CNN's Jake Tapper on Monday night criticized the police's heavy-handed approach to the people protesting the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The situation was overwhelmingly peaceful Monday night, with community leaders helping to keep the crowd calm. But that didn't prevent police officers from activating sound cannons and aiming rifles at protesters and journalists.
Here are Tapper's full remarks, via Mediaite:
I want to show you this, okay? To give you an idea of what’s going on. The protesters have moved all the way down there… they’re all the way down there. Nobody is threatening anything. Nobody is doing anything. None of the stores here that I can see are being looted. There is no violence.
Now I want you to look at what is going on in Ferguson, Missouri, in downtown America, okay? These are armed police, with — not machine guns — semi-automatic rifles, with batons, with shields, many of them dressed for combat. Now why they’re doing this? I don’t know. Because there is no threat going on here. None that merits this. There is none, okay? Absolutely there have been looters, absolutely over the last nine days there’s been violence, but there is nothing going on on this street right now that merits this scene out of Bagram. Nothing.
So if people wonder why the people of Ferguson, Missouri are so upset, this is part of the reason. What is this? This doesn’t make any sense.
To learn more about the protests in Ferguson, read the full explainer, Vox's timeline, and watch the two-minute video below:
