What?

Ferguson, Mo. Police Chief Thomas Jackson identified Officer Darren Wilson as the cop who shot an unarmed black teenager last weekend.
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Just to bring you up to date on the latest development in the Ferguson story, city police have released a police report that purports that show that Michael Brown was the suspect in a convenience store shoplifting/roberry incident in which the suspect stole a box of Swisher Sweets cigars. (It’s a little hard to capture the apparent progression of alleged events in a few words – see the print out of the police report here.)

A few things: Assuming the report and Brown’s identity are accurate, it’s a terrible thing that a kid losses his life over a convenience store argument over cheapo cigars.

But there’s salient issues raised by this. How are we only hearing about this almost a week later? This by no means justifies what happened to Brown. Really, we don’t know what happened to Brown, it’s important to remember that: for that we’re going to need a real investigation into just what led up to the fatal shooting. But it seems to bring home in an entirely new way just how unprepared and frankly clueless the Ferguson police department is that they’re only managing to mention this part of the story after days of war-zoning the city streets.

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