THIN LINE BETWEEN PEACEFUL AND VIOLENT PROTESTS

Since Sunday night, peaceful protests have turned into violent nightly protests in Ferguson, Missouri and the police have come under intense criticism for their crowd control tactics

Of course, it’s important to remember how this started. We lost a young man, Michael Brown, in heartbreaking and tragic circumstances. He was 18 years old, and his family will never hold Michael in their arms again. And when something like this happens, the local authorities, including the police, have a responsibility to be open and transparent about how they are investigating that death and how they are protecting the people in their communities.

There is never an excuse for violence against police or for those who would use this tragedy as a cover for vandalism or looting. There’s also no excuse for police to use excessive force against peaceful protests or to throw protesters in jail for lawfully exercising their First Amendment rights. And here in the United States of America, police should not be bullying or arresting journalists who are just trying to do their jobs and report to the American people on what they see on the ground.

That, in part, is what President Obama had to say Thursday as he spoke from Martha’s Vineyard in response to the nightly unrest that has been taking place in Ferguson, Missouri since Sunday night.

Police critics have had a field day with the way the cops in Ferguson have controlled the crowds of protestors. The general consensus of media types, academics and so-called police experts is that the Ferguson Police Department has badly botched its response to the protests over the deadly shooting of Michael Brown, 18, a black man, by a white police officer.

Some academics claim that the mere use of military equipment like armored combat vehicles supplied to the police by the Pentagon, and military style uniforms along with AR-15s, serve to incite anger against the police.

One critic said that there are daily protests in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, and the police handle those without any problems. He concluded that the Ferguson cops are doing a terrible job in handling the Brown-shooting protests. Of course, he failed to mention that unlike the protests in Ferguson, the protests in the cities he mentioned were not made up of people that were extremely angry.

The critics are being grossly unfair to the Ferguson PD in that the police attempting to control the protestors are made up of the St. Louis County police force, the Missouri state police and a number of other police agencies from the St. Louis area, all backing up Ferguson’s undermanned 53-man police force.

President Obama seemed to be saying that the cops in Ferguson are using excessive force and preventing people from exercising their First Amendment rights. That’s easy to say when you are in the ritzy vacation paradise of Martha’s Vineyard instead of standing in a police line facing an advancing angry crowd..

In addition to protesting over the shooting of an unarmed black man by a white cop, the protestors have become outraged because the authorities refuse to reveal the name of the cop who shot Brown. Al Sharpton showed up on the scene and demanded that cop be named, as did the NAACP. The authorities say that they have received death threats and that revealing the identity of the cop would put his life and that of his family in danger.

Sharpton is no dummy. The rabble-rousing charlatan knows full well that were the cop’s name to be made public, at worst he would become the target of assassins, or in the least he and his family would become the victims of constant harassment.

And then there is the thin line between peaceful and violent protests. I maintain that once an angry group of peaceful protestors refuses to follow police instructions to disperse or when they push against a line of cops, that demonstration is no longer peaceful. And when hooligans in the back of an assembled group of protestors start smashing store window and engage in looting and setting buildings on fire, that demonstration is no longer peaceful. Furthermore, even though the first dozen lines in a march may be peaceful, when someone in the thirteenth row hurls rocks or flings Molotov cocktails at the cops, that demonstration is no longer peaceful.

In an effort to cool things down, Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon has ordered the Missouri Highway Patrol to take charge in Ferguson and he has appointed Capt. Ron Johnson, a black officer who grew up in Ferguson, to be in command of all the cops there.

Two thirds of Ferguson’s 21,000 residents are black while its 53-man police department has only three black officers. As I have said before, that is the formula for a riot waiting to happen.