St Louis - Shooting - Riots - Anonymous Threats

[stickdog99]

The Bigger Picture

Ferguson Feeds Off the Poor: Three Warrants a Year Per Household

In the chamber where Officer Darren Wilson received a commendation six months before killing Michael Brown, a minor court generates major money from the city’s poor and working people.

The Ferguson Police have now released a video that shows police Officer Darren Wilson receiving a commendation six months before he became known to the whole nation as the cop who gunned down an unarmed 18-year-old. The irony is obvious to anyone who watches the footage of this proud young officer receiving the award at a ceremony in the City Council chamber as Ferguson’s six council members applaud.

“Officer Wilson, in recognition of outstanding police work while investigating a suspicious-vehicle call,” Chief Thomas Jackson says in making the presentation. “Acting alone, you struggled with one subject and [were] able to gain control of the subject and his car keys until assistance arrived. Later, during the interview, it was discovered that the subject was breaking down a large quantity of marijuana for sale.” Jackson adds, “Great job, Darren.”

But there is another, unnoticed irony in the venue itself. Three times a month—one day and two nights—the City Council chamber also serves as home to the incredibly busy and extremely profitable Ferguson municipal court.

A report issued just last week by the nonprofit lawyer’s group ArchCity Defenders notes that in the court’s 36 three-hour sessions in 2013, it handled 12,108 cases and 24,532 warrants. That is an average of 1.5 cases and three warrants per Ferguson household. Fines and court fees for the year in this city of just 21,000 people totaled $2,635,400.

The sum made the municipal court the city’s second-biggest source of revenue. It is also almost certainly was a major factor in the antagonism between the police and the citizenry preceding the tragedy that resulted when Wilson had another encounter with a subject six months after he got his commendation. And any complete investigation into how Michael Brown came to be sprawled dead in the street with a half-dozen bullet wounds must consider not just the cop but the system he served, a system whose primary components include a minor court that generates major money, much of it from poor and working people.

Five of the six City Council members who meet in this chamber are white, even though the city itself is more than 70 percent black. The City Council appoints the municipal judge, currently Ron Brockmeyer, who is also white. But when this same chamber serves as Ferguson Municipal Court, a disproportionate number of the defendants are black.

The immediate explanation is that the bulk of the cases arise from car stops. The ArchCity Defenders report notes: “Whites comprise 29% of the population of Ferguson but just 12.7% of vehicle stops. After being stopped in Ferguson, blacks are almost twice as likely as whites to be searched (12.1% vs. 6.9%) and twice as likely to be arrested (10.4% vs. 5.2%).” Lest anyone contend that blacks inherently merit greater police attention than whites, the report offers another statistic.“Searches of black individuals result in discovery of contraband only 21.7% of the time, while similar searches of whites produce contraband 34.0% of the time.”

That would suggest both that whites were more likely to be stopped when there was actual probable cause and that blacks were more likely to be stopped when there was not. And the antagonism sure to be generated by such racial disparities was magnified by the sheer number of cases. The report cites a court employee as saying the docket for a typical three-hour court session has up to 1,500 cases. The report goes on to say that “in addition to such heavy legal prosecution,” the Ferguson court and others like it in nearby towns “engage in a number of operational procedures that make it even more difficult for defendants to navigate the courts.”

The report goes on, “For example, a Ferguson court employee reported that the bench routinely starts hearing cases 30 minutes before the appointed time and then locks the doors to the building as early as five minutes after the official hour, a practice that could easily lead a defendant arriving even slightly late to receive an additional charge for failure to appear.”

The lawyers of ArchCity Defenders specialize in representing the indigent and the homeless. They noticed that many of their clients had multiple warrants on minor charges issued by municipal courts in Ferguson and the other 80 municipalities in St. Louis County that have their own courts and police. “They didn’t just have one case, they had 10 cases,” says Thomas Harvey, the organization’s 44-year-old executive director.

The warrants too often precluded the clients from securing shelter and services, and access to job programs. The lawyers sought some remedy in the issuing courts. “It kept being about the money,” Harvey recalls. “We were telling the court, ‘They don’t have any money because they’re homeless.’”

That same venue where Wilson received his commendation and the City Council members applauded is where justice is insulted wholesale three times a week. The clients felt sure they were being targeted because they were black and poor, and told the lawyers tales of unfair treatment by everybody from the cops to the bailiffs to the judges. “I’ll be real honest, I didn’t believe them,” Harvey says.

With the help of college students, ArchCity Defenders started a court watch program eight months ago. They concluded that much of what their clients had been saying was all too true. Impoverished defendants were frequently ordered to pay fines that were triple their monthly income. Some ended up with no income at all as they sat in jail for weeks, awaiting a hearing.

ArchCity decided to focus on what seemed to be three of the worst cities. “Three courts, Bel-Ridge, Florissant, and Ferguson, were chronic offenders and serve as prime examples of how these practices violate fundamental rights of the poor, undermine public confidence in the judicial system, and create inefficiencies,” the subsequent report says.

