Another media driven false narrative?

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madhatter
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Re: Another media driven false narrative?

Post by madhatter »

Geoff wrote:
deadheadskier wrote: And no, the situation in Ferguson is about race. The statistics don't lie. That's the scoreboard. Black people are more likely to get stopped and arrested than white people, even for crimes that statistically white people are more likely to commit. They are more likely to get incarcerated for crimes white people do not. They are more likely to be victims of excessive force than white people. This is FACT.
The notable thing in my mind about Ferguson is that the demographics of the town were 75% white, owner-occupied multifamily, and working class 25 years ago. It's now 1/3 single parent households mostly in Section 8 housing. I'm 100% in support of a strong temporary safety net. What happened in Ferguson is an indictment on the total failure of the LBJ Great Society programs. Most of us "got the memo" that the path to success in life is to get your education, get your career established, then get married and pop out children. The perverse US social welfare program provides perverse incentives to break that virtuous cycle. It toppled Ferguson and turned it into a war zone. No town survives 1/3 single parent households in Section 8 housing.

I don't have the answer but what we're doing now absolutely doesn't work.
as you point out its CULTURE, not race...Hard for any objective person to see "race" as the driving factor here either for the criminal behavior or for the arrests that occur...but that won't get any votes or media attention...
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Re: Another media driven false narrative?

Post by Geoff »

madhatter wrote:
Geoff wrote:
deadheadskier wrote: And no, the situation in Ferguson is about race. The statistics don't lie. That's the scoreboard. Black people are more likely to get stopped and arrested than white people, even for crimes that statistically white people are more likely to commit. They are more likely to get incarcerated for crimes white people do not. They are more likely to be victims of excessive force than white people. This is FACT.
The notable thing in my mind about Ferguson is that the demographics of the town were 75% white, owner-occupied multifamily, and working class 25 years ago. It's now 1/3 single parent households mostly in Section 8 housing. I'm 100% in support of a strong temporary safety net. What happened in Ferguson is an indictment on the total failure of the LBJ Great Society programs. Most of us "got the memo" that the path to success in life is to get your education, get your career established, then get married and pop out children. The perverse US social welfare program provides perverse incentives to break that virtuous cycle. It toppled Ferguson and turned it into a war zone. No town survives 1/3 single parent households in Section 8 housing.

I don't have the answer but what we're doing now absolutely doesn't work.
as you point out its CULTURE, not race...Hard for any objective person to see "race" as the driving factor here either for the criminal behavior or for the arrests that occur...but that won't get any votes or media attention...
In the summer, I live a couple of miles from New Bedford. New Bedford is a failed city with 20%+ unemployment and many neighborhoods that have degraded into Section 8 war zones with failed school systems. It has a permanent underclass problem but it's less than 10% black. I know lots of people who tell the same story of growing up in owner-occupied working class multifamily home neighborhoods. One house goes Section 8. In a few years, anybody who can sells out to the Section 8 slum lords and moves. The neighborhood collapses. I know quite a few people in the Section 8 business. You sign up a tenant. You're guaranteed rent for a year. When the tenant moves out, you drop a dumpster on the street, shovel out the unit, repair the destroyed walls, replace the destroyed appliances, paint & carpet, and rent to the next one. That is all worked into the pricing for the rent and it's made rents unaffordable for non-Section 8 working class tenants. Approaching half of the Section 8 units are single parents. Most are late-teens or early 20's with no education and no prospects. It's not black but, from my perspective, it's identical to Ferguson where the police are working in a war zone and don't behave anything like the suburban cops where I live a couple miles away. Big heroin problem. Hookers & pimps. Gangs. It's surprising the police don't shoot more people than they do.
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madhatter
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Re: Another media driven false narrative?

