A protester carries a sign as she participates in a protest against the police in Ferguson, Missouri, in the Manhattan borough of New York on Monday. A few dozen protesters gathered at New York City Police headquarters to show their support for Michael Brown, who was killed by police in Ferguson on August 9.
Reuters/Ferguson
US lawmakers yesterday called for calm and a change in police tactics in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, which has been rocked by racially charged clashes and riots after a white officer killed an unarmed black teenager 10 days ago.
The violence has captured headlines around the world, raising questions about the state of US race relations nearly six years after Americans elected their first black president.
Law enforcement has made various efforts to soothe angry demonstrators, but police said they had come under heavy gunfire overnight and arrested 31 people despite the deployment of Missouri National Guard troops and the lifting of a curfew to allow protesters to have more freedom to demonstrate.
“We overpoliced for a few days, and then we completely underpoliced,” US Senator Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat who was traveling to Ferguson yesterday, told cable channel MSNBC.
She said she was working with local leaders on ways to quell the violence. Possible methods include screening for weapons and moving protest areas away from the business district to open green spaces.
Both she and US Representative Emanuel Cleaver, another Missouri Democrat, said calm was needed to allow federal investigators to evaluate the evidence.
“What’s happening now is damaging, or interfering, with what needs to be done,” Cleaver told MSNBC.
On Monday, President Barack Obama said he told Missouri Governor Jay Nixon that use of the National Guard should be limited, and he also called for conciliation. Attorney General Eric Holder plans to visit Ferguson today.
Ferguson, a community of roughly 21,000 mostly black residents just outside St. Louis, has a long history of racial tension. Blacks have complained of police harassment and under-representation in city leadership.
Tension boiled over 10 days ago after 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot dead while walking with a friend down a residential street on the afternoon of August 9.
The police refused to immediately release the name of the officer who killed Brown. They later identified him as 28-year-old Darren Wilson but and still have not provided details about why he fired multiple rounds at Brown.
Both the US Department of Justice and the St. Louis County Police Department are investigating the shooting. The county prosecutor’s office said it could start presenting evidence to a grand jury today to determine if Wilson will be indicted.
Since the killing, thousands of protesters have taken over the site of the shooting and the nearby business district each night, chanting anti-police slogans and carrying signs calling for Wilson’s arrest.
Some journalists covering the confrontations have been hit by tear gas and arrested.
Yesterday, the Vienna-based Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, an intergovernmental security and human rights organisation whose members include 57 countries including the US and Canada, criticised the treatment of the journalists.
On Monday night, officials had hoped that the lifting of a curfew imposed over the weekend would cool tensions and end the looting and violence. Police also closed a roadway to traffic to provide a path for marchers.
But police said some in the crowd hurled bottles, rocks and petrol bombs at officers, who responded by firing gas-filled canisters and a noise cannon to try to disperse the throng.
State Highway Patrol Captain Ron Johnson, who is overseeing security in Ferguson, said officers had come under “heavy gunfire” but did not return it. Riot police did confiscate two guns and what looked like a petrol bomb from protesters.
Four officers were injured, he said.
Johnson separately told CNN that two people were shot within the crowd, but not by police, and were taken to hospital. There was no immediate word on their condition.
“This has to stop,” said Johnson, an African-American who grew up in the area. “I don’t want anybody to get hurt. We have to find a way to stop this.”
The disturbances are the worst since the angry but peaceful protests across the US in July 2013, over the acquittal of George Zimmerman, a white Hispanic who killed unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin during a scuffle in Florida.
Two California youths arrested in high school shooting plot
Reuters/Los Angeles
Police in the Los Angeles suburb of South Pasadena said on Monday they had thwarted a mass shooting plot with the arrest of two teenagers who were conspiring to kill several staffers and as many fellow students as possible at their high school.
Detectives were tipped off to the plot by South Pasadena High School administrators and arrested the two students after serving search warrants at each of their homes, the South Pasadena Police Department said in a statement posted online.
“Enough evidence was discovered, and based on that evidence the two students were arrested,” the statement said, though it did not identify the pair or make clear when they were taken into custody.
One of the youths was detained without incident, while the second student “resisted arrest and officers had to force entry into his residence,” police said in the statement.
“He was captured in the home as he tried to run away from the arresting officers,” police said.
No further details of the alleged plan to attack the school were given, except that police said the two youths were “plotting to kill three staff members and as many students as possible with firearms.”
“This is a prime example of school officials recognising suspicious behaviour,” police Sergeant Brian Solinsky said in the statement. “It was this information that helped prevent a horrific tragedy.”
Police were expected to reveal more details of the arrests and their investigation at a news conference set for Tuesday morning in South Pasadena, an affluent suburban town of some 24,000 residents about eight miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles.
Just over 1,500 students are currently enrolled at the high school, according to its website.
News of the two arrests in Southern California came three weeks after a judge in Minnesota dismissed attempted murder and property damage charges brought against a teenager there who was accused of planning a shooting and bomb attack on his high school. Prosecutors said they planned to appeal that ruling.
Probe into NY police arrest death
A New York prosecutor announced yesterday he will convene a grand jury to probe the death last month of a 43-year-old black man placed in a chokehold by police.
Eric Garner, a father of six who was suspected of illegally selling cigarettes, was wrestled to the ground by several white police officers after resisting arrest in Staten Island July 17.
An amateur video showed police subduing him with a chokehold. Garner lost consciousness and was pronounced dead of a heart attack after being transferred to a hospital.
“Based upon the investigation that my office has conducted to date regarding the July 17, 2014, death of Eric Garner, and after a careful review of the recent findings of the Medical Examiner regarding the cause and manner of Mr Garner’s death, I have determined that it is appropriate to present evidence regarding the circumstances of his death to a Richmond County Grand Jury,” said Staten Island prosecutor Dan Donovan.
