Ferguson

Turmoil, tear gas give way to hope in Ferguson

Associated Press

By ALAN SCHER ZAGIER

http://news.yahoo.com/turmoil-tear-gas-way-hope-ferguson-053336976.html

FERGUSON, Mo. (AP) — County police in riot gear and armored tanks gave way to state troopers walking side-by-side with thousands of protesters as the St. Louis suburb where an unarmed black teen was shot by a city police officer overwhelmingly avoided violence Thursday after nearly a week of unrest and mounting public tension.

The dramatic shift came after Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon assigned oversight of the protests to the state Highway Patrol, stripping local police from the St. Louis County Police Department of their authority after four days of clashes with furious crowds protesting the weekend death of 18-year-old Michael Brown.

“All they did was look at us and shoot tear gas,” said Pedro Smith, 41, who has participated in the nightly protests. “This is totally different. Now we’re being treated with respect.”

The more tolerant response came as President Barack Obama spoke publicly for the first time about Saturday’s fatal shooting — and the subsequent violence that shocked the nation and threatened to tear apart Ferguson, a town of 21,000 that is nearly 70 percent black and patrolled by a nearly all-white police force.

Obama said there was “no excuse” for violence either against the police or by officers against peaceful protesters.

Nixon’s promise to ease the deep racial tensions was swiftly put to the test as demonstrators gathered again Thursday evening in the neighborhood where looters had smashed and burned businesses on Sunday and where police had repeatedly fired tear gas and smoke bombs.

But the latest protests had a light, almost jubilant atmosphere among the racially mixed crowd, more akin to a parade or block party. The streets were filled with music, free food and even laughter. When darkness fell —the point at which previous protests have grown tense — no uniformed officers were in sight outside the burned-out QuikTrip convenience store that had become a flashpoint for standoffs between police and protesters.

“You can feel it. You can see it,” protester Cleo Willis said of the change. “Now it’s up to us to ride that feeling.”

Nixon appointed Highway Patrol Capt. Ron Johnson, who is black, to lead the police effort. Johnson, who grew up near Ferguson and commands a region that includes St. Louis County, marched alongside protesters Thursday, joined by other high-ranking brass from the Highway Patrol as well as the county department. The marchers also had a police escort.

“We’re here to serve and protect,” Johnson said. “We’re not here to instill fear.”

Several people stopped to shake hands and even hug Johnson and other officers, thanking them by name. At one point, Johnson spoke to several young men wearing red bandanas around their necks and faces. After the discussion, one of the men reached out and embraced him.

At the QuikTrip, children drew on the ground with chalk and people left messages about Brown.

“I know emotions are raw right now in Ferguson, and there are certainly passionate differences about what has happened,” Obama said. “But let’s remember that we’re all part of one American family.”

Residents in Ferguson have complained about the police response that began soon after Brown’s shooting with the use of dogs for crowd control — a tactic that for some evoked civil-rights protests from a half-century ago. The county police had taken over the investigation of Brown’s shooting and security at the request of the smaller city.

Nixon vowed that “Ferguson will not be defined as a community that was torn apart by violence but will be known as a community that pulled together to overcome it.” The governor was joined at a news conference by the white mayor of St. Louis and the region’s four state representatives and the county executive, all of whom are black.

The city and county remain under criticism, though, for refusing to release the name of the officer who shot Brown, citing threats against that officer and others. The hacker group Anonymous on Thursday released a name purported to be that of the officer, but the Ferguson police chief said the name was incorrect.

Like the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin, social media brought international attention to the tragedy. Ferguson spawned a proliferation of hashtags and has been a dominant subject on Twitter, Facebook and other sites. Journalists and protesters offered real-time pictures, videos and updates, and the world responded.

Police have said Brown was shot after an officer encountered him and another man on the street. They say one of the men pushed the officer into his squad car, then physically assaulted him in the vehicle and struggled with the officer over the officer’s weapon. At least one shot was fired inside the car. The struggle then spilled onto the street, where Brown was shot multiple times.

Dorian Johnson, who says he was with Brown, has told a much different story. He has said the officer ordered them out of the street, then grabbed his friend’s neck and tried to pull him into the car before brandishing his weapon and firing. He says Brown started to run and the officer pursued him, firing multiple times.

Attorney General Eric Holder has said federal investigators have interviewed witnesses to the shooting. A person familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing, said federal authorities have interviewed Johnson. Holder spoke by telephone Thursday with Brown’s family.

In St. Louis, Brown’s mother appeared briefly Thursday night at an anti-brutality gathering near the city’s Gateway Arch, urging through a relative for peace to prevail. The observance was among many staged nationwide, each with a minute of silence for Brown and others affected by alleged police brutality.

‘When They Don’t Know Who You Are, All You Are Is Black’

Bears defensive end David Bass, who grew up in St. Louis County, says harassment and racial profiling are a way of life for young African-American men in Ferguson and places like it

http://mmqb.si.com/2014/08/16/nfl-player-david-bass-ferguson-racial-profiling/

CHICAGO — Last season there were just under 30 NFL players who graduated from Missouri high schools. Five of them hail from St. Louis, including Pro Bowl safety Jairus Byrd and 2013 defensive rookie of the year Sheldon Richardson. And one of those five, Bears defensive end David Bass, grew up six miles away from the neighborhood where Michael Brown was shot and killed by a police officer, flash-boiling long simmering tensions between local law enforcement and the predominantly black community.

Bass, who was drafted by the Raiders in the seventh round a year ago, watched the drama of mass protests, arrests and looting unfold on his Instagram feed. There were local rappers laying down police diss tracks, photos of looted stores and news of friends being arrested as police in riot gear combed the city in the days following the killing. A graduate of Missouri Western with a degree in criminal justice, Bass seemed to The MMQB well suited to discuss the relationship between the people of Ferguson and its police force.

