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Outrage in Ferguson
Just hours ago, I proposed to Ricochet’s Liz Harrison that comparing the United States under Obama to Turkey under Erdoğan reflected a failure of imagination. I was remembering, among other things, the circumstances under which I left Turkey, which I detailed at length here:
June 1: Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in more than 40 Turkish cities keep protesting. The protesters move to the office of Prime Minister Erdoğan in Beşiktaş, providing the police with an excuse for even harsher retaliation. Every living being in the district gets showered with tear gas—including, I’m told, the officials in the office, which at least was satisfying to imagine, if it’s true. Ankara and Izmir rise up in force.Snippets of conversation: “They’ve got to be running low on tear gas.” … “They saturation bombed this part of the city with gas, how much can they possibly have?” … “This is just ridiculous. What the [redacted] are they thinking?” … “Why the [redacted] are they provoking this, I wonder? Completely lost it? …
… And as all of this is happening—and broadcast around the world by foreign news services—Turkish television is showing anything but these scenes. CNN Türk aired a documentary about penguins.
I posted a link to that for Liz, then checked Twitter. God help us. My timeline looked just as it did last summer in Turkey, but it was happening in the United States, down to the most painful details: arrests of journalists, no coverage on the network news, and a police chief blaming “outside agitators.”
I saw images like this, again:
And Tweets like this, again:
Innocent people are dying and being hurt in #Ferguson please spread the word of #mediablackout Our world needs help. pic.twitter.com/NfMag9Uesu
— Charlie B (@TheCharlieB) August 14, 2014
“Young man gives cops the finger immediately laser-targeted with an AR-15 assault rifle in #Ferguson pic.twitter.com/GKKyv0DqY3”this is so scary
— ㅤ (@ramenIoudles) August 14, 2014
#Ferguson police are literally rolling up to reporters and tear gassing them to keep reports from getting out. pic.twitter.com/sSFmTRPJFc
— The Illuminati (@TheEyeOfControl) August 14, 2014
Be aware. What you are seeing, isn’t Middle East. This is United States, a War Zone in little city #Ferguson. pic.twitter.com/9580CYs9Mq
— Most Valuable (@NikeFamousss) August 14, 2014
And as all this was happening, it seems, our news stations were preoccupied with deep thoughts about Robin Williams.
This video establishes clearly that the police attacked people who were running away. Police in military garb, with military gear, attacked the very kind of assembly our Constitution was designed to protect, and terrorized an American city. There wasn’t a word from the White House. Obama was too busy hugging it out with Hilary Clinton on Martha’s Vineyard even to issue a statement.
This is both a domestic disaster and a foreign policy disaster. Turkish officials are already gloating, joined by tinpot thugs the world around. I cannot count the number of times I told people in Turkey that what we were seeing would never happen in America. I was wrong.
There can be no minimising or excusing this. The entire world saw this, or will see it soon enough. This, as Julia Ioffe wrote, is not what I told people America was.
The photograph below is from Turkey, last summer. The photographs above are all from America, yesterday.
Can you tell the difference?
Published in General
There was retaliation after the police started firing tear gas and rubber bullets into what had been prior to that, a peaceful protest.
Once you start assaulting people, a certain percentage of them are going to retaliate.
Responding that there was looting on a previous day is no excuse for the behavior of the police on this occasion. We have to be allowed to be critical of them, or else this type of behavior will get worse.
The defenses of the police here are too reflexive, rather than based on what is happening on the ground.
The problem at this point as I see it is that the local police is no longer capable of policing. They are no longer neutral enforcers of the law. They are one of the combatants in this conflict. And, as is human nature want to do they are using what resources they have to win their fight. This though is detrimental to the very concept of law and order. I think the State Government should step in and publicly relieve the local police temporarily. They should either be put on leave of absence or desk duty. You bring in as many state troopers and volunteer cops from other precincts, and you offer people a clear forum to let out their grievances. You might at this point just have to let people loot for one night and then ask the local populace if they want police back. You can always go back and arrest looters if you can get video surveillance and what not. What you can’t have is all out fights between cops and citizens, and cops gassing and arresting journalists (how stupid is that?).
I have to agree with Ryan, it’s tough to know exactly what is going on with Ferguson. I do wonder how much of what we see is staged or provoked. We only see what the cameras show us, not what was happening before the cameras started or after they finished.
