st. louis post-dispatch ferguson coverage - august 12
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DaviD Carson • [email protected] A man yells as tear gas is fired Monday night at Lang Drive and West Florissant in Ferguson.
J.B. ForBes • [email protected] Michael Brown Sr. and Lesley McSpadden, parents of Michael Brown, speak Monday at a news conference.
DaviD Carson • [email protected] Police line up in riot gear Monday night near the burned out QuikTrip on West Florissant Avenue.
T H E N O . 1 S T. L O U I S W E B S I T E A N D N E W S P A P E R
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Comic icon Robin Williams is dead at 63Preliminary cause of death for Oscar winner is suicide by asphyxia. • A19
St. Charles County toddler attacked by pit bull dies • A2
Miley Cyrus spectacle entertains at Scottrade Center • A3
Iraqi leader readies troops as crisis deepens • A4
CALLS FOR JUSTICEfbi opens civil rights inquiry into police shootingMORE UNREST FAMILY SPEAKS SHOW OF FORCE
Laurie skrivan • [email protected] “He was my second cousin. It’s just so wrong,” says Tony Petty, who holds his granddaughter at a protest Monday in Ferguson over the fatal shooting of Michael Brown.
Two accounts, from police and victim’s friend
Explaining the violence to kids
Civil rights leaders ask for calmPAGES A5-8
Live updates StltodAy.com
By Koran [email protected]
Michael Brown’s parents on Monday emphatically rejected police accounts of their son’s fatal shoot-ing by an unnamed officer on Saturday, calling on wit-nesses to step forward with information that would cast doubt on law enforcement’s version of events.
Speaking through their lawyer, Benjamin Crump,
By Tim [email protected]
deLLWOOd • Ferguson-area businesses grappled Monday with the aftermath of weekend looting that left windows shattered and store shelves empty.
The violence started Sun-day evening in response to the fatal police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown. By the time it ended early Monday, more than two
CLEAnUp bEgInS FOR bUSInESSES hIT by LOOTERS
See cleanup • Page a7
FAmILy ASkS wITnESSES TO COmE FORwARd
See BroWn • Page a7
from STaff reporTS
FeRGusON • Tension stayed high and raw Monday as the St. Louis region waited for answers in the fatal shooting of an unarmed teenager by a municipal police officer.
In another day of fast-moving events, the FBI prom-ised to investigate the kill-ing of Michael Brown, 18, on Saturday by a Ferguson po-lice officer. Brown’s parents called for an end to the vio-lence while strongly disput-ing the police version of their
son’s death. More than 1,000 people observed a moment of silence at a meeting called by the NAACP.
Throughout the day, pro-testers continued to face off with police, and as the sun set, lines of police in riot gear fired tear gas to disperse pro-testers, telling them it was time to go home. By midnight, the situation was quiet.
St. Louis County Police and the FBI promised thor-ough investigations into the
pOLICE USE TEAR gAS TO dISpERSE CROwdS
See ferGuSon • Page a8
08.10.2014 • Sunday • M 3 ST. LOuIS POST-dISPaTCH • A5
public safety
She then said she saw the teen, hands in the air, attempt to flee. Several shots hit Brown as he ran, Crenshaw said. She com-plied with a request that she give photos of the scene to authorities.
Brown, a 2014 Normandy High School graduate, was scheduled to begin classes at Vatterott College on Monday.
The shooting sparked a furious back-lash.
Further shots were heard as police ar-rived immediately after the shooting but no one was injured as angry residents screamed obscenities mixed with threats to “kill the police.” More than 60 area po-lice officers responded to the scene.
Louis Head, Brown’s stepfather, held a sign that said: “Ferguson police just ex-ecuted my unarmed son!!!”
Tension flared off and on through the evening. A calm settled over the area af-ter mourners gathered at a prayer circle — watched over by a St. Louis County police officer sitting atop a SWAT vehicle — and then a candlelight vigil as darkness fell.
The acrimony briefly resurfaced about 8:30 p.m. as demonstrators again swarmed the street chanting, “We Are Michael Brown” as wary police officers stood nearby with assault rifles.
At one point, residents held up their hands, saying, “Don’t shoot me!” as police officers with barking dogs tried to keep or-der.
Approximately 100 protesters then went to the street outside Ferguson police headquarters and chanted, “No Justice! No Peace!”
McSpadden appeared at the shooting scene sporadically, comforted by friends and neighbors.
“I know they killed my son,” McSpad-den was heard telling an acquaintance. “This was wrong and it was cold-hearted.”
Her son, she continued, “doesn’t kill, steal or rob. He doesn’t do any of that.”
Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson
said his department immediately turned the matter over to the St. Louis County police.
He declined to comment on what had led to the shooting or any other details.
“We are hoping for calm and for people to give us a chance to conduct a thorough investigation,” Jackson said.
