Even former NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly, who presided over the police shooting Sean Bell 50 times the night before his wedding in 2006, knows the situation in Ferguson is a disaster from a law-enforcement perspective. Kelly, while stopping short of calling out the excessive use of force, blamed the selective, delayed release of information — no official autopsy has been made public — surrounding the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown. Communicating the facts on the ground to the public “certainly has the potential for quelling or lessening disturbances,” Kelly told Bloomberg News. “You tell them what you know and tell them what you don’t know, rather than dribbling it out.”
Kelly added that it’s “mind-boggling” that 50 out of 53 police officers in Ferguson are white, in a town that’s nearly 70 percent black.
“The toothpaste is out of the tube here,” he said. “There’s lots of things that should have been done differently, and you have to live with them.” Unless, of course, that’s no longer an option.