Post by madhatter »

Geoff wrote:
madhatter wrote:
Geoff wrote:
deadheadskier wrote: And no, the situation in Ferguson is about race. The statistics don't lie. That's the scoreboard. Black people are more likely to get stopped and arrested than white people, even for crimes that statistically white people are more likely to commit. They are more likely to get incarcerated for crimes white people do not. They are more likely to be victims of excessive force than white people. This is FACT.
The notable thing in my mind about Ferguson is that the demographics of the town were 75% white, owner-occupied multifamily, and working class 25 years ago. It's now 1/3 single parent households mostly in Section 8 housing. I'm 100% in support of a strong temporary safety net. What happened in Ferguson is an indictment on the total failure of the LBJ Great Society programs. Most of us "got the memo" that the path to success in life is to get your education, get your career established, then get married and pop out children. The perverse US social welfare program provides perverse incentives to break that virtuous cycle. It toppled Ferguson and turned it into a war zone. No town survives 1/3 single parent households in Section 8 housing.

I don't have the answer but what we're doing now absolutely doesn't work.
as you point out its CULTURE, not race...Hard for any objective person to see "race" as the driving factor here either for the criminal behavior or for the arrests that occur...but that won't get any votes or media attention...
In the summer, I live a couple of miles from New Bedford. New Bedford is a failed city with 20%+ unemployment and many neighborhoods that have degraded into Section 8 war zones with failed school systems. It has a permanent underclass problem but it's less than 10% black. I know lots of people who tell the same story of growing up in owner-occupied working class multifamily home neighborhoods. One house goes Section 8. In a few years, anybody who can sells out to the Section 8 slum lords and moves. The neighborhood collapses. I know quite a few people in the Section 8 business. You sign up a tenant. You're guaranteed rent for a year. When the tenant moves out, you drop a dumpster on the street, shovel out the unit, repair the destroyed walls, replace the destroyed appliances, paint & carpet, and rent to the next one. That is all worked into the pricing for the rent and it's made rents unaffordable for non-Section 8 working class tenants. Approaching half of the Section 8 units are single parents. Most are late-teens or early 20's with no education and no prospects. It's not black but, from my perspective, it's identical to Ferguson where the police are working in a war zone and don't behave anything like the suburban cops where I live a couple miles away. Big heroin problem. Hookers & pimps. Gangs. It's surprising the police don't shoot more people than they do.
there is no answer, there is no solution... only the slow motion trainwreck of societal implosion....

in the era I grew up in no one locked their doors at nite, people slept w just the screen doors, usually not even latched during the summer...no one had an alarm or security system... we ain't going back to those days...we're going further away...it's all about respect for personal property and personal freedom... unfortunately there isn't much of it anymore...

I live in place where ya still don;t need to lock the doors, but the other day I was working around the house and had the music on...I turned around and there was my dad sitting on the stairs( he had stopped by to visit) " he said he didn't want to scare me so he just waited for me to turn around" but it got me thinking that a little more security might be prudent...but that security also makes it a pain in the @ss for me... I want my dad to be able to come in, I want my wife to have the door open when she gets home, I want my friends to knock and enter, I want the doors open when I come around from one side of the house to the other and need to get back in...ahhh simpler times... :Toast
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Re: Another media driven false narrative?

Post by Geoff »

Meh. I live a half hour walk from the first housing project. I don't lock my doors unless I'm gone overnight. I leave the keys in the center console cup holder in the cars. My neighbors on my little lane are all retired. Nobody is going to drive in with an unfamiliar car and empty out my house.

I lock my cars at Killington. Too many transients. I'd rather not get a pair of skis ripped off. I only lock the door during peak rental season when moron renters walk in thinking I'm the unit they rented.

If I park in downtown New Bedford, I'd be an idiot to leave anything valuable in the car because I'd come back to a smashed window and anything valuable gone. In the war zones, people steal from themselves. If there are riots, they burn their own neighborhoods and loot their own stores.
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Re: Another media driven false narrative?

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madhatter wrote: as you point out its CULTURE, not race...Hard for any objective person to see "race" as the driving factor here either for the criminal behavior or for the arrests that occur...but that won't get any votes or media attention...
There is a point where culture and race meet and that's because of our history. It's really interesting sometimes to see the difference in attitude (and I'm generalizing here) between native born and immigrant black people. Whereas native born grew mainly out of a slave/segregationist history and have to rise generation through generation to grow out of a past strewn with pot holes aided (???) over the past 50 years with government supports, immigrants have come here for a better life and seem to rise more quickly to working and middle class. We have trained multiple generations of the poor to expect and depend heavily on government supports while those who are more recent arrivals take advantage of the opportunities presented to them by this country and work to rise economically.

