transport section of st. louis full of. tear gas rubber bullets and on rats erupts for the fifth night in ferguson missouri we have extensive coverage on the protests that all began when an unarmed teen was shot and killed by police. it's thursday august fourteenth four pm in washington d.c. i'm your i david and you're watching our team america we begin today with the latest out of ferguson missouri where protests and rioting over

a deadly shooting continue. the protest stemmed from saturday's shooting of eighteen year old michael brown by an unnamed officer police say brown was shot after he struggled to grab for the officers weapon on the other hand some witnesses say brown who was unarmed began to run after the officer pursued him and proceeded to shoot the young man multiple times even after his hands were raised for a closer look at what happened last night the fifth straight night of protests over this fatal shooting let's go to our tease ana stasia churkin out who's on the ground in ferguson. mayhem and chaos continue to unravel on the streets of ferguson in the suburbs of st louis missouri for a fourth night. coming out onto the streets an outrage over the death of

eighteen year old michael brown right now the air here is filled with tension and really smells of tear gas still hours after it was fired michael brown just days away from college was shot and died multiple bullets fired at him by a local police officer bringing hundreds of people out to out on to the streets demanding justice tonight on wednesday night yet again police in riot gear clashed with protesters using tear gas and rubber bullets now the central street in ferguson is filled with scattered left overs of tear gas cannons in fact near our life position an explosion had gone off just meters away from where we were standing violence and looting began on sunday night as hundreds of protesters took out onto the streets dozens of. there was writing and of course. wrote gas fired at these protesters we have witnessed tear gas in fact being used

when protesters were quite peaceful when nobody really was doing anything but it seems to be a different story according to the police that have been quite heavily militarized out on the streets night after night expecting it seems the worse the local community is outraged because witnesses who say they saw exactly what happened during michael's killing report that he has he had been running away from the police car with his hands lifted up in the air showing that he was unarmed when he was killed by multiple gunshots so certainly the local community here says that is the kind of misconduct that they have seen from the police is something that they have gotten used to over the years this community ferguson in fact has a population of twenty. one thousand people two thirds of them are african-american whereas the ferguson police department is estimated to have only three black police officers out of fifty so the issue of race is certainly

a huge one in these unraveling clashes and violence that have been taking place. to talk a little bit more about the community's reaction in the pending investigation i'm joined by our team our teams on the start. so i'm sorry i know it's a little bit noisy there let me know if you need to keep myself but we just saw your report from from last night and things were looking really dicey how has ferguson been today well i mean our emotions are certainly continuing to fly high we're in the fifth day of protesting after michael brown was shot and killed saturday where right now out on the central street and ferguson where if you can see behind me there are several dozen protesters out on the street with signs cars are going by on king there is certainly a very emotional atmosphere in the air as people continue to come out onto the streets to demand justice and accountability it has to be said that violence and clashes with police don't really occur until nighttime night after night when

heavily militarized police come out onto the streets and that's when tear gas and rubber bullets begin to be used it has to be said that apart from the nighttime clashes protesters and the local community here are very respectful towards one another towards the journalist and really towards the entire situation people understand that some of the looting and vandalism that has been taking place has not reflected too well on the message that this community is trying to send and while people don't necessarily condone some of the of the looting that has taken place there are continuing to say that desperate times unfortunately call for desperate desperate measures this community is trying to make sure that their voices of indignation and outrage are heard and one thing that's been a point of contention is the release of this officers name a lot of people in the community are demanding it any indication that they plan to make that information available and are there any other states in the investigation so far well let me read curiously no it's been five days since the shooting and the

