Thread: Looting After Vigil for Missouri Man

Ferguson chief resigns in wake of scathing federal report
By JIM SALTER and JIM SUHR
Associated Press

FERGUSON, Mo. (AP) - The police chief in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson resigned Wednesday in the wake of a scathing Justice Department report prompted by the fatal shooting of an unarmed black 18-year-old by a white police officer.

Calling Chief Thomas Jackson an "honorable man," Mayor James Knowles III announced the city had reached a mutual separation agreement that will pay Jackson one year of his nearly $96,000 annual salary and health coverage.

Jackson's resignation becomes effective March 19, at which point Lt. Col. Al Eickhoff will become acting chief while the city searches for a replacement.

Jackson had previously resisted calls by protesters and some of Missouri's top elected leaders to step down over his handling of the fatal shooting of Michael Brown and the weeks of sometimes-violent protests that followed. He was widely criticized from the outset, both for an aggressive police response to protesters and for his agency's erratic and infrequent releases of key information.

He took nearly a week to publicly identify Officer Darren Wilson as the shooter and then further heightened tension in the community by releasing Wilson's name at the same time as store security video that police said showed Brown stealing a box of cigars and shoving a clerk only a short time before his death.

Jackson submitted a four-sentence letter in which he said he was announcing his resignation with profound sadness. He told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that he felt it was time for the city to move on.

"I believe this is the appropriate thing to do at this time," Jackson said. "This city needs to move forward without any distractions."

During a 12-minute news conference, Knowles said Jackson resigned after "a lot of soul-searching" about how the community could heal from the racial unrest stemming from the fatal shooting last summer.

"The chief is the kind of honorable man you don't have to go to," Knowles said. "He comes to you when he knows that this is something we have to seriously discuss."

Jackson becomes the sixth employee to resign or be fired after the U.S. Department of Justice last week issued the report that cleared Wilson of civil rights charges in the shooting but found a profit-driven court system and widespread racial bias in the city police department.

The acting head of the Justice Department's civil rights division released a statement saying the U.S. government remains committed to reaching a "court-enforceable agreement" to address Ferguson's "unconstitutional practices," regardless of who's in charge of the city.

A U.S. law enforcement official said Wednesday the Justice Department had not pressured or encouraged Jackson to resign during meetings with him but had also not resisted the idea. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing meetings between the Justice Department and the police department.

The resignation was welcomed by state lawmakers who represent Ferguson.

"There would be a lot of people that would approve of that," said Democratic state Rep. Sharon Pace, who represents the neighborhood where Brown was shot.

Jackson oversaw the Ferguson force for nearly five years before the shooting that stirred months of unrest across the St. Louis region and drew global attention to the predominantly black city of 21,000.

Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster and U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill were among those working behind the scenes to get him to resign, but Jackson stood firm.

Since the Aug. 9 shooting, he has spoken of a desire to work with community members and described efforts to bolster minority hiring in a department that had just three black officers at the time of Brown's death.

But he struggled to manage a local crisis that turned into an international event and explain his decision-making at news conferences disrupted by angry protesters and grieving community members.

Then the Justice Department issued its report, which found that Ferguson's police and court systems functioned as a money-making enterprise rather than one meant to ensure public safety. The report found black drivers in Ferguson were more than twice as likely as others to be searched during routine traffic stops and more likely to face excessive force from police, often during unwarranted stops.

Investigators also noted that Ferguson was counting on revenues from fines and fees to generate nearly a quarter of its total $13.3 million budget for the 2015 fiscal year. Many residents ended up in jail after missing court dates or failing to pay fines for minor violations. The report also uncovered evidence that three employees - a court clerk and two police officers - had sent racist emails.

The clerk was fired last week and two officers resigned. The judge who oversaw the court system also resigned and the City Council on Tuesday agreed to a separation agreement with the city manager.

Associated Press Writer Alan Scher Zagier in St. Louis, David Lieb in Jefferson City and Eric Tucker in Washington contributed to this report.
http://www.wafb.com/story/28372208/f...federal-report

I thought black lives matter?

I guess that's only if you are a POS thug, fighting with the cops!

.... but "Black Lives Matter" ... Right ?



A Teen is Beaten While the Crowd Cheers During Brutal Attack at McDonald’s.
By Kyle Becker (7 hours ago)

A scrawny 15-year-old girl, afraid to be identified because of fear for her own safety, was beaten to a pulp at a McDonald’s on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, New York on Monday shortly after school.

She showed up to confront a girl who NYPD believe was in an argument with her over telling “lies.”

