smallstrawhat:

i’m watching a live stream with Vice and Al Jazeera America camera crews on the ground in Ferguson right now and it is absolutely incredible. the area was very good and there was a lot of positive energy from people who were glad the police weren’t attacking and shooting them anymore and they were break-dancing and camera crews were doing interviews with them and then the police thought that it was getting out of control so they brought in SWAT teams and tried to break everyone up.

a lot of people started reacting really negatively and breaking things and going into the street and the police told them to get out of the street and go home and people were yelling about how the police told mike brown to “get the fuck on the sidewalk” before they murdered him. a group of people then broke into the liquor store that the police claimed mike brown stole from and threatened the Vice and Al Jazeera America crews, telling them to stop filming them (the looters) (all of this was on the live stream which i was watching) and shoving them into the road so they backed off for a long time and were nervous to check on the store again for about 15 minutes.

when they next checked there was a group of about half a dozen black men blocking the broken entrance to the liquor store with their hands raised and keeping anyone else from going in. the camera crews approached them and began interviewing them and here are some things i caught even though it was loud with multiple interviews going on at once: “we live in this town and these are our stores. we shop at these stores. every one of us protecting this store is from ferguson and the people looting it weren’t. they wanted to set it on fire. we stopped them and told them ‘that’s what they want us to do. that’s how they want us to act here’. very few people want to fuck things up and ruin people’s day to day jobs and those are the stories the press wants to cover but they don’t show us chasing them off and protecting our stores. we want our town to stay together. the police don’t care about us, they will kill us the same as if we were the ones doing it because they can’t tell us apart. they don’t care enough to try to tell who is looting and who is peacefully protesting and trying to keep things together.”

one of the guy who was blocking people from looting the store then handed his cellphone to the al jazeera america reporter and said “my mom is on the phone and she’s scared for me, she thinks i’m out here fucking things up, can you tell her what is going on” and the reporter talked to the guy’s mom and was telling her how brave her son is. god damn.