death of michael brown took place and the police here locally has decided that it's not in the best. this police officer to release his identity and his name and certainly the community is very outraged about this they say whenever any type of murder occurs and the police knows who was potentially a suspect they release these names and this information in this case that has not been the case at all because they're fearing for this officers life because of the amount of outrage that this community has been expressing over this incident in terms of the investigation we do know that of course locally there is one ongoing that the f.b.i. is conducting an investigation as well as the department of justice and of course the u.s. president has promised an independent investigation but any real specific results of that are yet to be seen now we've of course men hearing reports by journalists limited by the police and and getting a story on the ground what's been your experience reporting there so far have you had any issues well you know certainly in terms of especially in the night the areas where any clashes with police and fire is heavily. controlled by the police

so it's hard to get into those there we have found ways night after night to kind of infiltrate and get into the the action but certainly the line between you know journalists and chester's out on the streets has been up on race quite a bit because when tear gas is used it doesn't seem that the police make too much of an effort to make sure that you know t.v. crews are not in the way many crews here have reportedly been affected by the tear gas including ourselves last night where we certainly the tear gas was thick in the air and we were in that atmosphere certainly it's been quite an intense experience and even last night when we were going live we had an explosion go off just meters from where we were standing so it's certainly quite a volatile situation and of course we know that there been journalists even to arrested for doing their job here so are quite quite dramatic to be reporting from here and anasazi of the protests haven't seemed to let up is a community expecting more commotion this evening. i mean i who i wish i could see

hopefully not but unfortunately that is not really been the key. as we've seen for four nights in a row up until now we'll see what unravels tonight people have been in fact coming out onto the streets yesterday we did see both of those with the most violent clashes thus far and it looks like this is not going to die down because of this continued issue existing and we do think that more people are going to be coming out onto the streets there have been met with riot police and certainly the trend usually is that over the weekend the numbers countrified so we'll have to wait and see how that unravels what will be certainly here to to report on that as a country robert all right certainly a very active senior at r.t. correspondent on saucier churkin out thanks for that reporting thank you. and it seems it's not only the residents of ferguson who are under attack it's journalists as well two reporters covering the on rest in the city were arrested and physically assaulted by police last night those journalists were ryan riley of the huffington

post and wesley lowry of the washington post the two reporters had been working in a mcdonald's not too far from the scene of the incident when a swat team stormed into the restaurant and demanded that everyone immediately evacuate soon after the two journalists began recording the police activity here's a look at some of that footage what's going on we're going on stuff videotape an autograph or something tells me which video hurry up lets you know these are what you do you see you are. easier to know if you start to do what you know you know we were down about forty five seconds and still. we're not used to shoot this until the job done and i'm john that's for sure and this is your classic cars are here let's go this is what i was just going to let you go through here let's go. that's when the journalists were told to stop the

proceedings and leave when they didn't the officer shoved lowery into a soda machine and slammed riley's head against some glass just before taking them into custody upon being released riley had a scuffle with officers as he tried to find out who arrested him and why take a look. this officer says one things they want to say to us and they were changing you're saying it's fine all that can be any people are really sure what to do is there and i would really wish that you were given where we were told multimedia wise or so we're really going to need the name of the officer i last over a dozen times the officer. of the detainees you're walking out the door now. now in a separate instance though a group of reporters from al jazeera america were tear gassed as they attempted to film an ongoing protest to talk about what some people are calling an assault on journalism i want to bring in georgetown university professor chris chambers chris

as always great to have you so we might expect to see this kind of activity you now in egypt for example or in syria but not necessarily in ferguson missouri do you think what happened could have been a misunderstanding or is it clear that this really is an assault on journalism i can't see how it could be a misunderstanding first of all this is oppression one hundred one if you want to control the narrative you control first of all the people the protesters on the ground and then you control the people who are recording what the protesters on the ground are doing just as you were you know you control say eyewitnesses who might have camera phones etc etc who were there at the point of contact between the officer and young mr brown who was apparently shot with his hands up according to all the witnesses. and they've seized camera phones to that effect so you want to control the information or to control the narrative this is a good way to do it and what we've seen here are journalists being basically you

