Yeah, there's a definite gung-ho attitude there, makes me wonder how long they'd last in the NYPD.
Still, the local authorities seem to have managed to pull their collective heads out of their backsides and put someone with a bit of sense in charge and it helps that he's the right colour, so to speak.
Let's hear it for Captain Johnson:
"When I see a young lady cry b/c of fear of this uniform then that is a problem”
Well said, sir. He's also ordered police to remove their gas masks, and is setting up media staging areas. Sounds like a man who a) knows how to de-escalate the situation and b) knows how to handle the media. Hopefully this thing will wind down now.
I think that this is another lesson to the US PD that using overwhelming force against a reasonably small protest in an attempt to crush it does not work, not back in the old days and especially not now when everyone has a camera on their mobile phone.
Now I don't know if Brown instigated a skirmish with the police, or whether it was an overzealous copper, either is entirely possible. However the reaction of the local PD to the incident and to the protests of the public has only served to keep this unrest going as long as it has. I mean, this protest is only a small fraction of the size of the 2011 London riots, and we didn't even use tear gas during them...heck, we didn't even use Baton rounds...we just sort of saturated the area with police and waited for the rain.
So I think really in the grand scheme of things the response was somewhat disproportion to the level of violence in Ferguson.
I guess we'll just have to see what happens tonight after the vigil, needless to say Alex Jones is loving it:
http://www.ustream.tv/RealAlexJones