s right to know. This should be the course taken in Ferguson if citizens are not to be further outraged at embattled authorities’ stonewalling. “When we get answers, things will calm down,” one resident told The Times’s Julie Bosman.

Mr. Nixon said Ferguson would become known “as a community that pulled together to overcome” violence. But first local politicians and law enforcement leaders will have to talk to residents to understand the deep vein of mistrust that has grown over the decades.

Restoring a sense of justice will not be an easy task in the town of 21,000, which is 69 percent black yet remains under white government leadership. While authorities have the right to respond forcefully to looting and violent rioting, the unyielding use of military tactics and abusive behavior have widened that rift. Once the tear gas has dissipated, Mr. Nixon and Mr. Obama have an obligation to ensure that a real dialogue begins in Ferguson and other racially segregated areas, in hopes of keeping armored vehicles off the streets of America.

A version of this editorial appears in print on August 15, 2014, on page A22 of the New York edition with the headline:
The Search for Calm in Missouri.

    The Search for Calm in Missouri, NYT, 14.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/15/opinion/
    abusive-police-tactics-in-ferguson-will-only-delay-justice.html

In Wake of Clashes,

Calls to Demilitarize Police

 

AUG. 14, 2014

The New York Times

By JULIE BOSMAN

and MATT APUZZO

FERGUSON, Mo. — For four nights in a row, they streamed onto West Florissant Avenue wearing camouflage, black helmets and vests with “POLICE” stamped on the back. They carried objects that doubled as warnings: assault rifles and ammunition, slender black nightsticks and gas masks.

They were not just one police force but many, hailing from communities throughout north St. Louis County and loosely coordinated by the county police.

Their adversaries were a ragtag group of mostly unarmed neighborhood residents, hundreds of African-Americans whose pent-up fury at the police had sent them pouring onto streets and sidewalks in Ferguson, demanding justice for Michael Brown, the 18-year-old who was fatally shot by a police officer on Saturday.

When the protesters refused to retreat from the streets, threw firebombs or walked too close to a police officer, the response was swift and unrelenting: tear gas and rubber bullets.

To the rest of the world, the images of explosions, billowing tear gas and armored vehicles made this city look as if it belonged in a chaos-stricken corner of Eastern Europe, not the heart of the American Midwest. As a result, a broad call came from across the political spectrum for America’s police forces to be demilitarized, and Gov. Jay Nixon installed a new overall commander in Ferguson.

Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was shot and killed Saturday by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo. The Times examines the demographics of the town and its police force, as well as crime rates.

“At a time when we must seek to rebuild trust between law enforcement and the local community,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said, “I am deeply concerned that the deployment of military equipment and vehicles sends a conflicting message.”

Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, and Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, voiced similar sentiments.

But such opposition amounts to a sharp change in tone in Washington, where the federal government has spent more than a decade paying for body armor, mine-resistant trucks and other military gear, all while putting few restrictions on its use. Grant programs that, in the name of fighting terrorism, paid for some of the equipment being used in Ferguson have been consistently popular since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. If there has been any debate at all, it was over which departments deserved the most money.

Department of Homeland Security grant money paid for the $360,000 Bearcat armored truck on patrol in Ferguson, said Nick Gragnani, executive director of St. Louis Area Regional Response System, which administers such grants for the St. Louis area.

Since 2003, the group has spent $9.4 million on equipment for the police in St. Louis County. That includes $3.6 million for two helicopters, plus the Bearcat, other vehicles and night vision equipment. Most of the body armor worn by officers responding to the Ferguson protests was paid for with federal money, Mr. Gragnani said.

“The focus is terrorism, but it’s allowed to do a crossover for other types of responses,” he said. “It’s for any type of civil unrest. We went by the grant guidance. There was no restriction put on that by the federal government.”

While the major Homeland Security grants do not pay for weapons, Justice Department grants do. That includes rubber bullets and tear gas, which the police use to disperse crowds. A Justice Department report last year said nearly 400 local police departments and more than 100 state agencies had bought such less-lethal weapons using Justice Department grant money.

The grants also paid for body armor, vehicles and surveillance equipment. It was not immediately clear if those grants had paid for equipment being used in Ferguson.

The military also sent machine guns, armored trucks, aircraft and other surplus war equipment to local departments. Compared with other urban areas, however, St. Louis County has received little surplus military equipment.

All these programs began or were expanded in response to the Sept. 11 attacks, when the authorities in Washington declared that local police departments were on the front lines of a global war on terrorism. Terrorism is exceedingly rare, however, and the equipment and money far outpaced the threat.

“You couldn’t say that back then with as much certainty as you can say that now, though,” said Frank J. Cilluffo, director of the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University. After Sept. 11, few people asked whether the police would use the equipment against protesters, Mr. Cilluffo said. “By and large, I don’t recall an outcry of any sort historically along these lines.”

In most instances, the government did not require training for police departments receiving military-style equipment and few if any limitations were put on its use, he said.

The increase in military-style equipment has coincided with a significant rise in the number of police SWAT teams, which are increasingly being used for routine duties such as conducting liquor inspections and serving warrants.

For years, much of the equipment has gone unnoticed. But as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have drawn down, police departments have been receiving 30-ton, mine-resistant trucks from the military. That has caught the attention of the public and caused controversy in several towns.

Nowhere has the deployment of military-style equipment been on starker display than this week in Ferguson.

The center of the protests is West Florissant Avenue, a run-down commercial strip that runs north-south. On it stands a nail salon, a barbecue restaurant and the burned-out remnants of a QuikTrip convenience store that looters targeted on Sunday night.

