A raucous crowd disrupted speakers, threatened violence and accused police of murder Tuesday night as the fallout from the police shooting in Ferguson, Mo., reignited.
And anyone who disagreed with the mob needed a police escort to get out.
That was the scene of “democracy” as protesters apparently conceive it during a meeting of the St. Louis County Council in Clayton, Mo., as a meeting called to conduct local government descended into two hours of near chaos and mob rule, according to an account by the St. Louis Post Dispatch.
The mob was on hand, of course, to “protest” the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown, a black man shot to death during a scuffle with a police officer Aug. 9.
The case is in the hands of a grand jury – which now has until January to decide whether Officer Darren Wilson should face criminal charges. But the mob at Tuesday night’s meeting demanded the justice system be ignored and Wilson placed under arrest now.
And if the grand jury completes its term and decides Wilson was justified in shooting Brown the mob threatened violence. It matters nothing to them that Brown had marijuana in his system at the time of the scuffle, had just used physical force to rob a nearby convenience store of the kind of cigars used to roll marijuana “blunts,” and was said by at least one witness to have been charging Wilson at the time of the shooting.