Man shot near Ferguson protest critically injured

Harris attempted to fire at the officers again, but was shot. “Police understand they are now under the microscope”, said Mark Lomax, executive director of the National Tactical Officers Association, said.

A coalition calling itself the Ferguson Action Council criticized St. Louis County for putting plainclothes officers without body cameras in Ferguson.

The latest shooting came after two rival groups exchanged gunfire in the late evening, police said. Local pastor Michael Brooks said that protest was also to remember Ryan Stokes, a 24-year-old black man killed by Kansas City police in 2013.

The shooting, on an otherwise peaceful day, was another vexing turn for activists and the authorities alike.

“It’s stressful. It’s so frustrating”, said Dellena Jones, whose hair salon on West Florissant Avenue was ransacked.

The consequences, he said, are that good police officers who consider themselves under scrutiny will be reluctant to act, and it will be tougher to recruit good people to be cops.

“We can not continue, we can not talk about the good things that we have been talking about, if we are prevented from moving forward with this kind of violence”, he said.

A year after Michael Brown was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., one of his close friends was reportedly injured in an apparent gunfight with police early Monday morning.

Michael Brown Sr. also led a parade involving several hundred people on Saturday. The protesters then scaled a waist-high barricade, staging a sit-in before advancing past police to the entrances.

A phalanx of helmeted police wearing body armour and carrying shields moved in.

Yet there have been some important changes in the year since Brown’s death that policymakers hope could improve relations between the police and the public. Police arrested four people who put tape across a roadway and lay down in the street. Most of the crowd dispersed, until a long line of police cars drove up with their sirens blaring. Helicopters whirred overhead as additional police armed with assault rifles swarmed the area, some roaring down the street in armoured vehicles in the direction of the gunfire.

St. Louis Public Radio reports that another shooting – a drive-by attack – took place at a nearby apartment building several hours after the violence at West Florissant Avenue. Multiple store windows had been smashed out and police stood atop vehicles surveying the scene. Sekou was among the protesters arrested Monday.

Sunday’s gunfire followed the looting of at least two Ferguson businesses, on a commercial strip around the corner from where Brown fell.

In New York, dozens of people gathered at Union Square to hold a vigil for Brown in solidarity with Ferguson and to call for on-going demonstrations against police killings of minorities.

Hosko, a former assistant director of the FBI, blamed what he considers excessive media coverage of a few incidents – such as the deadly police confrontations in Staten Island and Baltimore – as well as the Obama administration and other politicians for what he considered maligning 800,000 police officers nationally. It started at the site where Brown was fatally shot by officer Darren Wilson. It wasn’t immediately clear how badly the man was injured.

The Justice Department report found police were singling out African-Americans for arrests and ticketing, in part to raise revenue for the city.