The dust appears to have settled in Ferguson, MO, at least for the time being. And Chief Jon Belmar, head of the Saint Louis County Police, is taking advantage of the lull to rehab his department's bruised public image for their handling of protests of the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed teen, by a Ferguson police officer.
Chief Belmar's county police force was called into Ferguson when the small Ferguson PD was overwhelmed by protestors in the streets. The St Louis County PD has been criticized for using excessive, militarized force that, in some observers' opinions, actually made the situation in Ferguson a lot worse. Ultimately, St Louis County police were relieved of that duty by Missouri Highway Patrol officers headed by Capt. Ron Johnson, a Ferguson native himself.
Yesterday, Chief Belmar held a final press conference at St Louis County Police headquarters where he and other law enforcement department heads tried to explain the events of the last few weeks.
Chief Belmar says that he has "no regrets" about aggressive tactics used in Ferguson because his officers could have been a lot more brutal, as he explains:
Our choices were to rip, wade into the crowd with nightsticks and riot sticks. Like I said before, in my 28 years I’ve seen the damage they can do -- they’re not temporary damage, sometimes those injuries are long-lasting. I felt like after 20 years of law enforcement experience -- I’ve been tear-gassed perhaps two dozen times. It’s a chemical agent, it’s not pleasant, but at the end of the day there aren’t any long-lasting effects. So we’ve talked a lot about optics, the optics of nightsticks, dogs and other things like that.I have to question whether or not tear gas or beatings with a baton are truly the only two crowd control tactics at Chief Belmar's disposal. Something tells me that if things get boisterous in the parking lot of Busch Stadium, after a Cardinal's game, police don't roll-up in MRAPs with semi-automatic rifles or tear gas to move the crowd along.
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