Tag Archives: ferguson

Here’s the Data That Shows Cops Kill Black People at a Higher Rate Than White People

by DewayneEdmonson Posted on September 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Since a police officer shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, one month ago, reporters and researchers have scrambled to find detailed data on how often cops wound or kill civilians. What they’ve uncovered has been frustratingly incomplete: Perhaps not surprisingly, law enforcement agencies don’t keep very good stats on incidents that turn deadly. In short, it’s a mystery exactly how many Americans are shot by the police every year.

However, as I and others have reported, there is some national data out there. It’s not complete, but it provides a general idea of how many people die at the hands of the police—and the significant racial disparity among them:

• The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reporting program records that 410 people were killed in justifiable homicides by police in 2012. While the FBI collects information on the victims’ race, it does not publish the overall racial breakdown.

• The Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that between 2003 and 2009 there were more than 2,900 arrest-related deaths involving law enforcement. Averaged over seven years, that’s about 420 deaths a year. While BJS does not provide the annual number of arrest-related deaths by race or ethnicity, a rough calculation based on its data shows that black people were about four times as likely to die in custody or while being arrested than whites.

Note: Most arrest-related deaths by homicide are by law enforcement, not private citizens. Rate calculated by dividing deaths by the average Census population for each race in 2003-09. “Other” includes American Indians, Alaska Natives, Asians, Native Hawaiians, other Pacific Islander, and persons of two or more races.

• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Vital Statistics System offers another view into officers’ use of deadly force. In 2011, the CDC counted 460 people who died by “legal intervention” involving a firearm discharge. In theory, this includes any death caused by a law enforcement or state agent (it does not include legal executions).

The CDC’s cause-of-death data, based on death certificates collected at the state level, also reveals a profound racial disparity among the victims of police shootings. Between 1968 and 2011, black people were between two to eight times more likely to die at the hands of law enforcement than whites. Annually, over those 40 years, a black person was on average 4.2 times as likely to get shot and killed by a cop than a white person. The disparity dropped to 2 to 1 between 2003 and 2009, lower than the 4-to-1 disparity shown in the BJS data over those same years. The CDC’s database of emergency room records also shows similar racial disparities among those injured by police.

However, these numbers provide an extremely limited view of the lethal use of force by law enforcement. For reasons that have been outlined by USA Today, Vox, FiveThirtyEight, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and others, the FBI data is pretty unreliable and represents a conservative estimate. Some 18,000 agencies contribute to the FBI’s broader crime reporting program, but only about 750 reported their justifiable homicide figures in 2012. New York state, for example, does not report justifiable homicides to the FBI, according to bureau spokesperson Stephen G. Fischer, Jr.

It’s also not clear that Brown’s death—the circumstances of which remain in dispute—would show up in the FBI’s data in the first place. (Ferguson reported two homicides to the 2012 Uniform Crime Report, but neither were justifiable homicides, according to Fischer.) The FBI’s justifiable homicide data only counts “felons,” but its definition of a felon differs from the common legal understanding of a felon as someone who has been convicted of a felony. “A felon in this case is someone who is committing a felony criminal offense at the time of the justifiable homicide,” according to a statement provided by Uniform Crime Reporting staff. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Handbook describes the following scenario to illustrate what constitutes the justifiable killing of a criminal caught in the act:

A police officer answered a bank alarm and surprised the robber coming out of the bank. The robber saw the responding officer and fired at him. The officer returned fire, killing the robber. The officer was charged in a court of record as a matter of routine in such cases.

And since the classification of felonies—usually serious criminal offenses such as murder and assault—may vary by jurisdiction, UCR staff states, there is no standard definition of the word.

This leaves much room for interpretation. Was Michael Brown committing a felony at the time Officer Darren Wilson shot him? Local authorities in Ferguson have claimed that Brown was a robbery suspect and that he assaulted Wilson prior to the shooting. Whether Brown’s case might be classified as a justifiable homicide hinges on the details of what happened in the moments before his death and whether local investigations determine that Wilson was justified to shoot. The FBI’s records ultimately rely on police departments’ word and the assumption that the victim was a criminal.

BJS, meanwhile, collects its data from state-level coordinators that identify arrest-related deaths in part by surveying law enforcement agencies. But the majority of these coordinators do not contact each law enforcement agency in their states, so BJS has no way of telling how many deaths have gone unidentified, according to spokesperson Kara McCarthy. BJS collects some details about each reported death, such as how the victims died, whether they were armed, whether they were intoxicated or displayed signs of mental illness, and whether charges had been filed against them at the time of death. It does not collect information about whether the victims had any prior convictions.