“First of all,” says Bass, who grew up in University City, “St. Louis isn’t that big. When people say Ferguson, Missouri, we don’t really think of it like that. It’s St. Louis. As a community Ferguson isn’t a bad place to grow up. It’s not the east side, with the gang violence and the killing. Ferguson used to be all white, but blacks from all over town started moving out of poorer neighborhoods into north county areas like Ferguson. There’s a lot of diversity now, with white and black people living side by side. The police stayed white, though.”

According to recent survey data, 22% of Ferguson residents live below the poverty line. Bass, who grew up just to the south, on the other side of I-70, was raised alongside a younger brother by a single mom—his father died when he was seven. As a teenager he learned to fear the police after an incident at The Loop, a popular cluster of shops and restaurants in his hometown.

“People don’t trust the police where I’m from. They’re hated,” Bass says. “I was 15 and one of my best friends had just got a car from his mom, a white Lincoln, and he picked up my brother and I to go to The Loop. When we parked there were police behind us, and next thing you know, there are about 10 police cars surrounding us. They’re screaming, ‘Stay in the car! Keep your hands up! Hand over your IDs.’ People are starting to gather to watch. They took 45 minutes searching the car while we sat on the sidewalk.

“Finally, they said three black males robbed a store in The Loop and drove away in the same model car. Tell me this: If we robbed the store, why would we go back and park in The Loop?”

Bass majored in criminal justice at Missouri Western and aspired to become a crime scene investigator if football didn’t work out. Instead he became the first MWSU football player invited to the NFL combine a year ago. The Bears signed him after he was waived by Oakland on Aug. 31, and he played 12 games for Chicago. With his rookie earnings he bought a black Dodge Durango and drove it between Chicago and St. Louis during breaks. He says the police harassment has intensified in adulthood.

“When I go home I get pulled over just because,” Bass says, “and they’ll say, ‘We’re doing random checks,’ which is against the law. Or they say, there was a theft and the getaway car was like my black Durango. When they don’t know who you are, all you are is black. They don’t know that I graduated from college, or that I’m in the NFL. But when they find that out, they want to stop and have a conversation.”

When I go home I get pulled over just because. It’s about the way they look at you, the way they talk to you. Like you don’t matter.

Bass recounts an incident from just before minicamp in June at a St. Louis nightclub. He, his girlfriend, brother, cousin and a friend were out in Ballpark Village, near Busch Stadium, with plans to enter the club. Three of them went in, but the cousin was turned away upon entrance by a white bouncer without explanation. Protests from Bass’s girlfriend and brother led to her being forcibly pushed out. Bass and his friend were about to gain admittance through another entrance when a manager emerged to tell him that his friend wasn’t welcome. Bass says the friend was told by a manager, “We don’t want your kind in here starting trouble.” Bass says he started receiving frantic texts from his girlfriend, and they met to share stories. They took the account of Bass’s girlfriend being pushed to police.

“They took one look at us and took the club’s side,” he says.

“It’s about the way they look at you, the way they talk to you. Like you don’t matter. Like you have nothing going for you in life.

“I can’t sit here and justify Michael Brown’s actions, because I don’t know what he did leading up to his death. But I know that police cannot shoot unarmed men, and the reason you have the violent reaction from the community is the violent, aggressive and disrespectful way policing is done in the St. Louis area.”’

There is, in every NFL locker room, an abundance of such stories. When black NFL players return to their hometowns driving and wearing the spoils of their new wealth, many profess to being targets of racial profiling. In Bass’s mind, that brand of harassment and those dehumanizing glares create the kind of blind rage and violent opportunism that we’ve seen in Ferguson, set off by one instance of alleged injustice. Ferguson was a gasoline-soaked woodpile before Michael Brown, just waiting for a spark.

“I’m all for the peaceful demonstrations,” Bass says. “But a lot of our youth looted. They trashed the Quik Trip, Walmart, Target, Foot Locker. They’re robbing people like it’s a way out in this time of crisis, but it’s really a sign of weakness and impatience, and for a lot of people it justifies the way we’re being harassed and profiled.

“As far as I can see, there’s no end to it.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/20/us/shooting-accounts-differ-as-holder-schedules-visit.html?_r=1

Shooting Accounts Differ as Holder Schedules Visit to Ferguson

By FRANCES ROBLES and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDTAUG. 19, 2014

ERGUSON, Mo. — As a county grand jury prepared to hear evidence on Wednesday in the shooting death of a black teenager by a white police officer that touched off 10 days of unrest here, witnesses have given investigators sharply conflicting accounts of the killing.

Some of the accounts seem to agree on how the fatal altercation initially unfolded: with a struggle between the officer, Darren Wilson, and the teenager, Michael Brown. Officer Wilson was inside his patrol car at the time, while Mr. Brown, who was unarmed, was leaning in through an open window.

Many witnesses also agreed on what happened next: Officer Wilson’s firearm went off inside the car, Mr. Brown ran away, the officer got out of his car and began firing toward Mr. Brown, and then Mr. Brown stopped, turned around and faced the officer.

But on the crucial moments that followed, the accounts differ sharply, officials say. Some witnesses say that Mr. Brown, 18, moved toward Officer Wilson, possibly in a threatening manner, when the officer shot him dead. But others say that Mr. Brown was not moving and may even have had his hands up when he was killed.

The accounts of what witnesses have told local and federal law enforcement authorities come from some of those witnesses themselves, law enforcement authorities and others in Ferguson. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified discussing a continuing investigation.

