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One Shot, In Critical Condition, 7 Arrested After Protesters Break Ferguson Curfew
As
we reported
last night,
when the Ferguson curfew hitting at midnight, while most of the
protesters dispersed, many still remained on the streets despite a
clear warning by the police department that anyone still
rioting/looting/protesting would be arrested. Which is when things
went from bad to worse for yet another night. In roughly
chronological order:
Live Blog: Majority of demonstrators obey Ferguson curfew, other...
And then this happened:
6:19 PM - 17 Aug 2014 Ferguson, MO, United States
According
to Reuters,
Missouri State Highway Patrol Captain Ron Johnson said the person
shot at a restaurant was in critical condition. Police were unable to
identify the victim, who he said was not shot by police, and
that the alleged shooter was still at large.
Well, what else would he say: that the cops shot yet another
Fergusonite?
As
we warned
yesterday,
all that is needed for the racial divide in this country to reach
levels (of violence) not seen in generations, is for one or more
people to die, whether in Ferguson or elsewhere, while protesting
along racial lines. We can only hope that the person in critical
condition makes a recovery or else this may well be just the
beginning of what we have warned for years will happen when a record
wealth/class/religious/ethnic divide, largely aided and abetted by
the administration, finally spills out on the streets and the people
demand a reversion to the mean: something which for those who follow
history happens with clockwork regularity when the divide between the
haves and the have nots reaches record levels.
So
to summarize last night's events, here
is KTVI with
a first person account of the latest nightly rioting in Ferguson:
More
tear gas and gun-fire in the streets during another violent night in
Ferguson and leaving many to wonder when will it end.
One
person shot, a police car hit by gun-fire, and seven arrests as
police enforced the governor’s new curfew.
Police fired smoke bombs and tear gas at protesters who didn’t want
to leave after the midnight curfew rolled around. Police got
reports of people on the roof at Red’s Barbecue. Then
they saw a man in the street with a gun and they found a man shot in
the neck, critically hurt. That is when the SWAT Team came in.
Police
tried to move back the crowd with smoke bombs and tear gas to try to
get to the shooting victim. By the time police got to the scene
near Red’s the victim was already gone. He was taken to the
hospital in a private car.
Authorities
arrested seven people for failing to disperse the area around.
At around 1am it appeared that police had removed all of the
protesters.
Captain
Ron Johnson talks about dealing with the protesters at curfew time.
“There was a shooting victim near QuikTrip and Red’s Barbeque.
As we approached Red’s Barbecue we deployed tear gas. The
first can of gas that was deployed was there. In an effort to
get back and get to the shooting victim. Also, a police car at
that location was shot at.”
We
don’t have any details on whether that police car was hit.
But, we don’t believe that anyone was injured.
We
did get video overnight of police processing the car used to take the
shooting victim to the hospital. County police tell FOX 2 that
the shooting victim is in critical condition. The circumstances
surrounding the shooting are still unclear.
It
is rumored, although unlikely, that a city devolving into a state of
emergency and actual curfew, will be enough for the president to take
a break from his golf game and make a teleprompted statement later
today.
By
Walter Olson of Overlawyered
Police
Militarization In Ferguson, Missouri
17
August, 2014
Why
armored vehicles in a Midwestern inner suburb? Why would cops wear
camouflage gear against a terrain patterned by convenience stores and
beauty parlors? Why are the authorities in Ferguson, Mo. so given to
quasi-martial crowd
control methods (such
as bans
on walking on the street)
and, per the reporting
of Riverfront Times,
the firing of tear gas at people in their own yards? (“‘This my
property!’ he shouted, prompting police to fire a tear gas canister
directly at his face.”) Why would someone identifying himself as an
82nd Airborne Army veteran, observing the Ferguson police scene,
comment that “We rolled lighter than that in
an actual warzone“?
As
most readers have reason to know by now, the town of Ferguson, Mo.
outside St. Louis, numbering around 21,000 residents, is the scene of
an unfolding drama that will be cited for years to come as a
what-not-to-do manual for police forces. After police shot and killed
an unarmed black teenager on the street, then left his body on the
pavement for four hours, rioters destroyed many local
stores. Since then, reportedly, police have refused to disclose
either the name
of the cop involved or
the autopsy
results on
young Michael Brown; havenot
managed to interview a
key eyewitness even as he has
told his story repeatedly
on camera to the national press; have revealed that dashcams for
police cars were in the city’s possession but never installed; have
obtained restrictions on journalists, including on news-gathering
overflights of the area; and more.
The
dominant visual aspect of the story, however, has been the sight of
overpowering police forces confronting unarmed protesters who are
seen waving signs or just their hands.