Most of us here, with only a few exceptions, are white, reasonably educated and reasonably successful and we cannot know the ingrained feelings and attitudes of black people brought up through a world of discrimination and, for many, poverty. We are only a generation removed from legal segregation and other discriminatory practices. It will take at least another generation to rebound from that history.
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Re: Another media driven false narrative?

Post by Dr. NO »

Bubba wrote:
madhatter wrote: as you point out its CULTURE, not race...Hard for any objective person to see "race" as the driving factor here either for the criminal behavior or for the arrests that occur...but that won't get any votes or media attention...
There is a point where culture and race meet and that's because of our history. It's really interesting sometimes to see the difference in attitude (and I'm generalizing here) between native born and immigrant black people. Whereas native born grew mainly out of a slave/segregationist history and have to rise generation through generation to grow out of a past strewn with pot holes aided (???) over the past 50 years with government supports, immigrants have come here for a better life and seem to rise more quickly to working and middle class. We have trained multiple generations of the poor to expect and depend heavily on government supports while those who are more recent arrivals take advantage of the opportunities presented to them by this country and work to rise economically.

Most of us here, with only a few exceptions, are white, reasonably educated and reasonably successful and we cannot know the ingrained feelings and attitudes of black people brought up through a world of discrimination and, for many, poverty. We are only a generation removed from legal segregation and other discriminatory practices. It will take at least another generation to rebound from that history.
Dead on Bubba. I know immigrants from Africa that took whatever job they could get. They have degrees from AS to BS and working on higher. They move around the job and became the supervisor or manager. A health care worker runs the facility she works at with her nursing degree. Sitting and talking they ask "why are so many LAZY?" . They came for a better life while many natives have a "you owe me (us)". For what I don't know.
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Re: Another media driven false narrative?

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madhatter wrote:as you point out its CULTURE, not race...Hard for any objective person to see "race" as the driving factor here either for the criminal behavior or for the arrests that occur...but that won't get any votes or media attention...
yup, it's about culture. These emails were about culture.......not racism whatsoever. Yup

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Re: Another media driven false narrative?

Post by XtremeJibber2001 »

deadheadskier wrote:
madhatter wrote:as you point out its CULTURE, not race...Hard for any objective person to see "race" as the driving factor here either for the criminal behavior or for the arrests that occur...but that won't get any votes or media attention...
yup, it's about culture. These emails were about culture.......not racism whatsoever. Yup

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If I was to attend a Chris Rock or Kevin Hart stand-up, would I not hear jokes that play on common cultural stereotypes? If I laughed at the jokes, would I be considered insensitive and racist? I don't think so.

What I think we're seeing here is evidence the police department was using their township e-mail accounts inappropriately and likely violated the townships ethical standards. Are some of the officers racist? I'm sure some are, but I don't see how these e-mails can be used to paint a department/city as racist .... stupid/idiotic and should be suspended, sure. Racist? I'm not seeing the evidence.
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Re: Another media driven false narrative?

Post by madhatter »

XtremeJibber2001 wrote:
deadheadskier wrote:
madhatter wrote:as you point out its CULTURE, not race...Hard for any objective person to see "race" as the driving factor here either for the criminal behavior or for the arrests that occur...but that won't get any votes or media attention...
yup, it's about culture. These emails were about culture.......not racism whatsoever. Yup

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If I was to attend a Chris Rock or Kevin Hart stand-up, would I not hear jokes that play on common cultural stereotypes? If I laughed at the jokes, would I be considered insensitive and racist? I don't think so.

What I think we're seeing here is evidence the police department was using their township e-mail accounts inappropriately and likely violated the townships ethical standards. Are some of the officers racist? I'm sure some are, but I don't see how these e-mails can be used to paint a department/city as racist .... stupid/idiotic and should be suspended, sure. Racist? I'm not seeing the evidence.again possibly prejudiced, unlikely racist...
yep people just exploiting "politically correct" in order to further an agenda...

