The Ferguson community has “come together” in outrage and disappointment a day after two officers were shot in a demonstration in front of the city Police Department, Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill said Friday.
“Many of the protest community have spoken out in very dramatic terms about how disappointed they are that some thug would come to a peaceful protest site and commit a violent criminal act like this against police officers who are doing their jobs,” she said, echoing Attorney General Eric Holder, who called the at-large perpetrator, a “damn punk.”
The shootings came the morning after the town’s chief of police, Thomas Jackson, resigned following a Department of Justice report that found widespread racial bias among the city’s police. The city manager and a judge have also resigned after the damning report ordered by Holder after the killing of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown by a white police officer in August.
Ferguson remained calm overnight Thursday despite the shootings. A few hundred protesters gathered peacefully outside the police department and no fights broke out, as they had before the shootings, according to the Associated Press. The AP reports that the two officers, who were released from the hospital Thursday, were the first shot in more than seven months of protests in Ferguson.
McCaskill said Friday that the racial tension enraging Ferguson isn’t unique. “This is a bigger issue than Ferguson,” she said on the Today show. “We have a disconnect between some communities in this country and law enforcement. And law enforcement only works if the people of this country believe in it. So we’ve got to back to the drawing board [and] get back to community policing models. There is healing going on in Ferguson and there is reform going on in Ferguson. And that needs to be happening in many communities across this country.”
McCaskill’s office said she was drafting legislation to address these issues, prioritizing federal resources for body cameras for police officers and providing more oversight of federal grant and equipment programs that critics claim have militarized the nation’s police force.
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