can control the time place and manner of access to the press of a but that's it you know you have to have very compelling reasons to control that now if there's safety if the reporters are going to be attacked or they're interfering with some kind of ongoing police. investigation that kind of thing how does a reporter know you know what when is it their obligation to say ok i should turn my camera off and walk away and do what the police is telling you to do well when you're in mcdonald's basically working on your story in a bunch of people busted and you're far from the from the actual action that's probably on the line of i think i'm ok right here they were not standing in the you know in front of the protesters. these guys were in mcdonald's working on their story the al-jazeera crew and other t.v. crews were out there trying you know off to the side but on a public street where they're allowed to be filming the police the police were actually shining lights on to the cameras so the cameras could not record the

action i think that here you have the police the government defining basically basically crossing the line not the reporters crossing the line from there and and intruding where they should not have access which again is controlled by their own safety or if they are literally in the middle of a police action say the cops are in a shootout with somebody and somebody was a bomb or a gun and the reporters interposed themselves somehow or interfered these these reporters are not interfering and that's that av that basically the concept of interference there's no interference here it's observation and the police don't want that so i think you know i don't see how this is a blurry line or anything gray i think you can sit back and look at this and say that you know the first amendment has been violated here and probably the police the their own internal rules of the police department as they've they've worked out with say local press in the st louis area as a fact mean haven't they been trained to work or turn left don't they know what to

do when encountering someone i get most police forces have that you know in you know they have some sort of training they have something in their their rulebook along those lines but you know you have an extraordinary situation come up this police department is very separate from the st louis miscible police department st louis county you know you have mostly white cops in a two thirds black community even though it's just it's two thirds but ninety percent of the arrests the stops except for a have been on african-american citizens so this is a police department is probably not used to dealing with the press and this sort of thing and they're not used to dealing with the press really zooming in on them. you have you know alternate new sources huffington post r t al-jazeera basically aiming a beam at them they're not used to that they used to do it more large corporate mainstream outlets who are just going to really just cover perhaps play by the ruling by their own little talk to the public information officer generally say the

local press is probably covered some officer friendly kind of events they're not used to this and they're not used to the social media coverage that especially african-americans are focused on this so that's another aspect there were social media has really focused our attention on this and we actually heard president obama speak about this very issue earlier this afternoon let's take a quick listen to what he had to say and here in the united states of america police should not be bowing or arresting journalists who are just trying to do their jobs and report to the american people on what they see on the ground. put simply we all need to hold ourselves to a high standard so basically came to the defense of these journalists do you think that that was very strategic i mean do you do you think that he had to do that considering how much these protests have really ask elated over the last thing on two levels one to buttress attorney general holder's efforts in st louis county on another it's you know it's up to the media outlets themselves to go after the

police the federal government doesn't really get involved with trying to remediate the rights of news organizations so i think it was wise for him to you know back up the attorney general's investigation and provides you know the bully pulpit for the lawyers of these news organizations we already know the washington post as a lawyer it up and are probably going to go after this police department so i think he's trying to provide some some some kind of support for the private efforts on that then and right georgetown university professor chris chambers as always thank you so much for appearing on weighing in. traditional news networks on the ground in ferguson have been able to provide some critical information to the public but it's social media that's taken a front seat in both getting the information out and helping to organize the resistance the demonstrators protests and cetera in the aftermath of brown's shooting we've seen everything from witnesses to citizen journalists to world

observers taking to social media in order to find and share this story and with journalists now even being limited by the police it's made platforms like twitter facebook and vine all the more valuable joining me to talk about how the internet has shaped what we're seeing in ferguson is our two web producer andrew blank andrew how you doing and test thank you all right so it seems like twitter has been a huge phenomenon throughout this incident in the last five days how critical though has twitter and all of social media really been in sort of galvanizing these protests you know it's really rare that we're seeing this now in the united states where twitter was developed several years ago this is what was happening on other parts of the world where oppressive regimes were stepping in and trying to silence people that were protesting whatever be it the government or police activity and that's why we see those oppressive regimes try to cut back on social media use with things like twitter so what we're seeing this now in the united states is i don't want to say a step backward it's something that other parts of world people are kind of

