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| FERGUSON STATISTICS PAINT HORRIBLE PICTURE |
This past Sunday the, Washington Post featured an article which provided a granular background piece about the troubled upbringing and early law enforcement career of 28-year-old Darren Wilson, the Ferguson, Missouri police officer who, on August 9th - when he abandoned all realistic public policing procedures - and he grotesquely fired at least six 9 mm bullets into 18-year-old Michael Brown, executing him on the spot.
This spot, is where Michael Brown laid on public display, in a pool of his own blood for four hours—and then for good measure, not getting the courtesy of a hearse, was tossed into the back of a police SUV like road kill - the first of two weeks’ worth of shocking, visual reminders, laid unearthed for all the world to witness - everything that’s wrong with the institutionalized racism that runs rampant throughout America’s militarized police state, today.
“WaPo: Darren Wilson’s previous job was at disbanded PD fraught w/ racial tension, like Ferguson.”
Yesterdays delayed and highly emotional start to the new school year in Ferguson, the Huffington Post jumped onboard about the preposterous recent history of the Ferguson Police Department with a story (SEE: "Ferguson Police Officer Justin Cosma Hog-Tied And Injured A Young Child, Lawsuit Alleges") about the gauche behavior of a plethora of St. Louis County law enforcement officers, specifically focusing upon - two of Ferguson's 50 white (out of a total of 53) police officers (in a city where almost 70% of its citizens are African-American), starting with patrolman Justin Cosma. Officer Cosma joined the city’s force in Fall 2012, “transferring” from his job as a Jefferson County Sheriff’s deputy where it’s alleged (in a pending lawsuit by the victim) that he choked, hog-tied and otherwise beat the shit out of a 12-year-old boy in front of his own house. The child's capital crime - was checking his mailbox at the end of his driveway.
As you’ll soon see below - another Ferguson police officer, Eddie Boyd III - According to the Huffington Post, Boyd has faced “allegations of hitting children” (including pistol-whipping a 12-year-old girl in the head; and, in a separate incident, repeating the same behavior against a teenage boy, this time his nose was the recipient of the abuse) while serving in the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department. Eventually, and after being demoted, Boyd “resigned" - and you guessed it, Boyd was hired by the Ferguson Police Department sometime between July 2009 and December 2010.”
Monday’s New York Times has a lead story that is, perhaps and by far, the most cloying article on the behavior of Darren Wilson and the overall practices of the FPD (SEE BELOW: "Darren Wilson Was Low-Profile Officer With Unsettled Early Days”).
In their totality, these latest stories depict the deplorable operations of police within the FPD.
Here are the links and excerpts from Sunday's Huffington Post piece and yesterday's NYT article:
HUFFINGTON POST
Ferguson Police Officer Justin Cosma Hog-Tied And Injured A Young Child, Lawsuit Alleges
Ashley Alman and Ryan J. Reilly
Huffington Post
Posted: 08/24/2014 5:48 pm EDT Updated: 5 hours ago
WASHINGTON -- A Ferguson police officer who helped detain a journalist in a McDonald's earlier this month is in the midst of a civil rights lawsuit because he allegedly hog-tied a 12-year-old boy who was checking the mail at the end of his driveway.
According to a lawsuit filed in 2012 in Missouri federal court, Justin Cosma and another officer, Richard Carter, approached a 12-year-old boy who was checking the mailbox at the end of his driveway in June 2010. Cosma was an officer with the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office at the time, the lawsuit states. The pair asked the boy if he'd been playing on a nearby highway, and he replied no, according to the lawsuit.
Then, the officers "became confrontational" and intimidated the child, the lawsuit claims. "Unprovoked and without cause, the deputies grabbed [the boy], choked him around the neck and threw him to the ground," it says. The boy was shirtless at the time, and allegedly "suffered bruising, choke marks, scrapes and cuts across his body."
The 12-year-old was transferred to a medical facility for treatment, but the lawsuit says Cosma and the other officer reported the incident as "assault of a law enforcement officer third degree” and “resisting/interfering with arrest, detention or stop."
