“We were very close to having happen what happened to the NYPD,” said St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar in a briefing in Ferguson Missouri after two of his officers were shot during a protest last night. Belmar was referring to the killing of officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, both attacked and killed in New York last December.
The Ferguson shooting occurred around midnight. Multiple protesters were arrested through the evening for blocking the roadway. Officers reported seeing muzzle flashes around 300 feet from their file. According to police, shooters fired from or behind a crowd of protesters.
“I’m not blaming anyone other than the individuals who [shot my officers],” said Belmar. He added that officers did not fire a single shot during the night.
Police at the protest last night certainly showed more restraint than Darren Wilson, the Ferguson cop that shot unarmed African-American teenager Michael Brown. The shooting on Thursday comes a week after a Department of Justice report found egregious levels of racial profiling among the nearly all-white Ferguson police force.
The names of the injured officers have not been released. One officer, 32 of the Webster Groves suburb, was shot in the face. The bullet entered his mouth below the jaw and traveled toward his temple, according to Belmar. Its currently lodged in his head. The other officer, 41, of St. Louis County was shot in the shoulder. Both officers are in stable condition.
"Violence is never the solution," Benjamin Crump, the Brown family’s lawyer told CNN. "There may be a few people who are misguided or confused but in large part the majority of the protesters and the majority of Americans want justice."
"These police officers were standing there and they were shot, just because they were police officers," Belmar said at a news conference earlier Thursday morning. "I have said all along that we cannot sustain this forever without problems."
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