It’s like the Kent State narrative. I personally know one of the guardsmen who was there that day and the story he tells is not in the history books. That shooting, while tragic and avoidable, was hardly unprovoked. There were outside rabble rousers there, professional protestors ginning up the crowds and hoping that students would be shot. Apply that lesson to Ferguson, where both sides want to be seen as righteous and both sides have cameras, and you have a poisonous mix. The innocents there are tools of both sides.
The other consideration is that this violence goes right to the White House, to an administration that is ginning up racial animosity for its own ends while encouraging the militarization of the police forces. I honestly think they want this sort of violence as it fits their own revolutionary agenda, and the useful idiots of Ferguson comply.
Frank Soto:
inmateprof:
OK, I’ll see your peaceful protest, and raise you a Molotov cocktail from said peaceful protest.
Or property destruction from a different “protest.”
http://www.kmov.com/home/Interactive-Map-of-Shooting-Looting-and-VIolence-270801281.html
So those nice gentleman just came to peacefully protest with a sandwich board or something like that, and just happened to have a bottle filled with an accelerant, a dirty rag and a lighter, and had no intention of using it for nefarious purposes until the Gestapo St. Louis County Police started firing tear gas?
You can’t discount previous encounters where the protestors turned violent and started looting. I’m aware that a few bad apples spoiled the bunch here, and maybe the police are on edge and overreacting, but they did not come to downtown Ferguson with tanks and tear gas on the first night, they did this when the bricks and cocktails started flying. This isn’t 1960’s Birmingham.
There are always troublemakers in a group, but no, the police should not be proactively shooting into crowds of protesters before violence has broken out. They futhermore should not be demanding no one record them as they do this, and then arrest them when they continue to film.
I am prepared to stipulate, for the sake of argument, that the police in Ferguson have behaved impeccably in the face of intolerable provocation, that the media has distorted everything that has gone on*, and that outside agitators are responsible for all that is bad and ugly.
Still, I think:
A. The militarisation of the police is a terrible thing for citizens and police; and
B. This is an issue the right should make its own.
* This is axiomatically true, of course.
There are always troublemakers in a group, but no, the police should not be proactively shooting into crowds of protesters before violence has broken out. They futhermore should not be demanding no one record them as they do this, and then arrest them when they continue to film.
I agree with the part of the filming. You should always be able to film police action whether it’s a traffic stop or a conflict like this. However, there should be a caveat. If the journalist is hindering police from doing his/her job, then that is not acceptable. From the stream you showed me, the police were in the wrong on this one in that I don’t think they were hindering the police from doing their job (I’m not on the ground there, so I’m kinda pleading ignorance). Sorry for the bold, I’m just an idiot who can’t get the block quote thing to work and separate our dialogue.
If you press shift + enter after a paragraph, it creates a hard break that should allow you to separate paragraphs in terms of what will and won’t be put in block quotes.
I am irritated how this went from a comparison to a debate about which group is right, or within bounds for civil American society. This is not the same as demonstrations in Turkey. Claire’s pictures show the Turkish people walking through the streets past storefronts intact. There are no pictures of citizens running down streets carrying away another citizen’s property. Look at Ferguson and this is what you see. This is not just private citizens against the police there is a subset of private citizens also involved – the silent minority – the business owners. So are the police protecting the state, or are they protecting the private property of the silent minority? In my opinion given the early videos of stealing and looting, it is that – an excuse to steal and loot, and to now call it a protest against a policeman shooting an innocent victim is plain silly. If you want to steal and loot, steal and loot. If you want to protest you gather in force, in daylight with a diverse group of citizens, silently, non-violently, outside the police station and city hall and stymie business until recognition of the wrong and justice is achieved.
It looks like the Missouri Governor is dong exactly what I suggested. Too bad he couldn’t get his act together sooner. Really I think this situation speaks badly of local governance in Missouri.
While it is fair to blame looters, and agitators for their contributions to this mess it is in many ways beside the point. We know that these kind of bad actors exist in the populace, we know they are always looking for excuses and opportunities. That is why we have police and government. To keep these bad actors in check, but it is not enough to just be ready to beat these bad guys when they rear their ugly heads. Part of maintaining order is maintaining tranquility, and doing this is not just the job of the police. Where was mayor of this town in all of this? Who was making the argument to the crowd that their protest had been used by lowlifes to criminalize other’s in their community? Was that really part of the justice they wanted for this kid who got shot? In stead of making a argument the local government decided to throw a punch.