The new details on the witness accounts emerged as Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. was scheduled to visit Ferguson on Wednesday to meet with F.B.I. agents who have been conducting a civil rights investigation into the shooting.

Mr. Holder and top Justice Department officials were weighing whether to open a broader civil rights investigation to look at Ferguson’s police practices at large, according to law enforcement officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal talks. The issue came up after news reports revealed 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.

Under Mr. Holder, the Justice Department has opened nearly two dozen such investigations into police departments, more than twice as many as were opened in the previous five years, according to department data.

Also on Tuesday, federal authorities learned the results of an autopsy performed on Mr. Brown by military coroners that showed that he had been shot six times, though they declined to release further details until their investigation was finished. An autopsy conducted on behalf of Mr. Brown’s family also found that he had been shot at least six times — including once in the face and once in the top of his head — with all bullets striking him in the front. The county has also done its own autopsy, which found evidence of marijuana in Mr. Brown’s system.

Clashes between the police and protesters have become a nightly ritual, although the scene on Tuesday was initially calm. The authorities took their positions before sunset, and Missouri National Guard soldiers staffed checkpoints at the shopping center that is now a police command post. Demonstrators marched without incident while officers watched. The quiet nature of the protests raised hopes that they had entered a calmer phase, but more confrontations were reported overnight, with 47 people arrested.

In a statement on Tuesday night, Gov. Jay Nixon expressed sympathy for the Brown family and praised residents for “standing against armed and violent instigators.” But he also said that “a vigorous prosecution must now be pursued.”

“The democratically elected St. Louis County prosecutor and the attorney general of the United States each have a job to do,” Mr. Nixon said. “Their obligation to achieve justice in the shooting death of Michael Brown must be carried out thoroughly, promptly and correctly, and I call upon them to meet those expectations.”

The fatal confrontation began on Aug. 9 shortly after the police received reports that two men had robbed a convenience store in Ferguson. Officer Wilson, who was not responding to the robbery, had stopped to speak with Mr. Brown and a friend, Dorian Johnson. The Ferguson police chief, Thomas Jackson, said that it was around the time that Officer Wilson started talking to the two that he realized they fit the description of the suspects in the convenience store robbery.

A lawyer for Mr. Johnson said that his client was interviewed by the F.B.I. and the St. Louis County police last week for nearly four hours. In that interview, Mr. Johnson admitted that he and Mr. Brown had stolen cigarillos from the store, said the lawyer, Freeman R. Bosley Jr.

Mr. Bosley said that the officer told the two to get off the street, adding that Mr. Johnson told the officer that he lived nearby. They got into a bit of a verbal dispute with the officer about whether walking in the street constituted a crime, Mr. Bosley said.

Contrary to what several witnesses have told law enforcement officials, Mr. Bosley said that the officer then reached out of the window with his left hand and grabbed Mr. Brown by the throat.

He said Mr. Brown pushed him off, and the officer then grabbed Mr. Brown’s shirt.

“My client sees the officer pull a gun and hears him say, ‘I’ll shoot you’ — then ‘pow!’ there was a shot,” Mr. Bosley said, referring to the one that apparently went off in the car. “He did not describe a scuffle. It was more of a scuffle for him to get away.”

Asked if Mr. Brown had punched the officer, Mr. Bosley said that Mr. Johnson “did not observe that.”

However, law enforcement officials say witnesses and forensic analysis have shown that Officer Wilson did sustain an injury during the struggle in the car.

As Officer Wilson got out of his car, the men were running away. The officer fired his weapon but did not hit anyone, according to law enforcement officials.

Mr. Johnson took cover near a parked car as he saw the officer confronting Mr. Brown, Mr. Bosley said.

A man who lives nearby, Michael T. Brady, said in an interview that he saw the initial altercation in the patrol car, although he struggled to see exactly what was happening.

“It was something strange,” said Mr. Brady, 32, a janitor. “Something was not right. It was some kind of altercation. I can’t say whether he was punching the officer or whatever. But something was going on in that window, and it didn’t look right.”

Mr. Brady said he could see Mr. Johnson at the front passenger side of the car when he and Mr. Brown suddenly started running. Mr. Brady did not hear a gunshot or know what caused them to run. But he said he did see a police officer get out of the patrol car and start walking briskly while firing on Mr. Brown as he fled.

What happened next could be what the case turns on. Several witnesses have told investigators that Mr. Brown stopped and turned around with his arms up.

According to his account to the Ferguson police, Officer Wilson said that Mr. Brown had lowered his arms and moved toward him, law enforcement officials said. Fearing that the teenager was going to attack him, the officer decided to use deadly force. Some witnesses have backed up that account. Others, however — including Mr. Johnson — have said that Mr. Brown did not move toward the officer before the final shots were fired.

A lawyer for the police union, Greg Kloeppel, did not return calls for comment.

The F.B.I., Mr. Bosley said, pressed Mr. Johnson to say how high Mr. Brown’s hands were. Mr. Johnson said that his hands were not that high, and that one was lower than the other, because he appeared to be “favoring it,” the lawyer said.

James McKnight, who also said he saw the shooting, said that Mr. Brown’s hands were up right after he turned around to face the officer.

“I saw him stumble toward the officer, but not rush at him,” Mr. McKnight said in a brief interview. “The officer was about six or seven feet away from him.”

Frances Robles reported from Ferguson, and Michael S. Schmidt from Washington. Reporting was contributed by Matt Apuzzo from Washington, Marc Santora from New York, and Alan Blinder and John Eligon from Ferguson.

