Racist Police Response to Ferguson Protests
 

The Ferguson protests are currently home to what may be the most severe case of mass civil rights violations domestically in my lifetime. Since the police murdered Mike Brown in cold blood several days ago, all but one instance of protest has been peaceful. Yet the police have taken it upon themselves to aim deadly weapons at crowds, fire rubber bullets, flash bangs and tear gas into crowds, and to violate the rights of citizens to film police by arresting those, journalist and non-journalist alike, who refuse to shut their cameras off.

The police chief just used, verbatim, the phrase "outside agitators" when placing blame for the escalating situation. This is the EXACT WORDS Bull Connor used in Birmingham in June of 1963. Racism is alive in America and there is no better example than in this St. Louis suburb.

Citizens:

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Reporters:

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Wow, that's terrible.

I wasn't aware there had already been a court case and that the police officer involved had been tried and convicted - I guess developments are moving fast.

A right wing libertarian militia group has announced that they are sending people to St Louis, so the police chief's comments may not be as far-out as you think.


Some words of sense, from the Reverend Al Sharpton:

Huffington Post Reporter Arrested In Ferguson

Sickening.

Not that I don't agree with you, but don't you think this post/thread is a little sensationalist?

I think PF posted it in the heat of the moment but I don't think it's that sensationalist. To accommodate people irked by the thread title I guess you can swap 'racist' with 'extreme'?

*terrorists

The police behaviour and response is hard to even fathom. Looking in from a distance, my reaction pretty much boils down to "holy fucking shit, people, what the hell?"

Of course there will be a court case, as there should be and must be. But don't think I buy the story the cops, who have given us every reason to not trust them on anything, needed a day and a half to come up with.

Two years ago the feds gave St. Louis County a grant for dashboard cams. They have them. But they never installed them. They are arresting journalists in restaurants. They are teargassing journalists on the streets and dismantling their equipment when they flee. Whatever the county police tell you is almost certainly a lie.

These are not outside agitators. These are residents being teargassed in their front yards.

Right, there's no question I was riled up. I was watching videos and reading stories last night and just got furious.

For those who are prepared to argue that it's not racist, I point to what happened at the Bundy Ranch. They had their guns pointed at officers. Do you think if black people had their guns pointed at officers they wouldn't be fired upon?

If a bunch of African Americans took the position that they are on sovereign land in the USA and armed themselves to the teeth to prevent the Federal Government access, you can bet your ass the story would have been totally different.

I would assume that would be the same outcome for any race other than white.

Don't know that there's a way you can look at it that doesn't reflect horrible on Ferguson police. Even the actual, black-and-white facts show that blacks in this community are unfairly maligned and have little representation in the authorities.

I really can not see how this is not about race. How many white kids are shot by the police every year? You marginalise a whole section of people this is what happens. To be honest I do not blame black people getting angry at this, I don't particularly blame them for lobbing stuff at the police. They are definitely not there to protect or serve when dressed in gear only suitable for a war zone. Coming from Northern Ireland anyway I have little trust of any police service. Black people are treated daily as people in NI were in exceptional circumstances. The whole police story sounds complete bollocks.

Racism does not have to be in your face but to me this is as in your face as it gets in this day and age.

I wasn't insinuating, just for the record, that it wasn't about race. More to the point, we've just talked, before, about how thread titles can totally color the thread itself.

Of course this is about race. One of the greatest misconceptions about racism, especially in this country, is that it's only about active individual acts of discrimination. This is the litigation-based culture of racism (which, to be fair, managed to achieve significant progress). But there's a widespread tendency to overlook structural issues - like racial imbalances in police forces, overlay of race and class, or criminal laws that de facto cause bias against racial minorities - that for all intents and purposes are racist if not in design, at least in consequence.

Oh I knew you weren't, I didn't mean to imply anything like that. But racism was put in the title by design, I'm not really interested in reading a conversation about this that doesn't involve race.

My mother is from St. Louis and she remarked that it was odd to her how white the police force is. "The Philly police force matches the demographics now. For some reason, it looks like St. Louis's still doesn't. It's a really black city but there are hardly any black cops involved."

The Washington Post had a very instructive graph about racial imbalances in the police force across the country. It's quite starking in some cases.

Where police forces don't resemble the community - Washington Post

and then you have serious academic research that reaches conclusions like this:

Who protests determines how police respond - The Washington Post

So yeah, one can choose to bury one's head in the sand.