Two officers were shot today in a demonstration against police violence in Ferguson, Missouri, which was hit by riots last year over the killing of an unarmed black teenager.
The officers were shot at the tail-end of a demonstration prompted by the resignation of the town’s embattled police chief.
Jon Belmar, police chief in St Louis County, said that the evening had been “fairly uneventful” until shortly after midnight when at least three shots were fired at the police department. He said that one officer was hit in the face and one in the shoulder; both had suffered “very serious gunshot injuries”.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that shots were fired as a crowd of about 150 people had begun to dwindle. Some protesters fell to the ground and others ran. A huge police presence, including officers in riot gear, later surrounded the department.
The Ferguson police chief Thomas Jackson was the sixth employee to resign or be fired after a Justice Department report cleared a white former Ferguson police officer, Darren Wilson, of civil rights charges in the shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson last summer. A separate Justice Department report found a profit-driven court system and widespread racial bias in the city police department.
Advertisement
Mr Jackson oversaw the Ferguson force for nearly five years before the shooting that stirred months of unrest across the St. Louis region and drew global attention to the predominantly black city of 21,000.
The police chief had previously resisted calls by protesters and some of Missouri’s top elected leaders to step down over his handling of Mr Brown’s shooting and the weeks of sometimes-violent protests that followed. He was widely criticised from the outset, both for an aggressive police response to protesters and for his agency’s erratic and infrequent releases of key information.
Mr Jackson took nearly a week to publicly identify Mr Wilson as the shooter and then further heightened tension in the community by releasing the officer’s name at the same time as store security video that police said showed Brown stealing a box of cigars and shoving a clerk only a short time before his death.
During a 12-minute news conference, Ferguson Mayor James Knowles III said Mr Jackson resigned after “a lot of soul-searching” about how the community could heal from the racial unrest stemming from the fatal shooting last summer.
“The chief is the kind of honourable man you don’t have to go to,” Knowles said. “He comes to you when he knows that this is something we have to seriously discuss.”