laughing at us because this is like this is why twitter took off the way it did to a degree in other parts of the globe but what social media is doing more than just driving these protests social media and as we were saying earlier is actually what's what's showing the world these protests when we're living in an environment where the media isn't even going in there and isn't allowed to have their cameras right up to two police officers marching down the streets with guns and tanks and stuff like that who else do we have left if it's a citizen journalist holding up a smartphone or with a digital camera or walking around with their i pad trying to stream some. those are the people who are relaying what's happening to the rest of the world and it's very courageous of them and those people i think are doing just as much in terms of putting the rest of world in ferguson and showing them what's happening is they are letting people in ferguson coordinate these activities but it is absolutely instrumental in first things like oh there's tear gas on this corner or you know

you're not allowed to walk into your house if you live on that side of the street social media if you're on the ground in ferguson is doing an instrumental job and actually just keeping people safe it has certainly been instrumental in it harkens back to the occupy protests i would i would say we've seen a lot of hot hashtags launch as a result of this many of them sort of racially motivated dealing with the issue of race can you talk about what's out there well i mean this is something that we've. seen for the last couple of years where. it's really unfortunate this keeps happening where there's a young black kid who's who's now dead because someone else did something stupid and whatever way the media chooses to portray it we're often unfortunately see this in a negative light and so that did spawn a couple hashtags a particular there's one that started all over the internet this week hashtag if they gunned down i believe it was people trying to say well you know if if that was me out there if that was me lying around lifeless on the street what picture with

a play of me on the news the next day when they're trying to justify it when they're trying to protect the police and say that oh you know everything here you know that it's who that person was yeah so we saw that one we actually saw people with the hashtag don't shoot don't shoot me which you really shouldn't have to advertise on the internet or with a sign or a hashtag or you really should never actually ever have to tell a police officer don't shoot me because they're there to protect the usually the action associated with that is you know putting your hands up and you say don't shoot and i think we've seen a lot of people in the protest doing that right they've been walking down the street with their arms up so you know it will it's without it would. really comes down to ferguson missouri is not prepared for protests like this and they're certainly not prepared for the response that's happened on the internet absolutely and i have only thirty seconds left but online hackers have been really instrumental to can you talk really quickly about that will a couple different factions of the have to this collective anonymous have been targeting various law enforcement entities you know it's really weird to

characterize any sort of attack on any sort of particular group because the case of anonymous this is this amorphous internationally dispersed collective anyone can take claim for anything but. they are without a doubt people are targeting law enforcement websites or trying to take them down by sending them to legitimate traffic crippling websites i've been told that you know they're actively trying to disclose information about private officials in order to bring that information to light but that's something that perhaps maybe the police should do. definitely hacktivism at its best and you're blake artie's web producer thank you so much for coming on. all right we've seen a lot of pictures coming out of the protests in ferguson police wearing riot gear holding machine guns and looking an awful lot like the u.s. military and that's because today they are a lot like the military not only have they been trained using some of the same tactics but they've also been authorized over the last few years to receive a surplus in military gear from the pentagon and that means local law enforcement

agencies are using weapons found on the battlefields of south asia and the middle east just asked this a little bit more i was joined earlier by john whitehead president of the rather for an institute he's long studied and written about the idea of a rising police state in america and i first asked him if the ongoing situation in ferguson were examples that evolution. of course yeah everything you're saying for the military here on the books so called police know they look like military personnel by the way they do not like placement to the military vehicles the high tech rifles all of asia using the us the culmination of a long process that began quite a while ago but has really accelerate or over the last five or six years especially under president obama whatever actually the handout from the pentagon on the part of all that security of all is not very dear so down a bit under george bush but it's really accelerated under president obama for whatever reason and we're seeing pictures of police officers and events that may