Some of the gaps in the FBI and BJS data can be filled in by the CDC data, but there are limitations here, too. The CDC data does not evaluate whether these killings were justified or not. The agency categorizes fatalities by International Classification of Diseases codes, which are used by coroners and medical examiners to record the medical cause, not the legal justification, of death. And death certificates aren’t immune to reporting problems, explains Robert Anderson, chief of the CDC’s Mortality Statistics Branch. This data is still “at the mercy of the medical examiner and coroner,” who often write death certificates and may not include details about officer involvement. Anderson says those details are necessary in order for the CDC to categorize a death as a legal intervention.

Better data, and the will to collect it, is necessary to get the full picture of how many criminals and law-abiding citizens are killed by police every year. Until then Michael Brown—and others like him—may never even become a statistic.

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Here’s the Data That Shows Cops Kill Black People at a Higher Rate Than White People

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Voter Registration Drives in Ferguson Are "Disgusting," Says Missouri GOP Leader

by RosellaHahn Posted on August 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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Over the last couple days, voter registration booths have been popping up in Ferguson. There was one by the ruined site of the recently burned-down QuikTrip convenience store, which has become a central gathering site of the protests, and another near the site where Michael Brown was shot.

Voter turnout was just 12 percent in Ferguson’s last municipal election, and in a city that’s 60 percent black, virtually all city officials are white. In December, the black superintendent of the Ferguson-Florissant school district was fired by the then all-white school board, and the longtime St. Louis county executive, who is black, recently lost his seat to a white opponent in a race seen as “racially charged.” “Five thousand new voters will transform the city from top to bottom,” said Jesse Jackson Sr., who told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Monday that he was meeting with local clergy to organize a door-to-door voter registration drive.

But the prospect of more registered black voters has greatly perturbed the executive director of Missouri’s Republican Party, Matt Wills, who expressed outrage at the new registration booths to Breitbart News Monday:

“If that’s not fanning the political flames, I don’t know what is,” Wills said. “I think it’s not only disgusting but completely inappropriate…Injecting race into this conversation and into this tragedy, not only is not helpful, but it doesn’t help a continued conversation of justice and peace.”

While some on Twitter echoed Wills’ sentiments and painted the voter efforts as Democratic opportunism, other political leaders in Missouri distanced themselves from Wills’ comments. Republican state Sen. Ryan Silvey of Kansas City tweeted, “I have no problem w/ protesters, or anyone, getting registered to vote. How do we keep our gov’t accountable if not by ballot?” And he had more to say later:

In April, an editorial in the Kansas City Star denounced “cheap” tactics by the Missouri GOP to “make voting more difficult for certain citizens, who are most likely to be elderly, low-income, students or minorities. They’re not even subtle about it.” A proposed amendment to the state constitution would require photo ID at the polls, and a proposal to bring early voting to Missouri would disallow it on Sundays—a big day for black voters. The Star pointed out that the photo ID law would cost the state over $6 million next year, “a huge cost, especially because Republicans have been able to produce zero examples of voter identity fraud in Missouri.” In fact, as my colleague Kevin Drum has exhaustively reported, incidents of voter fraud anywhere in the country are microscopically few; the New York Times found just 86 cases from 2002 to 2006, for instance.

“Elected officials don’t have to care about black citizens as long as they don’t fear them at the ballot box,” Dorothy A. Brown, a professor of law at Emory University’s School of Law who’s written a book on race and the law, noted on CNN.com last week. If anything, the Missouri GOP may be on track to increase the number of voters determined to put that notion into practice.

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Voter Registration Drives in Ferguson Are "Disgusting," Says Missouri GOP Leader

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Cop Being Sued Over Beating Is Now a Ferguson City Councilwoman

by JaxonAshcraft Posted on August 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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In 2009, police in Ferguson, Missouri, arrested Henry M. Davis on suspicion of driving under the influence and took him to jail. What followed is described in court documents as “physical contact between the officers and Mr. Davis.” One officer, Kim Tihen, allegedly “struck Davis in his head with a closed fist and hit him in the head with handcuffs.” Davis suffered a concussion and severe facial lacerations, while an officer was left with a broken nose. Afterwards, prosecutors charged Davis with four counts of destruction of property—because his blood had dirtied the officers’ uniforms.

