Pres Obama will deliver congratulations to the Ebola vaccine team when he visits NIH next Tues. Will also press Congress for Ebola funding.
— @markknoller
Dylan Scott:
A St. Louis County grand jury has decided not to indict Ferguson, Mo., police officer Darren Wilson for the Aug. 9 shooting of Michael Brown, and everyone is now trying to figure out what that means.
Brown's death, which surfaced the deeply burrowed and difficult-to-reconcile tensions that in some ways define our nation's history, seems too visceral, too revealing to be without consequence.
But that might be the deep fear that hides behind the second-guessing of the grand jury: No indictment is, as some have said, an indictment of the system. And what if that system is too difficult to change?
Michael Wines:
Paul McLemore, the first African-American to become a New Jersey state trooper, was on the streets of Newark in 1967 when riots following a police beating of a black taxi driver left 26 dead. He spent decades as a civil rights lawyer and years as a municipal judge in Trenton. His wife and children have gone on to enjoy accomplished careers.
“Of course, there’s been a lot of progress” since Newark’s days of rage, he said in an interview on Tuesday. But asked whether a young black man today could find the justice that was believed to be absent in Newark 47 years ago, he gave a response that was starkly different.
“No, period,” he said. “There’s pervasive racism — white racism.”
For whites and blacks alike, that duality may be the takeaway from a grand jury’s decision not to indict Darren Wilson, a Ferguson, Mo., police officer, in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, a young black man: Much has changed, and nothing has changed.
More policy and politics below the fold.
Kenneth Jost:
A cross-examination could have probed Wilson’s account, but the prosecutors merely let it go. On the PBS NewsHour, two experts shook their heads in disbelief. Susan McGraugh, a law professor at St. Louis University, said the prosecutors were merely “pitching softballs” at Wilson. Christina Swarms, a one-time criminal defense lawyer and now director of litigation for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, recalled that she often had her clients appear before grand juries. “I would love to have had my clients handled by prosecutors the way the prosecutors handled” Wilson, she said.
The prosecutors’ performance matched their boss’s passive attitude throughout the case. Throughout, McCulloch spoke only of presenting the evidence to the grand jury, not actually seeking an indictment. In his news conference, he described his office’s role not as prosecutors but as “legal advisers” to the grand jury.
Many in the Ferguson community and many others across the nation rightly feel that McCulloch simply punted the case to the grand jury. Prosecutors rely on cooperation with police, but McCulloch’s countywide office could have risked poisoning the well with the small Ferguson police department by taking a more assertive stance.
Now, Ferguson faces a challenging task of healing the breach between the predominantly white police department and the predominantly black citizenry. Wilson, who showed no remorse in his grand jury testimony, is reportedly resigning from the force. But more by way of reform will be needed in Ferguson and elsewhere to protect against the unnecessary deaths of civilians at the hands of those sworn to protect and serve, not to menace and kill.
I can believe that conflicting stories meant that at trial Darren Wilson would likely not have been convicted. Nonetheless, that's the process that should have been followed, not McCulloch deciding in advance to persuade the grand jury not to indict. And certainly not the spectacle of McCulloch treating Wilson as the victim and Michael Brown, the guy who lost his life at the hands of Wilson, as the demon child that spawned demon protestors.
Pew from August:
Amid continuing tensions over the police shooting of an unarmed teen in Ferguson, Mo., most Americans give relatively low marks to police departments around the country for holding officers accountable for misconduct, using the appropriate amount of force, and treating racial and ethnic groups equally.
However, most also continue to express at least a fair amount of confidence in their local police forces to avoid using excessive force and to treat blacks and whites equally, though there are large racial gaps in opinion here as well as in views of police performance nationally. Public confidence in community police in these areas has not changed substantially since 2009.
And in non-Ferguson news:
Paul Kane:
Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) and Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) were elected to the Senate on the same day in 1996, but Enzi holds seniority over his longtime friend through a totally random feature of party rules: They drew names out of a hat.
That quirk of history has led to a showdown over the chairmanship of the Budget Committee that has caused a backlash among conservatives, who say Enzi is unfairly laying claim to the powerful position at the behest of party leaders.
AP features Chris Christie at his most obnoxious:
Asked about the violent protests in Ferguson, Missouri, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie says that people across the country are deeply anxious because of a lack of leadership and that President Barack Obama is at least partly to blame.
Christie made the remarks as he talked to reporters about the aftermath of the grand jury decision not to indict police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown.
The potential presidential candidate calls the situation in Ferguson "tragic" and says people have a right to protest but that they should be nonviolent.