Verdict by grand jury fuels Ferguson’s fury
CLEARING OF OFFICER WHO SHOT BLACK TEEN SPARKS RIOTS, LOOTING
Fires were raging when a man with a scarf wrapped around his face walked out of the smoke and looked around him in disbelief. “All they had to do was give us justice and look at this,” he said. “This a war zone now.”
Chaos broke out on Ferguson’s West Florissant Avenue after it was announced that Darren Wilson, a white police officer, would not be charged for shooting dead Michael Brown, an 18- year- old African- American, earlier this year.
“It feels like someone took a pitchfork, stuck it in a fire and put it right in my stomach and then twisted it,” the man in the bandana said of the grand jury’s decision.
Outside Papa John’s Pizza, a man in a military- style balaclava scuffled with a woman who was trying to stop him from breaking in. Six men climbed out of the broken window of the next building, a tax office. Across the road, people were emptying Fashions R Boutique. Thick black smoke billowing from three blazing auto parts garages blurred the silhouettes of looters.
Seconds later, three armoured personnel carriers marked Swat emerged from the smoke. Officers carrying assault weapons clung on to the sides. Police officers in green military- style fatigues pointed their rifles at men and women who scattered into side streets.
Two looters were pinned to the ground. “We were just looking inside,” one of them, a woman, told the armed police. One officer shouted at a reporter: “Back up! This is a secure area”.
It was one of the few examples on Monday of police exerting control over crowds of mostly young men and women who rampaged through the streets of Ferguson, Missouri.
Despite National Guard soldiers arriving last week as reinforcements, and months of preparation in advance of expected protests over the decision on Brown’s death, police were unable to contain disorder on the fringes of the city.
Tear gas
In a bid to quell the unrest elsewhere in Ferguson, they flooded streets, firing teargas and hornet’s nest sting grenades, which disperse rubber bullets and a toxic chemical powder.
Those efforts occasionally prompted crowds to melt away into side streets, but they quickly reappeared in groups of a hundred strong and more.
At 1.30am, amid escalating unrest, Chief Jon Belmar, the St Louis County police chief, told a press conference: “Unless we bring 10,000 policemen in here, I don’t think we can prevent folks that are destroying a community.”
He said police had arrested 29 people. There were no reports of deaths, but several reports of injuries.
In surrounding towns, groups of people were casually walking in and out of mobile phone stores, supermarkets and pharmacies and looting.
Often they seemed to be burning down the buildings once they were empty.
A block north from where the Swat teams made their brief stop, a woman and man stood in front of a burning building, arms aloft. “This is America. I am a citizen of America,” the woman shouted. “I want justice and peace.”
She was interrupted by a man walking past. “Don’t burn this down,” he said. “Let’s go burn down their neighbourhoods.”
He didn’t say who ‘ they’ were, but throughout the looting, arson and the attacks on police there was a thread that seemed to unite the protesters in their violence. Brown’s name was mentioned occasionally. Some of those taking part in the riots stepped aside to explain their actions.
“What is going on here is real simple,” said DeAndre Rogers Austin, 18, who was with his two younger sisters. “We told them no justice, no peace. We didn’t get our justice, so they don’t get their peace. Plain and simple.”
The violence in Ferguson began shortly after 8.15pm on Monday outside the police department, scene of countless protests and demonstrations in recent months with a grand jury verdict that Wilson was not going to be indicted.