The important crime in Ferguson, MO was not stealing cigars

The Ferguson police union's stinging letter of protest against the governor's action -- removing them from the scene and putting Ron Johnson of the state highway patrol in command -- shows they have learned nothing from their failure and the obvious quick success of a very different approach.

In the press conference today, the Chief of Police was obviously trying to shift the focus from the killing and its possible illegality, and onto the character of Michael Brown, the victim.  He did this by:

(1) holding the press conference in front of a burned out store, the only really serious consequence of vandalism from previous nights -- thus exaggerating the very limited violence of these protests;  

(2) releasing the charges and incident report of Michael's apparent theft of cigars from a convenience store shortly before he was killed -- even though this is not why the officer stopped him;

(3) not releasing any kind of incident report about what happened when Michael was stopped by a police officer for walking in the street and 3 minutes later was dead, shot with his hands in the air.   How did the officer report this?   They haven't given a clue, except to say that he didn't know of the theft when he first stopped him.

As Esra Klein, writing about the police shooting of unarmed Michael Brown, says: 

This case is not about whether Michael Brown was One Of The Good Ones. It's not even about whether he robbed a convenience store. 

The penalty for stealing cigars from

 a convenience store is not death. 

This case is about whether Wilson was legally justified in shooting Michael Brown. 

This is a blatantly obvious shield-the-cop and blame-the-shooting-victim ploy.   It's highly unlikely that this police force can ever effectively do its job in Ferguson.

Ralph