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It's 2014 and black Americans are still getting gunned down like pheasants. America's a shithole.

Have you seen this?

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/protests-tu ... -missouri/

There is still disagreement over the shooting incident, but the whole thing has turned on it's head.

The bottom line seems to be that a White police force has no business policing a predominantly Black community. The Brown family gets an independent investigation and the Libertarians in Congress have again put the country on notice that military intervention is not an appropriate response to protest. This is one issue where it is easy to support Rand Paul.

The beauty of this denouement is that it is not 60's Selma. We have a Black President who can condemn both the police and the looters, a White Governor who can appoint a Black Highway Patrol Chief to take charge, and a community at large willing to trust the courts and the system to deal with the aftermath.

Here is the real significance of Michael Brown and all the young Black men:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/14/opini ... -284994457

Ending the mostly White police force is only part of the solution for this town.

Fah, you missed the photo opportunity?

Grant, the US is a large country and it has a painful history of race relations. If my memory is correct, there was a police shooting (black policemen) of an innocent black academic in Chicago a few years ago. There were demonstrations but not on this scale. I don't think the presence of black policemen will solve the underlying problem.

Institutional racism seems to be common among law enforcement officials. Then you have marginalisation, stigmatisation and presumptions – often based on historical bigotry- which create a feeling of injustice.

That the president is black and that the rights of AA have improved is a trivial conception. Policing and law enforcement are still issues of state.

When I was a student, I took a course on US law and I was surprised to discover that the racist state laws of the south were based on interstate commerce.

Granted, the USA is a large and diverse country and generalisations are perilous but the key issue is congenital institutional racism.

Jaalle,

That was the point of the second article, which is also a good indicator of why the progress is incremental.

I guessed that Ferguson was a plantation town , but found that I was wrong. It's a suburb of St Louis that has experienced a relatively recent shift (since 1990) from majority White to majority Black. I am pretty sure the recent figures for Whites in the town are even lower than these for 2010. It's clearly an area in transition.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferguson,_Missouri

"The population of Ferguson grew rapidly during the first six decades of the twentieth century, from 1,015 people in 1900 to 22,149 people in 1960, an average growth rate of 5% per year. Since 1960 the population has remained nearly constant. The racial composition of Ferguson has shifted since 1990, however. In 1990, residents of Ferguson who were identified in the U.S. Census as White comprised 73.8% of the total, while those identified as Black made up 25.1%.[21] (The remainder, 1.1%, identified with other racial categories.) In the 2000 census, 44.7% were White and 52.4% were African American. In the 2010 census, 29.3% were White and 67.4% were African American."

Not an excuse, but it does help explain the heightened tensions and partly why the police department was as White as it was.