AFTER nearly three months of investigation and deliberation, a St. Louis County grand jury declined to indict Ferguson police officer, Darren Wilson for shooting and killing 18-year-old Michael Brown.
The Ferguson grand jury was made up of nine white people and three blacks. 
Demonstrators took the streets after the announcement was made on Monday evening.
The decision means that Wilson, 28, will face no state charges for the August 9 shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown.
It also set off a show of fury on streets near where Brown was shot, a reflection of emotions that register in this riven city as either out of control or justifiable.
Following the announcement of the non-indictment, the prosecutor’s office took the unusual step of releasing nearly all the physical evidence and testimony presented to the grand jury, even though grand jury proceeding are usually completely secret.
Among the evidence are a photo taken of Wilson immediately after the shooting, marking the injuries he says he received after fighting with Brown.
Attorney General Eric Holder issued a statement late Monday night saying that while the grand jury in St. Louis County had decided not to indict Officer Darren Wilson, “the Justice Department’s investigation into the shooting of Michael Brown remains ongoing.”
Although prosecutor Bob McCulloch had sought to link his investigation with the federal inquiry, Holder stressed its independence.
“Even at this mature stage of the investigation, we have avoided prejudging any of the evidence,” the attorney general said.
“And although federal civil rights law imposes a high legal bar in these types of cases, we have resisted forming premature conclusions.”
Holder, who visited Ferguson during the first wave of protests in August, joined President Obama in calling for peaceful demonstrations.
“It does not honour (Brown’s) memory to engage in violence or looting,” he said.
Ferguson and St. Louis are not the only places where demonstrators have taken to streets to show their frustration and anger with the verdict.
In New York, marchers descended on Union Square and Times Square.
Despite the mostly peaceful protest, someone managed to pelt NYPD Commissioner William Bratton with fake blood.
In Oakland, protesters took a similar path to St. Louis, blocking highway I-580 by marching in the driving lanes.
The same thing happened on I-10 in Los Angeles.
And in Washington, more than 100 people gathered outside the White House, laying down in front of the building and chanting.
On Tuesday, three major crossings in New York City were blocked and shut down by protesters as marchers fanned out across the city in support of Michael Brown.
The Manhattan, Brooklyn, and RFK-Triboro bridges were all blockaded when hundreds of protesters walked onto the bridge, blocking and sitting down in the roadway. Meanwhile, in Washington D.C. the protest moved to the steps of the Supreme Court.
The already tense national conversation about police violence in America has been further inflamed by Rudy Giuliani, the outspoken former mayor of New York, who said white police would not be in black communities, “If you weren’t killing each other.”
Mr Giuliani was speaking after Ohio police shot a 12-year-old black boy as he played with a replica gun in the latest of a spate of shootings in which unarmed African-Americans have been killed by police officers.
Tamir Rice was shot dead in a public park on Saturday as he played with a BB gun while sitting on the swing set.
A man called the police to say that someone was brandishing a pistol, but warned that it was ‘probably fake’.
When two officers confronted Tamir and ordered him to raise his hands he apparently reached into his waistband for the toy gun, according to a police account of the shooting.
An officer fired twice from less than 10 feet away, hitting the youth in the stomach.
Tamir was taken to hospital, but died from his wounds on Sunday.
Cleveland Police said the toy gun’s orange cap had been removed, making it ‘indistinguishable from a real firearm’.
The officer involved in the killing has been suspended and police are investigating the shooting before handing over evidence to prosecutors.
The shooting was captured on video by a nearby security camera.
So how often are unarmed African-Americans getting shot by the police?
The short answer is that nobody really knows, but it’s clear that blacks are often disproportionately targeted by law enforcement.
In Missouri, for example, African Americans were 66 percent more likely than whites to be stopped by police in 2013, according to the St. Louis Post Dispatch.
A similar disparity exists in many other states and cities.
Delores Jones-Brown, a law professor and director of the Centre on Race, Crime, and Statistics at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, has identified dozens of black men and women who have died at the hands of police going back as far as 1994.
She notes that while these incidents happen regularly, it often takes a high-profile case, such as Brown’s, to bring other recent incidents to national attention.
“Unfortunately, the patterns that we’ve been seeing recently are consistent: The police don’t show as much care when they are handling incidents that involve young black men and women, and so they do shoot and kill,” says Jones-Brown, a former assistant prosecutor in Monmouth County, New Jersey.
“And then for whatever reason, juries and prosecutor’s offices are much less likely to indict or convict.”
Thursday, November 27 is ‘Thanksgiving Day’, but what are the majority of African Americans going to be thankful this year?
The male children are not safe on the streets, many of the men folk are incarcerated and more and more black children have little or no access to health care.
All the while we have a black man in the White House.
What a shame!