Why have the residents of Ferguson, Missouri reacted with such anger to the still-unexplained shooting of Michael Brown?
It is a mystery.
As darkness fell on Canfield Drive on August 9, a makeshift memorial sprang up in the middle of the street where Michael Brown's body had been sprawled in plain view for more than four hours. Flowers and candles were scattered over the bloodstains on the pavement. [...]
Soon, police vehicles reappeared, including from the St. Louis County Police Department, which had taken control of the investigation. Several officers emerged with dogs. What happened next, according to several sources, was emblematic of what has inflamed the city of Ferguson, Missouri, ever since the unarmed 18-year-old was gunned down: An officer on the street let the dog he was controlling urinate on the memorial site.
And:
[Missouri state Rep. Sharon Pace] purchased some tea lights for the family, and around 7 p.m. she joined Brown's mother, Lesley McSpadden, and others as they placed the candles and sprinkled flowers on the ground where Brown had died. "They spelled out his initials with rose petals over the bloodstains," Pace recalled.
By then, police had prohibited all vehicles from entering Canfield Drive except for their own. Soon the candles and flowers had been smashed, after police drove over them.
This is all in the first hours after Brown's body was finally removed, with the boy's mother and the rest of the crowd watching. So yeah, just a crackerjack job by St. Louis law enforcement on this one. Start out by letting dogs piss on the flowers, run over the candles in your cars, move on to tear gassing people for walking around after dark. The sixties never left Missouri.
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