One can wonder, was it a police department so removed from justice, that the whole department ended up being removed from duty? Or, was it just that they had lost the faith of the city's residents, and they were relieved only for that lack of good relations with the public?
I speak of the Ferguson Police Department.
When the Missouri Highway Patrol was handed charge, did they get all law enforcement responsibilities in Ferguson, or just the charge to patrol the protests that have erupted in the wake of the Michael Brown shooting? I don't know. But, I ask, how often is a police department relieved of any such responsibility?
To look at what is on the table, is to wonder but what the Ferguson Police Department, indeed, should have been relieved of duty.
Wonder. We don't know all yet, but we know enough to wonder.
There is the shooting, itself. Even if you go by the police account of what happened, you wonder how shooting and killing an unarmed man is going to be justified. You wonder why the person with Brown, Dorian Johnson, was not quickly interviewed instead of having to go to the police station on his own to make a statement.
You wonder at the police department's crowd-control efforts during the protests. Too over-the-top? Too militarized? Too quick to gas and punish?
You wonder at the dragging of two national journalists out of a McDonald's and the arrest of them.
You wonder at the account given by one of those journalists, of how, while being arrested, he witnessed another arrestee's plea for air lest he die, without any resulting move to help him.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/11/us/missouri-ferguson-michael-brown-what-we-know/index.html
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