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Davis pleaded guilty to reduced charges and ended up moving to Mississippi. Officer Tihen, for her part, is no longer with the Ferguson Police Department. In 2012, after four years on the force, she won election to the city council, becoming one of the six-person body’s five white members. (The sixth is Latino.) Two-thirds of Ferguson’s residents are black, but the city holds elections in the spring, making for low turnout—in April 2012, when Tihen was elected, less than 9 percent of eligible voters went to the polls. (The Ferguson police force is even less representative of the city’s African American majority: Just 4 percent of its members are black.) Last week, after police cracked down on residents protesting the killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed teen, Tihen and the rest of the city council issued a statement calling on demonstrations to cease at dusk.

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Cop Being Sued Over Beating Is Now a Ferguson City Councilwoman

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Here’s What We Saw on the Ferguson Livestreams Last Night

by KristiaOquinn Posted on August 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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The situation in Ferguson continued to deteriorate Monday night. The curfew imposed by Gov. Jay Nixon was lifted Monday as he called in the National Guard to help police the area. We kept tabs on the livestreams coming from Moustafa Hussein at Argus Radio (embedded below) and Tim Pool at Vice News (rewatch the feed here). See below for more updates as events unfolded.

Updates:

1:06 a.m. CDT, Argus: Hussein and other media are gathered in the designated press area outside the protest area, waiting for updates. We’re signing off for the night, but check back in the morning for more updates.

12:45 a.m. CDT, Argus: Hussein and his colleague are turned away at another entry point to the protest area. There appears to be a lot of confusion over where journalists and protestors can and can’t go. As the Washington Post’s Wesley Lowery tweeted earlier:

12:15 a.m. CDT, Argus: “Something is happening in the neighborhood and they’re keeping media completely away from it,” Hussein says. “Every time we get to the street that officers told us to go to, we’re being told to go to another area.”

11:53 p.m. CDT, Vice: Vice’s Tim Pool trying to get into press area but can’t find his credential. Officer: “Credentials.” Pool: “I lost it when I was getting shot at.” Officer: “Well you’re not getting through.” (Officer rips off “PRESS” decal on Pool’s vest) “This doesn’t mean shit.”

11:52 p.m. CDT, Argus: Police officers appear to arrest several protesters. One officer tells the Argus reporter that all media needs to go up 2.5 miles back to the press area near the Target store, apologizing for the inconvenience. “We don’t get told much,” the officer says. Meanwhile:

11:45 p.m. CDT, Argus: Police repeatedly tell protesters: “Everyone on the Ferguson-Market parking lot needs to leave immediately or you will be subject to arrest, with the exception of credentialed media. Do it now. Or you will be subject to arrest.” Moments later, a line of police officers proceeds down the street, holding up their weapons:

11:41 p.m. CDT, Vice: Tim Pool, Vice News reporter, to officer: “Are there live shots?” Officer: “Yes. Bad guys shot. We didn’t shoot.”

11:30 p.m. CDT, Argus: Police ask media to shut off the lights on their cameras.

11 p.m. CDT, Vice: Police begin deploying smoke, tear gas, and flash bang grenades. Vice reporter Tim Pool, who is filming the feed, says he was hit in the leg by a rubber bullet.

10:40 CDT, Argus: Police rush in and grab two protesters, one a woman who can be heard saying she is trying to get home.

10:20 CDT, Argus: Protest leaders are able to calm an increasingly tense situation by moving media and protesters out of the street and onto the sidewalk after police give indications they might move on the crowd.

10pm CDT, Argus: Antonio French, a local alderman, can be seen trying to calm down several aggressive protesters, and keeping media from getting too close to police. The police have also deployed, on and off, a noise device to try and disperse the crowd. Read our interview with French here.

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Here’s What We Saw on the Ferguson Livestreams Last Night

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What Do We Know So Far From Mike Brown’s Autopsies?

by DamienVxmvkqoot Posted on August 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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Normally, it takes weeks to get the results of an autopsy. But today, St. Louis County medical examiner Mary Case announced that Michael Brown, the unarmed teenager who was killed by a policeman last weekend in Ferguson, Missouri, was shot in the head and chest multiple times. Here’s the information we know about Michael Brown’s death, and a little background on why autopsies usually take so much longer.