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

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/22/ferguson-s-shameful-legal-shakedown-three-warrants-a-year-per-household.html

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 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.

Justice Dept. ‘exasperated’ by local probe of Missouri teen shooting

http://news.yahoo.com/justice-dept-exasperated-local-probe-missouri-teen-shooting-151027957.html

(Reuters) – U.S. Justice Department officials on Thursday criticized local authorities’ investigation of the shooting death of an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, saying the case had been handled in a “selective” and “inappropriate” manner.

The department’s criticism comes after the official St. Louis County autopsy of Michael Brown, 18, who was shot by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson on Aug. 9, was leaked to media on Wednesday.

The autopsy report, obtained by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and published on its website, suggested Brown sustained a gunshot wound to the hand from close range and came as a grand jury considered whether Wilson should face charges.

“The department considers the selective release of information in this investigation to be irresponsible and highly troubling,” Justice Department spokeswoman Dena Iverson said.

“Since the release of the convenience store footage there seems to be an inappropriate effort to influence public opinion about this case,” Iverson added, referring to the Ferguson police department’s release of video shortly after the shooting that showed a robbery at a nearby convenience store, although it did not specifically link Brown at the time to the footage.

In a meeting with Justice Department lawyers on Wednesday, Holder said he was “exasperated” by the “selective flow of information coming out of Missouri” and called the leaks “inappropriate and troubling,” the official said.

Brown’s death ignited angry protests across Ferguson, a mostly black community with a majority white police force and city government, and drew global attention to racial tensions in the United States.

Protests have continued since August and flared again on Wednesday night, leading to multiple arrests, according to police.

Accounts of the shooting differ, but witnesses and law enforcement officials have said Brown and Wilson got into an altercation through the window of the officer’s vehicle after Wilson told Brown and a friend to leave the middle of a street.

Brown, who was shot six times, died about 30 feet from the patrol car.

The official autopsy released this week said at least one bullet struck Brown’s hand at close range, suggesting that Brown’s hand was near Wilson’s weapon at some point. It also showed Brown tested positive for marijuana.

St. Louis County’s medical examiner office verified the autopsy report but said it did not release it.

Some activists have said the leak seemed aimed at bolstering support for Wilson and has further strained the community.

An attorney for Brown’s parents has said the autopsy was not surprising given witnesses accounts of an altercation at the patrol car.

Brown’s family released a preliminary private autopsy findings in August. The Justice Department also ordered its own autopsy but has not yet released its report. [ID:nL2N0QO049]

from off the net

—

Vance

The problem is none of that was proven and due process didn’t occur

1. No fingerprinting the weapon
2. 16 of 19 witnesses asked if hands were up while getting shot said yes
3. Officer failed numerous policies (Leaving scene, bagging own weapon into evidence, telling Chief one thing in regards to knowledge of robbery, telling courts something different)

As far as the Grand Jury process….

1. Prosecutor (who was more of Wilson’s defense attorney) told jury that they should ignore police policy and procedures when deciding to indict. That’s horrific

2. Prosecutor provided a law that states you can shoot a fleeing suspect. That law was deemed unconstitutional by Supreme Court in 1985. The prosecutor then said “we’re not here to make this a law class” when asked if Federal Law over take state…. Which it does.

Justice was not done because a police officer accused of excessive force received treatment that a citizen would never have the liberty to receive. For that reason his entire story and the process is rightfully questioned

Driving While Black in Ferguson

http://www.newsweek.com/ferguson-profiling-police-courts-shooting-264744

“You go to all of these damn courts, and there’s no white people,” one defendant, slated to appear before a municipal court in St. Louis County, recently said.

Another complained that North St. Louis County municipalities such as Ferguson, which attracted national attention after a police officer fatally shot Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old African-American high school graduate, on Saturday, prompting days of protests, profile minorities when it comes to traffic tickets.

“In Dellwood, Ferguson, basically, in North County, if you’re black, they’re going to stop you,” the resident said according to a new report on policing in the area.

For residents of Ferguson, Missouri, and surrounding municipalities in St. Louis County, it’s not surprising that racial tensions have boiled over. In a town of 21,000, two-thirds of the residents are African-American, and many reports have highlighted a fraught relationship between Ferguson’s residents and its mostly white police force. Only three people in the 53-member police department are black, according to the Washington Post, and the Ferguson Police Department disproportionately stops and arrests black drivers.

“Everybody in this city has been a victim of DWB, [driving while black],” Anthony Ross, 26, explained to the Post.

A paper published Thursday by the ArchCity Defenders, a legal aid organization representing indigent defendants in the St. Louis metropolitan area, offers another insight into why residents’ resentment of law enforcement officials run so deep: They don’t just feel that they are getting stopped because of the color of their skin. Rather, they feel like they are getting stopped because of the color of their skin so that the city of Ferguson can profit off of them—for traffic tickets.

ArchCity Defenders, which has tracked ticketing of St. Louis area residents for five years and focused primarily on vehicle violations, started a court-watching program because so many of its clients complained of traffic prosecution wreaking havoc on their lives. Defendants routinely alleged that a racially-motivated traffic stop led to their being jailed due to inability to pay traffic fines, which in turn prompted people to “los[e] jobs and housing as a result of the incarceration.” In other words, defendants alleged that racial profiling, for traffic tickets, propelled them deeper and deeper into the cycle of poverty. The ArchCity report does not allege racial profiling; however, it is clear that many of the people stopped for traffic violations feel that they were targeted for their race.

Of the 60 courts St. Louis County municipal courts observed by ArchCity, 30 were accused of engaging in illegal or harmful practices. “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,” according to the report.

