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Ferguson Tag

Posted by Mike LaChance on November 27, 2014 47 Comments
Back in the good old days, the left loved to lecture us about civility. That time is over. In the course of the last few days, at least two writers from liberal outlets have tried to justify and even advocate for the violent rioting in Ferguson. First, we have Darlena Cunha of Time:
Ferguson: In Defense of Rioting When a police officer shoots a young, unarmed black man in the streets, then does not face indictment, anger in the community is inevitable. It’s what we do with that anger that counts. In such a case, is rioting so wrong? Riots are a necessary part of the evolution of society. Unfortunately, we do not live in a universal utopia where people have the basic human rights they deserve simply for existing, and until we get there, the legitimate frustration, sorrow and pain of the marginalized voices will boil over, spilling out into our streets. As “normal” citizens watch the events of Ferguson unfurl on their television screens and Twitter feeds, there is a lot of head shaking, finger pointing, and privileged explanation going on. We wish to seclude the incident and the people involved. To separate it from our history as a nation, to dehumanize the change agents because of their bad and sometimes violent decisions—because if we can separate the underlying racial tensions that clearly exist in our country from the looting and rioting of select individuals, we can continue to ignore the problem.
Next up is Matt Bruenig of Gawker:

Posted by Amy Miller on November 26, 2014 13 Comments
The violence that gripped Ferguson, MO in the wake of the grand jury's decision not to indict Darren Wilson has spread to multiple cities across the US. Minneapolis Portland

Posted by Leslie Eastman on November 26, 2014 53 Comments
A lot of San Diegans were caught in gridlock when a group of student protesters from my alma mater, University of California - San Diego, blocked Interstate 5 just in time for morning rush hour.
Dozens of UCSD students brought traffic to a halt on northbound Interstate 5 Wednesday morning to protest the decision of a grand jury in Ferguson, Mo., not to indict a white policeman for killing an unarmed black teenager. A crowd of an estimated 50 to 70 protesters marched onto the freeway at Nobel Drive at about 6:49 a.m., blocking the northbound lanes. They remained in the roadway for about 40 minutes until San Diego police arrived and removed them. The protesters left the freeway peacefully and began marching on surface streets. There were no immediate reports of arrests. The demonstrators, led by an unidentified man with a bullhorn, held signs objecting to the Missouri grand jury’s decision not to charge Officer Darren Wilson in the Aug. 9 shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown, who was unarmed but allegedly came at the officer and, at one point, tried to take his service weapon from him.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 26, 2014 19 Comments
Darren Wilson, the Ferguson Police Officer whom a Grand Jury declined to indict over the shooting death of Micheal Brown, gave a lengthy in-person interview to George Stephanopoulos on ABC News last night. That interview is embedded at the bottom of this post. But this post is not really about Darren Wilson, at least not directly. It's about Johnson City, NY (near Binghamton), Police Officer David Smith, who was involved in a similar incident on March 31, 2014. A reader from this area (Johnson City is about 45 minutes from Ithaca) forwarded me the link, writing: "I had forgotten about this event very close to home but it seems to me that it is relevant to current events." http://www.localsyr.com/story/d/story/officer-shot-and-killed-near-binghamton-area-hospi/21718/364J-3q63EqZs8BkWb6lSw In that incident, a seemingly crazed and aggressive perpetrator managed to take Officer Smith's weapon from him, and then use it to murder Officer Smith:
Police say a suspect shot and killed a Johnson City police officer with the officer’s own weapon on Monday morning. Officer David Smith was an 18-year veteran of the force, police said at an afternoon news conference. The suspect, 43-year-old James Clark of Greene, pulled away Smith’s weapon and shot the officer three times, according to police. Clark fired at another officer, who then shot the suspect several times. Clark was taken to a hospital and later died.
As recounted in this video, the circumstances were remarkably similar to the initial assault on Darren Wilson by Michael Brown: Sucker punches to an officer seated in his patrol car, with the perpetrator then leaning in to try to steal the weapon:

Posted by Andrew Branca on November 26, 2014 41 Comments
This post focuses on the second-half of Police Officer's testimony before the Grand Jury, during which he is responding to direct questions from both the Prosecutors present (Whirley and Alizadeh) as well as from individual Grand Jury members. This portion of the testimony also covers the relevant post-shooting events. The first half of Wilson's testimony before the Grand Jury consisted of his narrative of events, and was covered in yesterday's post here: #Ferguson Grand Jury evidence: Police Officer’s Account of Shooting. It bears mentioning again that Officer Wilson was not compelled to testify before the Grand Jury, but rather volunteered to do so.  He did so knowing he would not be permitted to be accompanied by legal counsel during his testimony. As was done in yesterday's post, below is an abridged version of the testimony, to ease reading through the material. The full-text of the testimony is embedded at the bottom of this post in the form of a PDF of the official Grand Jury transcript. One observation comes immediately to mind as I've had the opportunity to both carefully review Wilson's September 26 testimony before the Grand Jury as well as watch him recount events in his November 25 ABC News interview with George Stephanopoulos, and that is the utter consistently between the two accounts. This stands in sharp contrast to the very often wildly varying testimony of "pro-Brown" witnesses before the Grand Jury.

Posted by Leslie Eastman on November 26, 2014 19 Comments
One of my most haunting memories from childhood involves a group of teens from a local Michigan high school; they pounded on our front door and begged my mom to call the police. This was during the 1967 Detroit Riots, when several groups of hostile students decided to take the conflict into our small suburb. My father was away, working as a reporter for the Detroit Free Press, and his team's coverage of this event lead to a Pulitzer Prize. My mom took the students in, made the call, and comforted everyone until parents arrived to pick up the group who fled to our doorstep. A short summary of this event via PBS shows seems similar to what unfolded yesterday:
For five days in July, Detroit, Michigan descends into chaos. An economic boom has created jobs, and urban renewal projects have built new infrastructure, but blacks have been left behind. New expressways destroy black neighborhoods, and economic opportunities are scarce for black residents. The 95% white police force, notorious for brutal and arbitrary treatment of black citizens, raids an illegal after hours club and draws an angry, frustrated crowd that quickly turns hostile. As Sunday July 23rd dawns, the growing crowd is looting and burning the city. Twelve hours into the frenzy, Governor George Romney calls in the Michigan National Guard; unprepared troops make mistakes like shooting out the street lights. Nearly 4000 people will be arrested in the first two days, and over 7000 by the third. Most are young and black. Police and guardsmen shoot at will, with some later insisting that all of their victims were armed.
Some footage from the station, WXYZ, and covered by two of the areas best-known reporters of that era:

Posted by Amy Miller on November 26, 2014 11 Comments
Ferguson is on fire, and small businesses are suffering. Our coverage of the violence in Ferguson has included tweets and photos showing rampant vandalism and destruction of locally owned businesses; from pizza joints to beauty shops to liquor stores, proprietors have been punished for the grand jury verdict, and many shop owners are now weighing the benefits of rebuilding vs. boarding up. One of those shop owners, Natalie DuBose, has decided to pick up the pieces and keep fighting. After the grand jury verdict was read and protesters took to the streets, the front windows of Natalie's shop were smashed, and the bakery portion vandalized. Encouraged by friends and family, she created a GoFundMe donation page, and asked for help:

Posted by Amy Miller on November 25, 2014 40 Comments
After last night's protests in Ferguson boiled over, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon has tripled the National Guard presence in Ferguson in an attempt to quell the violence. From the New York Times:
At an afternoon news conference, Mr. Nixon said that he had ordered the deployment of 2,200 National Guard soldiers to Ferguson. “Last night, criminals intent on lawlessness and destruction terrorized this community,” he said. “What they’ve gone through is unacceptable.” Earlier, Mayor James W. Knowles III of Ferguson criticized the governor for not deploying the Guard quick enough to save some of the businesses that burned. “The delay in deploying the National Guard is deeply concerning,” said Mr. Knowles, adding that he had not spoken directly to the governor since late August, despite almost nightly protests in Ferguson since. Police officers were overwhelmed by the wave of violence Monday night after the grand jury’s decision was announced. Jon Belmar, the St. Louis County police chief, said demonstrators had set fire to at least a dozen buildings in and around Ferguson, and he estimated that he had heard about 150 gunshots. None of the shots, he said, were fired by the police.
Last night's Ustream livestream from the ground in Ferguson is still up and running:

Posted by Andrew Branca on November 25, 2014 91 Comments
As promised, the transcripts of the Ferguson Grand Jury have been released to the public. That's the good news. The bad news is that the transcripts amount to 4,799 pages. That's not a typo: four thousand, seven hundred and ninety-nine pages. So, it's going to take a little time to work through and present in a useful form here. In this post I present the narrative of Police Officer Darren Wilson as he recounts to the Grand Jury his encounter with Mike Brown. I do so in abridged form, meaning that I've stripped out other people's statements to make the narrative more concise and easier to read. All of the text provided is, however, exactly as presented in the official transcript (baring, perhaps, an occasional typo here or there.) To make this more than a mere re-packaging of the official transcript, I suggest it might be a useful exercise as you read through Wilson's narrative to ask yourself whether it meets the required five elements of the law of self-defense. (Strictly speaking, just four of those elements apply, as there is no duty to retreat for a police officer in the performance of his duties.)  These four elements, then, are:
  • Innocence: Wilson must not have been the unlawful physical aggressor.
  • Imminence: Wilson must have been facing a threat that is either about to occur right now, or is in actual progress.
  • Proportionality: To be justified in the use of deadly force in self-defense Wilson must have been facing a threat of death or grave bodily harm.
  • Reasonableness:  Wilson's perceptions, decisions, and actions must have been those of a reasonable and prudent police officer in the same circumstances, with the same capabilities, possessing the same specialized knowledge, and under the same stresses of an existential fight.

Posted by Mike LaChance on November 25, 2014 54 Comments
The Ferguson verdict is in: No indictment. The people who deserve the most sympathy in Ferguson are the parents of Michael Brown who lost their son. That makes them the biggest losers and I mean that in a sympathetic way. The second biggest loser in Ferguson is the liberal media which flocked to the scene and stoked racial bias. Now that the facts are in, they look like complete fools. I mean that in a non-sympathetic way. The third biggest loser in Ferguson is President Obama who made a hasty statement on the situation which opened with these words:
First and foremost, we are a nation built on the rule of law.
We are? Really? Watch Obama's statement below:

Posted by Amy Miller on November 25, 2014 39 Comments
Last night's grand jury verdict vindicating officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown sent the people of Ferguson, Missouri into a tailspin. Even as the verdict was being read, reports began to trickle in of vandalism, looting, and violence against police officers attempting to keep the peace.
The racially charged case in Ferguson has inflamed tensions and reignited debates over police-community relations even in cities hundreds of miles from the predominantly black St. Louis suburb. For many staging protests Monday, the shooting was personal, calling to mind other galvanizing encounters with local law enforcement. Police departments in several major cities said they were bracing for large demonstrations with the potential for the kind of violence that marred nightly protests in Ferguson after Brown's killing. Demonstrators there vandalized police cars, hugged barricades and taunted officers with expletives Monday night while police fired smoke canisters and pepper spray. Gunshots were heard on the streets.
(added) Mark Levin notes how the lawlessness is a symptom, not the cause:
Ferguson burns and violence has been unleashed thanks to the reckless liberal media, the lawless administration (especially Eric Holder) exploiting the shooting to smear police departments across the nation, phony civil rights demagogues, race-baiting politicians, and radical hate groups.