Little did the girl know before she was subjected to a heinous beatdown before a cheering and disaffected crowd that it was all a set-up involving a purported gang appropriately named the Young Savages.

The harrowing video of the girl, who witnesses say threw the first punch, is as tragic for the way the crowd reacted as it is the violent altercation.

None of the witnesses called 911 – although the McDonald’s management claims it did twice within the first six minutes of the beating – but many observers did grab their cellphones to record images and videos of the sick and twisted attack.

At times, some even cheered or made sarcastic remarks. “Yo, she’s dead. It’s a murder!” one exclaims while watching a gang of girls beat and kick the tiny girl.

The girl being beaten did fight back – even pulling the shirt off of one of her attackers.

The girl’s grandma says that she received two black eyes and numerous body injuries from the attack “She can’t sleep because she got kicked to the body,” the grandmother told the New York Daily News while tears streamed down her cheeks. “She fell again and they had to take her to the hospital.”

Adding further insult to injury, no one at the McDonald’s that day wants to report the identity of the perpetrators to the police – not even the victim.

Furthermore, the girl’s mother doesn’t want to report the potentially deadly assault.

“Snitches get stitches,” as the saying goes.

http://www.ijreview.com/2015/03/2693...ack-mcdonalds/


Victim of Brooklyn McDonald's beatdown brags about newfound fame on Facebook
(WARNING: GRAPHIC LANGUAGE AND VIOLENT CONTENT)
BY Thomas Tracy , Corky Siemaszko
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS / Thursday, March 12, 2015, 12:28 PM


The pint-sized teenager who took a pounding at a Brooklyn McDonald’s was glorying Thursday in her newfound and very sick celebrity. “Everyone Like Im Famous Now,” 15-year-old Ariana Taylor posted on her Facebook page a day after shocking video of her being brutalized at the Flatbush Ave. fast-food joint hit the Web.

Several other of her pals posted photos of the Daily News front page bearing the headline “SAVAGE!” and showing part of the fracas.

As soon as Taylor, aka Arii V, outed herself online, hundreds of people began posting on her page from as far away as Florida and Texas.

While the Erasmus High School ninth-grader spent much of the day hiding out from reporters in her family’s Flatbush pad, she posted a selfie of herself online Thursday in which she did not look all that battered. “Im Gucc!” she wrote, which is street slang “good,” according to the Urban Dictionary.

There was also another shot on the page, apparently of her, posed in a way aimed at showing off her black pants-clad derrière.

Taylor also took issue with her grandmother’s description of her injuries.

“WHAT TWO BLACK EYES I HAVE THE NEWSPAPER IS A LIER &MY GRANDMA NEVER TALKED TO THESE PEOPLE,” the teen also posted.

Her grandma told The News on Wednesday that she “can’t sleep because she got kicked to the body” and an NYPD source said she suffered two black eyes and multiple bruises.

Taylor was beaten on Monday while dozens of other kids and at least two adults watched — and made no attempt to help her. The alleged ringleader of the beatdown squad, a 16-year-old with a lengthy arrest record, was arrested later Thursday and charged with gang assault and robbery for stealing Taylor’s purse and phone.

Many of the people posting messages — most written in street slang — on the teen’s FB page, gave props to the tough-as-nails Taylor for putting up a fierce fight.

“Yooo Sis You Dead Famous,” a high school student using the handle Staccs Thirtygvng wrote.

“I applaud u shorty u a ICON NOW.....” poster Richey Bandz chimed-in.

“Thanks guys,” Taylor replied.

But a poster named Marshonna Espinosa took a dim view of the teenager basking in this kind of a spotlight. “So sad this little girl think she’s famous for getting publicly humiliated,” she wrote. “No, you’re not famous, people felt bad for you.”

“This is so sad on so many levels,” added another poster, Deneane Silva.

Tiffany Doss urged the teen to cooperate with investigators and name her attackers. “Press charges on them hoes and McDonald’s,” Doss wrote.

Another poster named Jamie Shakur echoed that. “I don’t know you, but call the cops and report all of those girls,” she wrote. “And the people who you thought were your friends aren’t.”

“You need to be brave ND stop being naive,” wrote Tatiana Orr. “That’s gang assault.”


The March 12, 2015 edition of the New York Daily News.

Other posters wondered why nobody intervened to help the teenager. “Couldn’t nobody try to stop them,” asked Nichole Evette Taylor. “Even the customers there raggedy just want to see a damn fight.”

“I just don’t understand why no one helped,” Lana Thomas chimed in on the page.

