The grand jury considering the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson has decided not to bring charges against the police officer who shot him:
FERGUSON, Mo. — The streets were quiet but fires continued to burn Tuesday following a night of violence triggered by a grand jury’s decision not to indict white police officer Darren Wilson for the August shooting death of unarmed, black teen Michael Brown.
Demonstrators taunted police, shattered windows and set fire to two St. Louis County police cars at the protest’s furious peek. Scattered, intermittent gunfire was also reported.
and, predictably, a riot has broken out. People are protesting because they are angry. What do they want to happen? Vengeance, maybe. What policy change would have altered the outcome?
Ferguson’s mayor and police department have handled the situation badly from the very start but Ferguson is a tiny, nothing town that has suddenly had big city problems thrust upon it in the form of protesters, some peaceful, some just wanting to raise hell, coming in from outside. I sincerely believe that most of the residents just want to protect their lives and property and wish the whole thing would go away.
Question: What are you protesting?
Answer: What have you got?
Kerosene (Song)
As for policy changes, one CNN legal experts suggested that the police simply shouldn’t enforce laws against theft or assault & battery because a perp might get hurt.
I really hope I get the new Ellroy from the library today. Ellroy’s tales are dark & perverse, but not quite as morally degenerate as reality, and certainly not as stupid.
And I have yet to see or hear any black or liberal suggest that maybe Michael Brown could have avoided this by not stealing stuff, shoving people who tried to stop him , or assaulting a police officer, all of which is pretty much confirmed by physical evidence & eye-witness accounts.
And watching CNN last night it became clear that a lot of the worst of it was perpetrated by locals. They confirmed that at times indirectly and at others by asking looters & arsonists off camera. The idea of the peaceful local is as mythical as Wilson shooting the Gentle Giant in ththe back after “hands up don’t shoot.”
I thought the DA did a pretty good job of laying out the case. It was also clear that both CNN & the President didn’t bother to listen to that account.
That account largely matched what had been leaked by Holder’s DoJ to the NYT a few weeks back.
Still don’t buy that the officer did everything the way it should have been done, but it doesn’t look like anyone actually cares about good police procedure.
Never knew you were such an underground rocker, PD.
Very odd that the announcement was made so late, given the previous pattern of peaceful protests being taken over by violence and crime after sundown. I suspect that the answer might lie in a promise the prosecutor made to inform the Brown family (six?) hours in advance of the public of the decision.
Bizarre that after mobilizing the national guard and declaring a state of emergency that they are no-shows. The role of the national guard is riot control, not policing Baghdad. Did the feds block their use? The Mayor of Ferguson makes it sound like the Governor wouldn’t pick-up the phone, so he called the Lt. Governor instead.
I thought Obama did a good job, but was hurt by the split screens of burning Ferguson. Until about halfway through when he seemed to be at a loss as to what to say and began repeating himself.
I thought the prosecutor was o.k.; it’s pretty clear that this was not a prosecutable case. Professor Cassel has a lengthy post on the grand jury process was fair. He points out something I tried to write yesterday, to the extent that this process was different it because the grand jury uniquely had to determine whether or not there was even a crime. Most criminal investigations start with the existence of a crime (dead body, damaged or stolen property), and work on linking the crime to subject matter.
The prosecutor pled for acceptance of the decision, but a commitment to make changes to our society, but when asked for specifics he had no policy proposals. Obama had a similar moment, but came up with the need for more African-American cops and nothing else. Who wants to be a cop in Ferguson?
@Guarneri, until my oldest child was born I was the drummer in a punk rock band, and we were good enough to get paying gigs and open for nationally touring acts. Less Big Black, more like Naked Raygun, with an English singer that danced around stage in kilt.
I thought Obama’s comments quickly became meandering mush. He compounded the problem by starting to list all the things that rioters might do while telling them not to do that. If he had been white people would be howling today that he had been stereo-typing black people.
Of course, I contend that he’s a SWPL (Stuff White People Like, or in some usages a whiter person), and not black, but that’s clearly a minority view in the country. So his statements sounded exactly like what I would have expected of an aging hipster douchebag. But since most of the people that would comment on this are themselves aging hipster douchebags they wouldn’t notice unless he had an (R) behind his name.