The paper points out that in Ferguson, 86 percent of vehicle stops “involved a black motorist, although blacks make up just 67 percent of the population.” In addition, blacks stopped in Ferguson “are almost twice as likely as whites to be searched (12.1 percent versus 6.9 percent) and twice as likely to be arrested (10.4 percent versus 5.2 percent)”. Searches of blacks only results in discovery of contraband 21.7 percent of the time, whereas contraband is recovered from their less frequently stopped white counterparts 34.0 percent of the time.

Municipalities’ seeming willigness to profit off of minorities has undoubtedly fueled the flames ignited by Brown’s shooting. One resident quoted in the study said, “It’s ridiculous how these small municipalities make their lifeline off the blood of the people who drive through the area.”

Twenty-two percent of Ferguson residents live below the poverty line, and 21.7 percent receive food stamps. The unemployment rate in the town is 14.3 percent, or more than double that of St. Louis County and Missouri as a whole.

“Despite Ferguson’s relative poverty, fines and court fees comprise the second largest source of revenue for the city, a total of 2,635,400,” according to the ArchCity Defenders report. And in 2013, the Ferguson Municipal Court issued 24,532 arrest warrants and 12,018 cases, “or about 3 warrants and 1.5 cases per household.”

Exacerbating the problem, the report says, are “a number of operational procedures that make it even more difficult for defendants to navigate the courts.” A Ferguson court employee reported, for example, 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.”

Thomas Harvey, co-founder and executive director of ArchCity Defenders and one of the paper’s authors, says that residents’ perception that the system is unfairly stacked against them gives important context for the depth of the present outrage.

“There are 90 municipalities in St. Louis County that range from 12 people to 50,000 people. Eighty-six of them have their own courts. They have their own police forces,” he explains. “What ends up being the product of all that is just a low-level sense of harassment on a daily basis. The clients that we represent feel that. It’s palpable for them.”

“They resent it because it’s not about public safety,” he adds. “These aren’t violent criminals. These are poor people.”

Eric Garner grand jury probe shows similarities to Michael Brown case

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2014/1203/Eric-Garner-grand-jury-probe-shows-similarities-to-Michael-Brown-case-video

New York — Just a week after a Missouri grand jury declined to bring charges against former Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson, New York City is bracing for another long-awaited and controversial grand jury decision.

A Staten Island grand jury, which has been hearing evidence since Sept. 29, has heard from its final witnesses and could hand down a decision about whether to indict New York Police Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the chokehold death of Eric Garner as early as Wednesday, according to reports.

Like its Missouri counterpart, the Staten Island grand jury has been unusual, both in the duration of the proceedings and the amount of evidence presented. Meeting for months, the secret panel of 16 or as many as 23 jurors has been hearing a full array of evidence, including the testimony of the potential defendant, New York Police Officer Daniel Pantaleo.
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District Attorney Daniel Donovan has said little during the past two months about the secret grand jury proceedings, which must decide whether to bring charges against Officer Pantaleo, a white officer eight years on the force, who wrestled Mr. Garner to the ground with a headlock maneuver on the afternoon of July 17, even as the 6-foot, 3-inch, 350-pound father of six cried out, “I can’t breathe” numerous times.

The incident, dramatically captured on video by multiple bystanders with smartphones on the Staten Island sidewalk, provided the early backdrop to the often violent protests to the shooting of Mr. Brown in Ferguson, Mo., just a few weeks later. Both became symbols of the deep, decades-long divisions between police departments and black communities in a year marked by angry protests and civil unrest.

And just as St. Louis Prosecutor Robert McCulloch did with Officer Wilson, District Attorney Donovan brought in Officer Pantaleo to testify in his own defense, without being subject to adversarial cross examination.

In most cases, legal experts say, a prosecutor presents a grand jury only with select evidence to simply establish “probable cause” for an indictment, and the potential defendant is by definition the prosecutor’s legal adversary.

“But it’s very challenging for a local prosecutor, who oftentimes wins elections with the support of local police officers, and works very closely with local police officers each and every day, to bring a case against a cop,” says Jason Leventhal, a former Staten Island assistant district attorney who now represents clients bringing civil rights cases against the NYPD.

“The internal pressures that a local prosecutor receives from their brothers in law enforcement – these are their partners working together everyday, so it creates a very challenging environment for a prosecutor to seek and indictment, let alone a conviction, of a police officer.”

Pantaleo, an officer who lives in Staten Island, told his side of the incident to the grand jury for two hours on Nov. 21.

“He was gratified to tell his story, he was relieved,” said Stuart London, Pantaleo’s attorney, to CNN on Saturday. “He was anxious and anxiety-filled prior to that,” Mr. London said. “He is cautiously optimistic, and knows that his fate is in their hands now.”

In Missouri, Mr. McCulloch was criticized for taking the unusual step of presenting the entirety of his evidence to the grand jury, including the four-hour testimony of Wilson. None of the evidence was subjected to cross examination or hostile scrutiny, however, critics say.

And it is not difficult for a prosecutor to get an indictment. In 2010, federal prosecutors sought indictments in about 162,000 cases, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Grand jurors declined to return an indictment in 11 of these.

“[When] the prosecutor handled the Wilson case in a radically different manner, this signaled to the grand jurors that they were not expected to indict. And they did not,” wrote Marjorie Cohn, a criminal defense attorney and professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego, in an essay in The Huffington Post last week.

Many observers in New York see a similar strategy at play in the Garner grand jury.

“The length of the grand jury proceedings has given me pause, and there’s always the possibility that the district attorney is using the grand jury process to insulate him from the public scorn and criticism that would follow if he chose not to bring a case that the public believes should be brought,” says Mr. Leventhal of the law firm Leventhal & Klein.

