There’s tear gas and smoke hanging over Middle America again tonight, after a grand jury in Saint Louis, Missouri decided not to charge a white police officer with the killing of an unarmed, black teen.  Protests broke out in the town of Ferguson, where Michael Brown was killed, and other US Cities.

At least three building and two cop cars were set on fire in Ferguson, and another cruiser had its windows bashed in outside the building where state prosecutor Robert McCulloch announced the decision.  Don’t get the idea that cities are burning – the most intense protest is going on in a four-block area of a small suburb of a fading city.  Hopefully, no one is hurt, but that largely depends on the police reaction.  Last summer, they behaved as an occupying army.

McCulloch – an ex-police officer with ties to the Ferguson police department – said the panel of nine white and three blacks had exhaustively examined the evidence which he maintains justified the 9 August shooting of Michael Brown.  The decision technically means that Officer Darren Wilson can return to duty, although there were earlier reports that he was negotiating his exit from the police force.

Critics of McCulloch point out that never before has a prosecutor called a news conference to proud declare that he failed as his job – prosecutors, after all, are supposed to get charges filed and bring cases to trial.  During his 20-minute announcement, he attacked the witnesses of the shooting and its aftermath, blasting them for inconsistent accounts.  Any reporter or cop who has been on the job for longer than a week will tell you that witness accounts always conflict. It’s their job to sort the wheat from the chaff.

Throughout the presentation McCulloch spoke of the evidence, which observers said seemed only to be that which would have been presented by Wilson’s defense had there been a trial.  At no point did McCulloch reveal any piece of evidence that proved that Officer Darren Wilson’s life was in danger, the only thing that justifies a police shooting in which the subject is killed.