Similarly the gay dudes that rented my house made gay jokes to me all the time, about the gay little car they bought making them the gayest gays in town ( that kinda happens to have a gay overtone to its name), ranking on lesbians as ill-equipped homeowners when it comes to being a handyman( person?) etc... the world didn't end... you left wing totalitarians are pathetic...

I find I get along w gay people far more often than I get along w religious people, but that doesn't mean its ok to disparage those who are of religious devotion...I'm far more for "restricting" the role of federal govt in marriage ( and associated benefits) than I am for expanding it to encompass more people...but that don't buy votes either....
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Re: Another media driven false narrative?

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you won;t see any retractions or apologies from these turds... Like most lefty/progressives they are completely uninterested in the truth...It doesn't matter if the allegations are true or not or whether there is any proof one way or the other....The only goal is to marginalize the opposition and make it stick...

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Re: Another media driven false narrative?

Post by Geoff »

I don't see the big deal. Everybody is prejudiced and racist to some degree. It's part of being human.

25 years ago, Ferguson, MO was a 75% white working class town with mostly owner-occupied homes and a lot of owner-occupied multifamily homes. Now, it's a Section 8 war zone with 1/3 single parent households. The town employees are civil service workers who tend to have lifetime employment. Towns almost have a big bias to hire residents for all jobs. Pretty much anybody in their mid-40's or older who works for the town got their job when it was a white working class town. The town employee demographics reflect that reality. If you watched the town you lived all your life in go from a functional working class town to a Section 8 ghetto, what would you think of all the welfare people moving in to occupy those trashed Section 8 multifamily neighborhoods? Me? I'd resent the hell out of them.

This Section 8 thing is destroying towns and cities all over the country. Around Boston, inside Route 128 is now so expensive that most of the investor-owned Section 8 housing is gone. The former Section 8 tenants have been displaced to all the failing small cities. Lawrence. Brockton. New Bedford. Fall River. They've all become Section 8 ghettos. Massachusetts doesn't have a big black population but it has an enormous permanent underclass problem. At least there, this is a class problem, not a race problem. If you're in the bottom-20%, you have a very slim chance of escaping. New Jersey has the same issue. There are something like 30 cities & towns in New Jersey with 20%+ unemployment rate. Anybody who possibly could fled from those places years ago.

I think the only way to fix this is to segregate the public school systems. Put the behavior problems in separate buildings so the children who actually want to learn aren't being disrupted. Go to a 50 week school year and an 8 hour school day so working class parents can go to work and not have their children roaming the streets. Those extra hours and days can be for physical activity, proctored study hall & remedial education, and extracurricular activities and don't require certified teachers to be present. If you get your homework assignments done, you can go out and play. Otherwise, you sit there until you finish your work. Insist on proficiency in "American business English". Insist that all students can write a coherent and grammatically correct paragraph. It's really tough to escape the bottom-20% if you speak the thick local poor people's dialect and your writing is unintelligible ebonics.
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madhatter
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Re: Another media driven false narrative?

Post by madhatter »

Geoff wrote:I don't see the big deal. Everybody is prejudiced and racist to some degree. It's part of being human.

25 years ago, Ferguson, MO was a 75% white working class town with mostly owner-occupied homes and a lot of owner-occupied multifamily homes. Now, it's a Section 8 war zone with 1/3 single parent households. The town employees are civil service workers who tend to have lifetime employment. Towns almost have a big bias to hire residents for all jobs. Pretty much anybody in their mid-40's or older who works for the town got their job when it was a white working class town. The town employee demographics reflect that reality. If you watched the town you lived all your life in go from a functional working class town to a Section 8 ghetto, what would you think of all the welfare people moving in to occupy those trashed Section 8 multifamily neighborhoods? Me? I'd resent the hell out of them.

