Arrested photographer’s video about Ferguson, USA

This 19 January 2015 video from the USA is called Scott Olson on covering the civil unrest in Ferguson, USA.

Police in Ferguson arrest Getty photographer Scott Olson. Arrest marks the second time that police have arrested journalists covering the Ferguson protests: here. In pictures: Scott Olson’s photographs from Ferguson: here.

By Gannon Burgett in the USA:

Getty photographer shares his account of covering unrest, protests in Ferguson, MO

Monday, January 19, 2015 at 1:12 PM EST

One of the most high-profile news stories of 2014 was the shooting and killing of unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown by Ferguson, Missouri police officer Darren Brown. Shrouded in controversy, protests and police presence, the case immediately brought Ferguson, Missouri – a small suburb of St. Louis – to the forefront of national news.

As crowds gathered, both to mourn and protest, news agencies quickly sent out photographers to capture the emotions, tensions and friction of the case. One of those photographers was Scott Olson, a Staff News Photographer for Getty Images. In the above video, presented on behalf of Getty Images’ In Focus segment, Olson recounts the mission that was covering the growing unrest in Ferguson.

As shared by Olson in the video, the assignment was expected to be just a couple of days long. But, as tensions grew, police presence increased and protests took a turn for the worst – on both sides – Olson and other photojournalists were kept in Ferguson for two weeks. In that two weeks, Olson captured some of the most iconic images of the protests, demonstrations and events that surrounded the case.

The video comes in at just over four minutes long. In addition to Olson’s retelling, the video overlays a extensive collection of images captured by him throughout his coverage of Ferguson. It’s not often we get this kind of inside look at such a high profile case, so do yourself a favor and press play.

BLACK US politicians stepped into a church pulpit in Ferguson, Missouri, on Sunday to link slain civil-rights leader Martin Luther King’s legacy to the fight for justice reform: here.

Last November, police shot and killed Akai Gurley, an unarmed 28-year-old African American man, while he walking down a flight of stairs in Brooklyn’s Louis Pink public housing projects. Gurley’s death has exposed the deadly and authoritarian police presence faced by some of the poorest sections of the working class who live in housing complexes run by the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA): here.

11 thoughts on “Arrested photographer’s video about Ferguson, USA”

Fellow progressive:

In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. came to Stanford University to deliver the first iteration of his speech “The Other America.” Dr. King called attention to the disparate “two Americas” in which whites and blacks lived – one filled with potential and prosperity and the other filled with “blasted hopes and shattered dreams.”

When Dr. King gave this speech in 1967, the Civil Rights Movement was at a turning point. Unrest in America’s cities was growing in intensity and violence, and Dr. King’s activism began tackling the root of this upheaval: economic inequality.

I hope you take the time to read this very profound, uplifting speech, for it is as relevant now as it was then (PDF). It is this stage of the struggle we are still living. Forty-eight years later, Dr. King’s economic justice agenda is largely on hold and the two Americas he spoke of are intact – particularly for people of color.

The fact is, more people of color still struggle in our society. The poverty rate for African Americans is 28 percent; for Latinos, it is 25 percent. Native Americans have the highest poverty rate of all at 29 percent. For whites, the poverty rate is 13 percent. During the Great Recession, the poverty rate among Asian Americans grew by 37 percent – more than any other demographic group. Fourteen percent of Asian Pacific American seniors are on food stamps, compared with a national average of 9 percent.

Employment statistics for people of color are lopsided too. In 1967, Dr. King pointed out that while the current national unemployment rate was 4 percent, for African Americans it was 8.4 percent. Today the national unemployment rate is 5.8 percent; for African Americans it is 10.9 percent, and for Latinos it is 6.8 percent. In 1967, the average income for blacks was 50 percent of what it was for whites. Today, it’s 65 percent for black families and 68 percent for Latino families. The racial gap in assets is even wider: White families have a median net worth 13 times higher than black families and 10 times higher than Latino families.

These disparities are why Dr. King called for “massive action programs” to compensate for the fact that African Americans had historically been denied access to government aid. Today, the great social programs of the ‘60s – Head Start, Food Stamps (now SNAP), Job Corps, Medicaid – have their funding cut year after year. And those programs serve all low-income Americans; federal public programs specifically tasked with closing racial economic gaps are mostly wishful thinking. And in addition to targeted economic programs, Dr. King wanted to see a “guaranteed minimum income” for all families – black and white. While social security provides such an income to seniors and people living with disabilities, a program of this sort covering all Americans is still also wishful thinking.

Fully funding a robust safety net would go a long way toward closing these gaps. Creating programs whose explicit purpose is closing these gaps must be something we strive for. Today, let’s renew our commitment to making economic equality a reality. Because as Dr. King said in 1967, “Social progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability.”

We have to make it happen.

Thank you,

Barbara [Lee]
Member of Congress

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This is terrifying and wrong. How could anything this wrong happen in the USA?

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petrel41 on January 19, 2015 at 9:37 pm said:

I would say: domestic consequences of the Iraq war, which led to militarisation of police.

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- georgiakevin on January 19, 2015 at 9:43 pm said:
  
  I think it was happening way before but due to cell phones, video cameras and such we are aware of it now. Remember Rodney King? Back in 1978 I heard of a Long beach State football player being beaten to death in a black section of Long Beach CA not far from LA but police warned the community to not talk about what happened and then denied it ever happened. I think that the increased military arsenal that the police have is the result of the Iraq war.
  
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