Police shooting of unarmed teen leads to protests and Riot

[shermanator]

Sounds like they have arrested Antonio French, who was reporting on the issue. French is an alderman for Ward 21 in St. Louis.

[Arya Stark]

And you wonder why "#### the police" is such a popular phrase in America. I respect the police but I would not shed one tear if some crazed lunatic unloaded on these bully punks with an assault rifle.

[Vulcan]

Originally Posted by RougeUnderoos

This "police" force is acting they actually own this town, and aren't in fact employees of the people who live there. There are convoys of armoured cars with dozens of guys wearing military equipment rolling through the town. Geezus.

If this isn't a case for the NRA and the rest of the gun nuts to get on board against government tyranny and the right to bear arms, I don't know what is.

I wonder when we'll hear from them.

I think they believe they are the law.

[Arya Stark]

Originally Posted by fotze

Go easy dude. Always better to let the other side do the crazy. Advocating crazy is not good.

I know, it just seems inevitable. I can not believe this is happening in a first world country, I really am dumbfounded. Anyone who hasn't watched that live stream should go and watch every second of it.Protestors were doing nothing illegal, and were fired upon with tear gas and rubber bullets.

How is this allowed? The officers should be ashamed of themselves.

[Vulcan]

Originally Posted by Arya Stark

I know, it just seems inevitable. I can not believe this is happening in a first world country, I really am dumbfounded. Anyone who hasn't watched that live stream should go and watch every second of it.Protestors were doing nothing illegal, and were fired upon with tear gas and rubber bullets.

How is this allowed? The officers should be ashamed of themselves.

I've been watching this since 1963 and not much has changed. Bull Connor became a household name.

King’s saving grace was Connor. He had a notorious temper and he saw what were in fact relatively low key protests as a threat to his ‘rule’ in Birmingham. He set police dogs on to the protesters and suddenly Birmingham got national attention. King was arrested for defying an injunction that denied his right to march. He was kept in solitary confinement and was refused the right to see his lawyer. Only the intervention of J F Kennedy got his release.

http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk...ngham_1963.htm

Not saying things can't be changed.

[Shnabdabber]

http://stlouis.craigslist.org/sks/4614862334.html

[combustiblefuel]

Their are now photos on twitter of Police Intentionally firing bean bags at photographers.

[combustiblefuel]

Originally Posted by fotze

Go easy dude. Always better to let the other side do the crazy. Advocating crazy is not good.

I refer you back to the JFK quote.
Its not comoletley crazy (the assualt rifle thing was )the way the police have handled this is complete cluster%-ck. But a violent protest when a peaceful one cannot have effect reminds the city who city it really is in charge. If there was not a history of feeling oppressed in a community this usually dose not happen.
This is how America was formed. The British pushed and pushed. The legal system and the government leave people with little else to do. The coperations own the politics of the country

I have been to huge protests where they have been very peaceful UNTILL a cop doesn't like what you say or that one idiot gets to out of control


The biggest crime it seems to be today with them is if you hurt their ego your going down.

[cal_guy]

Originally Posted by combustiblefuel

Their are now photos on twitter of Police Intentionally firing bean bags at photographers.

Might be time to start giving those journalist body armor and helmets.

[combustiblefuel]

Originally Posted by llwhiteoutll

Taking down the police department's comms and trying to put a police officer in mortal danger are not altruistic acts. They are criminal acts and nothing more.

There is ZERO valid reason for the police officer to be publicly identified. Other than to let the "upstanding citizens" who have already threatened his life show up on his doorstep.

I said city comms. Like as City hall. I would of said police if that's what I meant. Not Identifying because he is a police officer is a complete double standard. Any other person accused of a crime is identified immediately whether his life is endanger or not.

He is not going to be any safer at a later time.

[combustiblefuel]

Originally Posted by cal_guy

Might be time to start giving those journalist body armor and helmets.

You mean like in Gaza

[combustiblefuel]

“None of the equipment we are using is military equipment.# The big vans you see are the SWAT Team’s” – Chief Tom Jackson

No action will be taken if protesters are demonstrating after dark- Chief Tom Jackson

“There is not a curfew.# I don’t know where that came from.” – Chief Tom Jackson

What a load of ####

[combustiblefuel]

Originally Posted by cal_guy

Might be time to start giving those journalist body armor and helmets.

