6 yr old asked what Ferguson Police Do: Answer- "They Shoot People"

[kpete]

When I asked six-year-old Amor, who wants to be a firefighter and who lives here in Ferguson, Missouri, what he thinks of the police, he said, “They shoot people.”

The children of Ferguson have an especially painful – and unfairly adult – task before them: they must make sense of the death of one of their peers, Michael Brown, and deal with the fallout from the protests, violence and militarized police presence that has, in many ways, quickly come to define their young lives in the week since Brown’s violent death at the hands of a local police officer.

The police response to protests in Ferguson has affected children as much as the death itself. Amor’s 11-year-old brother, Tavier, told me, “They shouldn’t shoot people for protesting.” Sitting over pizza just a few blocks from the Ferguson Police Department, he added, “As I was getting older, I thought police were nice people, and as I’m getting older, I’m thinking they’re so-so. They’re still good people, but they’re judging us now.”

Children cope with tragedy in myriad ways – and many of the younger kids in Ferguson are using sidewalk chalk in public spaces. At the now infamously torched QuickTrip convenience store, amidst messages from adults, I saw children sketching Superman and dinosaurs – a small measure of their innocence reflected while their families protested around them. But at Greater St Mark Family Church, where Saturday’s march from the site of Brown’s shooting ended, the drawings were more explicit: kids drew outlines of their own imagined dead little bodies.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/18/wisdom-ferguson-kids-trust-policehttp://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/18/wisdom-ferguson-kids-trust-police

[hedda_foil]

1. I'd like to read the rest of this but the link is bad.

It looks like two different urls got smushed together.