In trying to understand what's happening in Ferguson, I find myself looking back at something like a history of social and economic injustice writ large. One thing you need to know is--Ferguson as a community got the worst end of the recession stick, with the population of
actual poor doubling in the past 2 years. And another thing you need to know is,
Ferguson PD supports itself by fining Ferguson citizens. This isn't rare in
smaller communities. They rely on locals' eagerness to stay local, to do their jobs, etc.
Another is that there is a trend of police brutality there. When one hears a story about a person beaten by cops and then
charged because he bled on them, it almost sounds like someone must be exaggerating for effect. That this might have resulted in a question of how exactly the person came to be bleeding and whether the injuries were all that severe, is, well, a bit of a question. (It did not prevent one of the officers involved with the incident
becoming a councilwoman.) But record-keeping might not be the strong point of this police force. After all, the slaying of Michael Brown has
hardly anything like an incident report. And so sketchy are standards in this area, that even though this event should have possibly affected how area police forces engage with even "off"-seeming people, there was a similar incident (the police slaying of a young black man) and the story of the police differs from the
narrative and video of people on the scene. (This was over so quickly with no attempt to do anything but shoot multiple times.)