…
I kept watching riot porn on CNN until about 2 AM eastern. It really was incredible watching Anderson Cooper, who could not stop smirking while reporting on the “tragic” destruction of family businesses with roots in the community. The reporting was that insurance doesn’t cover riots so that the losses were total. But Anderson’s smirk ….
CNN’s coverage was despicable. The worst part IMO was the panel of four who all agreed (and commented with indignation) that the grand jury process was illegitimate.
That point is certainly arguable, but even if true they were clearly stepping into the story on one side and fanning the flames of protest.
Can’t have riot porn without a riot, CStanley.
I should say that the two or three reporters (two of whom were women, IIRC) working the streets were much better. They were out doing ACTUAL REPORTING, strange as that sounds, and at least one of them sounded like she had spent some time before hand to learn who some of the people were.
PD
As soon as I read the first sentence I knew you were going to cite Naked Raygun. Punk and underground aren’t my thing but that’s cool.
I am surprised that you did not take the broader view since you brought it up in your world going crazy post. For large areas of our world, it is not a very good time to be an 18-30 y/o male. If you are a minority in the US it is not especially good. If you are a Muslim living almost anywhere it is not good. Jobs are scarce. Respect is scarce. Frustration abounds. As a result, angry young men do what angry young men have always done. What do they want to happen? You know you can’t get a policy response from that group, but it is pretty clear that work and respect, a sense that the world is at least fair to them even if harsh, would be a big part of that answer.
Steve
Steve, I agree with your larger point. But it is plain stupid that if they want respect & jobs & a place in the community that they would then destroy their own community. If they had attacked the police department, or the courthouse, or even some lily-white neighborhood nearby, THAT would make sense. But to destroy the businesses owned by their friends & neighbors, ruining them, putting more friends & neighbors & family out of work, and ruining the prospects for themselves & their community is simply stupid.
Seriously, if you were interviewing for a new position and some 24 year-old black man from Ferguson wanted the job, you’d think twice about hiring him. They’ve ducked themselves in the ass.
Seriously, if this is a race war, then so far blacks have lost both the First Battle of Ferguson fought over several weeks, and lost the Second Battle of Ferguson in a rout – and they’ve done it all to themselves. Whites haven’t done shit to them.
And as I wrote this protestors just tried to overturn a police car in Ferguson, almost dropped on themselves, and now they’ve torched it. Looks like they’re about to start tossing Molotov cocktails to chase off the law. That would make sense except that now they’ll destroy what’s left. So much for that cake shop.
This is seriously stupid – community suicide by riot.
This piece from the American Prospect has a lengthy history racial discrimination in the area that didn’t have any surprises from similar stories in other Northern cities, but it offered a potential answer to something I’ve been wondering. Between the 1990 census and the 2010 census, the city went from 25% black to 67%, a huge transition. Was it push or pull? Where did they come from? Are today’s grievances even rooted in Ferguson?
“Litigation has revealed that in the 2000s, federally supervised banks marketed exploitative subprime loans to African American communities like Ferguson, expecting that African Americans (particularly the elderly) were too gullible to resist false promises. When the loans’ exploding interest rates combined with the collapse of the housing bubble, black neighborhoods’ devastation compounded. Half of Ferguson homes today are underwater, with owners owing more than their homes are worth.”
I’m skeptical of sourcing to the revealed truth of litigation, but they are claiming Ferguson is a crisis built on soft credit to minorities with government complicity.
Was listening to an interview with Ray Kelly on the radio while driving. He claims that the St Louis area has 90 municipalities with 50 different police forces. That training is very inconsistent. That when you call for help, and since most forces are pretty small that is common, you never know who will show up. First I heard of this.
Ice- You sort of got my larger point, but missed the obvious one. Since when do angry young men who have constantly been thwarted act rationally? What role model would they follow? One that they know?
Steve
Having a house involves more than a single factor. Making the mortgage payments is usually the easiest–it’s own cheaper than paying rent.
For many the down payment is a major obstacle. And that doesn’t even take into account the cost of ordinary upkeep. That’s why pushing people towards home ownership isn’t that great a strategy.
@steve, St. Louis County has 90 municipalities. St. Louis separated from the county over a hundred years ago, which strikes me as unique. In other places, I think “the City” would have continued to expand with the pace of urbanization and places like Ferguson would be part of “the City.”
