When the police riot:
The heavy-handed police response to the protests over the past week has done nothing to change that perception. On Sunday, Chandler went to the main protest site on West Florissant Avenue with her 15-year-old daughter, where she said protesters were gathered and milling about. She said that, around sunset, police arrived and ordered the crowd to disperse. As she and her daughter were trying to leave, her daughter was teargassed. Since then, they’ve been going to the quieter, smaller protest site on a tire shop parking lot across the street from the Ferguson police department, about 2 miles away. Late Wednesday night, police drove up to that site in armored trucks and full military-style gear, she said, and ordered them to leave: “They had about 40 or 50 men in it looked like military gear with M-16 [assault rifles], pointing them directly in our faces, and they put the gun in my daughter’s face, and [told us we were] trespassing,” she said. (She said that they had permission to be there from the tire shop's owner.) Chandler saw one woman, a pastor, get shot in the stomach with a rubber bullet.