The report was all but complete and just needed an introduction when Harvey went on summer vacation. He chanced to return the day after Michael Brown was shot to death by Officer Darren Warren. “I got off the plane saying, ‘I got to finish this and get it out,'” Harvey recalls.

Harvey understood that whatever the particular details of the tragedy, there was also a larger context. “It’s not just about Michael Brown and this officer,” Harvey says.

The statistics assembled for the report concerning race and car stops in Ferguson were no great surprise, especially considering that its police department is proportionately even whiter than its City Council, with just three blacks among its 52 cops. The number that jumped out was the huge revenue, big bucks for a little burg. “Anybody who makes a revenue source a line of a budget becomes dependent on it,” Harvey suggests.

But if the system’s objective was money, the result was still that many people felt targeted because of race and class.

“For many of the poorest citizens of the region, the municipal courts and police departments inflict a kind of low level harassment involving traffic stops, court appearances, high fines, and the threat of jail for failure to pay without a meaningful inquiry into whether an individual has the means to pay,” the report says.

By the remarkable stats the report offers, Wilson might have been expected to add one more case to the municipal court excess by issuing Brown and his friend summonses for walking down the middle of the road. Instead, Wilson seems to have simply ordered Brown off the road. His tone and Brown’s reactions seem to have reflected the long-standing tensions between police and young black men in particular.

Any effort to reduce those tensions in the wake of the tragic result had better include the chamber where the City Council meets and the municipal court convenes. That same venue where Wilson received his commendation and the City Council members applauded is where justice is insulted wholesale three times a week. And an entire city turns poisonous. The fury of the protesters was sparked not only by killing of Brown but by the circumstances that led up to it.

The Ferguson municipal court canceled its August sessions because of the turmoil, but it is expected to resume in September. The next session is scheduled for 9/11, of all days.

[Luther Blissett]

Justifiable shooting? BULLSHIT. Just another execution in St. Louis.

Wow .... How sickening is that. And they handcuffed the corpse?

Is this the first or the second video? Definitely not justifiable.

It's like they all get together and plan this stuff. Where's that post about the police conference where the question on all the pigs' walnut-brains was "when can we weaponize our drones?"

[km artlu]

Ferguson Feeds Off the Poor: Three Warrants a Year Per Household

It's like lifting the rock of focused current events to reveal the persistent maggots underneath. Big media attention on a transient flare-up in Ferguson generates ad revenue. It's impossible to imagine CNN sustaining a half-dozen or so reports per day on the "extremely profitable Ferguson municipal court."

Nor on the immensely more profitable systemic and nationwide vampirism of the underclass, for-profit prisons, surreal war on drugs, endemic racism.

I've been listening to Lenny Bruce lately. I recommend it. He does a hipster version of how societies develop, including the concept of law-enforcement. Speaking to a police recruit in the voice of a proto-one percenter, he says (paraphrasing here), "Now you'll hear me say a lotta things like, 'It takes a certain kind of mentality to do this job and blah, blah. That's all bullshit. I gotta do business with these assholes, you understand."

Then he says, rhetorically, "What are you protesting the police? That's like protesting the mailman."

What if the Ferguson protesters were instead on the lawn of the district's congressional representative, the police commissioner, Missouri senators, the CEO of private prison corporations, etc?

"If it bleeds; it leads". The long-standing axiom of media. They'd cover that too.

[Project Willow]

It's like they all get together and plan this stuff. Where's that post about the police conference where the question on all the pigs' walnut-brains was "when can we weaponize our drones?"

The Klan is still a factor, and Klan RA. I wish I could share the anecdote I heard today, but I'd breaking confidence. I wish someone would do some infiltration down there, figure out how many are active, from the Governor on down.

Then again, that Pew research poll, and media coverage show clearly that the majority of the white population is still proudly soaking in cruel, ignorant white privilege (racism).

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/22/police-officer-video-relieved-black-people-ferguson-dan-page

[seemslikeadream]

https://twitter.com/hashtag/ChalkedUnarmed?src=hash

[8bitagent]

The new top headline news of that St Louis cop bragging about how many blacks hes killed, how hes obsessed with going to Kenya to "expose Obama", his speach to the Oathkeepers...
man...scary shit.

[Zombie Glenn Beck]

Talked to a former SWAT guy I know. Those pictures and vids where the police are pointing assault rifles at protesters? According to him police are trained to keep their rifles pointed at the ground at all times unless there is a confirmed threat. So either the cops are deliberately breaking protocol to intimidate unarmed civilians, or a bunch of backwoods hick cops were handed assault rifles and given no training on how to use them in a law enforcement capacity.

[BOOGIE66]

Talked to a former SWAT guy I know. Those pictures and vids where the police are pointing assault rifles at pro

Ttesters? According to him police are trained to keep their rifles pointed at the ground at all times unless there is a confirmed threat. So either the cops are deliberately breaking protocol to intimidate unarmed civilians, or a bunch of backwoods hick cops were handed assault rifles and given no training on how to use them in a law enforcement capacity.