Late each afternoon, hundreds of people have trickled onto West Florissant, milling around on sidewalks and holding signs at television cameras.

As more protesters gathered, the police followed in greater numbers. They set up barricades of traffic cones so that cars could not enter. Protesters, usually young black men, have approached the police with their hands up in the air, a gesture that has become a taunt. (A witness to the shooting on Saturday said Mr. Brown had his hands up when he was shot.)

For three nights, the police made the same tactical move: When they determined that the protest was no longer peaceful, they used tear gas to force protesters off West Florissant and into the two residential neighborhoods on either side of it.

Once the protesters had been pushed onto side streets of small, one-story houses and low-slung apartment buildings, some of them said, they were effectively trapped on the wrong side of Florissant.

“Disperse! Go back to your homes!” the police shouted, often from the top of armored vehicles, through megaphones whose orders echoed throughout the streets.

Keonta Finch, 21, waited hours for the police to open the barricade on Monday. “There’s no way out,” she said. “I can’t get home. I was just here to be peaceful, and now I’m stuck.”

Ms. Finch echoed a common complaint from protesters: The police seemed unable to differentiate between people in the crowds who were causing trouble and those who were not.

A woman who was identified as a pastor tried to calm some unruly members of the crowd on Wednesday; later that night, she was shot in the abdomen with a rubber bullet.

“Peaceful protesters are being conflated with rioters and looters,” said Christopher Leonard, who joined a group of quiet protesters on Wednesday evening.

Journalists have also been caught up by the police use of weapons. On Monday night, the police aimed directly at a group of photographers and a reporter as they covered the growing protest. One photographer was hit with a rubber bullet. A police officer on Wednesday tossed a tear-gas canister directly at a television crew for Al Jazeera.

On Wednesday night, in the neighborhood on the east side of Florissant, several dozen people were drawn to the site where Mr. Brown was shot, on a gently looping street called Canfield Court. They stood in small groups and shared stories of harassment by the police; some people sat on their front stoops and smoked marijuana.

Suddenly, just after 10 p.m., explosions boomed from what sounded like a few blocks away, stopping conversations cold.

“Firecrackers,” one woman said, staring in the direction of Florissant. “No, no, gunshots,” a man said, telling everyone to drop to the ground.

In a few minutes, it was clear what had happened: Tear gas was drifting into the neighborhood, enveloping houses, cars and people, who ran for cover in cars and houses, coughing and gasping as their eyes stung and vision blurred.

Police officials have said that they felt they had no choice but to use tear gas and rubber bullets. They could not allow looting to happen again, they said, and dispersing the crowds was the only way to stop it.

Chief Thomas Jackson of the Ferguson police defended the use of force against demonstrators during the past five days and said heavily armed officers with military-style equipment would continue to be deployed if the authorities determined that circumstances warranted it.

The tactical units will be out there if firebombs are being thrown at officers or if demonstrators are otherwise behaving violently, Chief Jackson said.

“If the crowd is being violent,” he said, “and you don’t want to be violent, get out of the crowd.”

Correction: August 14, 2014

An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misstated when the photo was taken and credited the wrong photographer. The image of the police formation was from Wednesday, not Tuesday, and the photo was taken by Mario Anzuoni, not Whitney Curtis.

Julie Bosman reported from Ferguson, and Matt Apuzzo from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on August 15, 2014,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
In Wake of Clashes, Calls to Demilitarize Police.

    In Wake of Clashes, Calls to Demilitarize Police, NYT, 14.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/15/us/
    ferguson-missouri-in-wake-of-clashes-calls-to-demilitarize-police.html

New Tack on Unrest

Eases Tension in Missouri

 

AUG. 14, 2014

The New York Times

By JOHN SCHWARTZ,

MICHAEL D. SHEAR

and MICHAEL PAULSON

FERGUSON, Mo. — President Obama on Thursday called for an end to the violence here, denouncing actions both by the police and by protesters. Hours later, the Missouri governor, Jay Nixon, ordered the state highway patrol to take over security operations from local law enforcement.

Clashes between heavily armed police officers and furious protesters in Ferguson have defined the aftermath of an officer’s fatal shooting of an unarmed teenager on Saturday, and the latest moves came as federal and state officials scrambled to quell the growing crisis. Alarm had been rising across the country at images of a mostly white police force, in a predominantly African-American community, aiming military-style weapons at protesters and firing tear gas and rubber bullets.

Capt. Ronald S. Johnson, the highway patrol official appointed by the governor to take over the response, immediately signaled a change in approach. Captain Johnson told reporters he had ordered troopers to remove their tear-gas masks, and in the early evening he accompanied several groups of protesters through the streets, clasping hands, listening to stories and marching alongside them.

On Thursday night, the armored vehicles and police cars were gone, and the atmosphere was celebratory. A street barricaded on previous nights was filled with slow-moving cars blasting their horns. A man played a drum across the street from a convenience store that was looted this week. And there were few signs of police officers, let alone a forceful response.

Kimaly Diouf, co-owner of Rehoboth Pharmacy, said the reason for the difference was simple: “Because they’re not tear gassing us tonight.”

Captain Johnson, who is African-American and grew up in the area, said: “We’re just starting today anew. We’re starting a new partnership today. We’re going to move forward today, to put yesterday and the day before behind us.”

Criticism of the police response, already heavy because officials have refused to name the officer involved in the shooting, intensified after two journalists were arrested Wednesday while recharging their phones and working on their articles at a local McDonald’s.

