The head of the Drug Enforcement Administration said today the so-called “Ferguson effect” may be real, becoming the second top federal law enforcement official in as many weeks to suggest growing police “trepidation” could be behind a recent spike of violence in some American cities.

DEA Administrator Chuck Rosenberg said he’s been told by police chiefs across the country that — with cops now under intense scrutiny and videos of their interactions often posted online — officers are concerned “rightly or wrongly that [they] become the next viral video.”

Speaking to a group of reporters today in Washington, Rosenberg was echoing comments made last week by FBI Director James Comey, who told a gathering of international police chiefs in Chicago that “some part of what’s going on is likely a chill wind that’s blown through law enforcement over the last year.”

The White House, particularly President Obama, has seemed reluctant to go that far. But today, Rosenberg repeatedly called Comey’s remarks “spot on.”

“I rely on the chiefs and the sheriffs who are saying that they have seen or heard behavioral changes among the men and women of their forces,” Rosenberg told reporters. “The manifestation of it may be a reluctance to engage” with suspected criminals.

Police and other law enforcement officials have increasingly been under the national microscope — and in some cases the targets of potential threats — ever since a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, killed unarmed teenager Michael Brown last year. The controversial slaying prompted protests across the country.

In speaking of the “Ferguson effect” today, Rosenberg emphasized “a lot” of what he’s hearing “is anecdotal right now.” And, in further echoing Comey’s recent remarks, Rosenberg said there needs to be a national dialogue about what’s truly behind the spike in violence in some U.S. cities.

Rosenberg said gang-based competition in drug markets and the widespread availability of guns are also playing a part in it.

“There are some places where homicides are up and shootings are down. And then there are other places where both are up, and other places where both are down,” Rosenberg said. “We’re not entirely sure what’s going on, and we ought to talk about it and try to figure it out.”

Comey met with President Obama in the Oval Office on Thursday to discuss the matter. Rosenberg was a top aide to Comey at the FBI before joining DEA in May.

Steelerslounge.com reports that cops say a man shot himself in the face after exchanging gunfire with officers in Normandy on Wednesday afternoon, but that police report contradicts witnesses who claim they saw cops shooting him point blank in the face.

Activists at Normandy Police Department Corporal Tameika Sanders’ press conference pressed her about discrepancies between her account and those provided by alleged eyewitnesses. But when officers arrived on the scene, the teen rebuffed their attempts at dialogue and continued walking into the 7700 block of Ellington Drive.

The man then ran to the 7700 block Paddington. A man who shot himself during an altercation with police Wednesday near Ferguson, Mo., died from his injuries Thursday. Officers lost sight of him and heard a gun shot, police said.

For its part, the city of Ferguson tweeted that their officers were not involved in the shooting. “The male was transported to an area hospital where his condition is listed as critical”.

Looking out her window, the witness said she saw the man-who was wearing a red, orange and yellow jacket-turn to face the officers, who were just six or seven feet away from him, when one of the cops shot him in the face.

Deron Smith told the St. Louis Dispatch that he saw the teenager running from the officers, but that he didn’t appear to be holding a gun because he was using two hands to scale a fence. He told the Post-Dispatch he heard six to eight gunshots behind his home and went outside to investigate.

He saw a man running from police officers. Police were called to the scene at 2 p.m. CDT by concerned family members to tend to a “suicidal subject”, an 18-year-old male whose name was not revealed. They found the 18-year-old on the ground and unresponsive.

She said it’s unclear what sequence of events led the family to call the police, but she urged anyone with knowledge of the incident to call the St. Louis County Police Department at 314-889-2341. Anyone who may have witnessed this incident or may have pertinent information regarding it is asked to contact the St. Louis County Police immediately. The other officer is a 19-year veteran of the department.

It was at that point that officers “returned fire”, but did not apparently strike the subject, according to the statement. All Normady officers are trained in crisis intervention and must take a 40-hour course on how to handle suicidal suspects, Sanders said.

Normandy officers do not have body cameras. Relatives of the man showed up briefly later at the scene and challenged the police version of how he died.

In this Aug. 20, 2014 file photo police arrest a man as they disperse a protest against the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.

There’s no excuse for the brazen, chilling murder of Harris County Sheriff Darren Goforth, who was shot repeatedly while fueling his police cruiser at a Texas gas station and whose funeral is Friday.

But there’s also no excuse for attempts by law enforcement, media, and politicians to claim that the unmotivated killing is part of a “war on cops” or in any way related to the Black Lives Matter movement or other people critical of law enforcement and police brutality.

To do so is simply to wave away a decade-long decline in confidence in police that has everything to do with behavior by law enforcement, not the citizens they serve. According to Gallup, the percentage of Americans with “a great deal/quite a lot of confidence” in police has dropped from 64 percent in 2004 to just 52 percent, its lowest number in 22 years.

The suspect in Goforth’s murder, Shannon Miles, has a long history of violence and mental problems, including being declared “mentally incompetent” to stand trial in 2012 on felony assault charges. Connecting Miles’ horrific crimes to anything other than his own twisted mind makes as much sense as linking Jared Loughner, who shot former Arizona congresswoman Gabby Giffords, to the Tea Party or Sarah Palin PAC advertisements. Which is to say: None at all (Loughner was not just nuts, to the extent he followed the news, he watched MSNBC and UFO conspiracy docs.)