This Section 8 thing is destroying towns and cities all over the country. Around Boston, inside Route 128 is now so expensive that most of the investor-owned Section 8 housing is gone. The former Section 8 tenants have been displaced to all the failing small cities. Lawrence. Brockton. New Bedford. Fall River. They've all become Section 8 ghettos. Massachusetts doesn't have a big black population but it has an enormous permanent underclass problem. At least there, this is a class problem, not a race problem. If you're in the bottom-20%, you have a very slim chance of escaping. New Jersey has the same issue. There are something like 30 cities & towns in New Jersey with 20%+ unemployment rate. Anybody who possibly could fled from those places years ago.

I think the only way to fix this is to segregate the public school systems. Put the behavior problems in separate buildings so the children who actually want to learn aren't being disrupted. Go to a 50 week school year and an 8 hour school day so working class parents can go to work and not have their children roaming the streets. Those extra hours and days can be for physical activity, proctored study hall & remedial education, and extracurricular activities and don't require certified teachers to be present. If you get your homework assignments done, you can go out and play. Otherwise, you sit there until you finish your work. Insist on proficiency in "American business English". Insist that all students can write a coherent and grammatically correct paragraph. It's really tough to escape the bottom-20% if you speak the thick local poor people's dialect and your writing is unintelligible ebonics.
I was an instructor at a private post secondary school that had a good number of minority students, most of whom were getting a full scholarship and most of whom didn't much care what they got out of it...

Some however were VERY motivated, one in particular... But by 19 she already had a kid and a "possessive" ex that showed up at school looking for her all the time, taking her out of class, long unexplained absences etc... she ended up dropping out...

There's a whole host of issues that create this perpetual cycle...and a whole host of people who exploit it and want nothing more but for it to remain perpetual...


If you are a gov official in charge of eradicating poverty, the first thing you want to do is make sure there is always poverty, lest you find yourself out of a job...
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Re: Another media driven false narrative?

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Geoff wrote:
I think the only way to fix this is to segregate the public school systems. Put the behavior problems in separate buildings so the children who actually want to learn aren't being disrupted. Go to a 50 week school year and an 8 hour school day so working class parents can go to work and not have their children roaming the streets. Those extra hours and days can be for physical activity, proctored study hall & remedial education, and extracurricular activities and don't require certified teachers to be present. If you get your homework assignments done, you can go out and play. Otherwise, you sit there until you finish your work. Insist on proficiency in "American business English". Insist that all students can write a coherent and grammatically correct paragraph. It's really tough to escape the bottom-20% if you speak the thick local poor people's dialect and your writing is unintelligible ebonics.
It would be interesting to try that in one district, or one town. Funding would be large, but affordable on a small scale to run it for a decade. Don't make the test town fund it, money should come from the state. Track school test scores, graduation rates. Rather than pass some national program, try several promising ideas out on a small scale first. Start in pre-school. There could be parental programs/requirements as well. New Bedford sounds like a perfect candidate.

If it works, you're going to need to find a huge source of funding to implement it.
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Re: Another media driven false narrative?

Post by Bubba »

Mister Moose wrote:
Geoff wrote:
I think the only way to fix this is to segregate the public school systems. Put the behavior problems in separate buildings so the children who actually want to learn aren't being disrupted. Go to a 50 week school year and an 8 hour school day so working class parents can go to work and not have their children roaming the streets. Those extra hours and days can be for physical activity, proctored study hall & remedial education, and extracurricular activities and don't require certified teachers to be present. If you get your homework assignments done, you can go out and play. Otherwise, you sit there until you finish your work. Insist on proficiency in "American business English". Insist that all students can write a coherent and grammatically correct paragraph. It's really tough to escape the bottom-20% if you speak the thick local poor people's dialect and your writing is unintelligible ebonics.
It would be interesting to try that in one district, or one town. Funding would be large, but affordable on a small scale to run it for a decade. Don't make the test town fund it, money should come from the state. Track school test scores, graduation rates. Rather than pass some national program, try several promising ideas out on a small scale first. Start in pre-school. There could be parental programs/requirements as well. New Bedford sounds like a perfect candidate.