Governor Nixon, appearing defensive at times at a briefing in St. Louis County on Thursday afternoon, did not criticize the local police but said of Ferguson, “Lately, it’s looked a little bit more like a war zone, and that’s not acceptable.” He said he had met with residents and listened to their concerns, and said of Michael Brown, the 18-year-old killed by the police in disputed circumstances on Saturday, that “a young man, a man not much younger than my own sons, lost his life.”

Mr. Nixon, a Democrat, who was state attorney general before being elected governor in 2008, did not describe specific changes to police practices, uniforms or equipment, but said it was time for a “different tone” that balanced the need to prevent looting with the right of residents to assemble and demonstrate.

President Obama, speaking to reporters at a hastily arranged news conference on Martha’s Vineyard, where he is vacationing, denounced attacks both on the police and on protesters, and pleaded for “peace and calm on the streets of Ferguson.” He said he had spoken to Mr. Nixon and confirmed that he had instructed the Justice Department and the F.B.I. to investigate the fatal shooting, “to help determine exactly what happened and to see that justice is done.”

The president asked for peace on the streets of Ferguson, Mo., after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by the police.
Video Credit By Reuters on Publish Date August 14, 2014. Image CreditSteven Senne/Associated Press

The local police continued to face criticism for their refusal to identify the officer who shot Mr. Brown. On Thursday, a group identifying itself as Anonymous, the computer hacking collective, disclosed what it said was the name, but the St. Louis County police said it was wrong.

Mr. Obama said that local officials had “a responsibility to be open and transparent about how they are investigating that death.” And he said the Justice Department was consulting with the local officials about appropriate responses to the protests.

“There is never an excuse for violence against police or for those who would use this tragedy as a cover for vandalism or looting,” he said. “There’s also no excuse for police to use excessive force against peaceful protests or to throw protesters in jail for lawfully exercising their First Amendment rights.”

Mr. Obama also criticized the detentions of reporters, saying, “Here in the United States of America, police should not be bullying or arresting journalists who are just trying to do their jobs and report to the American people on what they see on the ground.”

To many, though, the president seemed less emotional and personal than he had been two years ago, when he called for “soul searching” after the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, a young black man in Florida. “You know, if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” he said then.

Multiple national officials criticized the decision of the police in Ferguson to use military-style garb and equipment to respond to the protests. “At a time when we must seek to rebuild trust between law enforcement and the local community, I am deeply concerned that the deployment of military equipment and vehicles sends a conflicting message,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in a statement. Later on Thursday, Mr. Holder called Mr. Brown’s parents and promised a full, independent investigation, according to a Justice Department official.

Across the political spectrum, officials seemed to agree. “The militarization of the response became more of the problem than any solution,” Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, told reporters in Ferguson. Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat who has become a favorite of the American left, said on Twitter, “This is America, not a war zone.” And Senator Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican with libertarian leanings and presidential aspirations, wrote an essay for Time in which he called the militarization of the police “an unprecedented expansion of government power” and said, “The images and scenes we continue to see in Ferguson resemble war more than traditional police action.”
Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story

Elsewhere in the country, rallies were held to demand justice for Mr. Brown and to protest police tactics. In Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and Phoenix, thousands of protesters gathered in public squares with their hands up in gestures of surrender, chanting slogans like, “Hands up, don’t shoot.” In Miami, eight people were arrested.

In Ferguson, officials were unapologetic on Thursday for their tough response to the protesters, which they said had been necessitated by violence and criminality: The police said some protesters had thrown rocks, bottles and even a firebomb at officers. If the situation warrants it, “the tactical units will be out there,” said the Ferguson police chief, Thomas Jackson. “If the crowd is being violent and you don’t want to be violent, get out of the crowd.”

The county executive, Charlie A. Dooley, called on residents to “calm down, stand down and be reasonable.” But the mayor of St. Louis, Francis G. Slay, struck a different tone, describing himself as “sad and angry” and saying: “Justice must happen. The grieving must be comforted. The angry must be heard. The innocent must be protected.”

Local police units were still helping to patrol Ferguson, but under a new command. The changes were obvious.

Captain Johnson, walking through the streets on Thursday, was approached by Karen Wood, who had been clutching a bright green sign against police brutality. “Do you have a minute to at least talk to, you know, a parent?” Ms. Wood asked.

The captain, a veteran law enforcement officer assigned to oversee security here, stopped. As sweat stained his blue uniform, he clasped Ms. Wood’s right hand and stood, for several minutes, listening to her story.

“Our youth are out here without guidance, without leadership,” Ms. Wood told Captain Johnson. “It’s important that they know there is an order.”

When Ms. Wood finished, Captain Johnson patted her right shoulder and said softly: “I thank you. I thank you for your passion, and we’re going to get better.”

He then joined a group of passing protesters, marching with them as his eyes scanned the roadway. “I know a lot of them,” he said. “Our police department, we have to be reflective of our community, and that’s why we’re all out here.”

Jessica Daniel, who was marching with her young children, said she had listened to speeches by Ms. McCaskill and Mr. Nixon and perceived a change. “The whole tone just turned around,” she said. “Now I feel like they are letting us know they think it’s tragic, too. It’s a beautiful thing.”

Outside a restaurant, London’s Wing House, Kristopher Conner said he was upset both by Mr. Brown’s death and by the violence that followed it. He put up a sign saying proceeds from soda purchases would benefit Mr. Brown’s family. And as officials hoped for calm, so did he.

“I just want it to get back to normal,” Mr. Conner said. “Before everything happened, it was peaceful. You’d come to work, and now some people are just kind of worried that something might start up again.”
 