They teach the same thing in the Marines.

[seemslikeadream]

St. Louis County Police Officer Suspended After Racist Video Surfaces
By Paula Mejia
Filed: 8/23/14 at 5:15 PM | Updated: 8/23/14 at 5:19 PM

A St. Louis County police officer has been suspended after a Youtube video surfaced of him making offensive remarks about killing, Muslims and President Barack Obama.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch states that in the hour-long video, Officer Dan Page appears in front of the Oath Keepers of St. Louis and St. Charles, a nonpartisan organization for current and former members of law enforcement and the military intent on upholding the Constitution. Page, a 35-year-old veteran of the department, made a slew of objectionable comments about Muslims in the 2012 video and said: “Muslims are passive until they gain parity with you or they exceed you in numbers and they will kill you.” While sharing a slideshow of a recent Kenya vacation, he made disparaging jabs about U.S. President Barack Obama, saying: "I wanna go find where that illegal alien claiming to be my president lives at."

Page made distressing comments about killing in the video as well. “I’m into diversity. I kill everybody. I don’t care," he said. Belmar, the St. Louis County police chief, told the Post-Dispatch that Page’s comments were “beyond the scope of acceptable police conduct.”


According to Belmar, Page has been deployed with the U.S. Army intermittently throughout the course of his law enforcement career. The officer was most recently deployed from 2008 to 2011, but it's unknown where. Page, a former Green Beret, said in the video that he retired early from military duty because he wouldn’t take orders from “an undocumented president.”

The focus on local police departments has heightened after Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was shot by an unarmed police officer in Ferguson, Missouri two weeks ago. On Monday, the department will begin an extensive internal review. Belmar says that it could result in disciplinary action and eventual termination for the officer. He has also ordered a psychiatric evaluation for Page.

On Friday, the police chief issued a public apology on behalf of the department. It reads: "[I] apologize to the community and anybody who is offended by these remarks, and understand from me that he ... does not represent the rank-and-file of the St. Louis County Police Department."

[Project Willow]

Quite a change since N30...

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/19/ferguson-police-force-punish-cops

Nothing works in Ferguson. Here's how to fix a police force – and punish cops

Norm Stamper
theguardian.com, Tuesday 19 August 2014 11.15 EDT

I ordered military gear against protesters, and it failed. Ferguson needs to cut back on Swat, step up discipline and trust citizen leaders to bring justice. So does every police department

It’s difficult to view citizens as partners when you’re looking at them through a Kevlar helmet and a riot shield – or when you have failed to build a culture of trust and then you add military equipment and tactics to a combustible mix of racial discrimination and little police accountability. This explosive combination makes policing significantly less effective, and dramatically less safe for everybody.

It’s no wonder so many cops – like some of those in Ferguson, Missouri – view their own community as the enemy when they spend their time geared for combat. It’s no wonder why they, in return, are viewed as an occupying force.

I was the city police chief during 1999’s so-called “Battle in Seattle,” the clash between anti-globalization protesters and my police officers. I realize now that the way we looked – and the way we behaved – provoked and exacerbated the violence. My decision to authorize the use of so-called “hard gear” (black uniforms with ballistic helmets and face shields, and the use of chemical agents) in our interactions with nonviolent, nonthreatening World Trade Organization demonstrators heightened tensions and put everyone – cops and citizens – at greater risk. The militarization of the WTO protests did untold damage to our efforts to build a positive, trusting partnership with our community.

I’m saddened to have watched the situation unfold in Ferguson and see almost none of the lessons I’ve tried to offer since then put into effect. It’s difficult to implement any best practices when the everyday relationship between a city’s cops and its citizens is so broken.

It may be too late to have prevented violence in Ferguson, but the community and others like it must come together now and make immediate changes to establish a baseline of behavior for law enforcement – to abide by today and to build upon for the future. The situation in Ferguson is no longer just about Michael Brown’s death: it’s about systemic racism and patterns of neglect, about leadership and the ability to influence angry, sometimes criminally motivated, individuals. Beyond the lifted curfews and long after the National Guard’s presence attempts to restore some semblance of peace, real accountability for everyone’s actions – cops and citizens – is imperative.

First, leaders in Ferguson need to put together a large, representative, credible crisis team to work with the police, communicate systematically with the community and, most importantly, elicit grassroots suggestions for resolution of the conflict. While some leaders have already tried to do this on an ad hoc basis, their work needs to be institutionalized and expanded to include others.

Thereafter, the city or state government should convene a group of citizens, officers, politicians and civic leaders to craft and quickly implement a statement of non-negotiable standards for the performance and conduct of each and every police officer: for example, any officer should be fired if found to be using racial or ethnic slurs or excessive force. Those local officials should create a citizens’ review board (and a process for filling it) and give it investigative authority and subpoena powers, rather than rely on the local prosecutor and police to investigate their friends and colleagues – rather than just waiting around for the US Department of Justice and FBI to complete their own independent investigations.

