At the risk of being facile, I think it was an attempt to deter peaceful dissent that provoked violent protest. Like the execution of Louis Antoine, it was wors

At the risk of being facile, I think it was an attempt to deter peaceful dissent that provoked violent protest. Like the execution of Louis Antoine, it was worse than a crime -- it was a blunder. Edit: It's also worth noting that Ferguson is a particularly pernicious example: an exclusively white power structure that functioned as a rentier class, using its government monopoly on force to forcibly extract revenue from an impoverished, ethnically-minority and, for voting purposes, transient population. It's like a midcentury European Marxist's fever dream of problematic class relations embedded in a matrix of structural racism.