Police Now Claim Michael Brown Was a Robbery Suspect. But Did the Officer Who Killed Brown Believe That When He Pulled the Trigger?

This morning the Ferguson Police Department (FPD)

identified Darren Wilson as the officer who shot and killed
Michael Brown on Saturday afternoon. Despite some claims around the
internet, this is not the same Wilson who heads a St. Louis police
organization called “Police for an Ethical Society.” That Wilson,
who is black, is a cop in St. Louis proper.  No photo of
Ferguson’s Wilson is yet available.

The FPD did, however, post a still from surveillance footage it
claims shows Michael Brown in the act of robbing a convenience
store of a box of cigars. The claim is being cited by police
apologists as important in the context of the shooting of Michael
Brown. In my two and a half years covering police brutality issues
here at Reason (and before that a year and a half of doing the same
on Freedom Watch), and in my years of reading about these kinds of
stories, I have never come across an incident where someone
suspected of a crime who was shot by cops wasn’t immediately
identified as such in initial news reports. Cops make sure this
information gets out, because they believe it will strengthen their
narrative, provide the right context for their shooting. It’s
impossible to say for sure that Wilson didn’t know Brown was a
robbery suspect when he engaged him, but if he did know it, police
have no compelling reason, and have given none, for why that
information was withheld.  Considering that mainstream media
are often quick to give cops the benefit of the doubt, police
identification of Brown as a “suspect” may have kept the national
media from covering the story at all.

The FPD says Wilson has no previous disciplinary record,
although they did not release even excerpts of his personnel
record. In the meantime, the Daily Beast
uncovered a horrific case of police brutality in Ferguson in
2009. Then, a group of Ferguson cops picked up the wrong Howie
Davis and then tried to accuse the one they had in custody with
property damage, for getting blood on their uniform after they beat
him up. When Davis sued, they denied he got blood on their uniform.
They are still employed by the FPD as far as I can tell. They’ve
even countersued Davis. (PDF)
In 2010 they were among a few dozen officers who got commendations
from the mayor and city council (PDF).
Now please tell me how protections negotiated by police unions

aren’t part of the problem.