The Ferguson police department’s disciplinary system will need to be overhauled – with the oversight of the citizens’ review board – to created a dual-track system for police offenders: those found through an independent investigation to have made honest mistakes or have “routine” performance problems should be subject to corrective action (coaching, counseling, schooling); and those found to have engaged in willful misconduct, gross negligence or recklessness should be subject to punitive actions (up through and including dismissal and, in appropriate cases, criminal prosecution).

Meanwhile, the police department needs to immediately begin a process of demilitarization and replace the military model with a community policing model. As part of that, they should adopt the “Memphis model” of crisis intervention – requiring every employee to undergo a week of intensive training in defusing and de-escalation techniques conducted by mental health and communications experts. And they need to prohibit Swat operations for anything other than school shootings, armed hostage situations and other immediate crises when negotiations fail and lives are at stake. So should every police department in America.

It’s clear that Ferguson’s police officers, politicians and community leaders haven’t yet really embraced a philosophy of “community policing”, and that they weren’t working in partnership to identify and solve crime, traffic and other community-police problems – not with a police force that is 93% white in a city that is two-thirds black, or with a trove of military garb waiting in the wings. Some in the Ferguson area, like Missouri State Highway Patrol Captain Ron Johnson, understand the basics. But you can’t reverse the effects of years of military-style policing in a few hours of walking among protesters.

Still, law enforcement officers in Ferguson – and in so many other places – need to start somewhere. They need to start here ... or else they’ll just keep failing in all the same ways.

[seemslikeadream]

[Twyla LaSarc]

Quite a change since N30...

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/19/ferguson-police-force-punish-cops

I'd feel safer if as a city we weren't having to import talent to deal with a roided-out police union who likes to shoot their guns.

Lessons falling on deaf ears?

[seemslikeadream]

Darren Wilson’s first job was on a troubled police force disbanded by authorities

Supporters showed up to demonstrate for Darren Wilson, the white officer who killed unarmed black teen Michael Brown on Aug. 9 in a St. Louis suburb, setting off days of protests and riots.
Aug. 23, 2014 Greg Messmer, who first gave his name as Darren Wilson, and other supporters of Wilson line the street outside Barney’s Sports Bar in St. Louis. Messmer said was supporting Wilson because the media “hasn’t given him his voice.” Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post
By Carol D. Leonnig, Kimberly Kindy and Joel Achenbach August 23 at 10:22 PM
FERGUSON, Mo. — The small city of Jennings, Mo., had a police department so troubled, and with so much tension between white officers and black residents, that the city council finally decided to disband it. Everyone in the Jennings police department was fired. New officers were brought in to create a credible department from scratch.

That was three years ago. One of the officers who worked in that department, and lost his job along with everyone else, was a young man named Darren Wilson.

Some of the Jennings officers reapplied for their jobs, but Wilson got a job in the police department in the nearby city of Ferguson.


On Aug. 9, Wilson, who is white, killed unarmed black teenager Michael Brown after Brown and a friend had been walking down the middle of a street.

Wilson, 28, has completely vanished from public view. He has not explained publicly what happened in that brief, lethal encounter.


Video shows Officer Darren Wilson receiving a commendation months before Michael Brown’s death. Residents say they saw a different image of the officer after the shooting. (AP)
His lawyer did not answer phone calls or e-mails. The police union is mum.

His ex-wife is publicly silent. His friends aren’t speaking out.

His mother is long deceased, and there is no sign of his father or either of his stepfathers.

Wilson is under the protection of the Ferguson Police Department, which has chosen from the beginning of this case to opt for obscurity rather than transparency. The department did not reveal Wilson’s identity for nearly a week after the fatal shooting of Brown. By that time, his social media accounts had been suspended.

But everyone leaves a record, and Darren Dean Wilson is no exception.

People who know him describe him as someone who grew up in a home marked by multiple divorces and tangles with the law. His mother died when he was in high school. A friend said a career in law enforcement offered him structure in what had been a chaotic life.



What he found in Jennings, however, was a mainly white department mired in controversy and notorious for its fraught relationship with residents, especially the African American majority. It was not an ideal place to learn how to police. Officials say Wilson kept a clean record without any disciplinary action.

Angry aftermath of the Missouri shooting VIEW GRAPHIC
The job in Ferguson represented a step up and likely a significant salary increase.

Wilson has had some recent personal turmoil: Last year, he petitioned the court seeking a divorce from his wife, Ashley Nicole Wilson, and they formally split in November, records show.

Wilson won a commendation this year after he subdued a man who was found to be involved in a drug transaction, and he was honored in a ceremony in the Town Council chambers.

He seemed to be doing pretty well as a police officer — until shortly after noon on that Saturday when he passed two young black men walking down the middle of the street, put his police cruiser into reverse and said something to them.

Problems at home
Wilson was born in Texas in 1986 to Tonya and John Wilson, and he had a sister, Kara. His parents divorced in 1989, when he was 2 or 3 years old.

