Thursday, November 20, 2014
Associated Press
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo.
Newly released emails, sent to and from Missouri’s top public-safety officials, show that the state police captain placed in charge of security in Ferguson after Michael Brown’s death was both vilified and praised for attempting to replace authorities’ militarized approach with one more sympathetic to protesters.
The emails, obtained by The Associated Press through an open-records request, also show that police tried to find a way to protect members of the clergy who were in the protest crowds, and that some officers objected to an order to take their meal breaks in public.
The messages offer a small window into the inner workings of Missouri law-enforcement agencies as they tried to quell the tensions that arose after the fatal shooting of the black 18-year-old by white police officer Darren Wilson. The records also illustrate one of the many challenges authorities could face if new protests develop — how to walk a fine line between providing public empathy and security.
There is no specific date for a grand jury decision to be announced on whether to charge Wilson. But anticipation has been mounting because St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch has said previously that he expects a decision by mid-to-late November.
Brown, who was unarmed, was shot after some sort of confrontation with Wilson, who had ordered Brown and a friend to quit walking down the center of a street. Wilson has told authorities that he realized after initially encountering Brown that he matched the description of a suspect in a convenience- store robbery that occurred just minutes earlier, according to reports in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that cited unnamed sources.
The shooting stirred long-simmering racial tensions in the predominantly black St. Louis suburb where the police force is composed almost entirely of white officers. After a night of riots and looting, police in subsequent days approached protesters in armored vehicles and used tear gas after some demonstrators threw rocks or Molotov cocktails.
Capt. Ron Johnson of the Missouri Highway Patrol, who is black, was put in charge by Gov. Jay Nixon to try to restore calm. He talked and marched with protesters, posed with them for photos and spoke to loud applause at a rally where he apologized to Brown’s family and described his relationship with his own son who wears sagging pants and has tattoos.