It's 9:00 AM in Ferguson, Missouri, and the fires are still burning.
For those who don't know, last night the grand jury in the Michael Brown shooting declined to indict officer Darren Wilson on any of the the five charges, ranging from murder to manslaughter, presented by the prosecutor. As expected, this did not go over well, and the night quickly descended into violence and chaos. A couple of thoughts:
First off, the media sucks. Every commentator on every channel spent the whole day yesterday delivering dire warnings about what would happen if they didn't indict and saying "but we hope that doesn't happen." Then when the situation deteriorated they all shook their heads sadly and said "nobody wants this." Bullshit. It was EXACTLY what they wanted. That's why every media outlet in the country was camped out in Ferguson all weekend. They were hoping something like this would occur.
Most of the protesters were angry but peaceful, and all night long we heard reporters talking about the protesters who were trying to stop the violence and looting, correctly pointing out that such behavior only hurt their cause, and besides, these were black-owned businesses they were vandalizing. Well, except for the police cars they lit on fire. But such is the way with these things. A small minority of scumbags who are only looking to profit or cause mayhem (or both) will use the situation for their own ends. It's too bad because it reflects poorly on everyone in the community, especially when the media shows a nonstop barrage of images of looting, etc. ("But I was going to loot you a present!" -Homer Simpson)
The prosecutor in this affair is a piece of shit. He had no intention of pursuing this case, thus the grand jury. Some of the lawyers in our midst might want to speak to this, but a DA friend has told me that grand juries are generally only used for political cover. Grand juries are the prosecutor's show; they have complete control over what is presented, and grand juries generally do what prosecutors want them to do. In this case the prosecutor in question, Bob McCulloch, has a long history of using grand juries to pass the buck. He also has a history of lying to the public about grand jury testimony. From his Wikipedia entry:
In 2001, the officers told a grand jury convened by McCulloch that the suspects tried to escape arrest and then drove toward them; the jury declined to indict. McCulloch told the public that every witness had testified to confirm this version, but St. Louis Post-Dispatch journalist Michael Sorkin reviewed the previously secret grand jury tapes, released to him by McCulloch, and found that McCulloch lied: only three of 13 officers testified that the car was moving forward.
This last part is especially telling, since McCulloch made similar remarks about the consistency of testimony presented to the Michael Brown grand jury in his inflammatory statement about the decision, in which he basically accused witnesses of lying.
We don't know what happened in this incident. A lot of what was said in the early days turned out to be refuted by the physical evidence, such as the assertion that Brown was shot in the back. However, we are still left with an unarmed black teenager who was shot multiple times by a white officer from some distance away. Considering the highly charged nature of the incident and the prosecutor's checkered history, there is simply no way to know whether justice has been served. Maybe the grand jury did the only thing it could do in light of the evidence, but it sure looks like the authorities are circling the wagons to protect the cop. And in a case like this appearances count for a lot. If they had been serious about this case the investigation should have been conducted by outside authorities with no vested interests and no historical baggage. Instead it just looks like a whitewash.