Watch the video of what happened last night in Ferguson. No rioting, no looting. Is your argument that any previous night’s looting justifies tear gas and rubber bullets, regardless of what people are actually doing?
It seems to me that events in Ferguson are the inevitable result of how the US government responded to 9/11.
Instead of securing the border and reforming the immigration system to prevent entry by people likely to become terrorists, the Bush administration decided to keep the open borders, keep the idiotic immigration system- but record every personal communication, and arm the police like any common third world thugocracy. Barry is much worse.
Now the government has had an excuse to come out and play with its new toys. So we see police tanks rolling, tear gas thrown into uninvolved citizens’ back yards, followed by threats, press censorship, etc. Homeland security, folks. Just don’t expect anyone to be watching the US border, because that would be racist or something.
Forgive my tinfoil. But I find it unpleasant to compare the rules-of-engagement US forces have operated under in Iraq and Afghanistan with the way police behave in our own country.
I’ve read plenty of examples where they were forbidden to shoot back against people actively shooting at them in war- but here the police appear to have had no such restriction, here in America.
Third world, yep.
No one is going to argue that, however we should not ignore the tense volatile atmosphere in which law enforcement is being forced to operate. When the Chief of Staff of the New Black Panther Party is in Fergeson calling for violence and the FAA is ordering a No-Fly Zone due to shots fired at aircraft you simply are not going to get the best policing, there are most definitely bad actors here attempting to goad law enforcement into exactly this type of excessive force.
My Thoughts:
It is important to hear and listen to all sides of this.
This online headline shocked me:
America Is Not for Black People.
Whatever is going on in Ferguson, that someone can extract that idea as truth in America in 2014 is stunning and sad, and does not bode well for a resolution.
I think those of us unfamiliar with the tension of everyday living in places like Ferguson might sample that point of view by reading some of the 2222 comments from the Concourse article.
And then there is this:
Personally, I have a bad feeling about this event, and that it will be used by “bad actors” on both sides as a catalyst for more unrest and misery.
This is not a political event, these are people, with lives, homes and families.
Been listening to neighbors around Ferguson call into Talk Radio, unless you think that they are part of the police conspiracy, it would seem that we are not getting the full story from the press either about the last week or the violence in this area for the past several years.
I never said anything about a police conspiracy, stop trying to paint those who disagree with you as crazy. It is a poor debate tactic.
Now, with everything that I’ve said critical of the police in this incident, I can understand why they are on edge, and why they would want to have police in riot gear deployed when a group of people have massed like this.
However as long as the crowd stood there, as opposed to doing anything wrong, the police should have likewise simply stood there. Their presence should have been a precaution. Treating everyone on the streets like a looter/rioter is extremely problematic.
Ordinarily I would agree with you. But whenever I hear the word “peaceful protest” in connection with something like this, I suspect that I’m not getting the whole story. Again, I’m reminded of the Trayvon Martin stuff… That was purely racial. It didn’t matter how bad a guy he was, it didn’t matter what the facts were. With a “protest” of that nature, I don’t blame the other side for being on edge. Listen to guys like Sharpton, Jackson… Obama. Add to that the absolute disaster of the first black presidency, and I say congratulations to everyone who voted for an incompetent president just because “it’s time;” you managed to knock “race relations” back to the ’60s.
Anyone catch Kevin Williamson’s piece on NRO today?
I was first making the comparison between the Turkish protests and Ferguson. One was a protest and the other looting. If you break into my home the first night and I chase you off; if you return a second night I assume you are not protesting my treatment of you. If you came during the day, stood on the sidewalk, had others with you and were not threatening, you might get me thinking – something has changed. It is suspect to loot and steal then change your message – “We are done looting and stealing, now you need to hear our protest”.” Frank if you wanted the local police and government’s attention and fellow citizens awareness of your plight do you protest at night, or do you protest during the day? Do you rob and steal and vandalize other citizens property? And if you did it once are your fellow citizens conducive to hearing your plight the second night?
Indeed, and this is yet another demonstration that riot control is one of the hardest, and most thankless tasks in policing. You will never win. Roll in aggressively, and you will be condemned. Take too light a hand, and you will be condemned (often by the same people, mind) for any chaos and damage that occurs.