What have the autopsies found so far?

Three separate autopsies are in various stages of completion. The St. Louis County medical examiner’s office announced on Monday that Brown was killed by multiple bullets to the chest and head. The office has not yet released information about the number or location of the bullets or their toxicology report. According to a confidential source reporting to the Washington Post, Brown’s toxicology test found that he tested positive for marijuana.

The preliminary results of an independent autopsy arranged by the Brown family and performed on Sunday by former New York City medical examiner Michael Baden found that Brown was shot six times: four times in his right arm, and twice in the head. One of the bullets entered the top of Brown’s skull, indicating that his head was tilted forward when the bullet struck him and caused a fatal injury. According to Benjamin Crump, the attorney representing the Browns, the family wanted “an autopsy done by somebody who is objective and who does not have a relationship with the Ferguson police.”

Attorney General announced on Sunday that the Justice Department would conduct a third autopsy, because of “the extraordinary circumstances involved in this case and at the request of the Brown family.” A department representative said the autopsy would take place “as soon as possible.”

Why does it usually take so long to get autopsy results?

An autopsy itself usually doesn’t take too long, but often, medical examiners will wait to release the results until toxicology tests, which analyze the presence of drugs, are also complete. Toxicology tests usually take several weeks, in part due to the chemistry involved and in part because there’s often a backlog of tests. Coupling the release of the toxicology and autopsy results is standard practice because it gives a more complete picture of what may have happened during the shooting, says Judy Melinek, a forensic pathologist and the author of Working Stiff: The Making of a Medical Examiner. Determining whether or not a person was under the influence of drugs “may help interpret a person’s behavior and reaction time,” she says.

What do toxicology tests entail?

A basic screening often involves using immunoassays to test blood and urine (from inside the body) for drugs, including alcohol, marijuana, and opiates. If a test comes back positive, then a lab will run more complex tests, like mass spectrometry, to determine the exact concentration of the drug. Melinek says that “negative results come back faster,” and “the more drugs found in a person’s system, the longer it takes because each has to be verified and quantitated.” If Brown only tested positive for marijuana, the tests would only take a few days.

Was Brown’s case slowed down by an autopsy backlog?

Autopsy backlogs do exist—last year in Massachusetts, for example, there were nearly 1,000 unfinished death certificates due to lack of qualified pathologists and state funding for toxicology testing. According to Suzanne Picayune, a representative of the St. Louis County medical examiner’s office, Brown’s case was expedited through the system, as often happens for cases involving officers.

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What Do We Know So Far From Mike Brown’s Autopsies?

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We Created a Policing Monster By Mistake

by AllenTritt Posted on August 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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Although I’ve avoided writing about Ferguson for private reasons, I almost wrote a short post yesterday in order to make one specific point. But it turns out to be OK that I didn’t, because Annie Lowrey wrote it for me and did a better job than I would have.

The point of her post is simple: Two decades ago violent crime really was out of control, and it seemed reasonable to a lot of people that police needed to respond in a much more forceful way. We can argue forever about whether militarizing our police forces was an appropriate response to higher crime rates, but at least it was an understandable motivation. Later, police militarization got a further boost from 9/11, and again, that was at least an understandable response.

But at the same time this trend started in the early 90s, the crime wave of the 70s and 80s finally crested and then began to ebb. Likewise, Al Qaeda terrorism never evolved into a serious local problem. We’ve spent the past two decades militarizing our police forces to respond to problems that never materialized, and now we’re stuck with them. We don’t need commando teams and SWAT units in every town in America to deal with either terrorism or an epidemic of crime, so they get used for other things instead. And that’s how we end up with debacles like Ferguson.

Police militarization was a mistake. You can argue that perhaps we didn’t know that at the time. No one knew in 1990 that crime was about to begin a dramatic long-term decline, and no one knew in 2001 that domestic terrorism would never become a serious threat. But we know now. There’s no longer even a thin excuse for arming our police forces this way.

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We Created a Policing Monster By Mistake

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6 Good Reasons a Black Person Might Resist Arrest

by BraydenDethridg Posted on August 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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At least four black men were killed by police in the past month, via chokehold, tasing, and shootings, after being confronted for reasons ranging from selling untaxed cigarettes to picking up a BB gun off a shelf in Wal-Mart.

