It has been announced that St. Louis County will stay in a state of emergency for at least another night, giving the county police authority to continue to surveil the area.
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According to an account provided by police, two rival groups exchanged gunfire for about 50 seconds on West Florissant. The teenager is being held on a $250,000 cash-only bond. The SPLC says the Oath Keepers envision a “coming last stand confrontation against globalist tyrants expected to steamroll across the U.S., crushing our freedoms”.
St. Louis County police Chief Jon Belmar said the overnight presence of the Oath Keepers, wearing camouflage bulletproof vests and openly carrying rifles and pistols on West Florissant Avenue, the hub of marches and protests for the past several days, was “both unnecessary and inflammatory”.
Although a tactical operations unit was on standby Tuesday night, it was never deployed.
“We’ve been in communications with them for a long time, and we’ve been very impressed by them”, an Oath Keeper said of the conspiracy-laden website.
Protesters were marching and staging acts of civil disobedience to mark the anniversary of the death of 18-year-old Brown.
Belmar said the de-escalation over the past two nights was largely due to police work that has been learned in Ferguson since last August.
The group has various Facebook pages for different chapters across the country and numerous posts are anti-Obama and verge on being racist toward Black people.
“My son was running to the police to ask for help, and he was shot”, Mr Harris said.
The SLCPD added that there were no reported shootings, no calls involving shots fired, nor burglaries, looting or damage to property.
St. Louis County officials also said Wednesday that the state of emergency – declared on Monday – would remain in effect for at least 24 more hours.
Activists are continuing their legal push for an independent probe of a prosecutor’s handling of grand jury proceedings in the Ferguson police shooting of Michael Brown.
At the Sunday night demonstration, tensions escalated after several hundred people gathered in the street, ignoring repeated warnings to get to the sidewalk or face arrest.
They said it shows Tyrone Harris Jr. grabbing a handgun from his waistband.
St. Louis County Police on Tuesday released surveillance video they say shows a man injured in a shootout with police holding a gun during street protests in Ferguson on Sunday night.
Police said that while there were some protests on Tuesday night, they were mostly peaceful and that there were no arrests.
St. Louis city police have not been involved in security so far this year. But the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks radical hate groups, stated Oath Keepers was a “fiercely anti-government, militaristic group”.
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For Justin Hansford, a professor at the St. Louis University School of Law, the images of protesters clashing with police, at first blush, were evocatively familiar.
