Roland S. Martin:
While the pain of not seeing Wilson in handcuffs is devastating to Brown’s family and the thousands of folks who have taken to the streets for more than 100 consecutive days to protest his death, there is solace in knowing that a movement is afoot that will change the direction of this nation for years to come.
It has always pained me to see scores of people show up for massive rallies, only to disappear when the case fades away. (Jena 6 comes to mind.) Yet two years ago, when Trayvon Martin was gunned down by George Zimmerman, we saw a new fervor come to the fore, driven by the connective tissue known as social media.
Fast forward two years later. No longer are people content to air their grievances online with hashtags. A collective button seems to have been pushed, igniting a fire in the belly of many who have opened their eyes to the severe injustices we see in America.
Jonathan Capehart:
In the three months since Brown’s killing we have come to learn that their collective failures are just the tip of the iceberg of problems in Ferguson. My colleague Radley Balko reported extensively on how municipalities in St. Louis County, Mo., profit from poverty. “If you were tasked with designing a regional system of government guaranteed to produce racial conflict, anger, and resentment,” he wrote, “you’d be hard pressed to do better than St. Louis County.” The inherent mistrust of police, the grand jury process and the motives of elected and law enforcement officials that we have seen from blacks in Ferguson can be traced back to the Balko’s observation.
Much more below the fold.
Former U.S. Attorney Jenny Durkan explains why it's so difficult to charge police officers:
That year, there were a number of high profile incidents involving use of force by Seattle Police officers. Many were caught on video (including one that showed a gang unit cop yelling he was going to “kick the f ***ing Mexican piss” out of a prone and unarmed suspect), and the images weren’t pretty.
Things reached fever pitch when Seattle police officer Ian Birk shot and killed John T. Williams, an unarmed Native American woodcarver. Williams was walking on a downtown Seattle street, tool in hand. As he crossed the street in front of a police car, the officer got out, followed Williams and ordered him to drop his knife. [...]
But a majority of jurors also found that the officer did believe Williams was a threat. They made this seemingly contradictory ruling because the state sets a very high legal burden for prosecuting police. Under state law, the prosecutor must prove an officer acted with malice and without a good faith belief the shooting was justified. There was insufficient evidence to meet that standard, so the local state prosecutor determined state charges could not be brought.
Chase Madar adds his take:
How to police the police is a question as old as civilization, now given special urgency by a St. Louis County grand jury’s return of a “no bill” of indictment for Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson in his fatal shooting of an unarmed teenager, Michael Brown. The result is shocking to many, depressingly predictable to more than a few.
Can the cops be controlled? It’s never been easy: according to one old sociological chestnut, the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence is what defines modern government, and this monopoly is jealously protected against the second-guessing of puny civilians. All over the country, the issue of restraining police power is framed around the retribution against individual cops, from Staten Island to Milwaukee to Los Angeles. But is this the best way to impose discipline on law enforcement and roll back what even Republican appellate court appointees are calling rampant criminalization?
Raul A. Reyes:
Sadly, the grand jury's failure to return an indictment of Wilson was not surprising. But don't blame the grand jury; blame McCulloch. He oversaw the proceedings and bears responsibility for their outcome.
McCulloch compromised the Ferguson grand jury proceedings from the start. He resisted calls to recuse himself, saying, "I have absolutely no intention of walking away from duties and the responsibilities entrusted in me by the people of this community." However, the community would have been better served if he had stepped aside.
Katie McDonough:
Justice is always elusive in this system. What continues to shock, even the cynical, is how the appearance of fairness is often too much to ask. It’s more than likely that Wilson would have escaped a conviction had he gone to trial, but an indictment would have been a sign, meager as it was, that the system recognized the value of Mike Brown’s life. An acknowledgment that putting Wilson on paid administrative leave or a desk position or an orchestrated resignation was not an appropriate response to an officer killing an unarmed teenager.
I thought again of fairness and justice and how our system overwhelmingly fails black Americans on both counts when Marissa Alexander agreed to a plea deal that would grant her release from jail come January. Alexander, who was arrested and jailed after firing a warning shot to ward off the man who had a history of abusing her and had threatened to kill her, likely took the deal because the alternative was 60 years in prison. Alexander pleaded guilty to three charges of aggravated assault and was sentenced to three years, including the time she had already served.
On the foreign policy front,
Dana Milbank looks at the "echo of history":"
In a cruel echo of history, Obama is morphing into the president whose foreign policy he campaigned to overturn. Obama on Monday morning sacked his Pentagon secretary, Chuck Hagel, after huge midterm election losses in the sixth year of his presidency — just as Bush did in sacking Donald Rumsfeld after midterm losses in the sixth year of his presidency.
As with Bush, the ouster comes as a war in the Middle East is going badly — then, the Iraq war, now, the bombing of the Islamic State terror group. Rumsfeld’s ouster led to the surge in Iraq, and Hagel’s departure comes amid signs of an expanded role for U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria. And, as under Bush, this guarantees that Obama will leave his successor an ongoing U.S. war in the Mideast — quite possibly the sort of ground war Obama vowed to undo.
John Cassidy argues that the appointment of Hagel was a mistake in the first place:
Perhaps the move is a reflection of Hagel’s managerial skills and his occasional public stumbles, as some have argued. However, it also raises questions about Obama’s judgment in a number of respects: in hiring Hagel in the first place; in his Administration’s failure to foresee the series of challenges the Pentagon is now facing; and in the execution of its efforts to roll back the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham.
Having chosen a Republican, Robert Gates, to be his first Secretary of Defense, Obama was evidently keen to hire another after his second, Leon Panetta, a veteran Democrat, decided to retire at the start of 2013. But all that Obama’s effort to use the position to transcend partisanship earned the White House was a bruising nomination battle, which ended with just four G.O.P. senators voting to confirm Hagel.