In at least two of these cases—Dante Parker and Eric Garner—the victims allegedly resisted arrest. Some political leaders, witnesses at the scene, and Internet commenters have placed blame on the victims for this reason, saying their refusal to go quietly with the cops is what ended their lives.

More MoJo coverage of the Michael Brown police shooting


Ferguson Is 60 Percent Black. Virtually All Its Cops Are White.


“Hands Up, Don’t Shoot:” Peaceful Protests Across the Country Last Night


Exactly How Often Do Police Shoot Unarmed Black Men?


4 Unarmed Black Men Have Been Killed By Police in the Last Month


A Few Horrifying Pictures From Ferguson Last Night


Anonymous Posts St. Louis Police Dispatch Tapes From Day of Ferguson Shooting


Incredibly Powerful Photo of Black Students at Howard University


The Ferguson Shooting and the Science of Race and Guns

“For FUCKS SAKE stop struggling and resisting like this and deal with it at the precinct!! Resisting arrest, even if the police have the wrong guy, is a TERRIBLE idea!! God why don’t people get this?” writes one commenter at Gawker. At a press conference on gun control in Harlem yesterday, New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio said that “once an officer has decided that arrest is necessary, every New Yorker should agree to do what they need to do as a citizen and respect the police officer and follow their guidance. And then there is a thorough due-process system thereafter.”

And how about in the tasing death of Dante Parker? A San Bernadino county newspaper employee and married father of five with no criminal record, Parker was out riding his bike for exercise on Tuesday when he was approached by sheriff’s deputies as a robbery suspect. A witness relayed what he saw:

He was super strong…it took about two or three guys to get his hands behind him. They went to try to get him to stand up, but he wouldn’t do it…He kept kicking and kicking and kicking. He was very uncooperative.”

So why would someone like Dante Parker or Eric Garner resist arrest? Here are six good reasons:

  1. The idea that “if you didn’t do anything wrong, you don’t have anything to fear” does not hold true for black people. Most people who end up being exonerated for crimes they served time for, but didn’t commit, are people of color.
  2. Blacks routinely serve higher sentences than whites—for the same crimes.
  3. Once in custody, black men are rough-handled by police more often than whites.
  4. Racial profiling and bias in police departments across the country is well–documented.
  5. There are many well-known cases of police torture directed at blacks in prison, such as the dozens of black Chicago inmates who were systematically tortured over a span of 20 years.
  6. Scientific studies shed light on how racial bias can influence witness testimony, like this finding that race can make people “see” guns, or a reach for a gun, where no weapon was present.

Asking why a black man with even the slightest bit of awareness of these facts wouldn’t fully cooperate with the cops is a bit like asking why William Wallace didn’t simply extend a warm welcome to the invading English forces. Here’s a better question: What are law enforcement agencies doing to heal their relationships with the black communities they’re supposed to protect and serve?

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6 Good Reasons a Black Person Might Resist Arrest

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Meet the St. Louis Alderman Who’s Keeping an Eye on Ferguson’s Cops

by AlannahVKGC Posted on August 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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If you watched some truly jaw-dropping Vines of tear-gassing and smoke-bomb-throwing from Ferguson this week, chances are they came from Antonio French, the social-media-loving St. Louis alderman who’s been spending lots of time with the protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, since the shooting of Michael Brown. He also spent a night in jail after Ferguson police arrested him late Wednesday, initially without giving a reason and later saying it was for “unlawful assembly.” (He captured the moment of his arrest in a Vine, naturally.) French still hasn’t been given any documents related to his arrest, but he’s back to keeping his Twitter followers—there are now nearly 80,000 of them—up to speed on what’s happening on the ground.

We asked him about his arrest, what happens next in Ferguson, and his secret to keeping his phone charged while documenting the protests.

What’s the No. 1 question you want answered right now?

Right now the thing that we still don’t know is the physical evidence in the case. Specifically, autopsy results will be able to answer a lot of questions. At least two witnesses have come forward to date, and both have described almost an execution style murder on the streets. Location of gun wounds, number of gun wounds—any of those would really give some more info about exactly what happened.

The fact that police in Ferguson arrested an elected local official is pretty stunning. Has anyone at any level of law enforcement there reached out to you to talk about why this happened?

Oh, absolutely not. When I was released from jail, I was still outside as I bailed out some of my staff who were also arrested. While I was waiting, the chief of police just walked past me.