John Schwartz reported from Ferguson; Michael D. Shear from Edgartown, Mass.; and Michael Paulson from New York. Reporting was contributed by Matt Apuzzo from Washington; Alan Blinder from St. Louis and Ferguson; and Timothy Williams, Serge F. Kovaleski and Ashley Southall from New York. Susan Beachy contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on August 15, 2014,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
New Tack on Unrest Eases Tension in Missouri.

    New Tack on Unrest Eases Tension in Missouri, NYT, 14.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/15/us/ferguson-missouri-police-shooting.html

Michael Brown and Black Men

AUG. 13, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist

The killing of Michael Brown has tapped into something bigger than Michael Brown.

Brown was the unarmed 18-year-old black man who was shot to death Saturday by a policeman in Ferguson, Mo. There are conflicting accounts of the events that led to the shooting. There is an investigation by local authorities as well as one by federal authorities. There are grieving parents and a seething community. There are swarms of lawyers and hordes of reporters. There has been unrest. The president has appealed for reflection and healing.

There is an eerie echo in it all — a sense of tragedy too often repeated. And yet the sheer morbid, wrenching rhythm of it belies a larger phenomenon, one obscured by its vastness, one that can be seen only when one steps back and looks from a distance and with data: The criminalization of black and brown bodies — particularly male ones — from the moment they are first introduced to the institutions and power structures with which they must interact.

Earlier this year, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights released “the first comprehensive look at civil rights from every public school in the country in nearly 15 years.” As the report put it: “The 2011-2012 release shows that access to preschool programs is not a reality for much of the country. In addition, students of color are suspended more often than white students, and black and Latino students are significantly more likely to have teachers with less experience who aren’t paid as much as their colleagues in other schools.”

Attorney General Eric Holder, remarking on the data, said: “This critical report shows that racial disparities in school discipline policies are not only well-documented among older students, but actually begin during preschool."

But, of course, this criminalization stalks these children throughout their school careers.

As The New York Times editorial board pointed out last year: “Children as young as 12 have been treated as criminals for shoving matches and even adolescent misconduct like cursing in school. This is worrisome because young people who spend time in adult jails are more likely to have problems with law enforcement later on. Moreover, federal data suggest a pattern of discrimination in the arrests, with black and Hispanic children more likely to be affected than their white peers.”

A 2010 report by the Southern Poverty Law Center found that while the average suspension rate for middle school students in 18 of the nation’s largest school districts was 11.2 percent in 2006, the rate for black male students was 28.3 percent, by far the highest of any subgroup by race, ethnicity or gender. And, according to the report, previous research “has consistently found that racial/ethnic disproportionality in discipline persists even when poverty and other demographic factors are controlled.”

And these disparities can have a severe impact on a child’s likelihood of graduating. According to a report from the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University that looked at Florida students, “Being suspended even once in 9th grade is associated with a two-fold increase in the risk for dropping out.”
Continue reading the main story

Black male dropout rates are more than one and a half times those of white males, and when you look at the percentage of black men who graduate on time — in four years, not including those who possibly go on to get G.E.D.s, transfer to other schools or fail grades — the numbers are truly horrific. Only about half of these black men graduate on time.

Now, the snowball is rolling. The bias of the educational system bleeds easily into the bias of the criminal justice system — from cops to courts to correctional facilities. The school-to-prison pipeline is complete.

A May report by the Brookings Institution found: “There is nearly a 70 percent chance that an African American man without a high school diploma will be imprisoned by his mid-thirties.”

This is in part because trending policing disparities are particularly troubling in places like Missouri. As the editorial board of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch pointed out this week: “Last year, for the 11th time in the 14 years that data has been collected, the disparity index that measures potential racial profiling by law enforcement in the state got worse. Black Missourians were 66 percent more likely in 2013 to be stopped by police, and blacks and Hispanics were both more likely to be searched, even though the likelihood of finding contraband was higher among whites.”

And this is the reality if the child actually survives the journey. That is if he has the internal fortitude to continue to stand with the weight on his shoulders. That is if he doesn’t find himself on the wrong end of a gun barrel. That is if his parents can imbue in him a sense of value while the world endeavors to imbue in him a sense of worthlessness.

Parents can teach children how to interact with authority and how to mitigate the threat response their very being elicits. They can wrap them in love to safeguard them against the bitterness of racial suspicion.

It can be done. It is often done. But it is heartbreaking nonetheless. What psychic damage does it do to the black mind when one must come to own and manage the fear of the black body?

The burden of bias isn’t borne by the person in possession of it but by the person who is the subject of it. The violence is aimed away from the possessor of its instruments — the arrow is pointed away from the killer and at the prey.

It vests victimhood in the idea of personhood. It steals sometimes, something precious and irreplaceable. It breaks something that’s irreparable. It alters something in a way that’s irrevocable.

We flinchingly choose a lesser damage.

But still, the hopelessness takes hold when one realizes that there is no amount of acting right or doing right, no amount of parental wisdom or personal resilience that can completely guarantee survival, let alone success.

Brown had just finished high school and was to start college this week. The investigation will hopefully clarify what led to his killing. But it is clear even now that his killing occurred in a context, one that we would do well to recognize.