County police spokesman Brian Schell-
man promised a “lengthy investigation.”“We’re still trying to piece together
what happened and why,” Schellman said.The unnamed officer has been placed on
paid administrative leave.The shooting sparked a furor on social
media, with commenters expressing out-rage over the killing.
As the afternoon wore on, activists, public figures and others arrived on the scene to urge calm.
State Sen. Jamilah Nasheed, D-St. Louis, said she would petition the U.S. Justice Department on Monday for a for-mal investigation.
The St. Louis County NAACP is also asking that the FBI investigate.
Nasheed said she would additionally request that St. Louis County Prosecu-tor Robert McCulloch look into what she termed the shooting of an “unarmed citi-zen.”
Ferguson Mayor James Knowles III said
the city was in mourning.“It’s a tragedy whenever a young person
loses his life,” the mayor said as he urged residents to remain calm and “have faith in the process.”
A protest rally is scheduled for Monday morning in front of the Ferguson police station.
County police are to hold a press con-ference Sunday morning.
David Carson, Huy Mach and Denise Hollinshed of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.
SHOOTING • from A1
Officer has been placed on leave; Ferguson police have turned the investigation over to the St. Louis County Police
PHOTOS BY DaviD CarSOn • [email protected]“Don't shoot us,” people in the crowd call out as they confront police officers arriving to break up a gathering Saturday on Canfield Drive in Ferguson where earlier in the day a Ferguson police officer fatally shot a man, 18, on the street.
Police officers with canine help arrive to break up the crowd near the scene of the shooting in Ferguson on Saturday.
Michael Brown, 18, a 2014 Normandy High School graduate, would have begun classes at Vatterott College on Monday.
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Ferguson police shooting
dozen businesses in Ferguson and neighboring Dellwood were damaged or looted.
Monday found near bum-per-to-bumper traffic up and down the ravaged stretch of West Florissant Avenue, where many businesses — even those untouched by vio-lence — remained closed.
Among those striving to put things in order was Zisser Tire & Auto, where workers spent the day installing plywood over the shattered remains of massive glass panels that once bordered the showroom on three sides.
Owner John Zisser, who hopes to be open again today, said looters nabbed display wheels and tires along with a customer’s car. They would have taken more — after breaking into a warehouse in back — but police showed up in time to stop them, he said.
Zisser, who learned about the break-in while watching TV coverage Sunday night, was left shaken by the events.
“I don’t understand,” Zisser said. “We’ve never had black-white issues here in the store.”
A quick survey of the dam-aged businesses suggests a pattern focused on auto parts suppliers, cellular phone stores, payday loan offices, beauty shops and larger re-tailers such as Walmart, Fam-ily Dollar and Toys R Us.
Of course, not every busi-ness fit that pattern. Outliers included a Taco Bell, a barbe-cue restaurant and, oddly, St. Vincent de Paul’s Thrift Store, at 10052 West Florissant Av-enue.
Manager Bill Andre arrived early Monday morning to
find that a brick was used to shatter the store’s front door. But that was the extent of the damage, with the looters ap-parently deciding to move on without taking anything.
“You’re curious what their thought process was,” Andre said. “But who wants used clothing when you can take new shoes?”
Andre said the thrift store decided to open for business Monday with a skeleton crew, after a couple of employ-ees expressed worries about working. He planned to close early, concerned that new vi-olence could erupt later in the day.
The southern end of the rioting centered around the QuikTrip at 9420 West Flo-rissant Avenue. The burned-out shell of a convenience store was a focal point for fresh, though quieter, dem-onstrations Monday. A few dozen protesters were camped out on the graffiti-marred site throughout the day, waving signs and receiving encour-agement from passing cars.
QuikTrip spokesman Mike
Thornbrugh said it’s too soon to say what the company will do with that location. “We haven’t even discussed it,” he said.
But he said employees who worked at that store will be offered transfers to other stores in the area.
The company also has tem-porarily closed another of its stores, farther north on West Florissant.
The largest targets of the mob were found on the north-ern end of the crime spree, where Walmart and Toys R Us both remained closed Mon-day.
A Toys R Us spokeswoman said cleanup is underway. “At this time, we do not know when we will be ready to re-open,” Kathleen Waugh said in an email.
A Walmart spokesman also offered no timetable for that store’s return to business, saying the company is still as-sessing the damage.
“We’re still learning about what happened last night. But it’s safe to say it was signifi-cant,” said Brian Nick, of the
chain based in Bentonville, Ark.
In the meantime, he said employees would still be working at the store to help get it ready for its reopening.
“The associates will still be doing work. It will just be a different kind of work,” he said.
While most of the damaged stores were located along the West Florissant corridor — stretching just north of I-270 — the looting also extended east hitting the shopping cen-ter, anchored by the Home Depot, at New Halls Ferry Road and I-270.
On Monday, it was unclear whether the home improve-ment store was hit, but several nearby businesses, includ-ing Nu Fashion Beauty, Party City and Boost Mobile, were boarded up.