“Presenting evidence this way insulates the DA from the decision,” he continues. “Even if he was seeking an indictment – an indictment that would be unpopular, and he might be concerned with the fallout from fellow law enforcement partners – it also serves that purpose to be able to say, ‘It wasn’t my decision, I put all the evidence in, and it was the grand jury’s decision.’ ”

On Monday, NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton met with local clergy, community leaders, and elected officials in Staten Island to discuss the possible fallout of the impending grand jury decision, including the possibility of Ferguson-like violence.

“Here on Staten Island, Eric Garner had a lot of friends, especially in that area, and he’s very, very well missed by a lot of people who’s anxiously waiting the decision,” said Cynthia Davis, a leader with the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, to NY1. “So I even think maybe some agitators may try to worm their way in and try to cause problems, but we’re just praying and hoping that that doesn’t happen.”

wv wrote:

Yeah, the system is absurd. The prosecutor
and the cops work together everyday. They are
allies. The prosecutor is a “cop” and has a badge.
He’s the top-cop, essentially.

Anytime there’s evidence a cop has assaulted
anyone a “special prosecutor” ought to be
appointed by a neutral panel of some sort.
Thats how it would be handled in utopia-world
anyway.

w
v

From another thread:

Dak wrote:

In talking to a cousin who is an attorney, it’s obvious to me that the prosecuting attorney didn’t do his job. His job, if he takes the case to a grand jury, is to do whatever he can to get an indictment. In this case, because Wilson’s a police officer, McCulloch did not do his job … his office basically acted as Wilson’s defense. I have no problem with the grand jury’s decision based on the evidence presented, but in any other type of case (that doesn’t involve a police officer as defendant) his office wouldn’t have presented evidence that helped the defendant. McCulloch went this route to avoid his responsibility and avoid public backlash. If he didn’t think there was enough evidence to charge Wilson, he should have never presented the case to the grand jury. But, that would have meant he would have had to take the heat.

As Mack and WV say, the “accused” usually doesn’t testify in grand jury cases. AND because it was a grand jury, his testimony was not met with cross-examination. Prosecutors, who depend on the police, use this tactic to keep cops from going to trial. They did the same thing in the Eric Garner case.

There’s all sorts of nonsense going on with this whole thing. For example, Cook and the other players were acting, they said, in the name of peaceful protest. That means they were supporting protests of the Ferguson police. They would have no idea when they did that that ALL local police would take that as aimed at them all. In fact, in a better world, all other local police ought to be hands off, neutral, or in support of a legal means of discovering the truth.

The other thing is that Ferguson has a long, bad history with its police and local courts. There’s real research on this, too. It’s documented. It’s in the same thread I just linked. So the Ferguson community doesn’t trust its police. Well. Then why would they believe Wilson now. So the gesture to them ultimately means–the police here have a bad record, fix it. Change things. Whether or not Brown was a petty thief should have nothing to do with it. You don’t go around shooting those. And the only basis for believing he was a threat was Wilson, who again did not even get cross-examined. Ferguson does not believe Wilson. But then it’s the local police and courts that set up a world where they are not trusted…for damm good reasons.

more from

Mackeyser

(Responding to a concern that it would be hard to believe that the DA had a remotely prosecutable case, but just decided to shelve it) Well, yeah, that’s pretty much what happened. Justice Scalia in 1992 laid out very clearly the role of the Grand Jury and the presentation of evidence.

“It is the grand jury’s function not ‘to enquire … upon what foundation [the charge may be] denied,’ or otherwise to try the suspect’s defenses, but only to examine ‘upon what foundation [the charge] is made’ by the prosecutor. Respublica v. Shaffer, 1 Dall. 236 (O. T. Phila. 1788); see also F. Wharton, Criminal Pleading and Practice § 360, pp. 248-249 (8th ed. 1880). As a consequence, neither in this country nor in England has the suspect under investigation by the grand jury ever been thought to have a right to testify or to have exculpatory evidence presented.”

I’m quoting from an article on Alternet, but there are several good articles out there on this very topic. The article goes on:

The passage was first highlighted by attorney Ian Samuel, a former clerk to Justice Scalia.

McCulloch allowed Wilson to testify for hours and made sure the grand jury was aware of every possible piece of evidence that could exculpate the cop. In his rambling press conference Monday night, McCulloch explained that the refusal to indict resulted from the combination of contradictory eyewitness testimony and other exculpatory evidence. But it was immediately obvious to legal experts that the way the prosecutor presented the evidence virtually guaranteed that there would be no indictment, and therefore no trial. As the cliche goes, a prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. But, it should be added, the prosecutor has to want the ham sandwich to be indicted. (emphasis mine)

There was so much wrong with how this went down that books will be written about it. McCulloch should have recused. He didn’t. He should have actually presented the charges to the Grand Jury. He didn’t. Not in the same manner as every OTHER Grand Jury. Normally a DA will actually present the charges and then essentially make his Prima Facie (or first facts) case as to WHY the Grand Jury should indict. It’s the whole point. His office functioned as de facto defense attorneys in the Grand Jury for Officer Wilson, a breach of the duties of his office before the Grand Jury. Other than giving the Grand Jury a list of charges, the Assistant DAs, NOT the DA himself, did NOT make any case for the return of any of the charges. As the Grand Jury was not sequestered, they KNEW they were in on the biggest case in the country and for the DA to not be presenting the case for indictment sent a STRONG signal to them that he didn’t expect an indictment. DAs are political animals and you will NEVER see a DA pass up a chance to get an indictment on a high profile case before the Grand Jury because if it goes to trial, he will want to ensure that everything before the Grand Jury is perfect. As an example, if this were going to trial, there’s NO WAY Wilson goes before the Grand Jury because the DA would want to tear into his inconsistent testimony on cross examination. Why the different distances? Why was his testimony from that day so different from the subsequent testimony a week later? How does he reconcile the testimony of the other person with Michael Brown who says Officer Wilson actually opened his car door and slammed it into Brown, which also puts everyone and the DNA in the right place, but puts Wilson on the aggressive and totally contradicts his account? NO ONE has put Wilson on a stand and cross-examined him. EVER. And now, it can’t happen. Which…was pretty much the plan all along. It had to be. There are just simply too many affirmative actions (no pun intended) taken to come to any other conclusion.