Brown’s mother told a local television station after he was killed just weeks after his high school graduation: “Do you know how hard it was for me to get him to stay in school and graduate? You know how many black men graduate? Not many. Because you bring them down to this type of level, where they feel like they don’t got nothing to live for anyway. ‘They’re going to try to take me out anyway.’ ”

    Michael Brown and Black Men, NYT, 13.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/14/opinion/
    charles-blow-michael-brown-and-black-men.html

Amid Protests in Missouri,

Officer’s Name Is Still Withheld

 

AUG. 13, 2014

The New York Times

By JULIE BOSMAN

and ERIK ECKHOLM

FERGUSON, Mo. — In the five days since an unarmed young black man was fatally shot by a police officer here, the selective release of information about the shooting, and especially the anonymity granted to the officer, has stoked frustrations in this largely African-American community north of St. Louis, where residents describe increasingly tense relations with the police.

The police chief, Thomas Jackson, has repeatedly declined to identify the officer, who has been put on administrative leave. But on Wednesday, the chief did offer a new detail about the shooting, which has kindled nights of racial unrest and an unyielding police response with tear gas, rubber bullets and arrests.

Chief Jackson said that the officer who shot Michael Brown, 18, on Saturday was struck in the face during the encounter and treated at a hospital. Touching his own cheek, the chief said that a side of the officer’s face was swollen from what the police have described as a struggle in which Mr. Brown assaulted the officer and tried to take his gun — an account disputed by a witness, a friend of Mr. Brown’s who said his hands were raised when the last of several shots was fired.

Despite persistent and increasingly angry calls from the public to release the officer’s name, Chief Jackson said the officer required protection after numerous death threats had been made. Computer hackers, saying they were outraged by police conduct, now have also joined the fray.

Anonymous, the loosely organized group of international hackers, said on Twitter that it had broken into Ferguson’s municipal computer system. It released details about city workers and posted photos of Jon Belmar, the chief of the St. Louis County police who is conducting the investigation into the shooting, as well as his wife, son and daughter. It also posted his address and phone number. The group threatened to bring down city, county and federal networks if the police overreacted to rallies and protests.

On Wednesday night, scores of police officers in riot gear and in armored trucks showed up to disperse protesters who had gathered on the streets near the scene of the shooting. Some officers perched atop the vehicles with their guns trained on the crowds while protesters chanted, “Hands up, don’t shoot.” A police spokesman said that some demonstrators had thrown Molotov cocktails at officers and that some had tried to set fires. The police used tear gas on demonstrators, and some protesters said rubber bullets had been fired at them. Police said one officer appeared to have suffered a broken ankle after being hit by a brick.

The police made more than 10 arrests. Among those arrested was Antonio French, a St. Louis alderman, who had been documenting the protests on social media, his wife said on Twitter.

Chief Jackson and the St. Louis County prosecutor, Robert P. McCulloch, held news conferences on Wednesday to try to allay concerns without divulging the officer’s name or details of the investigation. Neither would say how many times Mr. Brown had been shot.

Mr. McCulloch promised a thorough investigation but refused to say how long it would take. “There is no timeline,” he said. But he added that all the evidence would be made public, whether or not there was an indictment.

Whether to identify an officer in a charged situation like a shooting has been a continual tug of war around the country, pitting the desire of police departments to protect their own against the demands of victims’ relatives and the public for accountability.

“I get why they want to protect him,” said Meko Taylor, 36, of Ferguson, who was at a protest on Wednesday. “But the people want answers. When we get answers, things will calm down.”

David A. Harris, an expert on police misconduct and accountability at the University of Pittsburgh Law School, said: “Police departments do not welcome disclosure or the input of outsiders. So when you have a problem like this, it’s hardly surprising to see that they are very reluctant to give out information.”

That reflexive, insular stance is increasingly being questioned in the courts, said Merrick J. Bobb, a Los Angeles-based consultant on police oversight. “What is happening is that in a number of jurisdictions, voluntarily or as a result of a lawsuit, the ability of police to keep the name of the officer secret has been constrained,” he said.

In Missouri, legal groups citing the state’s sunshine law, which requires government agencies to release most documents to the public, have joined with community leaders to press for information about the officer who shot Mr. Brown.

On Tuesday, the Missouri office of the American Civil Liberties Union wrote to the Ferguson and St. Louis County Police Departments requesting unredacted copies of the “incident reports” describing the death of Mr. Brown. The A.C.L.U. said it had been told by the St. Louis County police that it would not release an incident report because the investigation was continuing. Adding to the pressure, the National Bar Association, an organization of African-American lawyers and judges, also filed a records request on Wednesday with the Ferguson Police Department.

By law, police departments have three days to comply, but if they choose to withhold an officer’s name, they could argue that circumstances warrant an exception. Then the petitioning groups would have to file lawsuits.

There is no federal constitutional right, under the First Amendment, to information about government activities, including internal police reports, said Erwin Chemerinsky, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine. Rather, individual states have disclosure laws with varying degrees of bite, and the country’s thousands of law enforcement agencies have their own rules and subcultures regarding disclosures.

The inconsistency in policies, even when a freedom of information law is on the books, is illustrated in New York City. In most cases, the New York Police Department refuses to release the names of officers who have shot people, at least in the days immediately afterward. If a shooting attracts widespread attention, however, the officer’s name rarely remains a secret for long.

In the July 17 case of Eric Garner, who died after being wrestled down by the police, including one officer who apparently used a forbidden chokehold, the department did reveal the name of the officer — but after two days, and only after wide public viewing of a videotape of the fatal confrontation. By that time, the news media had already reported the officer’s name based on unnamed sources.

Mr. Harris said that while it was understandable that police officials would try to protect their officers from threats and unfair accusations, silence also had its risks. “This case is not being tried yet, but the narrative is being forged in the public arena,” he said of the Ferguson shooting. “When that goes on, information is put out selectively and withheld selectively.”

“There is real danger in that,” he said, “because ultimately law enforcement depends on the trust of the people they serve.”