Are you expecting anyone to reach out to you?

Expecting anyone from Ferguson? No.

How did you think the press conference by the Ferguson Police chief this morning went?

Let me be very clear about this: they need to take the microphone away from that Ferguson police chief. All he does is make things worse. The captain from the Missouri Highway Patrol made clear after the press conference that he was not consulted about it, and in no way we would he have released negative or insinuating information about Michael Brown at the same time as you’re releasing the name of this police officer. The mishandling of this whole situation continues. The governor was right to take the security out of the hands of the local authorities and now somebody needs to shut the mics off and let the adults handle it.

The press conference ends, and the crowd has a negative, angry mood again when we should be there celebrating what was a peaceful night. The first hour from the Ferguson police chief now has everybody pissed off again!

What were you doing right before you were arrested?

I was in my vehicle, as the officers there had thrown smoke bombs, flashbang bombs, and they tear gassed. When the tear gas started, I rolled up my windows. Because I went through this a couple days ago, I know that the best way to be was inside your car with the windows up and closing the vents. So that’s what I did. My car was surrounded by officers in riot gear and assault rifles. One opened my door and asked me to step out. Before he arrests me, I was actually recording all the way up to that moment, then my phone died and I wasn’t able to post or even view the video until the next day when I was released. and when I viewed it, the Vine was incredible, it recorded exactly that moment as the officers were in my car and pulled me out. If you ever shoot Vine videos, you know how difficult it is to get like, the moment within that six seconds! It was pure luck.

What are you up to today?

Man, I’m very thankful of the new guy in charge Captain Ron Johnson of the Missouri State Highway Patrol. He gets it. He’s doing a great job. What a difference 24 hours makes. It went from horrific to beautiful in 24 hours. And so now that peace is restored I’m gonna be out there with the youth as they continue to demonstrate again.

I think one of my roles now is to kind of articulate to the greater community and even to white America what it is they’re seeing. Explain the young people’s point of view. This is really a youth-led movement. I’m not old—I’m 36, so not necessarily young anymore—so my role is to be out there and to lead when necessary, intervene if things get out of control one way or another, and really just to be there to support. And at times, to protect these young people from more well-off people who are very aggressive and do not love these young people like we do.

If there was one thing you hope people outside of Ferguson take away from this…

For me, this is a very personal situation, a very local situation. These are issues that I’ve been talking about with great frustration myself for as long as I’ve been an elected official and even before that when I was just an activist-journalist. And it has just been so frustrating here in St. Louis. We talk about these issues and they are clear to those of us that are in the community, and they go completely unheard outside of our community. It’s almost like you have two St. Louises here, and getting the one to care about the other has been so frustrating. I hope that this invisible St. Louis is now visible, and that it starts the conversations between the two that have to happen if we’re ever going to become one St. Louis.

Where can these conversations happen?

There’s kind of two levels. You have the top level, which is that in media outlets, your roundtable discussions, even conversations on the local radio about the future of our city, very often these are all the same demographics: these are a table of white St. Louisans, young or old but all white, talking about the future of our city, which is majority black. Those conversations have to become more diverse. And then, on a more personal one-on-one level, people have to start being around each other. We’re such a segregated city that it is possible for people to go from the time they wake to the time they go to sleep and not interact with anyone, on any significant level, of another race.

In my life I’ve been blessed in that because of what I do, I bounce between so many different worlds. It’s very comfortable for me to be sitting at a table with a millionaire for lunch, and then out on the street with gangbangers at midnight. But that’s not typical. I get to see firsthand how these folks don’t know anything about each other. Zilch. It’s troubling.

A news outlet took the angle of going to interview white people in St. Louis County who live within five or six miles of ground zero of this protest movement, to hear what they have to say about it. It broke my heart. They just have a very negative feeling about it. Dismissed it as “thuggery.” I think a great percentage of white St. Louisans right now are still not getting it.

The first part was to stop the violence. And we have: we had our first peaceful night yesterday, and it was beautiful. So the next phase now is to initiate the difficult conversations. Part of my media schedule this week is going on some outlets that aren’t really friendly territory for me to talk to that audience. KMLX, the biggest talk radio station in town, has probably a 90 percent white audience. Going on Fox News with Sean Hannity later tonight. You gotta talk directly to those folks, and explain what’s happening here.

What do you say to folks asking “where is the black leadership” right now?