His mother then married Tyler Harris, and they lived in Elgin, Tex., for a time, records show. Tyler and Tonya Harris had a child named Jared.

The family later moved to the suburban Missouri town of St. Peters, where Wilson’s mother again got divorced and married a man named Dan Durso, records indicate.

Wilson attended St. Charles West High School, in a predominantly white, middle-class community west of the Missouri River. He played junior varsity hockey for the West Warriors but wasn’t a standout.

There were problems at home. In 2001, when Wilson was a freshman in high school, his mother pleaded guilty to forgery and stealing. She was sentenced to five years in prison, although records suggest the court agreed to let her serve her sentence on probation.

She died of natural causes in November 2002, when Wilson was 16, records show. His stepfather, Tyler Harris, took over as his limited guardian, which ended when the boy turned 18.

A family friend, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of threats, said Wilson sought out a career in law enforcement as a way to create a solid foundation in his life that he’d been missing.

“He had a rough upbringing and just wanted to help people,” the friend said. In Wilson’s childhood, “there was just no structure.”

After going through the police academy, Wilson landed a job in 2009 as a rookie officer in Jennings, a small, struggling city of 14,000 where 89 percent of the residents were African American and poverty rates were high. At the time, the 45-employee police unit had one or two black members on the force, said Allan Stichnote, a white Jennings City Council member.

Racial tension was endemic in Jennings, said Rodney Epps, an African American city council member.

“You’re dealing with white cops, and they don’t know how to address black people,” Epps said. “The straw that broke the camel’s back, an officer shot at a female. She was stopped for a traffic violation. She had a child in the back [of the] car and was probably worried about getting locked up. And this officer chased her down Highway 70, past city limits, and took a shot at her. Just ridiculous.”

Police faced a series of lawsuits for using unnecessary force, Stichnote said. One black resident, Cassandra Fuller, sued the department claiming a white Jennings police officer beat her in June 2009 on her own porch after she made a joke. A car had smashed into her van, which was parked in front of her home, and she called police. The responding officer asked her to move the van. “It don’t run. You can take it home with you if you want,” she answered. She said the officer became enraged, threw her off the porch, knocked her to the ground and kicked her in the stomach.

The department paid Fuller a confidential sum to settle the case, she said.

“It’s like a horror story in my mind. I never thought a police officer would pull me off my porch and beat me to the ground, for just laughing,” Fuller said in an interview.

The Jennings department also had a corruption problem. A joint federal and local investigation discovered that a lieutenant had been accepting federal funds for drunken-driving checks that never happened.

All the problems became too much for the city council to bear, and in March 2011 the council voted 6-to-1 to shut down the department and hire St. Louis County to run its police services, putting Lt. Jeff Fuesting in charge as commander.

Fuesting, who overlapped for about four months with Wilson during a transitional period, described him as “an average officer.”

“My impression is he didn’t go above and beyond, and he didn’t get in any trouble,” Fuesting said.

He said of the department during its difficult period: “There was a disconnect between the community and the police department. There were just too many instances of police tactics which put the credibility of the police department in jeopardy. Complaints against officers. There was a communication breakdown between the police and the community. There were allegations involving use of force that raised questions.”

Robert Orr, the former Jennings police chief who retired in 2010, said of Wilson: “He was a good officer with us. There was no disciplinary action.”

Tense policing
The structure of policing in these small St. Louis communities, as in many places in the United States, is innately combustible.

Officers rarely stay in the same police force for a long time, much less for an entire career. This means police and residents are typically strangers to one another — and not simply from different social, ethnic or racial backgrounds.

Ferguson is an example of a police department staffed predominantly with white officers, many of whom live far away from, and often fail to establish trust with, the predominantly black communities they serve. Policing can become a tense, racially charged, fearful and potentially violent series of interactions. Distrust becomes institutionalized, as much a part of the local infrastructure as the sewers and power lines.

A newly released report by a nonprofit group of lawyers identifies Ferguson as a city that gets much of its revenue from fines generated by police in mundane citations against residents — what the group calls a poor-
people’s tax.

The civil unrest that followed the shooting of Michael Brown suggests a deeper problem with the city’s police department, said Geoffrey Alpert, a University of South Carolina professor of criminology who has studied police shootings for decades.

“In order for a police department to weather a storm like that, it has to have social capital. And this police department didn’t have social capital in that community,” he said.

The Ferguson shooting became a national story in part because of what happened in the days afterward, when the country witnessed street protesters chanting “hands up, don’t shoot” as they faced heavily militarized police units in armored personnel carriers. The images shocked Americans across the ideological spectrum and prompted President Obama to order a review of federal programs that supply military weaponry to police departments.

The protests have grown smaller, and the looting and street violence that flared late at night have subsided, and so the community is renewing its focus on the original Aug. 9 incident and to the question of how the criminal justice system will handle Wilson’s use of deadly force — six bullets fired in a matter of seconds — against 18-year-old Michael Brown.