On Wednesday, the St. Louis County medical examiner’s office said it would take two to three weeks to complete the autopsy of Mr. Brown, including a toxicology report, which is standard procedure in such deaths.

Suzanne McCune, a forensic administrator at the office, said that a preliminary autopsy was completed Monday and found that Mr. Brown had died of gunshot wounds, but she gave no other details. She added that Mr. Brown’s body had been released to his family. Ms. McCune said the police department would decide whether to approve the release of the report once it was complete.

Benjamin L. Crump, a lawyer representing the Brown family, said that arrangements were being made for a private autopsy to be performed in the next week or so. “The family wants an autopsy done by somebody who is objective and who does not have a relationship with the Ferguson police,” Mr. Crump said.

Trying to control protests that have sprouted up daily in Ferguson and intensified after dark, the mayor and the City Council posted a letter on Wednesday on the city website asking protesters to limit their demonstrations to daylight hours.

The police have made over 50 arrests since Sunday.

“We ask that any groups wishing to assemble in prayer or in protest do so only during daylight hours in an organized and respectful manner,” the letter said. “Unfortunately, those who wish to co-opt peaceful protests and turn them into violent demonstrations have been able to do so over the past several days during the evening hours.”

Chief Jackson said the request did not amount to a curfew.

As to the actions of Anonymous in releasing the names of department personnel, Chief Jackson said protection had been assigned to some and others had taken vacation.

Anonymous also released on Wednesday what it said were county 911 tapes from the time of the shooting on Saturday. Most initial calls seemed to be about crowd control, but the tapes also suggested that dispatchers learned from an early call that a police officer was involved. Chief Jackson said he had not heard the tapes.

Correction: August 14, 2014

An earlier version of this article misidentified the university
at which Erwin Chemerinsky is a law professor.
It is the University of California, Irvine,
not the University of California, Los Angeles.

Julie Bosman reported from Ferguson,
and Erik Eckholm from New York.
Reporting was contributed by Timothy Williams,
Joseph Goldstein and Serge F. Kovaleski from New York,
and John Schwartz from St. Louis.

A version of this article appears in print on August 14, 2014,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Anonymity in Police Shooting Fuels Frustration.

    Amid Protests in Missouri, Officer’s Name Is Still Withheld, NYT, 13.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/14/us/
    missouri-teenager-and-officer-scuffled-before-shooting-chief-says.html

The Death of Michael Brown

Racial History Behind the Ferguson Protests

AUG. 12, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

The F.B.I. may be able to answer the many questions surrounding the death of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black student from Ferguson, Mo., who was a few days from heading off to college when he was shot by a police officer on Saturday. The shooting of Mr. Brown, who was unarmed, led to three days of protest, some of it violent, and several tense confrontations between residents of the St. Louis suburban town of 21,000 and the police.

But it doesn’t take a federal investigation to understand the history of racial segregation, economic inequality and overbearing law enforcement that produced so much of the tension now evident on the streets. St. Louis has long been one of the nation’s most segregated metropolitan areas, and there remains a high wall between black residents — who overwhelmingly have lower incomes — and the white power structure that dominates City Councils and police departments like the ones in Ferguson.

Until the late 1940s, blacks weren’t allowed to live in most suburban St. Louis County towns, kept out by restrictive covenants that the Supreme Court prohibited in 1948. As whites began to flee the city for the county in the 1950s and ’60s, they used exclusionary zoning tactics — including large, single-family lot requirements that prohibited apartment buildings — to prevent blacks from moving in. Within the city, poverty and unrest grew.

By the 1970s, many blacks started leaving the City of St. Louis as well. Colin Gordon, a professor at the University of Iowa who has carefully mapped the metropolitan area’s residential history, said black families were attracted to older, inner-ring suburbs like Ferguson in the northern part of the county because they were built before restrictive zoning tactics and, therefore, allowed apartments.

As black families moved into Ferguson, the whites fled. In 1980, the town was 85 percent white and 14 percent black; by 2010, it was 29 percent white and 69 percent black. But blacks did not gain political power as their numbers grew. The mayor and the police chief are white, as are five of the six City Council members. The school board consists of six white members and one Hispanic. As Mr. Gordon explains, many black residents, lacking the wealth to buy property, move from apartment to apartment and have not put down political roots.

The disparity is most evident in the Ferguson Police Department, of which only three of 53 officers are black. The largely white force stops black residents far out of proportion to their population, according to statistics kept by the state attorney general. Blacks account for 86 percent of the traffic stops in the city, and 93 percent of the arrests after those stops. Similar problems exist around St. Louis County, where earlier this year the state chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. filed a federal civil rights complaint alleging widespread racial profiling by police departments.

The circumstances of Mr. Brown’s death are, inevitably, in dispute. Witnesses said he was walking home from a convenience store when stopped by an officer for walking in the middle of the street, and they accused the officer of shooting him multiple times when his hands were raised over his head. The police said Mr. Brown had hit the officer. State and federal investigators are trying to sort out the truth.

What is not in dispute is the sense of permanent grievance held by many residents and shared in segregated urban areas around the country. Though nothing excuses violence and looting, it is clear that local governments have not dispensed justice equally. The death of Mr. Brown is “heartbreaking,” as President Obama said Tuesday, but it is also a reminder of a toxic racial legacy that still infects cities and suburbs across America.


A version of this editorial appears in print on August 13, 2014,
on page A22 of the New York edition with the headline:
The Death of Michael Brown.