If
you’re new to the issue of police militarization, which
Overlawyered has covered
occasionally over
the past few years, the key book is Radley
Balko’s,
discussed at this Cato forum:
Federal
grants drive police militarization. In 2012, as I was able to
establish in moments through an online search, St. Louis County (of
which Ferguson is a part) got a Bearcat armored vehicle and other
goodies this way. The practice can serve to dispose of military
surplus (though I’m told the Bearcat is not military surplus, but
typically purchased new — W.O.) and it sometimes wins the gratitude
of local governments, even if they are too strapped for cash to
afford more ordinary civic supplies (and even if they are soon
destined to be surprised by the high cost of maintaining gear
intended for overseas combat).
As
to the costs, some of those are visible in Ferguson, Mo. this week.
Charting
Poverty In Ferguson: Then And Now
17
August, 2014
While
there have been many socio-economic 'explanations and justifications'
for the recent events in Ferguson, many of which have exceeded the
realm of the factual and have brazenly encroached on feelings,
emotions, heartstrings, and various other of the media's favorite
manipulative mechanisms to achieve a desired outcome, the unpleasant
reality is that much of what has transpired not only in the small
21,000-person St. Louis suburban community, but what is taking place
across all of America has to do with a far simpler phenomenon: the
rise of poverty and the destruction of America's middle class.
Ferguson
has been home to dramatic economic changes in recent years. The
city’s unemployment rate rose from less than 5 percent in 2000 to
over 13 percent in 2010-12. For those residents who were employed,
inflation-adjusted average earnings fell by one-third. The
number of households using federal Housing Choice Vouchers climbed
from roughly 300 in 2000 to more than 800 by the end of the decade.
Amid
these changes, poverty skyrocketed. Between
2000 and 2010-2012, Ferguson’s poor population doubled. By
the end of that period, roughly one in four residents lived below the
federal poverty line ($23,492 for a family of four in 2012), and 44
percent fell below twice that level.
These
changes affected neighborhoods throughout Ferguson. At the start of
the 2000s, the five census tracts that fall within Ferguson’s
border registered poverty rates ranging between 4 and 16 percent.
However, by 2008-2012 almost all of Ferguson’s neighborhoods had
poverty rates at or above the 20 percent threshold at which the
negative effects of concentrated poverty begin to emerge. (One
Ferguson tract had a poverty rate of 13.1 percent in 2008-2012, while
the remaining tracts fell between 19.8 and 33.3 percent.)
Below
are charts of Ferguson poverty in 2000 and 2012:
Then:
Census Tract-Level Poverty Rates in St. Louis County, 2000
and
Now:
Census Tract-Level Poverty Rates in St. Louis County, 2008-2012
The
biggest concern, however, is that Ferguson is merely the canary in
the coalmine. According to Brookings, within the nation’s 100
largest metro areas, the
number of suburban neighborhoods where more than 20 percent of
residents live below the federal poverty line more than doubled
between 2000 and 2008-2012. Almost
every major metro area saw suburban poverty not only grow during the
2000s but also become more concentrated in high-poverty
neighborhoods. By 2008-2012, 38 percent of poor residents in the
suburbs lived in neighborhoods with poverty rates of 20 percent or
higher. For poor black residents in those communities, the figure was
53 percent.
Like
Ferguson, many of these changing suburban communities are home to
out-of-step power structures, where the leadership class, including
the police force,
does not reflect the rapid demographic changes that have reshaped
these places.
Suburban
areas with growing poverty are also frequently characterized by many
small, fragmented municipalities; Ferguson is just one of 91
jurisdictions in St. Louis County. This often translates into
inadequate resources and capacity to respond to growing needs and can
complicate efforts to connect residents with economic opportunities
that offer a path out of poverty.
And
as concentrated poverty climbs in communities like Ferguson, they
find themselves especially ill-equipped to deal with impacts such as
poorer education and health outcomes, and higher crime rates.
In an article
for Salon,
Brittney Cooper writes about the outpouring of anger from the
community, “Violence is the effect, not the cause of the
concentrated poverty that locks that many poor people up together
with no conceivable way out and no productive way to channel their
rage at having an existence that is adjacent to the American dream.”
We
have warned all along that the Fed's disastrous policies are
splitting the nation in two, creating a tiny superclass of
uber-wealthy oligrachs, and a vast majority of disgruntled,
disenfranchised poor. It is the latter, whose life of squalor and
poverty, has left them with little if anything to lose. Unless
dramatic and rapid changes take place within the executive levels of
the US corporato-banking oligrachy and its D.C. puppets, very soon
"Ferguson-type" occurences, where participatnts could care
less if the S&P 500 closed at a fresh all time record high,
will become a daily, and very deadly, occurence. All thanks to the
Fed's dual mandate of "maximum employment and stable inflation."
*
* *
And
as a tangent, we must say that we find the fact that none other than
former Fed chairman Ben Bernanke is now a Distinguished Fellow in
Residence with the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings
Institution,
the source of most of the above data, to be ironic beyond words.
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