Grand jury reviews evidence
Behind closed doors, meeting once a week, a grand jury has been hearing evidence about the shooting from St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch. He has said he does not expect the grand jury to finish its deliberations until October.

Meanwhile, the FBI is interviewing witnesses as part of a Justice Department investigation that could potentially lead separately to federal civil rights charges.

There are two competing narratives about what happened Aug. 9.

Dorian Johnson, 22, was walking with Brown when, he said, Wilson instigated a confrontation by pulling up to the pair in his police cruiser and telling them to get out of the middle of the street. Johnson said Wilson pulled up so close to Brown that when he opened his car door, it bumped into the teenager.

According to Johnson, Wilson reached out, grabbed Brown by the throat and then grabbed his shirt as Brown tried to move away. At that point, Johnson said, he saw Wilson pull out a gun and shoot Brown in the chest or arm. Johnson said the officer hit Brown with another round as he was running away and fatally gunned him down after he stopped and raised his hands in surrender.

The police have given few details of what happened, but Thomas Jackson, the Ferguson police chief, said in a news briefing that the side of Wilson’s face was swollen and he was treated at a hospital.

The Ferguson Police Department quickly ceded the investigation to the St. Louis County police. St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar said Brown “allegedly pushed” Wilson back into the car and physically assaulted Wilson. There was a struggle over Wilson’s gun, which was fired once inside the car, Belmar said. The only person to fire the gun was Wilson, he said.

Autopsies showed Brown was shot six times.

The Ferguson police report about the incident says it began at 12:02 p.m. and that Wilson called it in at 12:43 p.m. The body remained in the street for four hours.

Experts on police shootings say the investigation, including the grand jury deliberations, will focus on whether Wilson had a reasonable perception of being threatened with bodily harm. The experts say it does not matter how many bullets Wilson fired. Police are trained to shoot at the center of mass and stop the threat.

“If it’s an imminent threat of serious bodily harm, yeah, you become the judge, jury and executioner,” said Alpert, the University of South Carolina criminologist.

Richard Rosenfeld, a University of Missouri at St. Louis professor of criminology, adds, “It’s not simply that the officer perceives that he or she is under threat. It must be that the perception is reasonable. That term ‘reasonable’ is so legally freighted.”

Many African Americans here have little trust that the system is capable of reaching a fair decision. McCulloch, the prosecutor, is particularly controversial. His father was a police officer killed by a black man in 1964. He has resisted calls to recuse himself from the case.

“Why is it always in the African American community that it must be the victim’s fault if he got killed?” said Charlie A. Dooley, the county executive of St. Louis County and someone who has called for McCulloch to give way in favor of a special prosecutor. “That is just not right, and it’s not equal justice. African Americans are saying, ‘How dare you? We’re fed up with that. We fought for this country, too.’ ”

Dooley continued: “This is bigger than Mike Brown. What happened in those few seconds on Canfield is illustrative of how little value black men’s lives are worth. The message is clear: Police can kill a young black man and get away with it.”

‘We are Darren Wilson’
On Saturday, Wilson supporters staged a “Support Darren Wilson” rally at Barney’s Sports Pub, which is frequented by current and former officers.

“The people here don’t know him, but law enforcement is family,” said Rhea Rodebaugh, the bar’s owner and a former sheriff. “The poor guy is in hiding. He was doing his job.”


About 100 people, most of them white, showed up. A table held stacks of navy blue T-shirts for sale, each with a police badge on the front and the words “Officer Darren Wilson We Stand By You 8-9-14.”

Several in the crowd had connections to law enforcement, including one who said he knew Wilson from working in private security — and got a call from him on the night of Aug. 9. He said Wilson called to say he couldn’t make it to work because of the shooting.

“Really surprised me that he would think to notify somebody to cover a position that he was responsible for after being involved in what he was involved in,” the officer said.

The officers voiced their unhappiness with Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon, who called for a “speedy prosecution” in the case, a comment that his office later attempted to retract, saying he meant a “speedy investigation.” The cops said they aren’t buying it since it was from a prepared statement, and they worry about the effect it may have on the community if Wilson is not prosecuted.

“That just sets us up for riots,” said one of the officers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear for his safety.

As the day wore on, a counterprotest evolved across the street, growing from two young women to a group of 20 by 6 p.m. — seven hours after the pro-Wilson rally started.

Motorists began driving by and honking in support of people on both sides of the road, largely dividing along racial lines.

“You are disgusting!” screamed one protester at the Wilson supporters.

The person who started the counterprotest, NaKarla Rimson, said they began with two people, and that as motorists drove by, they parked their cars and joined them. It was hard to keep things peaceful, but she said she tried to tell people to “allow everyone to have their opinion.”

Tempers flared on the other side of the street, too, with some people screaming and making rude gestures of their own. By 8 p.m., the pro-Wilson organizers had moved their tables and chairs inside.

“We are trying to get everyone inside to calm things down,” said one of the organizers, who declined to give her name.

Achenbach reported from Washington. Chico Harlan, DeNeen Brown, Sarah Larimer and Krissah Thompson in Ferguson and Alice Crites and Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.