Posted by Andrew Branca on November 24, 2014 29 Comments
As has been widely anticipated for weeks, the Ferguson MO Grand Jury has DECLINED to indict Police Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of black adult Michael Brown. This result has not been unexpected, as the overwhelming weight of both the eye witness and forensic evidence has been entirely consistent with Officer Wilson's narrative of self-defense, including:
  • Wilson being attacked by Brown and his accomplice Dorian Johnson in his patrol vehicle
  • a struggle over Wilson's service pistol
  • shots fired inside the vehicle (which forensic examination confirmed caused a contact gun shot wound to Brown's right hand)
  • the temporary flight of Brown upon those initial gunshots
  • the return of the 292 pound Brown re-engage the much smaller officer
  • the firing of additional defensive rounds as necessary to halt Brown's violence
In contrast, the narratives put forward that might have favored an indictment were serially changed as each was proven inconsistent with the evidence:
  • Brown was shot in the back (there are no gun shot wounds to Brown's back, and contrary to bulk of eye witness testimony)
  • Brown had his hands raised in surrender (inconsistent with forensics and bulk of eye witness testimony)
  • Brown was on his knees when Wilson simply executed him (inconsistent with forensics and bulk of eye witness testimony)

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 24, 2014 107 Comments
Today may be the day you and the rioters have been waiting for. The Grand Jury reportedly has reached a decision whether to indict Officer Darren Wilson in the killing of Michael Brown. But the decision has not yet been announced yet. That is expected to come sometime today. You can follow the Twitter stream at the bottom of the post. We will embed a live video feed when available. The announcement could come at any time.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 22, 2014 10 Comments
We previously highlighted the role of anti-Israel activists in exploiting and fomenting trouble in Ferguson, Missouri as a Grand Jury decision is awaited whether to indict Officer Darren Wilson in the killing of Michael Brown, Intifada Missouri – Anti-Israel activists may push Ferguson over the edge:
As much tension as there is, an underreported story is the active role of “pro-Palestinian” activists who have exploited the Ferguson riots and tension this summer and fall to push their anti-Israel agenda. That anti-Israeli agenda, which involves encouraging confrontation with police in solidarity with Palestinians, is helping provide the accelerant to an already volatile situation.... It also has involved a propaganda campaign to blame Israel for the killing of Brown because a former St.Louis County police chief three years ago attended a one-week anti-terrorism program in Israel. Presumably some Ferguson officers also have attended various training sessions routinely given in the U.S. and elsewhere to police departments, but the one-week training in Israel by someone who wasn’t even on the job when Brown was shot was enough for the usual suspects to try to blame Israel for everything that happens in Ferguson.... Israel has nothing to do with whatever did or did not happen in Ferguson. But anti-Israel activists rarely care about the truth, it’s all propaganda for the cause. But this propaganda, and this agitation, actively is pushing for a confrontation between police and protesters in Ferguson, in which people are likely to get hurt. And the activists like Masri will be there to take the viral videos and photos. And that’s the point. Just as Palestinian and supportive Western leftist activists encourage children to throw rocks at Israeli police so they can get the video of the police arresting a child, so too this is all about the photo- and video-ops. And it may push Ferguson over the edge.
One of the featured activists was Bassem Masri, someone active in the #Palestine2Ferguson movement to portray the Ferguson issues as somehow to be blamed on Israel.