feel resemble a military operation in iraq or afghanistan one brought us to this point where local police forces are resembling our military and the way that they look and their actions well first of all all the equipment the spending given out basically free from the pentagon the part of whole of security i mean the foreign hold and secure is giving out amaranth's to local police departments they're mine resistant armor protection vehicles they use in afghanistan they're basically tanks that and all the other thing that i've talked to police that are concerned about this is the training their training policemen the very militarily and in the police academies across the country and actually swat teams are studying the military units the other factor is that a lot of the returning veterans from overseas are becoming police officers so what you're getting is what the founding fathers master george washington all warned about a standing army saying never do this because they experience what would be the tyranny

of a standing army used to when you post a policeman america had a round outfit on and maybe a firearm sometimes they were armed now you're saying i'm with high tech waffles you have the part of homeland security arming themselves with palm point moments with jamal like international law but social security administration by all of what most in passing about forty one locations across the united states. it's a definite change we've got we do have a standing army now it's the local police working with federal agents and then some of the cases where involved are people's homes get raided it's well the police working with federal departments like the f.b.i. and department will lend security and they're all decked out in this military gear and yet in some ways the way that they're addressing is actually causing this tension. yes i show them a book of going to wolves there is what they call the psychology of compliance the number studies show that once you put on the gear as a policeman and you're trained you start asking like a military unit like you're in a patrol and unfortunately what happens is the psychology changes in

a lot of these local policemen when they're approaching a house for a swat team or a it's like they're moving in on our car that that's what you have that's what the studies show and then they've been confirmed recently by other studies that show the same thing and the psychology has a lot to do with it it's like a psychology of intimidation how it's going to have it it's how they view the citizen and that's that he not is supposedly we're the masters and they're the servants but you know in ferguson they're telling people to back off twenty five feet get in the zone they're violating their free speech rights you have a right to walk up to a civil servant and say sir why are you doing this why you're here there pointing guns at people and chasing them away that's not a policeman anymore again that's the military and that's what we're dealing with and indeed a lot of people are are vulnerable because they don't even know what their rights are in these situations but you know how can we begin to really roll back this kind of militarization that we're seeing with them and these police force and is it even

possible at this point are we too far too far gone it's possible but again it's going to take local citizens in their community getting down to their city councils and creating oversight police oversight committees where one of the swat team rangers stuff you see in ferguson they need to back them down the need to be held accountable most police agencies operate basically any way the lot of the local law of city councils and politicians just let them go. but i've written in a number of instances i've seen. local citizens get they get down that local city council meeting they get their signs and they say we're not moving into the changes thing if not you go see terri in this country this is this is the face of the government today what you're seeing in ferguson and it's only going to get worse if we don't back off all right john whitehead president of the rather for an incentive thanks for weighing in thank you. stay with our team for more coverage on the ferguson shooting and protests will continue bringing you the details throughout

the week. we're currently in ferguson where tensions have flying high ever since saturday when eighteen year old michael ground was killed by multiple shots from. the soul can see it right. here fired tear gas. to be clear. there is no use in being a human being should be. is. doing. all right you can also get updates from our team on facebook and twitter. now to breaking news from iraq to rocky state television says prime minister nouri al maliki has stepped down from office he has given up his post to hide or a love body iraq's new president ford most soon nominated me on monday to form the next government but al maliki had refused up until now to step aside and maliki is

due to make a statement later today. does it for now for more on the stories we cover go to youtube dot com forward slash r t america check out our website r t dot com forward slash usa and follow me on twitter at a mirror david stay tuned boom bust is next. i know c.n.n. the m s n b c news have taken some slightly but the fact is i admire their commitment to cover all sides of the story just in case one of them happens to be accurate. that was funny but it's close and for the troops in the might think. it's because one whole attention and the mainstream media works side by side the joke is actually on the air. coming up.

at our teen years we have a different approach. because the news of the world just is not this funny i'm not laughing dammit i'm not. ok i guess. you guys stick to the jokes i will handle to make it so that i've got to. be martin write the stories we cover here you're not going to hear any right.