Who shot the cops?

Reuters wrote:Ambush of policemen triggers manhunt in racially tense Ferguson

(Reuters) - The shooting of two police officers during a protest rally in Ferguson, Missouri, sparked an intense manhunt for suspects on Thursday and ratcheted up tensions in a city at the center of a national debate over race and policing.

U.S. President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder condemned the attack on the officers, who were treated at a local hospital and released. Hours after the shooting, police said they were questioning an undisclosed number of people following a raid on a home in the St. Louis suburb.

"What happened last night was a pure ambush," Holder said at a press conference. "This was not someone who was trying to bring healing to Ferguson, this was a damn punk."

With organizers vowing more protests on Thursday night, St. Louis County police and the state's Highway Patrol will take over security from the local force at any demonstrations.

Security was similarly stepped up after rioting erupted in November, when a grand jury brought no charges against a white officer who shot a black teenager to death, an incident that touched off a national wave of demonstrations.

Since 18-year-old Michael Brown's killing in August, protesters have rallied regularly in Ferguson, where tensions between African-Americans and a mostly white police force have smoldered for years.

Thursday's shooting left a 41-year-old St. Louis County Police officer with a shoulder wound and a 32-year-old officer from nearby Webster Groves Police Department with a bullet lodged near his ear, St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar said.

The incident unfolded while protesters were gathered at Ferguson police headquarters to demand more changes in the wake of the resignation of its long-criticized police chief, Tom Jackson, who quit a week after the release of a scathing U.S. Justice Department report that found his force was rife with racial

In one video taken at the chaotic scene, a witness can be heard commenting, "Acknowledgement nine months ago would have kept that from happening."

Investigators wasted no time in bringing people in for questioning. A law enforcement team in tactical gear surrounded and swarmed a home near the scene of the shooting, and television images showed officers breaking through the roof with heavy tools.

Shawn McGuire, a St. Louis County police spokesman, would not confirm media reports that two men and a woman were led away in handcuffs but he said people were taken in for questioning. There were no arrests so far, he said.

Belmar said authorities had possible leads, and said the shooter used a handgun and shell casings had been recovered. Two Missouri congressman offered a $3,000 reward for information leading to an arrest.

The shooting came less than three months after a man ambushed two New York City patrolmen, seeking to avenge the killings of Brown and an unarmed black man in New York.

The White House sent a Tweet that read: "Violence against police is unacceptable," a message echoed by Brown's family. "We reject any kind of violence directed toward members of law enforcement," they said in a statement.

Police and protesters appeared to disagree about where the shots originated. Belmar, who said police did not return fire, asserted the gunfire came from the middle of the crowd.

"I don't know who did the shooting, ... but somehow they were embedded in that group of folks," Belmar said.

Protesters at the scene insisted the shots came from further away.

"The shooter was not with the protesters. The shooter was atop the hill," activist DeRay McKesson said on Twitter.

Jackson, the police chief, was the latest in a string of Ferguson officials who have quit after the Justice Department report, which found the city used police as a collection agency, issuing traffic citations to black residents to boost its coffers. Activists want the city mayor, James Knowles, to step down as well.

Organizers from several St. Louis-area religious, legal and community groups, condemned the shooting but said they would press ahead with street protests.

"We deplore all forms of violence," said Rev Osagyefo Sekou, who was in the crowd when shots rang out. "But we also deplore the findings of the Department of Justice report and the suffering and the misery that this community has endured."

The shooting reignited a long-running debate over race and policing that has sporadically flared on social media since Brown's killing. Among the popular Twitter hashtags was #bluelivesmatter, a play to the #blacklivesmatter slogan popularized by Ferguson protesters.

"A police officer can get away with killing someone on video. Black ppl are often blamed for crimes they didn't commit. But #BlueLivesMatter," read a Tweet from Keziyah Lewis.

(Additional reporting by David Bailey in Minneapolis, Fiona Ortiz in Chicago and Carey Gillam in Kansas City; Writing by Frank McGurty; Editing by Bernadette Baum and James Dalgleish)

Wiki wrote:Manson had been predicting racial war for some time before he used the term Helter Skelter. His first use of the term was at a gathering of the Family on New Year's Eve 1968. This took place at the Family's base at Myers Ranch, near California's Death Valley.

In its final form, which was reached by mid-February 1969, the scenario had Manson as not only the war's ultimate beneficiary but its musical cause. He and the Family would create an album with songs whose messages concerning the war would be as subtle as those he had heard in songs of The Beatles. More than merely foretell the conflict, this would trigger it; for, in instructing "the young love," America's white youth, to join the Family, it would draw the young, white female hippies out of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury. Black men, thus deprived of the white women whom the political changes of the 1960s had made sexually available to them, would be without an outlet for their frustrations and would lash out in violent crimes against whites. A resultant murderous rampage against blacks by frightened whites would then be exploited by militant blacks to provoke an internecine war of near-extermination between racist and non-racist whites over blacks' treatment. Then the militant blacks would arise to sneakily finish off the few whites they would know to have survived; indeed, they would kill off all non-blacks.

In this holocaust, the members of the enlarged Family would have little to fear; they would wait out the war in a secret city that was underneath Death Valley that they would reach through a hole in the ground. As the only actual remaining whites upon the race war's true conclusion, they would emerge from underground to rule the now-satisfied blacks, who, as the vision went, would be incapable of running the world; Manson "would scratch [the black man's] fuzzy head and kick him in the butt and tell him to go pick the cotton and go be a good n---er...."

* * * *

Manson had said the war would start in the summer of 1969. In late June of that year, months after he'd been frustrated in his efforts to get the album made, he told a male Family member that Helter Skelter was "ready to happen." "Blackie never did anything without whitey showin’ him how," he said. "It looks like we’re gonna have to show blackie how to do it."

Cass wrote:I don't agree. I think it is far too early to speculate of hypothesize.

Original Quill wrote:

Cass wrote:I don't agree. I think it is far too early to speculate of hypothesize.

I agree it's early.  And certainly, we have no leads whatsoever.

But it's a theory of the case.  I just have a hunch.