Posted by Andrew Branca on November 21, 2014 42 Comments
CNN's Anderson Cooper is reporting that police officer Darren Wilson, who shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson MO on August 9, is purportedly in the final stages of preparing his resignation from the Ferguson police department. Wilson, who has been in hiding for months following threats of violence against himself and his immediate family, has apparently been negotiating terms of resignation with the police department. One key factor reportedly delaying his resignation prior to this point is that he preferred to wait to resign until after the Grand Jury had completed its deliberations, fearing that his resignation would make him appear guilty in their eyes. Wilson had six years of unblemished service on the Ferguson Police Department before, the evidence overwhelmingly suggests, being viciously attacked by Michael Brown and Brown's accomplice Dorian Johnson. After Brown received a contact gun shot wound to the hand while trying to take Wilson's service pistol, Brown fled a short distance before turning to attack the officer again.  It was during this renewed attack that Wilson was compelled to re-engage Brown with gun fire, ending the attack with a fatal gun shot wound to the head. Officer Wilson has maintained throughout the investigation and Grand Jury proceedings that he has done nothing wrong.  Notably, Wilson voluntarily appeared before the Grand Jury and provided over four hours of personal testimony of the events of his fatal encounter with Brown, without legal counsel present.

Posted by Andrew Branca on November 16, 2014 22 Comments
There is much speculation around when the Ferguson Grand Jury is likely to finally release their (widely expected) no true bill (non-indictment) of Police Officer Darren Wilson over the shooting death of Mike Brown. A great many people, myself included, have suggested that the authorities responsible for the release of the Grand Jury's findings would be prudent to wait for colder weather to do so, relying on the conventional wisdom that colder temperatures tend to diminish the frequency and intensity of riots and the other violent behavior (looting, arson) exhibited by the Ferguson protestors. Legal Insurrection commenter Another Ed, however, has moved us past mere conventional wisdom on this subject by kindly linking to a scientific paper that studies precisely the correlation between riots and temperature. That paper, "Ambient Temperature and the Occurrence of Collective Violence: A new Analysis," by JM Carlsmith and CA Anderson of Stanford University, was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1979. It is embedded at the bottom of this post, for those of you who enjoy reading primary research scientific literature. The Carlsmith paper conducted a re-analysis of earlier research, and found that in fact rioting (or, as they more politely refer to it "collective violence," as if it were a workshop of some kind) increases "monotonically" with temperature. The results of their research and analysis?
We conclude that the likelihood of a riot in a given city increases as the maximum ambient daily temperature in that city increases.
They helpfully include a graphical representation of their findings:

Posted by Andrew Branca on November 14, 2014 23 Comments
The New York Times reports today that the Ferguson Grand Jury sitting to determine whether to indict police officer Darren Wilson over the shooting death of Mike Brown heard testimony from Dr. Michael Baden, the pathologist hired by the Brown family to examine the body. Dr. Baden gave a lengthy press interview immediately after conducting his "unofficial" autopsy a week or so after Brown was killed, as shown in the press meeting below.  I've set the video to skip the preliminary 12 minute-long introductory comments of Brown family attorney Benjamin Crump, but feel free to "rewind" if you're into that sort of thing: One of the more remarkable aspects of the events surrounding the shooting of Mike Brown by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson Missouri this past August is that Brown was subject to three-count 'em, THREE--autopsies. One was the official autopsy, which we posted about here: Michael Brown Autopsy A Further Blow To #Ferguson Racial Narrative. (A copy of the official autopsy can be found at that post.)

Posted by Andrew Branca on November 13, 2014 11 Comments
NBC affiliate KDSK is reporting that Ferguson Committeewoman Patricia Bynes claims she was targeted for physical intimidation by protestors while attending the protests herself. Bynes specifies "Lost Voices" as the group that sought to intimidate her, one of many protest-related organizations currently in Ferguson. Democrat Committeewoman Bynes (pictured above) is black, as are the leaders of Lost Voices interviewed for the KDSK story. Bynes described being surrounded and intimidated by Lost Voices members, and says they demanded that she stop speaking to the media about their group.
"They wanted me to stop talking to the media about them, and it was basically done to try and bully me. But it didn't work."
It sure didn't: Asked for comment, Lost Voices leader Melissa McKinnies essentially responded, "It wasn't me."
"A lot of other protestors went around her that was not members of the Lost Voices. Then some of the Lost Voices went, you know, over to speak with her."
And I'm stickin' to it:
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