The shocking part isn’t that Officer Wilson wasn’t indicted. It was that it went to the Grand Jury at all and that they went to all the trouble of trying to cover for Officer Wilson when the outcome was predetermined. There is NO WAY after the release of that information that a discerning person can say that the DA sought justice or even the unvarnished truth.

The DAs office’s intent was to ensure that Officer Brown was NOT indicted. And they ensured that successfully.

I totally agree that any looting and burning is sad, unnecessary, counterproductive and wrong. What I appreciated were folks in the crowd wearing black hoodies with “Peacekeeper” on it in white letters and phone cameras and rather than videoing the cops, they were taking footage of the people. And whenever a crowd gathered, you’d see folks get there and try to start talking to people. Didn’t always work, but there were and are a lot of people who want to see this turn into positive change. MOST (easily 99+% of the people there throughout the months of protests) are looking to see positive changes… like community policing, body cams on police and a host of other things to make their community a better place.

One thing DA McCulloch DID say that is very true. If we want different outcomes, change the laws. Don’t burn things down. Now, with gerrymandering and all the political shenanigans all over the place, that’s a tough row to hoe, but if we as a people can deal with all we’ve changed from only white landowners participating in the political process to where we are today, we can certainly move even farther toward our founding ideals where we state that all men are created equal (and thus are treated equally under the law).
****

DA McCulloch misused the Grand Jury. Plain and simple.

As Justice Scalia points out, the Grand Jury is NOT the venue for exculpatory evidence. Moreover, Officer Wilson’s testimony was RIDDLED with inconsistencies that should have been subject to cross-examination at trial.

The purpose of the Grand Jury is NOT to convict. It’s to INDICT. And there was enough to indict. There just was.

Now… especially because Officer Wilson is a Police Officer, because the eyewitness testimony was inconclusive and because the forensics were also inconclusive and there was no video evidence, it’s pretty unlikely Officer Wilson would be convicted. At least of a higher crime like murder. Depending on what happened at trial, a REALLY good prosecutor might get him on a lower charge of a lesser manslaughter if he were able to establish better about the distances because Officer Wilson’s testimony didn’t match the forensic evidence…EITHER. That part gets glossed over by his defenders.

I’m not arguing that Officer Wilson is guilty…or innocent.

I’m not arguing that Michael Brown is guilty of anything since he’s not on trial (and he shouldn’t be PUT on trial in some BS equivocation nonsense).

I’m arguing that the Grand Jury process was subverted and, thus that justice was denied.

You don’t seem to argue that fact, but seem to rationalize it.

I wholeheartedly, to the marrow of my bones, respectfully disagree. The law is the law and we should follow it for all.

Officer Wilson was denied his day in court by this and thus was denied justice as well. Not to the degree that the Brown family was, obviously, as they lost a son. My point is that in subverting the Grand Jury process for a political outcome, justice was DENIED to all involved.

And anyone pointing to the Grand Jury process in this case as a vindicatory process simply doesn’t understand what happened.
****

(regarding the contention that the evidence dump was rigging the process)
the accusation that giving the jury all the evidence is the VERY DEFINITION of rigging it.

I’m sorry if you don’t understand that.

It is NOT, absolutely NOT the job of the Grand Jury to adjudicate the merits of guilt or innocence or to exonerate a person.

I’ve posted probably half a dozen times the standard articulated by Justice Scalia. That is NOT what McCulloch did. Moreover, what McCulloch did isn’t just kinda, sorta outside the norm. It’s SO UNUSUAL that it borders on the “unheard of” and people struggled to find precedent for it…anywhere.

Further, your statement that “it means there was no evidence of a crime” is just not correct. We don’t know that because the DA never ASKED the Grand Jury for an indictment. They put the Grand Jury in a very difficult position, a position that no trial jury is in because evidence there has the benefit of scrutiny by opposing counsel. They were asked to “figure it out” when the DA essentially created reasonable doubt by presenting all of the exculpatory evidence.

And let me be clear here. The ONLY evidence the DA SHOULD have presented was that evidence necessary to obtain an indictment. The DA before the Grand Jury functions in a prosecutorial role. Many veteran prosecutors have come forward (and they tend to lean pretty conservative) and said that they’ve never seen or heard of a DA or their office NOT presenting a case, only presenting the evidence AND presenting exculpatory evidence before the Grand Jury.

So, the only evidence the Grand Jury should have seen were those pieces of evidence that supported the charges AND THAT’S IT.

That’s the function of the Grand Jury. They perform a preliminary function in the judicial process.

It’s not exactly basic civics, but we can’t conflate juries.

And what DA McCulloch did sets a potentially disastrous precedent for DAs around the country to pawn off cases where they don’t want to indict onto the Grand Jury and then subvert the Grand Jury with these tactics.

It’s just really, really bad from a process standpoint. The Grand Jury is really important for a lot of reasons and its misuse by prosecutors should be heavily scrutinized and sanctioned.
****
I wanna say one thing.

