nothing short of an urban rebellion against a conspicuously corrupt just-us system?

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.”