Ferguson Cover Up For Opening Stargate And Martial Law (Video And Picture)

Basic evidence is being kept from the public. And investigators aren’t showing proper zeal to figure out the truth

re the police departments of Ferguson and St. Louis County, Missouri, involved in a conspiracy to obstruct justice in the case of Michael Brown’s murder? It seems disturbingly possible, given their actions over the past month, hiding basic evidentiary information from the public in direct violation of the state’s sunshine laws—and  perhaps not even gathering it in the first place. This raises the further possibly that evidence is being hidden from criminal investigators as well, particularly since the investigators have shown no great interest, much less zeal, in getting to the truth of the matter.

On Aug. 15, the world saw Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson belatedly release Darren Wilson’s name—and no other information at all about the killing of Michael Brown—while at the same time releasing a report (followed by a video) on an unrelated robbery that Brown was apparently involved in. On Aug. 20 and 21, first St. Louis County, then Ferguson released incident reports on the shootings—reports virtually devoid of any information. These highly questionable revelations stirred a fair amount of public outrage, but few people seemed to realize how truly sinister they were, or how they connected to much broader patterns of official lawlessness that have long bedeviled St. Louis County, and Missouri more generally, as well as many other jurisdictions across the land.

On Sept. 5, TheBlot magazine reported that Chief Jackson had lied on Aug. 15, when he claimed that he released the robbery report and video because of numerous media requests. Public records released to TheBlot showed that no one had specifically asked for either of them, while many people had asked for information about the killing of Michael Brown, which Jackson refused to release at that time.

Chief Jackson’s press statement at the time thus contained at least two big misstatements—first that information about the robbery was released because of media requests, and second that he was releasing all the information requested relative to the shooting of Michael Brown:

“So, we’ve had this tape for a while, and we had to diligently review the information that was in the tape, determine if there was any other reason to keep it, anybody else that would be charged with a crime, and we had determined that that was not going to be the case. We got a lot of Freedom of Information requests for this tape, and at some point it was just determined we had to release it. We didn’t have good cause, absent any other reason to not release it under FOI. So we decided, the same time, wouldn’t be prudent to release that information, which could be a little bit…i don’t know… well, we needed to release that at the same time we would release the name of the officer who was involved in the shooting, so that we could just keep open, give you all the information that we have. We’ve pretty much given you every bit of information that we have now, I don’t think there’s anything else that we have to give out.”

But while Jackson’s high-profile statement may have been outrageously false and misleading, it’s the underlying actions of his department in the shadows that are downright criminal, part of a seemingly routine pattern of actual lawbreaking by the police themselves, both in Ferguson and St. Louis County—a persistent pattern that hasn’t stopped, according to emails provided to Salon even though the Department of Justice has announced it’s going to investigate both organizations.

In fact, police are now using the DOJ investigation itself as an excuse for further violations of the sunshine law, relating to arrests of protesters who continue demonstrating in Ferguson, according to emails provided to Salon (details below). The emails come from Charles Grapski, a legal and political theorist and political scientist, as well as an active citizen with decades of experience filing public records requests, including work with local activists and lawyers in different states across the nation.

“It’s made me public enemy number one in the state of Florida,” Grapski said. It was Florida that first enacted sunshine laws, giving them their name. But that doesn’t mean public officials love them any more there than they do elsewhere.

It was Grapski, who now blogs for Photography Is Not a Crime (PINAC), who aggressively pressed for the release of police documents after the ACLU and others had been stonewalled, and the ACLU had filed suit—a suit that is still pending.

Anthony Rothert, of the Missouri ACLU, explained that the lawsuit only reflected one aspect of the ACLU’s concerns. “When this incident happened in Ferguson, the ACLU had several concerns,” he said, “among them being the First Amendment rights of protesters, and the militarized police response, but one of the pieces of it was transparency in the investigation.”

This was not an unusual situation, he explained:

I don’t think it’s unique to this story that police departments often operate with lack of transparency, and that really deteriorates the trust that the community has in the police departments. So you have a pretty good law in Missouri, on paper, the Sunshine Law requires incident reports to be made public, and arrest records to be made public, right away, and requires investigative reports to be made public at conclusion of investigations. But time and again police departments do not release those records unless it is favorable to them.

The ACLU, though a thorn in the side, is part of the legal system. Working through the courts is the lifeblood of what they do. But Grapski’s approach is more of an outsider’s one—and thus, more blunt. Thus, he unabashedly points out that both Ferguson and St. Louis County police have clearly broken the state’s open records law by holding back incident reports about the shooting, which should have begun with a report by the officer involved, Darren Wilson, while Ferguson is also withholding a use-of-force report, which should have been generated by Wilson’s commanding officer and gone up the chain of command all the way to the chief. Grapski has posted highly detailed accounts of both failures in two blog posts at PINAC (incident reports, Aug. 25/use of force reports, Aug. 29), with extensive documentation, including pdfs of relevant rules and regulations, as well as the correspondence involved.  (More on these below.)  MOREHERE