What do police officers and former police officers think of the grand jury decision in the Michael Brown (Ferguson, MO) case?

I will add to the present consensus here in saying I believe the decision to be appropriate. Some of the pertinent facts leading me to say that have already been ably articulated in this thread; I'm happy to see that facts in the case prevailed, and that seething masses weren't able to ultimately rule the day in that regard.

I won't argue that the larger issue of law enforcement engagement with minority communities (whether racial, LGBT or otherwise) needs to be dealt with; however, the people wanting to push that agenda simply went all in on the wrong hand here. It seemed some were determined to push the narrative of a racially based murder by cop even when successive days dealt blow after blow to it - and that's the bigger story here.

In addition to being former law enforcement, I'm a Missourian, and from that angle I'll tell you this whole situation was hijacked from the very beginning by a lot of different players. Governor Jay Nixon and Senator Claire McCaskill seemed incredibly eager (along with national figures like the president and Eric Holder) to score political points with carefully scripted photo ops and news conferences. Political parties used a dead teenager as leverage in fundraising in a lot of ways. News outlets nationwide did the community of Ferguson an incredible disservice in how they handled the story, first descending on the town and looking for leads - which prompted people wanting to be on TV to fabricate outright lies in order to do so - and then hyping the story as hard as they could to generate ratings and advertising revenue.

The grand jury process shut these voices out and focused on the facts of the matter. In doing so, the hyperbole and shrill voices got marginalized. Some of the people who swore up and down they had witnessed an execution started backtracking under oath and away from friends and television cameras - some of the "eyewitness" grand jury testimony turned out to be simple repetition of hearsay, and a lot of it is just cringeworthy if you read the transcripts. Autopsy findings were looked at with a clinical eye toward the legalities at play in a use of force situation.

So in the end, I think the right call was made - with the facts we have, an indictment would have been tantamount to sacrificing Darren Wilson on the altar of public rage. The problem is that, with proceedings being behind closed doors, the average person on the street successively hears "that white cop executed that black kid in the street" and then "the white cop got away with it."

With the exception of media conglomerates and glass repair businesses, everybody lost in this. Both sides of the coin are just further embittered now rather than having found middle ground. Nobody seemed willing or able to step into a leadership role in channeling the anger for good - Obama managing a meager call for restraint while Ferguson was already burning hardly counts there. And we seem to be in a worse place than when we started. My only takeaway is that cool heads didn't allow yet another life to be destroyed in the interest of placating the fury of the populace.

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Justin Freeman on Quora:

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