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MILITARIZATION / ISRAELIZATION OF U.S. POLICE

In 1990, when Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense, Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which contained Section 1208, authorizing the Secretary of Defense to "transfer to Federal and State agencies personal property of the Department of Defense, including small arms and ammunition, that the Secretary determines is suitable for use by such agencies in counter-drug activities; and excess to the needs of the Department of Defense." The "1208 Program" thus established, was updated in 1996 and became the "1033 Program" after Section 1033 of that year's NDAA. 1033 created a Law Enforcement Support Office within the Defense Logistics Agency to manage the dispersal.

Not surprisingly, given Dick Cheney's close ties to major defense contractors, the program was boon to the arms industry. Police and sheriffs departments around the country received old military hardware, including humvees and other armored vehicles, which required ongoing maintenance contracts, spare parts, etc. The program clearly established a militarization of police and sheriffs forces that has proceeded apace ever since. I am told that the biggest expansion of the 1033 Program has occurred under the present Obama Administration. According to a report in Newsweek on Aug. 15, so far $5.1b in military hardware has been transferred to the local police since the outset of the program. The Defense Logistics Agency, which coordinates the dispursal of the Pentagon equipment to the police and sheriffs have rebuffed efforts by the ACLU to obtain the list of which departments have requested access to tactical equipment like M16s, MRAPS, and grenade launchers. According to the Defense Logistic Agency's own website, half a billion dollars in equipment was passed to law enforcement agencies in 2013 alone. The New York Times reported in June that the withdrawal of US combat troops from Iraq and Afghanistan has accelerated the delivery of military hardware to the local police and sheriffs. "Former tools of combat--M16 rifles, grenade launchers, silencers and more--are ending up in local police departments, often with little public notice." Some police departments have even received military aircraft, in addition to night vision scopes, armored cars and camouflage gear. In addition, many local police departments, including the Ferguson police, have received additional military equipment via grants from the Department of Homeland Security, including the APCs used recently in Ferguson.

But the 1033 Program tells only half of the story. Not only are police and sheriffs departments encouraged to adopt military hardware for counter-narcotics and now counter-terror operations. They are being offered specialty training in Israel under the sponsorship of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai Brith and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). Both the St. Louis County Police Department and the St. Louis Police Department have participated in the training programs in Israel. Journalist Max Blumenthal has labeled this process the "Israelification of America's security apparatus."

According to the ADL's own website, since 2004, over 175 American law enforcement officers have been sent to Israel--all expenses paid--to attend ADL's National Counter-Terrorism Seminar" where they "study first hand Israel's tactics and strategies... from senior commanders in the Israeli National Police, experts from Israel's intelligence and security services, and the Israeli Defense Forces." All told, executives from 100 American law enforcement agencies have participated in the past decade alone in the ADL program.

In the same decade, JINSA has hosted a parallel program, their Law Enforcement Exchange Program (LEEP) which "takes delegations of senior law enforcement executives to Israel to study methods and observe techniques used in preventing and reacting to acts of terrorism." JINSA claims to have sent 9.500 to Israel under the LEEP program since 2004. And many more American police and sheriffs have been brought into JINSA seminars in the United States, where Israeli experts have been imported to train and indoctrinate American cops in the Israeli approach to counter-terrorism. If the recent razing of Gaza is any indication of the kind of training provided, the process of militarization of American law enforcement has gone a long way, just in the past decade. ADL has been conducting its program for at least the past 30 years. The program came under scrutiny in 1992, when the San Francisco District Attorney opened a criminal investigation into one San Francisco Police officer who had been outright recruited to spy for Israel and had illegally obtained California Department of Motor Vehicle records and other confidential data on thousands of individuals, including labor and civil rights activists, pro-Palestinian academics and activists and anti-apartheid organizers (that data was passed on through a Los Angeles private detective on the ADL payroll to South Africa's Bureau of State Security for lucrative payments).

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What I've Learned from Two Years Collecting Data on Police Killings

A few days ago, Deadspin's Kyle Wagner began to compile a list of all police-involved shootings in the U.S. He's not the only one to undertake such a project: D. Brian Burghart, editor of the Reno News & Review, has been attempting a crowdsourced national database of deadly police violence. We asked Brian to write about what he's learned from his project.

It began simply enough. Commuting home from my work at Reno's alt-weekly newspaper, the News & Review, on May 18, 2012, I drove past the aftermath of a police shooting—in this case, that of a man named Jace Herndon. It was a chaotic scene, and I couldn't help but wonder how often it happened.

I went home and grabbed my laptop and a glass of wine and tried to find out. I found nothing—a failure I simply chalked up to incompetent local media.

A few months later I read about the Dec. 6, 2012, killing of a naked and unarmed 18-year-old college student, Gil Collar, by University of South Alabama police. The killing had attracted national coverage—The New York Times, the Associated Press, CNN—but there was still no context being provided—no figures examining how many people are killed by police.