    The Death of Michael Brown, NYT, 12.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/13/opinion/
    racial-history-behind-the-ferguson-protests.html

Grief and Protests

Follow Shooting of a Teenager

Police Say Mike Brown Was Killed
After Struggle for Gun in St. Louis Suburb

 

AUG. 10, 2014

The new York Times

By JULIE BOSMAN

and EMMA G. FITZSIMMONS

The fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager Saturday by a police officer in a St. Louis suburb came after a struggle for the officer’s gun, police officials said Sunday, in an explanation that met with outrage and skepticism in the largely African-American community.

The killing of the youth, Michael Brown, 18, ignited protests on Saturday and Sunday in Ferguson, Mo., a working-class suburb of about 20,000 residents. Hundreds of people gathered at the scene of the shooting to question the police and to light candles for Mr. Brown, who was planning to begin college classes on Monday.

Mr. Brown’s stepfather, Louis Head, held a cardboard sign that said, “Ferguson police just executed my unarmed son.”

At a news conference on Sunday morning, the St. Louis County police chief, Jon Belmar, said that a man had been shot and killed after he had assaulted a police officer and the two had struggled over the officer’s gun inside his patrol car. At least one shot was fired from inside the car, Chief Belmar said.

“The genesis of this was a physical confrontation,” Chief Belmar told reporters.

But elected officials and advocacy groups called for a full investigation and questioned the tactics of the police, who acknowledged that Mr. Brown had been unarmed. Antonio French, a city councilman in St. Louis, was at the scene of the protests on Sunday and said in an interview that more than 100 people had gathered, most of them silently standing in groups, some leaving behind teddy bears and balloons to memorialize Mr. Brown.

Mr. French said he was unsatisfied with the police department’s explanation of the shooting.

“I find it hard to believe,” he said, adding that he was disappointed with the police response in the aftermath of the shooting, which further distressed Ferguson residents and members of Mr. Brown’s family.

“It’s a textbook example of how not to handle the situation,” Mr. French said. “Ferguson has a white government and a white mayor, but a large black population. This situation has brought out whatever rifts were between that minority community and the Ferguson government.”

Esther Haywood, the president of the N.A.A.C.P. in St. Louis County, said in a statement: “We are hurt to hear that yet another teenaged boy has been slaughtered by law enforcement, especially in light of the recent death of Eric Garner in New York, who was killed for selling cigarettes. We plan to do everything within our power to ensure that the Ferguson Police Department as well as the St. Louis County Police Department releases all details pertinent to the shooting. We strongly encourage residents to stay away from the crime scene so that no additional citizens are injured.”

The police on Sunday said they were still trying to sort out the exact details, but they released what they said was the fullest account of the shooting that they could provide. Just after noon on Saturday, the police said, an officer in a patrol car approached Mr. Brown and another man. As the officer began to leave his vehicle, one of the men pushed the officer back into the car and “physically assaulted” him, according to the police department’s account.
Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story

A struggle occurred “over the officer’s weapon,” and at least one shot was fired inside the car, Chief Belmar said. The two left the car, and the officer shot Mr. Brown about 35 feet away from the vehicle, the police reported. Several shots were fired from the officer’s weapon.

The medical examiner for St. Louis County is investigating to determine how many times Mr. Brown was shot, the police said.

Chief Belmar said that the Ferguson police chief, Thomas Jackson, had called him personally and asked that his department to look into the shooting because Chief Jackson wanted an independent investigation. Chief Belmar said that the St. Louis County prosecuting attorney would determine whether the shooting was justified or charges should be filed.

As Chief Belmar spoke at a televised news conference, chants of “Don’t shoot!” and “We want answers!” could be heard from the protesters who had gathered outside the Ferguson police headquarters.

At a candlelight vigil on Sunday evening, the heightened tensions between the police and the African-American community were on display. A crowd estimated in the thousands flooded the streets near the scene of the shooting, some of them chanting “No justice, no peace.” They were met by hundreds of police officers in riot gear, carrying rifles and shields, as well as K-9 units.

Witnesses described a peaceful protest that later turned volatile, and there were scattered reports of violence. Images and videos captured on cellphones and posted on social media sites appeared to show people spray-painting and looting a QuikTrip gas station and other stores. Rioters shattered the windows of the gas station and damaged several police cars, said Brian Lewis, a spokesman for the St. Louis County Police Department.

It was not immediately clear if anyone was injured or arrested during the protests. County officials did not return calls and messages seeking comment.

Community and civic leaders pleaded for calm and to allow the investigation to run its course.

“We have to do this in a constructive manner,” Mayor James Knowles III of Ferguson said in an interview with a local Fox television station.

The officer who shot Mr. Brown has been on the force about six years and will be interviewed extensively by detectives on Sunday, the police said. They did not identify the officer involved by either name or rank.

“Any other details, including the reason as to why the encounter occurred and the initial struggle ensued, are still a part of the continuing investigation,” the police said in a statement.

Family members of Mr. Brown said that he had been walking to his grandmother’s house when the shooting occurred. His body remained in the street for some time, guarded by the police, while neighbors gathered in the area.

Police officials, fearing civil disorder, dispatched officers with police dogs to control the crowds. In response, some Twitter users posted pictures of the dogs at the Ferguson gathering on Saturday next to photos of police dogs used to control African-American crowds during the Jim Crow era.

Mr. Brown had just graduated from high school and was planning to attend Vatterott College, his mother, Lesley McSpadden, told reporters. His family has retained Benjamin Crump, the lawyer who represented Trayvon Martin’s relatives.

