"It
is Officially Open Season on Black Folks": Legal Expert Decries
Handling of Wilson Grand Jury
On
Monday St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch announced the grand
jury had found "that no probable cause exists" to charge
Officer Darren Wilson with any crime in the death of Michael Brown.
The jury deliberated for three months and heard dozens of hours of testimony, including from Wilson himself. But did they hear the full story? McCulloch himself had faced public scrutiny throughout the grand jury investigation, with calls for him to resign over allegations of a pro-police bias and questions raised about an unusual grand jury process that resembled a trial.
We speak to Vince Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who is just back from Ferguson.
"I don’t think we can take away anything from this decision not to indict other than that it is now officially open season on black folks when it comes to police violence," Warren says.
The jury deliberated for three months and heard dozens of hours of testimony, including from Wilson himself. But did they hear the full story? McCulloch himself had faced public scrutiny throughout the grand jury investigation, with calls for him to resign over allegations of a pro-police bias and questions raised about an unusual grand jury process that resembled a trial.
We speak to Vince Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who is just back from Ferguson.
"I don’t think we can take away anything from this decision not to indict other than that it is now officially open season on black folks when it comes to police violence," Warren says.
'F**k
CNN!" - Angry protesters disrupt Ferguson live coverage
RT,
25
November, 2014
Police
in the vicinity of Ferguson, Missouri had their hands full Monday
night when the absence of an indictment against Officer Darren Wilson
spawned protests, fires and looting. For the media, covering the
madness was an ordeal as well.
While
journalists scrambled to deliver live coverage from the region into
the morning as demonstrations raged on, reporters on the ground in
towns like Ferguson, Clayton and St. Louis saw themselves under
attack — verbally and physically — from protesters enraged by a
grand jury’s decision not to indict Wilson, the 28-year-old
Ferguson cop who killed unarmed teen Michael Brown earlier this year.
In
one instance on CNN, critics of the network relied on their words to
express their feelings about Monday’s night coverage. At one point,
a live segment was derailed when a demonstrator rushed the microphone
and barked, “Fuck CNN!”
“As
we said, we don’t know what’s going to happen, so we apologize
for that,” CNN
host Don Lemon responded.
Indeed,
the network again was in for a surprise when another anchor was
belted in the head with a rock thrown from off camera later into
their coverage.
A
grand jury determined earlier Monday that Wilson will not be charged
with any crime for now with regards to the August officer involved
shooting that killed Brown, 18. Despite pleas from US President
Barack Obama and others for demonstrators to stay calm, however,
matters quickly escalated in town and others.
Only
moments after the president addressed the nation, CNN host Don Lemon
took heat after saying what Gawker could
only describe as “something
infuriatingly dumb and insensitive.”
Broadcasting live from Ferguson, Lemon scrambled for the right words
to describe the scene before explaining,"Obviously,
there's a smell of marijuana in the air."
“Don
Lemon has become a one man [shake my damn head] factory,” DC-based
writer Dave Weigel tweeted on Tuesday.
Other
armchair media critics were quick to pounce on that comment and
others from the correspondent, but protesters rallying in Ferguson
were much more apt to make their grievances against the media heard:
at one point on Fox News, a mask-clad protester pried the network
photographer’s video camera out of his hands and threw it to the
ground on live TV.
Lorena
de la Cuesta, a field reporter for RT's video agency, Ruptly, said
she was injured herself after being struck with an apparent gas
canister while covering Monday's events.
Online,
individuals outraged by the lack of an indictment, the response from
protesters and the mainstream media’s coverage of events as they
unfolded took to Twitter and other outlets to make their complaints
heard.
Television
networks attempted to broadcast late into the evening as at least
dozen structure fires erupted around Ferguson, including one at an
automobile dealership, but their reporting was met with criticism
both on the streets and on the web.
Of
course, television coverage from the events that unfolded on Monday
evening represented just a fraction of what outraged Americans were
upset about in the wake of the grand jury decision. Demonstrations
like the ones in Ferguson that erupted after the announcement soon
were established in other locales like Washington, DC, New
York City and Oakland, California, and activists have planned similar
protests for Tuesday evening.
How Ferguson showed us the truth about police
On
August 9th, Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson shot a black
teenager named Mike Brown. Since then, the city has been protesting.
The police did not react well
Watch what happened on Twitter when the Darren Wilson grand jury decision was announced
The
map below uses geotagged tweets to track topics on Twitter. Watch a
stunning visualization of the reaction on Twitter last night as the
announcement was made that Darren
Wilson would not be indicted:
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