The Grand Jury not indicting Officer Wilson does NOT mean he was innocent or guilty.

The Grand Jury not indicting Officer Wilson also does NOT mean that Michael Brown was guilty of anything (he was never on trial. Remember… he was the victim and he’s a dead human being).

What it means is that the Grand Jury returned No True bills on the charges presented.

I’ve read several people post things like “the evidence exonerates Officer Wilson” and stuff like that.

Well, no, it doesn’t. While there was a LOT of evidence, much of it including Officer Wilson’s testimony was NOT subject to Cross Examination nor secondary examination AND much of it was contradictory. All the more reason it should have gone to trial, really.

My point is that there was still a lot of work left to do and that SHOULD have been done at trial. Just the fact that Officer Wilson’s testimony was so grossly inconsistent from his initial statements to his later statements and how the distances didn’t match should have been enough to indict considering that enough distance would have put his other testimony in question.

But, basically, that’s it. The Grand Jury coming back didn’t “acquit” or “exonerate” Officer Wilson.

It may have exposed a very flawed, biased system and it certainly exposed a misuse of the Grand Jury by DA McCulluch (as defined by Justice Scalia), but all the Grand Jury finding did is say that the process wouldn’t continue. It didn’t express innocence or a lack of guilt.

Of anyone.

==

while I’m HARDLY a Scalia fan, he’s absolutely RIGHT about the function of the Grand Jury.

It has a function. If you’ve ever seen the movie, My Cousin Vinny (which, like all movies in a legal setting, get aspects of the law incorrect), the inexperienced lawyer Vinny has to appear before the judge at the Arraignment. However, because Vinny understands the law, but not the procedures of the court, he struggles so mightily that he gets himself thrown in jail because he cannot fathom that the arraignment is simply and ONLY the act of entering a plea. That’s it.

Well, the Grand Jury has a specific function.

It is not and never has been about innocence or guilt and that’s why exculpatory evidence is not required.

The Grand Jury is the check on a prosecutor’s power so that a DA can’t just bring ANY charge against ANYONE, ANY time he/she feels like it. So, for major crimes, the DA or AG must go before the Grand Jury and present that prima facie evidence to at least establish that there is at least enough to CHARGE the person. NOT convict. Just to charge.

That is why McCulloch so misused this process. Well, it was two-fold. Firstly, he gave them all the evidence WITHOUT the benefit of rigorous cross examination. Trial juries at least have the adversarial process of the trial in which both sides CONTEST the evidence and THEN they can sort out the evidence. The Grand Jury in the Wilson case didn’t have that. They had the raw evidence and were forced in many cases to accept suspect evidence as is and then make a judgment based on that. If a person receives a proper defense, the trial jury isn’t put through that.

Secondly, DA McCulloch did NOT provide the narrative of WHY the evidence supported the charges. He stated himself that he gave the evidence to the Grand Jury and let them come to their own conclusion and EVEN IN cases where Grand Juries are investigative (like RICO cases), the DA or AG still goes to often great lengths to explain how the evidence supports the charges expressly in order to get indictments.

The very common misunderstanding in this case is that what DA McCulloch did is reasonable.

It not only isn’t reasonable, it’s unconscionable, unethical and sets a potentially disastrous legal precedent for high profile cases. Worse, it preys on the common ignorance of the legal system. DA McCulloch knows full damn well that if Michael Brown had killed Officer Wilson and claimed self-defense, even if there were video directly exonerating him, IT STILL WOULD HAVE GONE TO TRIAL. And the words he would have used were, “it’s important for this to run its course through the legal process”.

Now, if DA McCulloch simply didn’t want to charge Office Wilson, that was always at his discretion. He could have simply refused to charge him. Heck, he could have properly used the Grand Jury, GOT an indictment AND STILL not charged him. That’s happened before, too. Getting an indictment doesn’t automatically mean that the DA must file those charges.

But what DA McCulloch did was wrong on a lot of levels. Unfortunately, because they are procedural, it’s even easier for those who are on Team Wilson (not saying you, just saying those that clearly ARE on Team Wilson) to create tons and tons of obfuscation about how getting it so wrong is OKAY… because the outcome is what they wanted.

from off the net

==

Billy_T

a prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, if he or she wants to. In 2010, there were 16,000 grand juries, and only 11 of them failed to indict. McCullough has a long history of protecting police, and it’s a rather incestuous relationship between local prosecutors and the police in the first place. They’re colleagues. It shouldn’t be in the hands of a local prosecutor to begin with. There is an obvious conflict of interest.

Some relevant articles:

It’s Incredibly Rare For A Grand Jury To Do What Ferguson’s Just Did
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/ferguson-michael-brown-indictment-darren-wilson/

What America’s police departments don’t want you to know
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/eugene-robinson-its-a-crime-that-we-dont-know-how-many-people-police-shoot-to-death/2014/12/01/adedcb00-7998-11e4-b821-503cc7efed9e_story.html?tid=pm_opinions_pop

Officer Darren Wilson’s story is unbelievable. Literally.
http://www.vox.com/2014/11/25/7281165/darren-wilsons-story-side

Amid Conflicting Accounts, Trusting Darren Wilson
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/26/us/ferguson-grand-jury-weighed-mass-of-evidence-much-of-it-conflicting.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=b-lede-package-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=2

Mackeyser wrote:

John Oliver is GENIUS.

Just saying…

Also, it was 160,000, not 16,000 Federal Grand Jury indictments in 2012.

So it’s really that much more rare…

Oh, and that police officer’s account… fantastic.

You mean this, right?

It was a little back there in the thread so I brought it up.