In the seven weeks since the police-involved shooting that left Michael Brown dead and Officer Darren Wilson in recovery/hiding, not much has changed. The Grand Jury is still convened, and no determination has been made as yet as to whether Officer Wilson will be made to stand trial. Protesters are still on the streets essentially calling for Wilson's head. Although things have been slightly calmer in recent weeks, allowing residents to begin to rebuild and return to life as normal, the temperature has not strayed far from the boiling point.
Last night, the situation boiled over. Protesters on the street got agitated when news of a shooting broke, even though it didn't seem to involve any who were directly tied with the protest crowd. A Ferguson police officer approached a suspect who was loitering around the closed Dellwood Community Center, and the suspect opened fire. The police officer, whose identity has not been released, took a bullet to the arm. (Early reports identified the officer as a woman, but later the police department referred to the wounded officer as male.) He returned fire, but authorities have no reason to believe that the suspect (still at large) was hit.
In a separate incident, also not directly tied to protest activities, someone opened fire on the vehicle of an off-duty officer while he was on I-70 in the Ferguson area. The officer was not in uniform and was driving his personal vehicle, so authorities are yet unsure as to whether he was targeted specifically. Although multiple shots were fired, the officer's only reported injuries were scratches from the breaking windows in his vehicle.
Despite the fact that both shootings seemed to be largely unrelated to the protests and neither were instigated by the police, they served to further rile the crowd and its supporters on social media sites. A brief look at the #Ferguson timeline from last night saw a flood of racially charged hatred and anti-police anger that bordered on actual threats.