The fact that so many busi-nesses lost windows during the rioting created a small business boom, of sorts, for companies such as AM Rich-ards Glass Co., which had five trucks working the area throughout the day.
“It’s crazy. I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Steve Crandall, whose family owns the company. “It’s not some-thing you’d expect from a small suburb of St. Louis.”
Crandall said it would likely take a month or so before all the riot-ruined windows are replaced. That, he said, is based on his experience in dealing with insurance com-panies in other instances of large-scale damage — like when intense storms, or tor-nadoes, come through the area.
“It looks just like a storm blew through here. A storm of people,” he said.
cleAnup from A1
By Jim [email protected]
The town of Ferguson, like much of north St. Louis County, was inching its way back after suffering heavily in the real estate and jobs collapse in the last decade.
Then came the conflagration of Sunday night. Now local residents are wonder-ing if recent signs of economic hope could vanish.
Those signs included a rapidly falling number of home foreclosures in North County. Real estate agents in Ferguson and some nearby towns saw signs that prices were stabilizing, or even rising in some neighborhoods.
Ferguson city government had spruced up its little downtown along Florissant Road. It became a local destination with a wine bar, brew pub and restaurants. Busi-ness seemed to be looking up.
The town dangled subsidies in front of new college graduates to get them to buy houses in town, and launched a lending program for home repairs.
“Everyone was very optimistic,” said Carolyn Marty, president of the Greater North County Chamber of Commerce.
On Saturday, Michael Brown, an un-armed teen, was shot to death by a Fer-guson police officer. Crowds took to the streets in protest. On Sunday night, loot-ing and arson broke out on West Floris-sant Avenue, hitting many businesses in neighboring Dellwood, leaving neighbors
and business owners to wonder what comes next.
“I was just devastated. Everybody worked so hard to get North County grow-ing. Everything people were doing for years could be defeated with just one pop of the balloon,” said Carol O’Mara, direc-tor of housing in Florissant, Ferguson’s northern neighbor.
Ferguson, population 21,000, is a town of diversity.
“We have century homes — three-story houses on big lots. We have houses for first-time homebuyers, houses for the middle class, to the upper end,” says Rory Schwartz, who has sold Ferguson houses for 30 years.
Much of Ferguson is a picture of pleas-ant suburbia, with trees lining streets in front of tract houses built during the 1950s and 1960s.
Although it has a mix of housing, Fer-guson is mainly a blue-collar town and somewhat poorer than the rest of the re-gion. Median family income was $44,000 in 2012, compared with $75,000 in St. Louis County as a whole and $59,000 for the state of Missouri. The town had a pov-erty rate of 20 percent, according to the census, compared to 7.8 percent for the county as a whole and 10.7 percent in Mis-souri.
Like much of North County, Ferguson has also undergone a racial transition, from 52 percent black in 2000 to 66 per-cent in 2012.
Some worry that TV images of build-
ings burning could have a psychological impact, damaging business and the hous-ing market in Ferguson and surrounding towns. Reggie Bomar, a real estate agent and landlord with property in Ferguson, worries that people may decide to leave. “If my neighborhood is this explosive, do I get out of here?” he asked.
On the other hand, scenes of looting could fade into memory if future protests are peaceful. “I hope it’s not long-lasting, for Ferguson’s sake,” said Bomar.
Sunday’s disturbance came against a recent history of financial distress that altered neighborhoods in parts of North County. The Great Recession and housing bust hit the area particularly hard, both in jobs and in housing, and Ferguson was no exception.
As of March, the typical house in Fer-guson was worth 37 percent less than at its peak in 2007, according to the Zillow housing sales website. The region as a whole was down 15 percent.
Ferguson’s situation is fairly typical for North County. Economist Bill Rogers at the University of Missouri-St. Louis cal-culates that a house in most of St. Louis County would be worth roughly half as much if moved to the Ferguson-Florissant School District. It would lose roughly 60 percent of its value in the North County school districts of Normandy, Jennings or Riverview Gardens. Those gaps have been widening since the recession six years ago.
More than the rest of the region, North County suffered from a seven-year run of
home foreclosures that saw thousands of homeowners become renters and thou-sands of homes go from occupant-owned to rental property.
But foreclosures are fading fast. Less than 1 percent of Ferguson houses and apartments units were in foreclosure in the first half of this year, down from 5 per-cent in 2008, according to RealtyTrac.
Fewer cheap foreclosures on the mar-ket has given rise to hope that prices may finally start rising again. “We’ve been see-ing a little bit of an uptick in Ferguson, Florissant and Hazelwood,” said Rebecca Zoll, who heads North County Incorpo-rated, the regional economic development group.
There are no good estimates of unem-ployment for suburban towns. But North County maintains a good employment base. Emerson, a global manufacturer on the Fortune 500 list, is based in Ferguson. Boeing, Express Scripts, the University of Missouri-St. Louis and Mallinckrodt are among big employers producing a $7 bil-lion annual payroll in North County, ac-cording to a University of Missouri analy-sis. Still, the number of jobs has declined.
