Flutterby™! : On race & Ferguson

Pia Glenn: I Intervened On Behalf Of A Young Man Who Was In Danger Of Being Unfairly Arrested

Popped up on my radar because of the news coming out of Ferguson Missouri, where Michael Brown was shot by a police officer:

... The officer said to "get the eff onto the sidewalk," he recounted. Johnson said the officer reached out of the car window and grabbed Brown around the neck.

Another witness, Piaget Crenshaw, said she saw police chase Brown. “He ran for his life,” she said. “They shot him and he fell. He put his arms up to let them know that he was compliant and he was unarmed, and they shot him twice more and he fell to the ground and died."

And my Twitter feed last night was filled with images of (black) people standing, with their hands up, a cell phone in one hand presumably recording video, in clouds of tear gas. As we've seen in the Occupy crackdowns and similar attacks, the police have been planting provocateurs in protests, so in my mind it's as likely that the news of looting we're hearing has been police action as opportunists, but either way it's clear that in a Southern community that's 65% black, a 53 person police force with 3 black members is probably not working with the community effectively.

The big question for me is: How did the municipal government become so unbalanced that the police force ended up that racially imbalanced? What sort of disenfranchisement left them either feeling like participation in that government was fruitless, or making it actually fruitless?