If it works, you're going to need to find a huge source of funding to implement it.
Trust me, it works. When I was growing up in NYC, the school system had what it called "600 Schools". The name, I assume, was to differentiate them from the regular schools such as PS 93, PS 117, etc. which is the way the city named schools way back when. (Do they still do that?) Anyway, the 600 Schools were for chronic behavior problems, kids who had no intention of learning, etc. and they had a place to get these kids moved to and leave the rest of the students alone. As with many such solutions that were eliminated over the years, that approach seemed to work for the vast majority of students.
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Re: Another media driven false narrative?

Post by XtremeJibber2001 »

Seems Ferguson can't get out of it's own way. It's no longer about race, it's about culture.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/12/us/fergus ... index.html
Ferguson: 2 police officers shot after police chief resigns
By Holly Yan, CNN
Updated 7:03 AM ET, Thu March 12, 2015

(CNN)Two police officers were shot in Ferguson early Thursday morning, just hours after the city's police chief resigned.

"These police officers were standing there, and they were shot just because they were police officers," St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar said.

But neither of those struck was from the Ferguson Police Department. One, a 14-year veteran of the St. Louis County Police Department, was shot in the shoulder. The other, a 7-year veteran of the Webster Groves Police Department, was struck in the face, Belmar said.

The officers were in serious condition Thursday morning. It's not clear who the shooter was.

Police from an array of jurisdictions in Missouri were in Ferguson keeping an eye on the protestors at the time.

Several protesters said the shooter was not near the crowd of demonstrators, but was up on a grassy hill.

The gunman was "no less than 100 feet" away, protester Kayla Reed said.

Belmar said police have been fortunate that such a shooting hasn't happened until now.

"But I have said all along that we cannot sustain this forever without problems," the county police chief said. "That's not an indictment on everybody that's out there, certainly expressing their First Amendment rights. But we have seen, in law enforcement, that this is a very, very, very dangerous environment for the officers to work in."

From calm to chaos
Some demonstrators gathered Wednesday night at the Ferguson Police Department to cheer the resignation of Police Chief Thomas Jackson.

Others amassed there to demand more: the disbanding of the entire police department and the resignation of Mayor James Knowles, protester DeRay McKesson told CNN.

"Racist cops have got to go," some chanted.

By midnight the crowd had thinned out, ready to call it a night, when gunfire erupted.

"All of a sudden, I heard at least four or five shots ring out," witness Markus Loehrer said.

"It took me at least 30 seconds of watching before I realized there was an officer down. We are not there to shoot cops; we don't like violence. So we did what anybody would do -- we ran away."

Organizers say protests have continued for more than 200 days -- ever since Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed unarmed black teenager Michael Brown.

But the protest Wednesday night appeared to be the largest since November, when a grand jury decided not to indict Wilson for Brown's death. The latest protest suggests anger in Ferguson is far from over, even after the police chief's departure.

"We aren't satisfied with this," Reed said of Jackson's resignation. "It's a step in the right direction, but it's not what total justice looks like in Ferguson."

Total justice, she said, would include the departure of the mayor. McKesson said justice would also include criminal charges against Wilson -- which a grand jury has already to decided against.

The U.S. Justice Department also didn't find grounds to prosecute the officer, who resigned in November.

"There is no evidence upon which prosecutors can rely to disprove Wilson's stated subjective belief that he feared for his safety" when he shot Brown, the Justice Department said.

Damning report
Jackson's resignation is the latest fallout from a damning Justice Department report that cited widespread and systemic discrimination against blacks by the Ferguson police and court system.

City Manager John Shaw also resigned after the report, as did two police officers. And the city's top court clerk was fired for sending racist emails.

The police chief's resignation will go into effect March 19, Jackson said, to "provide for an orderly transition of command."

Ferguson police chief resigns, gets one year pay

Protesters had wanted Jackson gone since shortly after Brown's death.

After his resignation Wednesday, Jackson said he was encouraged by the report's conclusion, which said Ferguson "has the capacity to reform its approach to law enforcement."

"We agree that Ferguson can do the tough work to see this through and emerge the best small town it can be," he said.

Exactly how Ferguson can emerge united remains unclear.
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