But a pal named Corey Hockett told Taylor he would have defended her. “I Don’t Usually Hit Females But That Day I Would Of Put A Few Bitches Out,” the wannabe gangsta Sir Galahad declared online.

Taylor described herself as “married” to another teenager named Damon Thomas, who appears to be her boyfriend and refers to himself as a “former” Erasmus student. He also could not be reached for comment.

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/...icle-1.2146897

Michael Brown’s mom says something awful about the two cops shot in Ferguson
Michael Cantrell

Michael Brown’s mother decided to put her classless attitude on full display for the world to see when she made a comment on Facebook about the recent shooting of two police officers in Ferguson.

As you can imagine, what she had to say wasn’t pretty, and not long after leaving the comment, she took her page down.

Here’s what she said.

“If my FAM woulda got JUSTICE in August maybe those two comps wouldn’t have got shot LAST NIGHT…”

“F*** THEM 2 COPS..DON’T GOT NO SYMPATHY FOR THEM OR THEY FAMILIES…Aint no FUN when the Rabbit got the GUN.”

Unfortunately, the picture these are taken from (which you can see below) isn’t the best quality so you’ll have to excuse any errors in translation, but you can clearly see the important bits, and they aren’t too friendly.



Way to keep it classy, McFadden.

I understand she’s hurt and angry over her son’s death, and she has every right to be. The problem is who she’s directing her hostilities toward.

A cop isn’t what killed her son. His bad choices did. Period.

Being angry with police and spewing hatred on social media isn’t going to change that, nor is it going to make others sympathetic to the concerns she and her family claim to have about race relations in America.

Instead, it makes her appear to be a vindictive, cruel, mean person who just wants revenge and is willing to take out her rage on innocent people.

Perhaps she’ll come to her senses and make a statement apologizing for what she said about these officers. Highly unlikely, but at times, I do try to give folks the benefit of the doubt.

http://www.youngcons.com/michael-bro...y2Zw6YlPYbR.99

The Shocking Finding From the DOJ's Ferguson Report That Nobody Has Noticed
Nathan Robinson - Posted: 03/13/2015 2:42 pm EDT

This post was co-authored by Oren Nimni, a civil rights attorney in Boston and member of the National Lawyers Guild's executive board.

In the city of Ferguson, nearly everyone is a wanted criminal.

That may seem like hyperbole, but it is a literal fact. In Ferguson -- a city with a population of 21,000 -- 16,000 people have outstanding arrest warrants, meaning that they are currently actively wanted by the police.

That statistic should be truly shocking. Yet in the wake of the Department of Justice's withering report on the city's policing practices, it has gone almost entirely unmentioned. News reports and analysis have focused on the racism discovered in departmental emails, and the gangsterish financial "shakedown" methods deployed against African Americans. In doing so, they have missed the full picture of Ferguson's operation, which reveals a totalizing police regime beyond any of Kafka's ghastliest nightmares.

The Department of Justice's 102-page report is a rich source of damning facts about the Ferguson criminal justice system. But tucked halfway in and passed over quickly is a truly revelatory set of figures: the arrest warrant data for the Ferguson Municipal Court.

It turns out that nearly everyone in the city is wanted for something. Even internal police department communications found the number of arrest warrants to be "staggering". By December of 2014, "over 16,000 people had outstanding arrest warrants that had been issued by the court." The report makes clear that this refers to individual people, rather than cases, so people with many cases are not being counted multiple times. (Though clearly some of these cannot be Ferguson residents, since the number represents more than the entire adult population and Ferguson policing applies to visitors as well.) However, if we do look at the number of cases, the portrait is even starker. In 2013, 32,975 offenses had associated warrants, so that there were 1.5 offenses for every city resident.

That means that the city of Ferguson quite literally has more crimes than people.

To give some context as to how truly extreme this is, a comparison may be useful. In 2014, the Boston Municipal Court System, for a city of 645,000 people, issued about 2,300 criminal warrants. The Ferguson Municipal Court issued 9,000, for a population 1/30th the size of Boston's.

This complete penetration of policing into everyday life establishes a world of unceasing terror and violence. When everyone is a criminal by default, police are handed an extraordinary amount of discretionary power. "Discretion" may sound like an innocuous or even positive policy, but its effect is to make every single person's freedom dependent on the mercy of individual officers. There are no more laws, there are only police. The "rule of law," by which people are supposed to be treated equally according to a consistent set of principles, becomes the "rule of personal whim."