“You took my son away from me,” she told the television news station KMOV. “Do you know how hard it was for me to get him to stay in school and graduate? You know how many black men graduate? Not many. Because you bring them down to this type of level, where they feel like they don’t got nothing to live for anyway. ‘They’re going to try to take me out anyway.’ ”
 

Ashley Southall contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on August 11, 2014,
on page A11 of the New York edition with the headline:
Grief and Protests Follow Shooting of a Teenager.

    Grief and Protests Follow Shooting of a Teenager, NYT, 10.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/11/us/
    police-say-mike-brown-was-killed-after-struggle-for-gun.html

Family of South Carolina Boy

Put to Death

Seeks Exoneration 70 Years Later

 

JAN. 22, 2014

The New York Times

By ALAN BLINDER

SUMTER, S.C. — After South Carolina electrocuted George J. Stinney Jr. in 1944, his family buried his burned, 14-year-old body in an unmarked grave in the hopes the anonymity would allow him to rest in peace.

But on two mornings this week, nearly 70 years after the electrocution that ultimately made Mr. Stinney, a black teenager in the segregated South, the youngest person executed in the United States in the 20th century, lawyers and spectators crowded into a courtroom with a very different agenda: shedding enough light on the case to try to clear Mr. Stinney’s name.

“When I looked at the case and what was there and studied it, it was appalling,” said Miller W. Shealy Jr., one of the lawyers who agreed to help the Stinney family in its quest for a new trial or a voided verdict. He added that the case played out in the “old South Carolina,” but said, “It’s still appalling.”

Judge Carmen T. Mullen of Circuit Court did not rule on the requests at the end of the two-day hearing, and she asked for more written briefs in the coming weeks.

But in a state where racial matters still simmer — the presence of the Confederate battle emblem at the State House was the subject of a demonstration this week — the proceeding was a reminder of a difficult past recent enough that two of Mr. Stinney’s sisters were in the courtroom.

When a lawyer asked Amie Ruffner, one of the two, what she recalled of her Jim Crow-era childhood in South Carolina, she replied, “Nothing good.”

A huge part of that painful childhood was the execution of her brother, who was put to death less than three months after two white girls, ages 7 and 11, were found dead in Alcolu, the mill town where Mr. Stinney lived, in March 1944. Mr. Stinney, who, along with his father, joined the group searching for the two girls, was arrested soon after their bodies were found in a ditch, dead from blows with a railroad spike.

Investigators said then that Mr. Stinney had admitted to killing the girls after they asked him for suggestions about where to find maypops, a type of flower in the area. (His confession, and other records of the case, were lost.)

Mr. Stinney’s hastily scheduled trial lasted just hours, and he was executed that June.

Although Judge Mullen declared early in this week’s proceedings that she would not be contemplating Mr. Stinney’s guilt or innocence, the hearing took on the atmosphere of a trial, if one somewhat mellowed by the lessons of history.

“Back in 1944, we should have known better, but we didn’t,” said Ernest A. Finney III, solicitor for the Third Circuit Court in Sumter, who was opposing the request on the state’s behalf. “The fact of the matter is, it happened, and it occurred because of a legal system of justice that was in place.”

But Mr. Shealy said the state owed Mr. Stinney a different result, even if a favorable ruling prompted an onslaught of appeals in other aging cases. “The state really needs to say, ‘This was wrong,’ ” he said.

With another trial a prospect, if only a distant one, Judge Mullen heard legal arguments that touched on issues like judicial standing, and aggressive inquiries about the limits of memory, an especially important issue because many of the records in the case were destroyed.

Witnesses evaluated photographs and a large map, one that was disputed for its accuracy. Lawyers asked pointed questions during cross-examinations. A pathologist voiced concerns about the autopsies of the two victims, and a psychiatrist cast doubt on the validity of a confession Mr. Stinney gave investigators.

“Does the confession fit the evidence? No,” said Dr. Amanda B. Salas, a child and adolescent forensic psychiatrist who had studied the case before she began evaluating it on the Stinney family’s behalf less than a week ago.

Dr. Salas said Mr. Stinney’s admission was “a coerced, compliant, false confession,” but she cautioned that she had no evidence of misconduct by investigators. Instead, she attributed the confession to his vulnerability as a black teenager facing scrutiny by white officials.

Those echoes of the state’s past came into play as each side brought to the stand witnesses with fierce views about whether Mr. Stinney merits a trial that, both parties acknowledged, could not bring a boy back.

“I’d like to see them find him innocent,” said another sister of Mr. Stinney’s, Katherine Robinson, a retired teacher.

But Frankie Bailey Dyches, the niece of one of the victims, said she was unmoved by such calls.

“I believe that he confessed,” said Ms. Dyches, who was born after the 1944 killings. “He was tried, found guilty by the laws of 1944, which are completely different now — it can’t be compared — and I think that it needs to be left as is.”

She also said: “I’ve heard stories here that I believe are false. It doesn’t change my feelings about what happened.”

Despite the divergent testimony, Mr. Finney, a son of the first black State Supreme Court chief justice since Reconstruction, said he believed that the session had been cathartic for people in this region, who have watched the case become the subject of a theatrical production and a 1991 movie. “I think it’s been beneficial for the community, and I hope the Stinney family feels like we’ve done some good,” he said.
 

A version of this article appears in print on January 23, 2014, on page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: Family of S. Carolina Boy Put to Death Seeks Exoneration 70 Years Later.

    Family of South Carolina Boy Put to Death Seeks Exoneration 70 Years Later,
    NYT, 22.1.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/23/us/
    family-of-s-carolina-boy-put-to-death-seeks-exoneration-70-years-later.html