Police Chief’s resignation sparks further unrest in city
Two police officers were shot during a protest on Thursday, March 12 in Ferguson, Missouri.
The city, fairly close St. Louis, has been the site of political and cultural turmoil for the past year following the shooting of Michael Brown – an unarmed 18-year-old black man – by former Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson.
Tensions have been high between citizens and police since Brown’s death at the hands of Wilson, a white police officer. When a grand jury decided not to indict Wilson in November of 2014, protest and political unrest, which already overwhelmed the city, spread throughout the United States.
Tensions have continued to escalate in Ferguson, Missouri, as two police officers were shot outside the local station on March 12.
The new shootings occurred in front of the Ferguson police station in the early morning of March 12 – just a few hours after Thomas Jackson, the Ferguson police chief, announced his resignation.
The police officers – one of whom was shot in the face, and the other in the shoulder – were taken to the Barnes-Jewish Hospital to be treated for non-life-threatening injuries. A large number of police vehicles accompanied them.
Twenty-year-old demonstrator Jeffrey L. Williams was arrested late in the evening of Saturday, March 14 in connection with the shootings. On Sunday, March 15, St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch announced the charges laid against Williams: two counts of first-degree assault, one count of firing a weapon from a vehicle, and three counts of armed criminal action.
McCulloch also announced that there may have been other people in the vehicle with Williams, and as such, the investigation remains open.
The shooting of the officers has served to escalate tensions between protesters and the police. Police officers in Ferguson and surrounding area have been increasingly concerned for their safety, and the protesters have vocally criticized police officials for assuming the shooting was directly linked to them.
The New York Times reported that Williams has admitted his involvement and acknowledged that he fired the shots. Williams, however, says he had no intention to fire at police, but rather that he had a dispute with people outside the police station, which had nothing to do with the demonstration.
Protest leaders were quick to react on social media websites, telling several news sources, including The Toronto Star, that Williams had no involvement with the protest, and that they had not even seen him among the crowd during the day of the shooting.
“We are very tight-knit,” said Brittany Ferrell, a 26-year-old protest leader for the group Millennial Activists United, to the Star. “We know each other by face, if not by name, and we’ve never seen [Williams] before.”
Ferrell was leaving a meeting with protest leaders from other groups on March 15 when she learned the details of the arrest. Ferrell called McCulloch’s attempts to align Williams with protestors a “fear tactic.”
McCulloch notes that his department is “not 100 per cent sure that there was a dispute.”
“That’s part of the claim right now,” continued McCulloch. “It’s possible that there was a dispute. It’s possible that he was targeting police officers. We just have to wait for the investigation to develop.”
The shooting, along with Jackson’s resignation, comes in the wake of a U.S. Department of Justice report that revealed widespread racial abuses and biases from both the Ferguson Police Department and municipal court. Six Ferguson officials – including Jackson – have been fired or resigned following the release of the report.