Ferguson’s municipal government fought back with redevelopment pro-grams.
“Over the past few years, they’ve done remarkably well,” Zoll said. “They had lots of new restaurants that opened and hous-ing above the restaurants. Lots of busi-nesses are doing very well in Ferguson right now.”
worry about city’s revivalcommunity’s gradual recovery from recession may have been dealt a setback.
the family said the 18-year-old, whom teachers described as a “gentle giant,” didn’t have the personality to try and wrestle away an officer’s gun, as police have said.
This family “expects and demands and will not sleep until they get the truth,” Crump said during a Monday news con-ference at Jennings Mason Temple.
“If you are a witness to what happened, don’t be intimidated, come forward,” Crump said. “People from the U.S. Depart-ment of Justice will take statements without any intimidation or fear of retribution.”
Crump wouldn’t say what the family believed happened, but said witness ac-counts relayed to them have cast serious doubt on what police are describing.
“We think it’ll be very clear when this is over,” the civil rights lawyer said. Crump is known for representing the family of Flor-ida shooting victim Trayvon Martin.
Brown’s parents also used the event to request that all demonstrations done in their son’s honor be nonviolent. The plea came less than 24 hours after a night of unrest.
“He was a good boy. He didn’t deserve none of this,” Michael Brown Sr., said. “We want justice for our son.”
“With no violence,” the teen’s mother, Lesley McSpadden, added.
She later noted that her son was sched-uled to start college this week.
“We can’t even celebrate him going to college,” she said. “Now we’ve got to plan his funeral.”
The mood at Monday’s news conference ranged from fiery to somber, on the second day since the shooting.
Authorities have maintained that a po-lice officer shot Brown, who was unarmed, after the teen attacked the Ferguson of-ficer. Witnesses have said the officer fired multiple shots at Brown while the teen had his hands in the air.
Monday’s news conference was sup-posed to be a chance for Brown’s parents to speak publicly. His mother, however, was overcome with tears as she held a photo of her child and was unable to speak more than a few words at a time.
Brown’s father, was also visibly shaken throughout the afternoon.
Crump, the lawyer, did most of the talk-ing, calling Brown’s killing an execution, and making reference to other young black men from around the country that have been killed by police.
After the news conference, Brown’s mother made her way outside the church, where she was consoled by family, re-questing that reporters and onlookers give her time to grieve.
Crump, however, pressed her to come back inside the church for an interview with a cable news station.
Funeral details for Brown have not been released.
looters leave mess behind
photos by Laurie skrivan • [email protected]“This is ridiculous. It shouldn’t have resulted to this. I am embarrassed for the people who did this. They acted out of anger. Now I don’t have a job, “ said Marcelle Armenta, who surveys damage Monday at Sam’s Meat Market & More, 9241 West Florissant Avenue.
Carter Hamilton takes a photo Monday of his friend DeAndre Smith of Ferguson at the QuikTrip, 9420 West Florissant Avenue, that was burned by rioters Sunday. “How could they think there would not be a reaction? We are not taking this,” said Hamilton.
J.b. Forbes • [email protected] Brown Sr. and Lesley McSpadden, parents of Michael Brown, said at a news conference Monday at the Jennings Mason Temple Church of God in Christ they want justice for their son.
BroWn • from A1
A8 • ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH M 2 • TUeSDAy • 08.12.2014
Ferguson police shooting
shooting of Brown outside an apartment complex in the 2900 block of Canfield Drive. The ad-dress is just east of a stretch of West Florissant Avenue, in the eastern corner of Ferguson, that was the focus of violence and looting Sunday night after a day of peaceful protest.
Police fired the tear gas into an increasingly unruly crowd that had reformed near the QuikTrip at 9240 West Florissant Avenue, looted and torched Sunday. The gutted store was ground zero for protests all day Monday.
Police, backed by a SWAT ar-mored car, blocked both West Florissant and the entry to Can-field Drive, scene of the killing on Saturday afternoon that touched off the protests and violence. All but a few protesters had retreated from the scene by 9 p.m., and police held their positions in the streets.
Two miles to the south, an overflow crowd observed a mo-ment of silence at Murchison Tabernacle CME Church, 7629 Natural Bridge Road in Nor-mandy. Cornell Brooks, the new national president of the NAACP, pleaded for calm as the commu-nity responds to the “unfolding drama.”
“Martin Luther King did not live and die so that we might steal in the name of justice in the middle of the night,” said Brooks, who flew to St. Louis for the gathering, sponsored by the organization’s St. Louis County branch. The shooting and rioting have drawn international atten-tion.
Damage from Sunday night and early Monday was most ex-tensive on West Florissant, but it also jumped two miles north to commercial areas near Inter-state 270, where a Walmart was among retailers hit.