I would say that’s a good and fair question. What this thing has brought out is not only a division between black community and white community, or even between young people and the people who police the neighborhood, but also between black youth and their elected leaders. There’s a disconnect. I by no means went out there to be directly involved or to be a voice for this thing. I went down there to observe, and I was expecting local leaders to be taking the lead. That didn’t happen. I personally called an old friend of mine who is a state senator, Maria Chapelle Nadal, and told her she needs to get her butt over there. To her credit, she’s been there ever since.

That first night, when it got very violent and the riots happened and the looting happened, I was out there and that was the first time I put my camera down and got involved. That was when the young guys were first starting to come up to that line of police in riot gear. I was trying to calm them down, pushing them back. There were a couple young men who were angry and I had to physically constrain and try to talk to them and they weren’t trying to hear it. And later, they may have been involved in the violence. But fast forward 48 hours and these same men, the same exact boys, were leading the youth non-violent protests. And then last night they were out there and I hugged one of them and I said “Man, I am very proud of you.” And he said he was proud of me too. What’s happening is we’re having rapid maturity right now. We gotta put these guys on the fast track to becoming the leaders I know they can be.

What else can the young people in Ferguson be doing now?

One of these guys that’s been very involved down here who I’m also very proud of is a local rapper by the name of Tef Poe. He has a unique opportunity through music. He brings people of a lot of different races together. He’s been tweeting about this constantly, and he’s been down on the ground. It’s brought a lot of young white people down. Last night was one of the most diverse groups we’ve ever seen here. I posted a picture last night on Twitter, there’s a beautiful blonde white woman walking through the crowd holding a sign that says, “I support the black youth of St. Louis.” That’s what it takes. By reaching her, she can then convey the message to her community when she goes back.

What do you say to police who claim that if Eric Garner and some of the other black men who’ve been killed by police recently hadn’t allegedly resisted arrest, they would be alive today?

I think the statistics show that American police kill black people too often. The use of deadly force should be avoided by all means, and only used when absolutely necessary. If a police officer is in fear of being hit, that is not in fear of your life. If you think somebody’s gonna hit you that does not give you the right to take their life. That trigger is pulled a little bit too often. There’s a scale. If a child walks up to a police officer and hits him, he’s not gonna pull gun out and shoot him. If a white woman slaps a police officer in the face, she’s probably not gonna be shot. But if a black man rubs up against a police officer in the wrong way, he is in fear for his life.

African-American men are taught this at a very early age. You have be on guard, be careful around police. So if that’s what you’re taught to survive, then you’re not being taught that these are the good guys, these are the people who will protect you and serve you. You’re being taught that this is somebody who will probably kill you under certain circumstances. We have to change that relationship.

The first thing police always say is, “well, community doesn’t cooperate, they don’t tell us.” Well, they don’t trust you! When there is a crime, I make it a point as an elected official to go to the crime scene. I’ve seen too many crime scenes. I’ve seen dozens of young men’s bodies on the street. I go because people in the community will talk to me before they’ll talk to the police. If we wanna catch the person who killed somebody, it’s important for someone to be there who they trust.

Do you have some kind of secret industrial grade battery pack on your phone? How were you able to take so many Vines!?

My secret is that I park my car kind of strategically and keep coming back during breaks charging a little bit and charging a little bit. But I’ll tell you I have not seen 100 percent on my iPhone in like 5 days (laughs). I’m constantly living with 25 percent. I’m gonna recharge it fully today and I’m gonna post a picture of the 100 percent.

Read More:

Meet the St. Louis Alderman Who’s Keeping an Eye on Ferguson’s Cops

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Ferguson Is 60 Percent Black. Virtually All Its Cops Are White.

by AveryWinder Posted on August 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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Black residents of Ferguson, Missouri, the working-class city in northern St. Louis county where an unarmed black teenager was shot dead by police officers on Saturday, say the town has been a “powder keg” of racial imbalance for decades. “They treat us like second class all the way down the line,” one black resident told the LA Times. A black city alderman said the ensuing protests are “a boiling over of tensions that had been going on for a long while.”

Here’s a by-the-numbers look at who lives in Ferguson, who’s in charge, who gets stopped by police, and more.

All icons courtesy of the Noun Project. Houses: Laurène Smith

Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the number of black members of Ferguson’s school board.

Source – 

Ferguson Is 60 Percent Black. Virtually All Its Cops Are White.

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