NAACP President Cornell William Brooks said he was “concerned” about the forthcoming grand jury decision in the Michael Brown shooting case because the prosecutor failed to act upon previous complaints about the Ferguson, Missouri police department and didn’t give the jurors sufficient instructions.
Police stepped up security in St. Louis on Sunday, with a grand jury to decide whether to indict a white officer – Darren Wilson – for shooting dead an unarmed black teenager.
Brown, a high-school graduate planning to go to technical college, was shot at least six times by Darren Wilson in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson on August 9, inflaming racial tensions and sparking weeks of protests, some violent.
The mostly black suburb of 21,000, which has an overwhelmingly white police force and town government, has been on edge for several days in anticipation of the jury’s decision.
Metal interlocking fences and orange plastic barricades sealed off the Buzz Westfall Justice Center in Clayton, another suburb of the city of St. Louis and where the grand jury has been meeting, with a handful of uniformed officers on duty outside. A police officer unfurled yellow police tape saying around the barricades, watched by a group of journalists in the rain.
There was no announcement from the grand jury over the weekend, but vocal protests continued in St. Louis Sunday night.
Owners have boarded up shops and businesses in the part of Ferguson where protests were concentrated in August, and also braced for a violent fallout regardless of the jury’s decision on Wilson.
Wilson reportedly told the grand jury he acted in self-defense after tussling with the youth. Others say Brown had his hands in the air when he was shot dead.
OK, Fine. 