Seven miles south of the scene, several retailers in Brentwood closed their doors early Mon-day evening. “We didn’t want to take any chances,” said a security guard at the Brentwood Prom-enade. The Galleria mall also closed early after a few girls got into a fight. Authorities said the fight was not related to Ferguson.
Protests formed and reformed all day Monday outside the gut-ted QuikTrip. Marchers chanted and held up their hands in a mock sign of surrender as police hovered nearby. West Florissant was crowded with horn-honking gawkers in cars.
Earlier in the day, protesters gathered outside the Ferguson police station, 222 South Floris-sant Road, to the west of West Florissant. More than 150 people took part, also holding up their hands and shouting, “Hands up, don’t shoot,” and “No justice, no peace.”
At the scene of the shooting, where a growing pile of teddy bears marked the spot, a man in a white T-shirt fired a handgun Monday afternoon. Police did not respond to the scene.
Brown’s father, Michael Brown Sr., 36, was surveying the mound of bears when the shots were
fired.“I just need justice for my son,
get this case solved. I need every-body to come together to get this done,” he said.
At 5 p.m., honking and yelling continued outside the QuikTrip.
“It feels like I am at a his-torical moment,” said Armaon Simmons, 17, of the Normandy area. “Black people are coming together. We aren’t killing each other; we are working as one.”
But Zackery Keys, an African-American and union carpenter from St. Louis County, saw it differently. “This is a disturbed group of young people,” said Keys, 58, from a safe distance. “This is nothing to be proud of. Who wants to be part of chaos? ... Probably 95 percent of these people don’t even vote.”
Police said they made no more than 10 arrests Monday, mostly for peace disturbance. In con-trast, there were 32 arrests Sun-day, leading Monday to charges against 10 suspects. St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert P. McCulloch said the 10 were all “well-known” to investigators. Police officials and political lead-ers appealed for calm. St. Louis County Executive Charlie Dooley announced the FBI involve-ment during a news conference in Clayton. The St. Louis County NAACP branch and numerous elected officials had called for the FBI to step in.
Dooley promised the process would be open but not quick. “We’re asking all the public to be calm, be patient,” Dooley said.
St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar said the FBI “will take a lot of the information we have developed already through our investigation. They will take that investigation, and they may do their own interviews and take a look at the evidence themselves.”
“We will share our information with Prosecutor McCulloch’s of-fice and at the same time with the FBI,” Belmar said.
Belmar said Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson contacted him Saturday even before he got to the scene of the shooting. “This is a complex investigation, as it should be,” Belmar added. “We need to make sure every-thing’s done right.”
He said investigators still need to talk to scores of people at the apartment complex.
“I understand the public has a right to be skeptical,” Belmar said. “But I would also ask the public to be reasonable.”
Police did not release the name or race of the police officer, who was put on leave. Belmar said Sunday the officer had an en-counter with two people and that Brown pushed the officer inside his police vehicle. Belmar said one shot was fired in the car. He said the officer fired multiple shots at Brown, who was away from the car, killing him.
Family members and some witnesses disputed the police ac-count. They say Brown had his hands up in surrender when he was shot.
In Washington, U.S. Attorney
General Eric Holder said the Jus-tice Department’s Civil Rights Division will take part in what he called a “concurrent federal in-quiry.”
“The federal investigation will supplement, rather than sup-plant, the inquiry by local au-thorities,” Holder said. “At every step, we will work with the lo-cal investigators, who should be prepared to complete a thorough, fair investigation in their own right.”
The county NAACP and the African-American Mound City Bar Association released a joint statement urging witnesses to come forward. The statement said it was “clear that there were many witnesses who had not yet been interviewed by police in-
vestigators.”They promised to provide free
legal counsel to witnesses who come forward.
A spokesman for the Rev. Al Sharpton, of the National Ac-tion Network, said he would visit Ferguson today to meet with the victim’s family and community leaders, and hold a news confer-ence. At 7 p.m. today, the Rev. Traci D. Blackmon will host a forum at Christ the King United Church of Christ, 11370 Old Halls Ferry Road, where Fergu-son Mayor James Knowles III and Police Chief Jackson were ex-pected to be on hand to answer questions.
On West Florissant Mon-day, shopkeepers and employ-ees swept debris and boarded
up windows, raising sheets of plywood from trucks parked throughout the area. Not all the windows had been smashed — businesses were guarding against another round of violence.
A spokesperson for QuikTrip said employees of the burned store were transferred to other locations, and that the com-pany hadn’t decided whether to rebuild. A Walmart spokesman said it would keep its Ferguson store closed for now.
The Ferguson-Florissant School District canceled meet-ings scheduled for Monday eve-ning at eight elementary schools that would have allowed parents and students to meet teachers and visit classrooms. School is to begin Thursday.
“We are heartbroken by the tragic events of recent days in and around the City of Ferguson,” administrators wrote on the dis-trict website. “We are planning to receive and support our stu-dents when school begins this Thursday, and we look forward to working closely with our com-munity to heal and rebuild.”
