Paul Rosenberg asks the question:
Are the police departments of Ferguson and St. Louis County, Missouri, involved in a conspiracy to obstruct justice in the case of Michael Brown’s murder? It seems disturbingly possible, given their actions over the past month, hiding basic evidentiary information from the public in direct violation of the state’s sunshine laws—and perhaps not even gathering it in the first place. This raises the further possibly that evidence is being hidden from criminal investigators as well, particularly since the investigators have shown no great interest, much less zeal, in getting to the truth of the matter.
On Aug. 15, the world saw Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson belatedly release Darren Wilson’s name—and no other information at all about the killing of Michael Brown—while at the same time releasing a report (followed by a video) on an unrelated robbery that Brown was apparently involved in. On Aug. 20 and 21, first St. Louis County, then Ferguson released incident reports on the shootings—reports virtually devoid of any information. These highly questionable revelations stirred a fair amount of public outrage, but few people seemed to realize how truly sinister they were, or how they connected to much broader patterns of official lawlessness that have long bedeviled St. Louis County, and Missouri more generally, as well as many other jurisdictions across the land.
Rosenberg refers to
this report from TheBlot magazine:
The chief of police for the Ferguson Police Department misled members of the media and the public when he asserted that his hand was forced in releasing surveillance footage that purported to show 18-year-old resident Michael Brown engaged in a strong-arm robbery at a convenience store minutes before he was fatally shot by a police officer.
But there's a problem.
However, a review of open records requests sent to the Ferguson Police Department found that no news organization, reporter or individual specifically sought the release of the surveillance tape before police distributed it on Aug. 15.
Last month, TheBlot Magazine requested a copy of all open records requests made by members of the public—including journalists and news organizations—that specifically sought the release of the convenience store surveillance video. The logs, which were itself obtained under Missouri’s open records law, show only one journalist—Joel Currier with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch—broadly requested any and all multimedia evidence “leading up to” Brown’s death on Aug. 9.
Other records that would have been subject to Currier’s request, including 9-1-1 call recordings and police dispatch tapes, have yet to be formally released by the agency.
More beneath the fold.
And TheBlot refers to this NBC report:
The Department of Justice urged Ferguson police not to release surveillance video purporting to show Michael Brown robbing a store shortly before he was shot and killed by police, arguing the footage would further inflame tensions in the St. Louis suburb that saw rioting and civil unrest in the wake of the teenager’s death.
But on Friday, police released the video that stoked outrage in Ferguson, with Brown’s family calling it “character assassination” and a smear campaign. A law enforcement source told NBC News that Ferguson police wanted to release the video Thursday, but the Department of Justice convinced them to withhold the footage over fears it would spark further unrest.
So, Ferguson's police chief defied a DOJ request not to release the tape, and blamed it on nonexistent Freedom of Information Act requests from the media. He lied. He lied because he clearly wanted to smear Brown in the public eye. And then the
civil unrest that the DOJ had tried to prevent from happening was used as an excuse for
more police
brutality. But as Rosenberg points out, that's just the beginning.
But while Jackson’s high-profile statement may have been outrageously false and misleading, it’s the underlying actions of his department in the shadows that are downright criminal, part of a seemingly routine pattern of actual lawbreaking by the police themselves, both in Ferguson and St. Louis County—a persistent pattern that hasn’t stopped, according to emails provided to Salon even though the Department of Justice has announced it’s going to investigate both organizations.
In fact, police are now using the DOJ investigation itself as an excuse for further violations of the sunshine law, relating to arrests of protesters who continue demonstrating in Ferguson, according to emails provided to Salon (details below). The emails come from Charles Grapski, a legal and political theorist and political scientist, as well as an active citizen with decades of experience filing public records requests, including work with local activists and lawyers in different states across the nation.
In other words, the Missouri authorities are releasing what they want, and lying about why they are releasing it, while withholding releases of information that are actually being requested on the grounds for which the Missouri authorities are falsely claiming to have released the information they wanted to release. But this is about much more than their hypocrisy and lack of credibility.
“Ferguson is deliberately violating both the laws and its own policies to prevent any information from being produced and made public that could be used to hold Officer Wilson to account for his actions,” Grapski wrote in the Aug. 29 post, and he repeated this in interviews with Salon.
“They are committing criminal offenses themselves,” Grapski said of both police departments’ public records violations. “It’s not a high crime, but it is class A misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in prison, and a pretty significant fine, by withholding, by knowingly not complying with the public records law. The records law has teeth, and that is it has criminal sanctions.”
Rothert told Salon something similar, but slightly different. “From what we can tell right now it looks like the Ferguson Police Department never did an incident report,” he said, “which would be contrary to their policy, it would be contrary to the law, and quite, quite suspicious, not to take even an initial statement from someone who’s killed another person.”
The DOJ investigation continues. All questions must be answered, and they only begin with the night that an unarmed black teenager was gunned down by a white police officer. Because that one police officer is not the only one who needs to be held to account for his actions. This would seem not to have been a case of one rogue individual, but of rogue departments that behave as if they take for granted that they are above the law.
Are they?