The Missouri Governor Jay Nixon gave "no heads up" to the White House before deploying The National Guard [8] and has now made another abrupt decision as The National Guard closes in on Ferguson:
- *NIXON'S CALL TO HALT CURFEW TONIGHT MADE IN E-MAILED STATEMENT
We presume when there are military tanks rolling through the streets of a town, there is no need for the actual implementation of a curfew... This once again rubs the administration's nose in it as AG Holder's comments from last week hang in the air: "get those damned tanks out of there."
The neighborhood has been under a midnight-to-5 a.m. curfew the past two days, after Nixon declared a state of emergency. That has now changed...
Authorities on Monday lifted the overnight curfew for Ferguson, Missouri, after two nights.
The announcement came from Gov. Jay Nixon, who earlier in the day ordered the National Guard to the St. Louis suburb after a week of clashes between police and protesters over the police shooting death of an unarmed black teenager.
Nixon said that the National Guard would have a limited mission and that overall command would still be the responsibility of the Highway Patrol, which took over security in Ferguson on Thursday.
The National Guard, under the command of Brig. Gen. Gregory Mason, will “provide protection, and ensure the safety of our Unified Command Center, which was the target last night of a coordinated attack,” Nixon said.
Nixon said that law enforcement officers were the target of gunfire on Sunday. The violence also included firebombs, looting and “a coordinated attempt to overrun the unified Command Center,” Nixon said.
.@AP [10] Photo: President Obama talks with U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder about situation in #Ferguson [11], Missouri pic.twitter.com/vkZc1TuqMD [12]
— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) August 18, 2014 [13]
And as WSJ reports, [14] locals and Feds are not in agreement...
Mr. Holder, the attorney general, rewrote a statement about Ferguson he was planning to issue to emphasize he expected local authorities "to complete a thorough, fair investigation in their own right,'' even though the FBI had opened its own case into whether Mr. Brown's civil rights had been violated, a law-enforcement official said.
The two sides also clashed later in the week over the Ferguson Police Department's plan to release the surveillance tape of the convenience-store robbery. Lawyers in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division objected, saying it would anger the community and intensify protests by those who felt it was an attack on Mr. Brown's reputation rather than an evenhanded disclosure of information, law-enforcement officials said.
The police department decided to release the video Friday, over the continued objections of federal officials. Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson said last week the move came in response to numerous media freedom-of-information requests.
Federal, state, and local authorities also have disagreed publicly over the tactics and equipment deployed to deal with protests.
...
"Tell them to remove the damn tanks," Mr. Holder told his deputies on Thursday, according to a law-enforcement official, referring to heavily armored vehicles the local police had used. That day there were discussions among local officials about how to scale back the armed presence, officials said.
We are sure this, too, will end very well: for the happy ending tune in tonight sometime after sundown.