The Jennings School District, just east of the apartments on Canfield, canceled the first day of school Monday. “Safety is our uppermost concern,” according to a district news release. “At this time we do not feel it’s safe for our students to walk to school.” Classes were scheduled to begin today, according to the district website.
At the QuikTrip, one man who claimed to have taken part late Sunday sought to justify the vio-lence. But other citizens dropped by to decry the mayhem and to urge businesses to continue serv-ing the area.
Leonette Hilliard, a middle school English teacher, wrote a note to the store and taped it onto the side wall saying, “Corporate neighbor: I am sorry this act of robbery and violence has hap-pened. Please return soon.”
She taped it across graffiti say-ing “187 county police,” the 187 being a slang reference to mur-der. Hilliard said she comes to the store to two or three times a week and has been doing so for about 15 years.
“This just doesn’t represent who we are as a community and I wanted just to say something to do something that was produc-tive,” she said.
Belmar said Monday that of-ficers originally were deployed the night before so protesters had an “opportunity to vent, but at some point we could no lon-ger sustain that attitude.” He said they moved to police cars to become more mobile as depart-ments received numerous calls for shots fired, vandalism, bur-glary and assault.
“It was a miracle, however, that nobody actually got shot (Sunday) night,” Belmar said. “I was expecting the worst. You can never tell, when you’re in an en-vironment like this.”
Tim Barker, Kim Bell, Jesse Bogan, Jessica Bock, Tim Bryant, Nancy Cambria, Stephen Deere, Lilly Fowler, Steve Giegerich, Valerie Schremp Hahn, Paul Hampel, Jeremy Kohler, Tim O’Neil and Nicholas Pistor, all of the Post-Dispatch, contributed to this report.
FERGUSON • from A1
open inquiry is promised
RobeRt Cohen • [email protected] officers arrest a man Monday who refused to leave when police in riot gear cleared the area of South Florissant Road and Church Street in downtown Ferguson.
ChRis Lee • [email protected] White of Florissant (center, with purse) leads the singing of “Break Every Chain” during an impromptu rally Monday of the overflow crowd on the front steps of the Murchison Tabernacle CME Church. Inside, more than 1,000 people observed a moment of silence at a meeting called by the NAACP.
RobeRt Cohen • [email protected]“All of my friends have been killed. I’m sick of it,” yelled protester Jamell Spann at police officers in riot gear who were clearing demonstrators Monday at the Ferguson police station.
RobeRt Cohen • [email protected]. Louis County Police tactical officers fire tear gas Monday on a crowd along West Florissant Road in Ferguson.
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PLATFORM • I know that my retirement will make no di� erence in its cardinal principles, that it will always fi ght
for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fi ght demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfi ed with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty • JOSEPH PULITZER • APRIL 10, 1907
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St. Louis County Executive Charlie A. Dooley and county Police Chief Jon Belmar were absolutely correct on Monday to ask the FBI to help investigate the fatal shooting Saturday of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a Ferguson police officer.
This process won’t be quick, nor will it satisfy the understandable anger of those in Ferguson’s African-American community who are enraged by Mr. Brown’s killing. But getting it right is more important than getting it fast. As we’ve seen since Saturday afternoon, getting it fast often means get-ting it wrong.
At midday Monday, the only thing known for sure was that Mr. Brown was unarmed and that he was shot multiple times as he was attempting to flee an encounter with an as-yet-unidentified police officer. That much alone is profoundly disturbing.
Were he and a com-panion merely stopped for walking in the middle of the street in the 2900 block of Canfield Drive near West Florissant Avenue? Was the police officer shoved into his patrol car? Was there a struggle for the officer’s weapon? Was there a gunshot in the car? This is the account offered by both the Ferguson and St. Louis County police departments, but eyewitness accounts differ.
Patience, in the face of what looks like a grievous injustice, is hard. But let’s get it right.
What happened Saturday night into
Sunday in the wake of shooting cannot be excused. To say that burning and looting is somehow the proper response to a young man’s death is to trivialize that death.
The advent of social media enabled peo-ple from thousands of miles away to weigh in on the events in Ferguson this weekend. The killing of an unarmed black kid by a cop, followed by looting and civil unrest, is a great opportunity for facile or inflammatory commentary.
It does no disservice to the Ferguson and county police departments to say they were overwhelmed by the fast-breaking events. In a highly charged atmosphere, with ran-dom gunshots and flying rocks, officers in riot gear generally reacted professionally.
But Ferguson officials and county police did a poor job of disseminating informa-tion. Rumor filled the gaps. The city and
county police train for mass casualty events; if getting ahead of the information environ-ment isn’t a priority, it should be. In the county, with its five dozen law enforcement jurisdic-tions, some of which are barely competent, information flow is uneven at best.
One lesson from this weekend is that the
county must move quickly to centralize command and control for major emergen-cies. Fast, accurate information is part of that. It’s harder now than ever before to do that, but even more critical.
Even if he weren’t running for re-election in November, the Walgreen Co.’s flirtation with a tax-friendly Swiss headquarters would have been a fat pitch for Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin.
Happily for Mr. Durbin, Walgreen’s timing couldn’t have been better. As part of its plan to acquire the 55 per-cent of Swiss-based drugstore chain Alliance Boots that it doesn’t already own, Deerfield, Ill.-based Walgreen was considering one of the infamous “inversions” that have become increasingly popular in corporate America.
In an inversion, a U.S. company buys a smaller company in a nation where the corporate tax rate is lower than the putative 35 percent U.S. rate. The headquarters for the merged entity is established overseas, allowing the U.S. company to lower its worldwide tax bill.
Some 41 firms have established overseas tax domiciles since 1982, 12 of them in 2012 alone. Eight more are considering it. Most of them book most of their profits on intellectual property, like drug patents. Walgreen, however, runs 8,116 highly visible retail stores, making them vulnerable to consumer backlash.
Last month, Mr. Durbin began wav-ing the Stars and Stripes at Walgreen, writing in a letter to the company CEO that, “I believe you will find that your customers are deeply patriotic and will not support Walgreen’s decision to turn its back on the United States. Nearly all of your $2.5 billion in profits earned last year were from sales to U.S. taxpaying customers.”
Mr. Durbin also reminded the firm of a truth that lots of corporate executives like to forget: They benefit hugely from U.S. taxes. In Walgreen’s case, 25 per-cent of its profits came from taxpayer-supported Medicare and Medicaid programs.
In addition, he pointed out that “Walgreen’s uses taxpayer-supported transportation infrastructure to stock its stores and deliver its products. Your company benefits from our country’s investment climate and educated workforce, and you and your fellow executives have benefited from tax breaks on compensation packages. If you and Walgreen’s board of directors decide to invert to avoid U.S taxes, you will be turning your backs on the very people that have allowed Walgreen’s to thrive and prosper.”
With a dig at Walgreen’s advertising slogan, Mr. Durbin added, “Is ‘the cor-ner of happy and healthy’ somewhere in the Swiss Alps?”
Last Wednesday, Walgreen announced that the headquarters of the new holding company, Walgreen’s
Boots Alliance, would be in Illinois. Moving to Switzerland, the firm said, would not be in the long-term best interests of shareholders. Short term, shareholders immediately began dumping the stock, which closed down 14 percent. So much for Wall Street patriotism.
Even better for Mr. Durbin, his Republican opponent in the Novem-ber election, state Sen. and dairy executive Jim Oberweis of Sugar Grove, immediately accused him of “bully-ing” Walgreen. Mr. Oberweis did not specifically endorse tax-dodging, a fine point that may be lost during the fall campaign.
In fact, the United States does have the highest corporate tax rate among developed nations. Also in fact, almost no corporation pays the full 35 percent. More than 90 percent of all U.S. corpo-rations are so-called “pass-through” entities where business income is treated and taxed as personal income.
Large public corporations can take advantage of any number of loop-holes, deductions and tax havens; the Government Accountability Office reported last year that the average effective corporate tax rate was 12.6 percent, lower than many middle- and upper-class families pay.
Democrats and Republicans in Congress generally agree that the tax code needs reform, but as with so many other things, can’t agree on how to do it. Everyone wants a lower tax rate, but no industry wants to give up its bought-and-paid-for tax loopholes.
President Barack Obama has pro-posed lowering the corporate rate to 28 percent while trimming some of the special exemptions. Mr. Obama also wants Congress to limit the corporate inversion scam. He said this month:
“We don’t want companies who have up until now been playing by the rules suddenly looking over their shoulder and saying, ‘You know what, some of our competitors are gaming the system and we need to do it, too.’”
If Congress doesn’t act — and these days, that’s a given — the Treasury Department could take steps on its own to make the deals more difficult.
Too many multinationals have found ways to book U.S. earnings as foreign profits, stashing them overseas as part of the $2 trillion in overseas profits that can’t be taxed until they’re repatriated. All of this means that the average U.S. taxpayer has to make up the difference, or critical needs go unfunded.
What’s good for Wall Street often is not good for Main Street. Given the differences between Mr. Durbin and Mr. Oberweis on this issue, this debate could get a useful airing in Illinois this fall.
Get it right in Ferguson
Walgreen stays home
Our view • Communications failures made a bad situation worse.
Our view • Corporate tax avoidance scam loses a customer.
Slay should apologize for supporting Amendment 1
Mayor Francis Slay’s chief of staff says, “It’s a little irritating to be lectured about animal rights” after the mayor made robocalls telling St. Louis residents to vote for the anti-animal Amendment 1 (“Activists criticize mayor’s support of farm amendment,” Aug. 8). What’s a little irritating is Slay’s hypocrisy on this issue. Slay supported Prop B, the 2010 ballot initiative that regulated puppy mills, and repeatedly told us that he cares about animal welfare. We voted to keep him in office because we thought he was good to his word.
