The police department immediately played up Ferguson's record of prior arrests on drug charges and claimed he was carrying heroin at the time. Ferguson, a 23-year-old Black man, was arrested the previous Friday at a protest of the acquittals of the four cops who killed Amadou Diallo and charged with resisting arrest.

"It's not even a week since Amadou, and you're back here shooting us again!" yelled one of 200 protesters who gathered as news of the latest cop killing spread through the neighborhood.

In a related development, prosecutors revealed evidence against two cops who brutalized Cherae Williams. Last September Williams called the cops because she was being beaten by her boyfriend. When the cops arrived and refused to respond to her complaint, Williams testified, she asked for their badge numbers. She said they then grabbed her, handcuffed her, and took her to a deserted area where they beat her so severely her jaw had to be wired. Williams had to call her own ambulance.

In Los Angeles police released a report admitting a pattern of police brutality, frame-ups, and corruption. Earlier revelations led the United States attorney, FBI, and state attorney general to open a criminal investigation into the department. The big-business media openly says that hundreds of people have been wrongly imprisoned because of police misconduct and expect the city to pay out $200 million or more in lawsuit settlements.

The New York Times reported that the "unusual joint action appeared to reflect both plummeting public confidence in the police and growing, and increasingly open, political feuding between the police department and the district attorney's office over the pace of the investigation."  
 
 
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