Talk show host Joe Scarborough blasted authorities in Ferguson, Missouri, questioning why they allowed a "slow crescendo" buildup to a nighttime announcement that police Officer Darren Wilson would not be indicted in the death last August of black youth Michael Brown.
"Why the hell did they release this information the way they did? Why did they have this buildup — this slow crescendo, this slow crescendo, to say, 'We're going to be announcing it at 9:00?'" Scarborough told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" on Tuesday.
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"It's mind-boggling that a community and a state that had so mishandled this case from the very beginning, continue to mishandle it at the very end."
Scarborough suggested the announcement should have come "at 2:00 p.m. in the afternoon, when you would have been actually doing the police officers a favor. You would have been doing the black-owned small businesses that were torched last night a favor. You would be doing the family a favor."
"If you were going to go out and protest peacefully, you would do it at 3:00 in the afternoon. You would not do it, given the history of what's been going on since August, at 9:00 at night," he said.
Protesters took to the streets in Ferguson and across the country shortly after St. Louis County prosecutor Bob McCullough announced Wilson would not be indicted for shooting Brown, who was unarmed.
In Ferguson, a St. Louis suburb, rioters burned cars, including police cars, and looted and burned several businesses.
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President Barack Obama spoke from the White House after the announcement, appealing for calm as riots in Ferguson began to get underway. St. Louis County police announced that over
80 people were arrested in the area during the evening.
Scarborough, a former Republican Florida congressman, said it was anticipated that Wilson wouldn't likely be indicted once local authorities began their "calls for calm" earlier in the day.
"(Authorities) tipped their hand. Because, I had no idea over the weekend, because I still thought over the weekend the police officer was going to be indicted. But, when they started, when officials started coming out early urging calm, urging calm, urging calm, you knew how this movie was going to end," he said.
One thing, Scarborough said, that should result from the Ferguson tragedy is the widespread use of police body cameras.
While admitting that "for the most part, law enforcement officers do a great job," he said the cameras would be for the "2, 3, 4 percent, 5 percent of the people that are in uniforms that act like punks from time to time."
A camera "helps the cops. It helps the good cops. It helps citizens. As I've said repeatedly, the only people who don't want that are bad cops that do bad things," Scarborough said. "We need every cop in America to have a camera on them."
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