I think a lot of people agree that the 90 municipalities need to consolidate and share resources more, but that’s old news. The better-off communities don’t want to share.
It’s rare but not unique. The same arrangement is true in Baltimore IIRC.
Since when do angry young men who have constantly been thwarted act rationally? What role model would they follow? One that they know?
A fair point to an extent. But there’s still the question of simple thought and common courtesy. They have to know they’re tearing down the businesses of friends & neighbors.
They’re going to complain about The Man keeping them down while doing far more to keep themselves down that The Man would ever bother with these days. At some point, this is just simple bloody-minded stupidity for the evil joy of it.
Yes, Baltimore city & county have that arrangement. Iirc, Maryland’s main local governance structure is broken into counties and a small number of independent cities such as Baltimore & Annapolis which are independent of any counties.
The American Prospect article @PD Shaw linked explains why some of those small municipalities exist, but others are probably the result of the area’s development. Most contiguous areas did not grow that way. They were a patchwork that grew together.
(housing vouchers = section 8 housing)
It was probably a combination of natural growth, racism, and white flight. The article writer and liberals believe that they can force people together if the break down the smaller areas into one combined entity, but the white people will just move further.
With electronic surveillance and drones, these white communities will be able to end charges of profiling blacks. They will have everybody under surveillance. These communities will be filled with uptight people, but that is kinda the point.
Uptight white people do not want to single out black people. They want to keep everybody under surveillance. Uptight people believe that anybody who does not want to be under surveillance must be a criminal or a criminal sympathizer.
Take your typical white 18 year old post-racial progressive and drop them into Ferguson or the New Orleans Magnolia Projects. There will be an instantaneous transformation into an uptight conservative “racist” white 50 year old. When you only need to interact with a few black people, it is real easy being progressive.
Chicago’s and Detroit’s racism problem has been solved. Soon Ferguson’s racism problem will be solved as well.
What a wonderful world.
It’s partly a Mad Tea Party.
Until 15 years ago, Ferguson was almost entirely blue collar white. That’s when blacks started moving from adjacent North St. Louis into Ferguson. I’m quite sure that white flight definitely played a factor thereafter.
However, North St. Louis itself underwent a transition from almost entirely white to almost entirely black starting in the 1960s. Increasingly, North St. Louis has been characterized by empty lots where decaying houses were razed. Don’t forget that the most notorious project in the history of public housing, Pruitt-Igoe, was in North St. Louis. It was built in what had been Kerry Patch, where the North St. Louis Irish lived.
North St. Louis doesn’t lack space—it had a higher population a century ago than it does now—but it may lack affordable housing as houses transition from owner-occupied to rental to abandoned to razed.
The adjacent parts of North County which includes Ferguson are now, apparently, going through the same transition. I suspect that in a decade much of Ferguson will be empty lots.
I don’t know what the solution is. But the problems are pretty obvious.
Calling people racist and burning down businesses is probably not the solution, but I could be wrong.
As it works out this is a subject I know something about firsthand. When my great-uncle died in the late ’60s, he left a number of North St. Louis rental properties. For complicated reasons my mom ended up as trustee for his widow. For part of the period of her trusteeship I maintained the properties personally.
I could practically watch the neighborhoods deteriorate.
By the early ’80s my mom had sold all of the properties for pennies. The last property she sold had been the family home for that part of the family for a century. My mom sold that when my great-uncle’s widow died.
I still have a half dozen handmade tie quilts I bought from her next door neighbor.
The difference is that Baltimore kept growing as an independent city by annexation of surrounding cities. By becoming independent from the County, St. Louis stopped the ability to grow by annexation. That was the intent, people in the city didn’t want to pay for all the improvements for the rural areas of the county that offered little in the way of taxes. Sounds like there may be an important legal distinction about what an independent city can do in Missouri and Maryland.
Most large cities in the late 19th and early 20th century were gobbling up smaller towns on their outskirts, often using superior water and sanitary services to their advantage. For the suburbs to survive, they needed to build-up their own political and institutional resources. It was survival of the fittest, with only wealthy or consolidated cities surviving annexation, until around WWI when cities reconsidered the cost-benefits of annexation.