Part of the problem, in my view, is that too many observers take a binary view of a crowd situation: it’s either a peaceful crowd, or it’s a violent riot. And they expect a diametrically opposed police response to either scenario.
The truth is things are never so black and white. The difference between a crowd and a mob is one of degrees, and it can shift quickly and unpredictably. You can have a crowd that is a mix of peaceful grandmas and thugs bent on mayhem.
I see no such thing in the linked video. The police announce that it is no longer a peaceful protest and order the crowd to disperse. They then turn on the noisemakers and roll teargas canisters into the street behind the dispersing crowd to encourage them not to turn around. After which they clear the street with a shield wall. Even then, plenty of people are lollygagging their way down the street.
There is a cut at 39 seconds and we get a glimpse of a police officer firing a weapon -we have no idea at what or why, or even what he is firing. In fact, I’m not even positive there is a police officer firing a weapon -there are police officers with weapons raised, but I can’t find a muzzle-flash -the whole screen turns white. I suspect its a noisemaker.
I’m inclined to agree, Lord Regent. To move people from an area in the interest of public safety or police operations, yes. To leave them where they are and merely demand they stop filming, no.
Which is not to say that allowing people to film operations doesn’t hold some risk for police (activists and rioters study such films intently to anticipate and counter police tactics), but that’s generally not enough to shut it down.
Although the story about the Al-Jazeera news crew seems to be more complicated than it is being presented by activists. Imagine that.
In the jurisdiction where I work, there is a law on the books allowing an officer to order someone to leave an area “if he deems it necessary for the preservation of the public peace and safety, order that person to leave that place and any person who shall refuse to leave after being ordered to do so by a police officer shall be guilty of a violation.”
Don’t know if Ferguson has a similar law, but in situations like this, laws against blocking the street, etc. are often used as a legal basis to order the dispersal of a crowd.
The DOJ sent community organizers to Florida to make sure the “popular sentiments” would call for the response the administration wanted. Same folks heading for Missouri. Never let a crisis go to waste, and if there’s not enough crisis, take a bad situation and make it worse.
Police always had military quality equipment in armories. Automatic weapons , armored personnel carriers that they used to call Black Marias, and flash grenades and tear gas . To envision them with snub nosed 38s and illfitting blue shirts trying running in street shoes with billyclub takes one to Chicago 1968 .
Tactical clothing/ gear is big these days, runners with UnderArmor wear to policemen with Under Armor gear. It looks badass, the desired effect.
Browse through a Cabelas, Gander Mountain catalog .
The problem here is the media filter and we should know better. The media treat Hamas with kid gloves and that’s all we need to know . Most people remember Rodney King as a contrite guy in a brown sportscoat and tie pleading “why can’t we all just get along” . Imagine chasing him at 100mph + and finding out he is on PCP , which can make you extremely dangerous ?
Please consider a much wider number of reports and continue to make your judgements in retrospective, not through the eyes of a talking head . A camera can add bias to a story as easily Nixon’s five o’clock shadow added dread . Remember James Woods in Salvador ( Oliver Stone ).
Hahahaha, but hundreds of businesses were bankrupted and physically destroyed in that little act of civil disobedience. Rodney King’s injuries were the least of it; that neighborhood (Hancock Park) never fully recovered.
Perhaps I review such scenarios with less empathy because as a small child, I distinctly remember the fear my family felt during the ’68 Detroit riots and we lived 40 miles north of that crime scene.
Irony is a harsh mistress.
Obama, like Erdogan, has no problem with mobs incited by his supporters so long as the resulting crisis is exploitable. Holder’s DOJ has a team set up to work with, for example, the New Black Panther Party which has received special favors from Holder since they suppressed potential anti-Obama votes in 2008. The NBPP and various other radical cadres made certain there is mob rule in Ferguson, which was heading that way anyway.
Erdogan responded to peaceful, pro-democracy demonstrations as if they were a mob. IIRC some of Ms. Berlinsky’s excellent reporting from Istanbul mentioned the presence of regime provocateurs in the crowds.
Mob control is an intrinsically non- or anti-democratic task which, as Sabrdance showed, is platform neutral: no ordered society can survive mob rule. Tyranny is also an order. Tyrants exploit the mob to crush enemies, then crush the mob to preserve their rule. Free societies must crush the mob to save liberty.