St. Louis Cops Invaded Coffeeshop, Then Teargassed Peaceful #Ferguson Protesters

http://youtu.be/DqepHZ9Hi2E

Yet another story that you will never, ever hear about in American mainstream media:

Police deployed in riot gear fired tear gas directly at a coffee shop in St. Louis early in the morning on Tuesday.

The scene unfolded just hours after an announcement by St. Louis County prosecutor, Robert McCulloch, that a grand jury had found no “probable cause” to indict white Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson for killing an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, on August 9.

Rachel O’Leary, who is the Deputy Executive Director for Field Organizing for Amnesty International USA, was in MoKaBe’s Coffeehouse in the Shaw neighborhood with some members of a delegation of human rights observers. About 1 am—or just after—tear gas was fired.

“We noticed police behaving strangely,” O’Leary recalled. “They were squatting down in a group, and we couldn’t figure out what was happening. We were watching this out the window.”

A couple of people ran around the corner “from off of Grand” and a “militarized vehicle” followed quickly behind them. The vehicle shot a projectile at people who were running. The police then “turned their guns,” which had tear gas canisters, and “fired directly on the coffee shop,” according to O’Leary.

When the protesters who could still walk came out to yell at the cops for teargassing them, the cops teargassed them a second time.

Oh, yeah: There were children inside, as Amnesty International (which has observers on the ground there, including the coffeeshop) noted.

Occupy Protesters Throwing Bottles – To Each Other, To Rinse Tear Gas From Their Eyes

Video streaming by Ustream

When you hear about “protesters throwing bottles in the crowd” as it’s being tear-gassed or pepper-sprayed by the cops, here’s what probably actually happening:

Left a comment over at the NYT. They captured video that shows protesters throwing what they themselves identified as “water bottles”, and they contend they are throwing them at the police. But in the video, you can hear someone forward in the tear gas cloud calling out for water. The people aren’t throwing the water at the police. They are throwing it to the people calling for water. It’s for rinsing eyes. But this is how the media gets to report that the protesters were throwing projectiles at the police.

By the way — as TBogg and others have noted, isn’t it interesting that two of the major TV networks covering Occupy Oakland both cut their feeds at the same time just seconds before the cops rolled out the tear gas and the flash bang grenades and the beanbags and the rubber bullets?

See the video above to see what happened once the establishment media turned off its cameras. Or go here. Or see KTVU’s coverage (they’re the largest FOX affiliate that’s not actually owned by FOX but still has vestiges of independence from the NewsCorp party line).