Jack Tame: Fury understandable, but not the violence

Protestors drop to their knees in a rally for Michael Brown Jr, who was shot and killed by a Ferguson cop. Photo / AP

In Ferguson the cops fired tear gas, the canisters exploding like wayward fireworks, indiscriminate and briefly magical before the smoke began to rise.

The pictures from Missouri could be misleading in another way, too, for the guys behind the guns didn't look like police. In armoured vehicles with assault rifles and tactical kit for Timbuktu, Missouri looked like a military state.

No doubt the police had to do something. After protests in Ferguson led to looting, at least a dozen businesses were smashed and one store was burned to the ground.

Even the president's plea for quiet and calm fell to chanting crowds and rubber bullets: violence sparked violence, sparked violence.

But tear-gassing news crews and arresting civic leaders does little to win public support.

The masses had originally gathered to protest the death of an 18-year-old youth shot and killed by police.

Officers acknowledge the teenager was unarmed. Their version is Brown attacked an officer and tried to steal his gun.

Pretty much everyone else in Ferguson reckons a teen two days from starting university was harassed by police only because he was black. Some in Ferguson compared Brown's death with the shooting of Trayvon Martin. Others recalled Rodney King.

There are never race-based comparisons when unarmed white guys are killed by police.

But if anything, it's surprising that anger like that in Ferguson isn't more common in the United States.

Cities across the country foster heavy-handed policing.

There's still public outrage at an incident last month when a man died after being put in an illegal chokehold by police in New York. His alleged crime? Selling loose cigarettes.

And when it's a question of race, you need only consider America's prison stats, to understand some of the anger in Ferguson.

Non-Hispanic black people make up13 per cent of the US population, but almost 40 per cent of people in prison.

Nothing justifies looting or Molotov cocktails, but it's enough to make anyone angry.

• Jack Tame is on Newstalk ZB Saturdays, 9am-midday.