But on Amendment 1, Slay be-trayed his constituents. He acted neutral on the amendment, until at the 11th hour he made robocalls telling voters to vote for it. When called out on his fl ip-fl op, Slay’s chief of sta� said Slay supported the amendment because it is “in-nocuous.” But if Amendment 1 is innocuous, why did corporate ag-riculture groups pay for Slay to ro-bocall us all with a desperate plea to amend the state constitution?
The truth is that Amendment 1 is far from innocuous. It’s de-signed to roll back the very pro-tections against puppy mills that Slay said he supports. And it will make it far harder for St. Louis to become a no-kill city, as unregu-
lated puppy mills fl ood the city with more dogs.
Of course we could have debated all this if Slay had pub-licly announced his position in advance. Thankfully Mayor Slay’s constituents were too smart to fall for his deceptive message. Despite his robocall, fully 73 percent of St. Louis voters voted no on Amend-ment 1 last week — and I was one of them. Mayor Slay owes all of us — and every animal in Missouri who will be harmed by Amend-ment 1’s narrow passage — an apology.Wendi Neckameyer • St. Louis
Missouri should keep welcoming visitors by forgoing toll roadsWhen traveling across America, I have always found it laughable that when you cross the border into a state, you get a giant “(State) Welcomes You” sign, but then you get treated to raucous-sounding rumble strips, bringing your adventure in this new state to a dead halt so that you can pay a toll.
Missouri does not do this, and is therefore a truly welcoming state. But I blanched when I read in your post-election story about Amendment 7 (“No direction af-ter defeat,” Aug. 7) that toll roads are now on the table. We have resisted toll roads for this long; I think we need to go with it at this
point, get publicity for it, and fi nd some alternate means of paying for roads.
I could see a Missouri Depart-ment of Tourism campaign, “At the Crossroads of America … and Zero Tolls.” License plates that say “The No-Toll Road State.” Per-haps the increased tourism would flow back through to help pay for the roads.Emmett McAuliff e • A� ton
Access to electricity will improve public health systems in AfricaI was grateful to see Michael Ger-son, a former policy adviser and speechwriter for President George W. Bush, commend President Obama for his Power Africa initia-tive (“Bet on Africa rising,” Aug. 7). I believe the country wants to see more of this kind of bipartisan collegiality rather than the current I-hate-it-because-the-other-party-supports-it mentality.
The legislative component of Power Africa enjoys strong bipar-tisan support as well. The House of Representatives passed the Electrify Africa Act with a broad base of Democratic and Republi-can co-sponsors. The companion bill in the Senate titled Energize Africa also enjoys bipartisan sup-port and was recently approved by the Senate Foreign Relations committee, but is currently
languishing because of the August recess.
Access to electricity will improve public health systems in Africa, in part, by improving record-keeping and community education efforts, which may directly impact the current Ebola crisis. This is fast becoming a global health threat and has rami-fications for both Africans and Americans alike. Energy access will also improve education and business development in Africa which, as Mr. Gerson points out, will shift the United States away from simply responding to emer-gency situations like famines and focusing instead on sustainable development in Africa. This new direction in foreign assistance will provide the infrastructure needed to assist impoverished people to lift themselves out of extreme poverty.Debbie Cole • St. Louis County
Monarch fi re district politics at its bestJane Cunningham doesn’t like firefighters being asked to give to a political action committee (“The calamity is the firefighters union vs. the taxpayers,” Aug. 2).
The donations are strictly voluntary; nobody is forced or demanded to give to the union-endorsed candidate. The union-backed directors are not owned
by the union. They are citizens of their particular district who want to serve. They have their own opinions and do what’s best for the district and the community where they live.
It’s a little confusing how Cun-ningham won her position on the board given her statement: “Citizens who just want to serve cannot compete with that kind of machine.”
Let me get this straight. Cun-ningham can get donations from two lawyers for an election cam-paign for herself and the board president (the same two lawyers who received $230,000 in legal fees from your district). I guess that’s just good business. Now giving a donation from a fi re-fi ghter to a political action com-mittee is somehow reprehensible? Cunningham’s bias against the union fi refi ghters in the district is very apparent.
Cunningham even seemingly condemns them for making good money, implying that with only a high school degree they make too much money. I suppose 1 ½ to 2 years to train as a paramedic doesn’t count. Not to mention the continuous training throughout their career, since the fire district responds to calls including haz-ardous material, trench rescue and car extrications.Michael Foley • Weldon Spring
YOUR VIEWS • LETTERS FROM OUR READERS
ASSOCIATED PRESSSt. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar (left) and Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson.
ROBERT COHEN • [email protected] prayer vigil was held in front of the Ferguson police department on Sunday.