And this is precisely what occurs in Ferguson. As others have noted, the Ferguson courts appear to work as an orchestrated racket to extract money from the poor. The thousands upon thousands of warrants that are issued, according to the DOJ, are "not to protect public safety but rather to facilitate fine collection." Residents are routinely charged with minor administrative infractions. Most of the arrest warrants stem from traffic violations, but nearly every conceivable human behavior is criminalized. An offense can be found anywhere, including citations for "Manner of Walking in Roadway," "High Grass and Weeds," and 14 kinds of parking violation. The dystopian absurdity reaches its apotheosis in the deliciously Orwellian transgression "failure to obey." (Obey what? Simply to obey.) In fact, even if one does obey to the letter, solutions can be found. After Henry Davis was brutally beaten by four Ferguson officers, he found himself charged with "destruction of official property" for bleeding on their uniforms.

None of this is even to mention the blinding levels of racism, which remain the central fact of police interactions in Ferguson and nationwide. The overwhelming force of this violent and exploitative policing system is directed at the African American population. In 2013, 92 percent of Ferguson's arrest warrants were issued against African Americans, and black Fergusonians were 68 percent less likely than others to have their court cases dismissed. The racism is so blatant and comprehensive that the DOJ concluded that "Ferguson law enforcement practices are directly shaped and perpetuated by racial bias." Considering the qualified and colorless language typically deployed in government documents, this is an astonishingly forceful statement.

Ferguson's racism has been central to the media coverage of the release of the DOJ report. But in a certain way, by focusing entirely on disparate racial impacts without examining the sheer scale of the brutal state juggernaut, one misses crucial facts. MSNBC listed as the DOJ's number one "most shocking" finding the fact that "at least one municipal employee thought electing a black president was laughable." But the existence of racist views in the department is not the most shocking fact, not by a country mile. Rather, endemic racism in policing comes standard. However, that racism occurs in the wider context of an ever-enlarging interlocking system of administrative bureaucracy and police violence.

The other pitfall in analyzing the Ferguson report is to see it as being about Ferguson. There are 19,492 municipal governments in America, and the chances that Ferguson happens to be the worst are extremely slim. In fact, there is strong evidence that in the world of better funded, more militarized, more technologically advanced police departments, Ferguson is simply a high-profile case study. While the Ferguson nightmare may dwarf the problems in cities like Boston, American policing is so out-of-control that Ferguson-style practices can occur on at least some level in almost every department.

It's hard to believe, but the Ferguson police department's massive deliberate racism only represents one of its problems. The DOJ report shows not just a racist criminal justice system, but one in which the very act of being alive has been made a crime, and in which nearly everybody is wanted by the law at every moment of every day.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nathan...b_6858388.html

Protesters went to Ferguson for a PAYCHECK from ACORN
now ANGRY they aren’t being paid!
May 19, 2015

This is simply amazing. We kind of suspected that there was something else going on behind the Ferguson protests, but only now do we have absolute evidence that there were shady organizations PAYING for protesters to show up. How do we know? Because those same protesters are angry that they were promised money and it hasn’t been paid yet!

Which is, in itself, hilarious http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...#ixzz3acmWpseK

Hired protesters with the Black Lives Matter movement have started a #CutTheCheck hashtag and held a sit-in at the offices for the successor group to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) in Missouri after the group allegedly stopped paying them.

FrontPage Magazine reports that Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (MORE) has been paying protesters $5,000 a month to demonstrate in Ferguson. Last week, hired protesters who haven’t been paid held a sit-in at MORE’s offices and posted a demand letter online.

MORE is the re-branded Missouri branch of ACORN, which filed for bankruptcy in late 2010, FrontPage reported. MORE and other groups supporting the Black Lives Matter movement have received millions of dollars from billionaire financier George Soros.

The group Millennial Activists United posted a letter on their blog demanding MORE “cut the checks” to demonstrators.

“Early in the movement, non-profit organization MORE, formerly known as the St. Louis chapter of ACORN, and local St. Louis organization Organization for Black Struggle created a joint account in which national donors from all over the world have donated over $150,000 to sustain the movement,” the letter read. “Since then, the poor black [sic] of this movement who served as cash generators to bring money into St. Louis have seen little to none of that money.

SO there’s absolutely no doubt that part of the reason that Ferguson flared up was because protesters were being paid to be there. That makes you wonder – how many are being paid in Baltimore? How many more will be paid in the future? And if the media doesn’t report this, isn’t it admitting that it’s all part of a big show they’re compliant with?

It’s unfortunate how obvious the answers are.


Read more: http://therightscoop.com/protesters-...eing-paid-lol/