I started to search in earnest. Nowhere could I find out how many people died during interactions with police in the United States. Try as I might, I just couldn't wrap my head around that idea. How was it that, in the 21st century, this data wasn't being tracked, compiled, and made available to the public? How could journalists know if police were killing too many people in their town if they didn't have a way to compare to other cities? Hell, how could citizens or police? How could cops possibly know "best practices" for dealing with any fluid situation? They couldn't.

The bottom line was that I found the absence of such a library of police killings offensive. And so I decided to build it. I'm still building it. But I could use some help. You can find my growing database of deadly police violence here, at Fatal Encounters, and I invite you to go here, research one of the listed shootings, fill out the row, and change its background color. It'll take you about 25 minutes. There are thousands to choose from, and another 2,000 or so on my cloud drive that I haven't even added yet. After I fact-check and fill in the cracks, your contribution will be added to largest database about police violence in the country. Feel free to check out what has been collected about your locale's information here.

The biggest thing I've taken away from this project is something I'll never be able to prove, but I'm convinced to my core: The lack of such a database is intentional. No government—not the federal government, and not the thousands of municipalities that give their police forces license to use deadly force—wants you to know how many people it kills and why.

It's the only conclusion that can be drawn from the evidence. What evidence? In attempting to collect this information, I was lied to and delayed by the FBI, even when I was only trying to find out the addresses of police departments to make public records requests. The government collects millions of bits of data annually about law enforcement in its Uniform Crime Report, but it doesn't collect information about the most consequential act a law enforcer can do.

I've been lied to and delayed by state, county and local law enforcement agencies—almost every time. They've blatantly broken public records laws, and then thumbed their authoritarian noses at the temerity of a citizen asking for information that might embarrass the agency. And these are the people in charge of enforcing the law.

The second biggest thing I learned is that bad journalism colludes with police to hide this information. The primary reason for this is that police will cut off information to reporters who tell tales. And a reporter can't work if he or she can't talk to sources. It happened to me on almost every level as I advanced this year-long Fatal Encounters series through the News & Review. First they talk; then they stop, then they roadblock.

Take Philadelphia for example. In Philadelphia, the police generally don't disclose the names of victims of police violence, and they don't disclose the names of police officers who kill people. What reporter has time to go to the most dangerous sections of town to try to find someone who knows the name of the victim or the details of a killing? At night, on deadline, are you kidding? So with no victim and no officer, there's no real story, but the information is known, consumed and mulled over in an ever-darkening cloud of neighborhood anger.

Many Gawker readers watched in horror as Albuquerque police killed James Boyd, a homeless man, for illegal camping. Look at these stats, though (I don't know if they're comprehensive; I believe they are): In Bernallilo County, N.M., three people were killed by police in 2012; in 2013, five. In Shelby County, Tenn., nine people were killed by police in 2012; in 2013, 11.

Who the hell knew Memphis Police were killing men at more than double the rate the cops were killing people in Albuquerque? But when I emailed the reporter at the Memphis Commercial Appeal to track the numbers back further, I got no response. I bought a subscription, but haven't been able return to research in that region. (Why don't you help me out? Just do a last name search here before you dig in.)

There are many other ways that bad or sloppy journalism undermines the ability of researchers to gather data on police shootings. Reporters make fundamental errors or typos; they accept police excuses for not releasing names of the dead or the shooters, or don't publish the decedents' names even if they're released; they don't publish police or coroner's reports. Sometimes they don't show their work: This otherwise excellent St. Louis Post-Dispatch article claims there were 15 fatal shooting cases involving law enforcement agencies between January 2007 to September 30, 2011—but provides few names and dates for further research efforts.

And that list doesn't even get into fundamental errors in attitude toward police killing—for example, the tendency of large outlets and wire services to treat killings as local matters, and not worth tracking widely. Even though police brutality is a national crisis. Journalists also don't generally report the race of the person killed. Why? It's unethical to report it unless it's germane to the story. But race is always germane when police kill somebody.

This is the most most heinous thing I've learned in my two years compiling Fatal Encounters. You know who dies in the most population-dense areas? Black men. You know who dies in the least population dense areas? Mentally ill men. It's not to say there aren't dangerous and desperate criminals killed across the line. But African-Americans and the mentally ill people make up a huge percentage of people killed by police.

And if you want to get down to nut-cuttin' time, across the board, it's poor people who are killed by police. (And by the way, around 96 percent of people killed by police are men.)

But maybe most important thing I learned is that collecting this information is hard. I still firmly believe that having a large, searchable database will allow us not just better understanding of these incidents, but better training, policies and protocols for police, and consequently fewer dead people and police. But normal people don't much care about numbers. Trolls intentionally try to pollute the data. Subterranean disinformationists routinely get out fake numbers. I try to take advantage of the public passion when when an incendiary event happens, like the death of Kelly Thomas, James Boyd, Eric Garner or Michael Brown. Or when a Deadspin writer decides to get involved. My girlfriend calls this "riding the spike." I call it journalism. Or maybe, obsession.