Jon Swaine########✔ @jonswaine
Follow
Just saw teargas land right at feet of al-Jazeera America camera crew. They say they were also shot at




Video of this pic in link
http://boingboing.net/2014/08/13/fer...streams-o.html

[combustiblefuel]

Nm

[Tinordi]

On Tuesday, a freelance journalist noticed that a no-fly zone had been issued over Ferguson, Missouri, the site of the recent protests over police violence.
Residents have taken to the streets to express their anger at the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old shot dead by a police officer there. Witnesses allege that Brown was innocent and doing nothing but jaywalking, while police officials have stayed vague on the topic. In recent days, the protests have become violent, with police officers using rubber bullets and tear gas to quell unrest.
The reason listed on the Federal Aviation Commission’s website for the no-fly zone over the city is “TO PROVIDE A SAFE ENVIRONMENT FOR LAW ENFORCEMENT ACTIVITIES.”

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/201...uson-missouri/

[combustiblefuel]

Originally Posted by Tinordi

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/201...uson-missouri/

Ya I laughed when I posted up the no fly zone update. Lasts till Monday.

[Resolute 14]

At the rate this is going, Canada is going to be asked to send peacekeepers in to protect the journalists from the police.

[Senator Clay Davis]

The part about the white cops is somewhat offbase, but the overall point of the militarization of police forces in America is dead on.

You can argue about the looting and the brick-throwing. You can argue about what constitutes a race “riot” these days – and why the hell we are seeing teargas every other evening in the suburbs, or Jim Crow-reminiscent police dogs in the year 2014. There are a lot of things worth arguing about now that the world’s eyes are focused on Ferguson, Missouri, a town where two-thirds of the population is black and 50 of the 53 police offers are white, where one of those officers gunned down an unarmed black kid in broad daylight.

But here is something that makes no sense, that is inarguable: Ferguson (population: 21,135) has about 40 robberies per year, a couple of homicides, almost no arson cases and a crime rate only a bit higher than the national average. Indeed, the town’s crime rate was going down as of two years ago, when the last major data is available. Ditto in neighboring St Louis.

Now St Louis isn’t exactly the picture of safety, but two years ago the St Louis Police Department also acquired a Lenco BearCat armored military vehicle, a “tactical support vehicle” and a helicopter that’s popular with the Korean air force. Earlier this year, the US Department of Homeland Security donated a 22-ton Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle – the thing we used on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan – to the police department in nearby St Charles, Missouri (population: 66,463).

Kara Dansky, the chief author of the ACLU report, told me this week that “the unnecessary use of paramilitary policing tactics tends to escalate the risk of violence to both civilians and officers.” She said there is no central tracking system of the military equipment going out to local police departments – just as there is no oversight on how the equipment is used, or any reporting requirements other than hitting drug-enforcement numbers that bring in more cash to the local PD. One Georgia Congressman wants to introduce real federal oversight, but it’s currently very difficult to know exactly which police department has what, how much they paid for it or what they use it for.

We may never know whether Ferguson police chief Thomas Jackson – the one with the flag, apparently – ordered in the armored vehicles of war this weekend, because we don’t know very much about which paramilitary police force is in control on which night. (They are arresting reporters, after all.) But we know what Jackson said on Wednesday: “that the anarchists that are coming in, the people that don’t want healing, the people that just want to continue to fight” are the people he’s allegedly “concerned about”. We know that one cop in riot gear described Ferguson to the Guardian on Monday night as “a war zone”. And we know that cops who think they are fighting in a war zone like to use their MRAPs and their battlefield guns on the street corner.

On Tuesday, hours after the teargas and the wooden bullets came out in Ferguson for the first time, Jay Caspian King at the New Yorker asked questions we shouldn’t have to:

[H]ave we ... become anesthetized to images of police in armored vehicles and full military gear? And has the proliferation of images on news and social-media sites made them seem any more normal?

The world is arguing about whether the US should be intervening in Iraq, whether we’ll have “boots on the ground” in Baghdad or Mosul. Meanwhile, we have boots on the ground in Ferguson, Missouri. There is nothing normal about that. Why are we even arguing and asking anymore? The toys of war do no belong in a town of 21,000 – not for protests peaceful or less so, not for looting or brick-throwing. Certainly not for the memory of Michael Brown, who was killed by a policeman with a gun in the year 2014.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentis...oting-protests

[terminator]

This episode is disgusting. The police are indeed militirized, a function that has no place in "to protect and serve".
To many things going wrong here:
1.An innocent child murdered unarmed at a distance of 30-feet by the police.
2.The right to peaceful protest culled by curfews
3.Reporters and journalists not being allowed to cover the story, thus allowing for potential polarization of the situation.
4. Militrized police interventation.

Amerikah nearly requires a "third party police" in these situations. When the local police have angered the community and peace needs to be kept they need to organize a 3rd party and neutral force to govern the situation, not some monkeys who are more then obviously trying to kill the story and cover the truth.

[Flash Walken]

Cameras and civilian oversight of the police would reduce these incidents almost completely.