A more natural growth for St. Louis would have been for it to continue expanding for the next 50 years, places like Ferguson might have been part of the city. And to counteract that growth, larger cities would have emerged in the County. There wouldn’t be 90 cities in the county.
As if in confirmation of what I wrote above! My great-grandfather’s house was at 1406 Ferry in St. Louis.
Go to Google Maps, enter 1406 Ferry in St. Louis, select Street View and look around. You’ll see what I meant.
I don’t want to overstate the case though. I live somewhere in the triangle between St. Louis (independent city), Chicago (aggressive annexer), and Indianapolis (complete county-city merger), and the various forms of government don’t change fundamental problems of race and poverty. Many of the cities in St. Louis county are simply not adequately sized or resourced for the difficulties of urban areas.
Is 1406 even there any more? I think that background is useful, particularly as some bloggers have been talking about the downside of gentrification.
When I was driving around the older sections of Cincinnati in the Fall, there were a lot of tall, thin rowhouses that were obviously more densely situated at one time. The hilly terrain meant trying to compact a few of these next to each other on tops or sides of hills, but when their neighbors are torn down, the don’t look level or properly proportioned. It was the strangest thing about the trip.
It was on the opposite side of the street from where Street View comes down (at least for me) at 1403 Ferry. There was a row of Victorians there. Neither 1406 nor the houses on either side of it are there any more.
Just checked the street I grew up on (not too far from Ferguson). About half the houses on the street are gone.
I was going to add a longer comment about social class and racism, but I saw a reference to this link “I Was Mugged, And I Understand Why”.
Oliver is a rich liberal, and he has a rich liberal’s fantasy of the poor. In this fantasy, the poor steal because they lack the willpower to withstand the easy path of crime. Basicly, they are lazy and shiftless, or they are morally corrupt. He would fit in well at a Klan rally, but then, most rich white liberals would.
He does not know any poor people or criminals, but he assumes they are the same. He is a vile, disgusting, condescending, prick. I would love to drop him or any of the “millennial generation” into the shitholes around the US. They would not last ten minutes.
Oliver will never live around poor black people. Instead, Oliver would rather live with rich white racists. How many racists would need to move into Oliver’s neighborhood before he moved away? How many blacks will ever live in the same neighborhood as he does?
Oliver and the millennial generation are today’s racists. They have constructed a fantasy of the poor, pitiful, helpless black man who cannot live without the great and wonderful rich white liberal. They write books, plays, and movies about white people saving black people.
Of course, Oliver will become wealthy using the system that unfairly oppresses the black man he is working so hard to save. He will bitch and moan about the financial system and liar’s loans. He will argue with PE investors over the financial system screwing over the poor black homeowners, but he will conveniently forget that it was the PE investor who funded the things he is using to build his wealth.
The 60’s assholes were going to change the world. (Remember assholes?) It was great while somebody else was footing the bill. As soon as they had to start paying their way, we got leisure suits, cocaine, and disco. (Remember assholes?)
Today’s millennial generation will be tomorrow’s assholes, and if I am around, I will be sure to remind you assholes. You will not change the world. You will not do shit. You will take the world as you find it, and you will make it more like you found it. Period. You are too cowardly to change anything. You will never give up your luxuries.
The remaining brick houses don’t look bad. My grandparent’s brick house in Peoria was the kind that came in rolls and had to be nailed onto the frame.
Part of what is odd to me about St. Louis is that hub of government office buildings in Clayton would be in downtown St. Louis in other cities, providing more middle-class jobs in the center, resisting the gravitational pull to the outer ring.
There are actually two hubs of government office buildings. The one in St. Louis extends from City Hall roughly to the Civil Courts Building in downtown St. Louis. The other, for St. Louis County, is in Clayton as you describe it.
When I was very small and my dad was an associate working for a large law firm their office was downtown on 5th Street. 5th and Olive, maybe? Later he moved to Clayton and had an office for years on the second floor of a two story building (above a candy store) across the street from the court house.
After that he moved a couple of blocks to the first building in Clayton built with more than two stories (gasp!).
As soon as they had to start paying their way, we got leisure suits, cocaine, and disco.
LOL!
I believe the one good thing that could be said about Gen-Xers is that we have largely stood for nothing, save perhaps a certain sardonic sense of our own place in the American generational and cultural framework.
Nice obelisk at Bissell & Blair.