Nixon Sends National Guard to Impose Curfew in Ferguson

Gov. Jay Nixon (D-Mo.) has

ordered the National Guard into Ferguson after police and
protesters clashed on Sunday night. The governor didn’t inform the
White House,
according to BuzzFeed, which quotes an administration
official saying they got no “heads up.” President Obama took a
break from his vacation at Martha’s Vineyard to hold meetings at
the White House on both the situation in Ferguson, Missouri, and
the U.S. military campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq.

Nixon said he was sending the National Guard to “restore peace
and order to the community.” According to Missouri State Highway
Patrol (MSHP) chief Ron Johnson, whose agency took over for the
Ferguson police department last week, there were reports of
bottles, rockets, and Molotov cocktails being thrown at protests
last night, that police were shot at, and that protesters set up
barricades to block policy. “I had no alternative but to elevate
the level of our response,”
the Washington Post quoted Johnson as saying.

Prior to the MSHP takeover of riot control in Ferguson on
Thursday—which saw peaceful protests and a decidedly demilitarized
police presence at night—the Ferguson Police Department and various
St. Louis law enforcement agencies deployed militarized unites in
response to reports of looting during some of the protests. At the
time the counterinsurgent-like response appeared disproportionate,
looking for a problem that didn’t exist. As
I warned last Thursday, based on Johnson’s reports, the
police’s militarized response to protests may have helped create a
cause for that response. On Friday, Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) called
for “martial law” to be
imposed in Ferguson. Residents, like one the Post
spoke to, blamed the unrest on outsiders and people who wanted to
“vent and loot.” The NAACP has
backed Nixon’s decision to send the National Guard in.

Last night attorneys for Michael Brown’s family
released the results of a private autopsy, and in a press
conference today said the release came after clashes started in
Ferguson last night, and said Brown’s mother wanted to see the
officer who shot Brown last Saturday
arrested. Attorney General Eric Holder ordered the FBI to
conduct its own autopsy, but has otherwise not provided any updates
on the Department of Justice investigation in Ferguson.

On MSNBC a few minutes ago, Nixon avoided answering the question
of whether Ferguson police chief Tom Jackson should be fired for
releasing surveillance video allegedly showing Brown robbing a
corner store and strong-arming its owner, blamed by Andrea
Mitchell, and Holder, for a re-eruption of violence on Friday
night, something he apparently did not inform the Highway Patrol,
nominally in charge, he was going to do. Perhaps Nixon can’t.