FERGUSON, Mo. –
Police in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson arrested two people and said more arrests were likely following protests on the 10th anniversary of the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, a pivotal moment in the national Black Lives Matter movement.
Issues arose as protestors gathered outside the suburb’s police station on Friday to remember Brown, the unarmed Black 18-year-old who was killed by Darren Wilson, a white police officer.
The protest started as a reunion, with traffic diverted as around 40 people congregated outside the police headquarters, drinking beer and eating food, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.
“We wanted to give peaceful protesters the space to do so,” police spokeswoman Pat Washington said Saturday morning.
Around midnight, however, at least five protesters tried to knock down part of the fence surrounding the police station, leading to the arrests.
Washington said the department is still trying to make arrests and review footage to decide the charges.
“There will be others,” she said Saturday.
Police didn’t immediately return a phone message from The Associated Press seeking comment. The department’s Facebook page said the police chief would issue a full statement later in the day.
Meanwhile, the St. Louis Fire Department placed a member of the department on leave after he made an social media post that the department described as insensitive.
“We take this matter seriously and do not condone such behavior,” the department wrote.
The department didn’t disclose the contents of the post, but KMOV reported that it read: “Happy ALIVE day to Darren Wilson!”
Brown’s death turned Ferguson into the focal point of the national reckoning with the historically tense relationship between U.S. law enforcement and Black people.
In 2015, an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice also found no grounds to prosecute Wilson. But the report gave a scathing indictment of the police department — raising significant concerns about how officers treated Black residents, and about a court system that created a cycle of debt for many residents.