Jefferson County prosecutors "refused to issue a juvenile case" against the young child, the suit says.
The allegations against Cosma were made in September 2012, shortly after he was introduced as a new officer at a Ferguson City Council meeting. Jefferson County is just south of Ferguson.
Near to this point in the Huffington Post article, journalists Alman and Rielly proceed into a short list of some of the other officer-related perversions at the FPD and elsewhere in suburban St. Louis, over the past couple of weeks, which include:
• FPD officer Eddie Boyd III, whose plight was discussed farther up in this post.
• Dan Page, a St. Ann Police Department officer for 35 years, who "was suspended from duty for inflammatory comments made while addressing the Oath Keepers of St. Louis and St. Charles." If some readers recall, it was Page who "made racist and sexist remarks, called President Obama an “illegal alien,” denounced hate crime laws and spoke flippantly about violence and killings. The video, uploaded to YouTube in April, was uncovered by CNN after Page pushed anchor Don Lemon on Aug. 18 during demonstrations in Ferguson."
• St. Louis County police officer Lt. Ray Albers, who was suspended from duty, just a few days ago, "after he threatened civilians in Ferguson, pointing his gun at them and shouting, 'I will fucking kill you.'
NY TIMES
Darren Wilson Was Low-Profile Officer With Unsettled Early Days
By MONICA DAVEY and FRANCES ROBLES
NEW YORK TIMES
AUG. 25, 2014
…As a teenager, Darren Wilson lived in St. Peters, Mo., a mostly white city of 54,000 about 20 miles west of Ferguson, where his environment was chaotic. He was the eldest of three children of Tonya Dee Durso, who, records show, carried out financial crimes, including against Sandra Lee Finney, who lived across the street and had believed they were friends.
“It’s a terrible thing that has happened now, but he did have a troubled childhood,” Ms. Finney said in an interview, adding that Officer Wilson’s family had somewhat awkwardly stayed in the neighborhood — moving just one door down — even after his mother was convicted of stealing and forgery in 2001.
After her bank informed her that it was freezing her accounts, Ms. Finney said she learned that numerous credit cards had been opened in her name, her mail was being stolen, her phones were secretly forwarded across the street, and the thief had managed to obtain her driver’s license and a copy of the key to her front door. Among the purchases: tens of thousands of dollars of candles; home decorations; furniture; clothes, including some from American Eagle Outfitters, which Ms. Finney says was Officer Wilson’s favorite store at the time; and hockey gear.
“All the while, she’d come over and sit at my kitchen table to chat and say how she would help me with this terrible thing that was happening to us,” Ms. Finney said of Ms. Durso, whom she described as a thin, blonde woman who seemed upper-middle class. “What hurt me more than all of it was what she did to those kids.”
Ms. Durso pleaded guilty and was sentenced to probation. Not long after, in 2002, when Officer Wilson was a sophomore in high school, Ms. Durso died at age 35 and one of his stepfathers was granted guardianship until he finished high school. An obituary cited natural causes.
Years later, Ms. Finney said she was stunned when she saw her former neighbor appear outside the old house in a police uniform. “My husband and I thought, ‘How did he get to be a police officer?’ ”
After attending the police academy, Officer Wilson began work in Jennings, another suburb, in June 2009…
Officer Wilson’s formative experiences in policing came in a department that wrestled historically with issues of racial tension, mismanagement and turmoil. During Officer Wilson’s brief tenure, another officer was fired for a wrongful shooting, and a lieutenant was accused of stealing federal funds. In 2011, in the wake of federal and state investigations into the misuse of grant money, the department closed, and the city entered into a contract to be policed by the county…
There’s something terribly wrong within the political bailiwick of the state of Missouri, specifically with regards to the lack of local enforcement of civil rights laws in St. Louis County.
It would appear, that for Ferguson and surrounding militarized police stations, that when you give a man a hammer, everything looks like a nail!
NFTOS
Editor-In-Chief
Roger West
