What Ferguson teaches us

We are a nation of laws. All of us might not be very happy with all the laws but we are expected to follow it once it is signed into a law. The string of events which happened in Ferguson revealed how fragile humans are when it comes to reacting to a situation which did not turn in our favor. While it was shameful looking at the images on CNN with regards to looting, violence and bad behavior, I also felt a rush of emotions for the Brown's family who had to go through this ordeal. While race could be a problem in this particular case (I am not the one to judge or conclude), we need to take a step back and think about the following real issues:

1) Police presence in an area is directly linked to crime level in that area. The fact that this neighborhood of Ferguson had so much police presence itself means there is some work to do for the leaders in that community. Educating the youth, keeping them off the streets, providing jobs is #1 priority. This could have avoided what we have seen in August with Brown shooting.

2) Police force need to represent the areas demographics. Having 50 white and 3 black officers only means that they need to take a hard look at the applicants and make a genuine effort to hire a force which is in line with the area demographics.

3) I see lot of stats around blacks killing blacks and whites killing whites. It is stated as fact that blacks killing blacks happens 7 times more than whites killing whites. We have an inherent problem in the society with broken families who are unable to provide the best education for their kids and hence are unable to keep them off the streets.

Unless we address the core issues, no amount of policy changes would improve the situation in these areas. Hope we don't blow up this opportunity for change as we did before with the Newtown School shooting.