csm | Police are concerned about making a fellow officer and his family
vulnerable to death threats made on social media and may be concerned
that details of the autopsy could spark more civil unrest. But residents
have credible claims in demanding to know information that would be
available if the shooter weren’t a lawman.
The looting and mayhem in Ferguson, where a nearly all-white police
force patrols the largely black St. Louis suburb, suggests deep
frustration. Eyewitnesses have said that the officer pursued an injured
Brown and shot him after he put his hands up in surrender. Police have
done little to counter that narrative except to suggest there was a
struggle for the officer's gun and a shot fired inside the cruiser. Amid
that vacuum, questions about police transparency have only intensified.
Ferguson
police are “are walking a tightrope of how much they should be
releasing versus how much information they are releasing,” says Rob
Kane, a policing expert at Drexel University in Philadelphia and
coauthor of “Jammed Up: Bad Cops, Police Misconduct, and the New York
City Police Department.”
“Police departments operate in an
environment where they are often tried in the media, and where they have
a very real concern about civil litigation, so that’s where it gets
tricky,” Professor Kane adds. At the same time, “the police are
teetering on the total loss of legitimacy, and it has to do with not
releasing information that the public wants.”
As a result, he says, Ferguson is seeing “nothing short of an urban rebellion against the justice system.”
In
a statement Tuesday, United States Attorney General Eric Holder warned
Ferguson police that the department “should be prepared to complete a
thorough and fair investigation in their own right…. Aggressively
pursuing investigations such as this is critical for preserving trust
between law enforcement and the communities they serve.”