The rising use of body cameras all over the country isn’t being done to document a “war on cops” but to promote essential peace and trust between citizens and police.

Yet at a press conference announcing Miles’s arrest, Sheriff Ron Hickman argued that “very dangerous national rhetoric” that’s critical of law enforcement is at least partly to blame. “When rhetoric ramps up to the point where cold-blooded assassination has happened, this rhetoric has gotten out of control,” Hickman said. “We heard ‘black lives matter.’ All lives matter. Well, cops’ lives matter too, so why don’t we drop the qualifier and say ‘lives matter’ and take that to the bank.”

Hickman’s sentiments echo throughout police departments around the country. “If I don’t know you,” one Arizona cop told theLos Angeles Times, “I’m going to be extra guarded around you… It is a different world.” Such thoughts are resounding especially loudly in media outlets such as Fox News, where hosts ranging from staid morning-show business reporter Stuart Varney to primetime blowhard Sean Hannity have been quick to adopt the “war on cops” motif. Ted Cruz, never one not to hitch a ride on a media bandwagon, has also gotten into the act. “Cops across this country are feeling the assault,” says the Texas Republican and presidential hopeful. “They’re feeling the assault from the president, from the top on down as we see.”

Such reactions are not just grotesquely opportunistic, they’re wrong in two fundamental ways.

First—and most importantly—there is no “war on cops,” if the term suggests increasingly brazen and numerous open “executions” of police officers. The National Law Enforcement Officers Fund, which tracks police deaths, finds that the number of police killed in assaults so far this year is 25, the same as last year. The FBI says that while the number of cops “feloniously killed” each year has fluctuated over the past decade, “it stands at about 50.” As my Reason colleagueEd Krayewski writes, “In 2007, there were 67 cops shot and killed in the line of duty. In 2007 there was no ‘national conversation’ about police reform, no sustained focus on criminal justice reform, nothing in the national zeitgeist that would suggest the number of murders were the result of anything more than the number of people who had killed cops that year.”

Second, to the extent that there is serious discussion about reforming criminal justice practices, it is driven by highly publicized cases of overreaction or brutality by law enforcement that is increasingly visible due to smart phone cameras and social media. The 2011 case of Kelly Thomas, a 37-year-old schizophrenic drifter beaten to death by Fullerton, California, police, perfectly illustrates the real “new world” faced by police. It was only after Thomas’s father took gruesome pictures of his comatose son’s severely battered body and face and shared them via social media that public pressure grew for a full investigation and trial.

In the past year alone, high-profile events in Ferguson, Staten Island, Troy, Ohioand elsewhere have sparked a nationwide movement to rethink not just policing strategies but also the ways in which race factors into law enforcement and howlocal governments abuse their power to levy fines and fees on their poorest residents. The rising use of body cameras all over the country isn’t being done to document a “war on cops” but to promote essential peace and trust between citizens and police.

It’s a sad coincidence that Darren Goforth’s funeral will take place just as the trial begins for the officers accused in the death of Freddie Gray, the Baltimore man who died this year from injuries suffered during police custody.

By all accounts, Goforth was an honorable man and a credit to law enforcement and his murder is as tragic and disturbing as it is senseless. But if his brothers and sisters in blue and their partisans in politics and the press simply use his killing as an excuse to avoid ongoing reform, there’s no reason to believe public confidence in the police will rebound any time soon.

By Nick Gillespie

Two young men featured in iconic photos taken during the Ferguson, Missouri, protests of August 2014 are among a whole swath of demonstrators and observers whom St. Louis County authorities chose to prosecute nearly a full year later.

Others who were recently charged by the St. Louis County Counselor’s office include a pastor, a “peace poet,” a young student muralist and a legal observer. At least three professional journalists (including one of the authors of this story) also recently found out they would have to appear in St. Louis County Municipal Court.

Authorities have not said precisely how many people have been charged just under the statute of limitations, but court records examined by The Huffington Post indicated that over two dozen individuals had court dates Monday for allegedly “interfering with a police officer in performance of his duties.” An unknown number of other individuals have court dates on Wednesday and next month.

It’s noteworthy that so many have been charged with little more than “interfering.” That’s the type of vaguely defined offense that policing experts say should be closely scrutinized by law enforcement agencies and by prosecutors because of the wide potential for misuse.

A demonstrator throws back a tear gas container after tactical officers worked to break up a group of bystanders on Chambers Road near West Florissant on Wednesday, Aug. 13, 2014. (Robert Cohen/St. Louis Post-Dispatch/MCT) St. Louis Post-Dispatch/ MCT /LANDOV

Edward Crawford — also known as “da man wit the chips” — is one of those now being charged. He was arrested in Ferguson on Aug. 13, 2014. Shortly before that, a St. Louis Post-Dispatch photographer snapped a photo of Crawford, wearing an American flag T-shirt and holding a bag of chips, as he threw a police tear gas canister away from the crowd. The picture went viral.

Crawford, a 26-year-old waiter and father of three, told HuffPost that he recently received a summons in connection with the year-old incident. At the time, he was arrested on an officer interference charge, and a court official said he is also facing an assault charge. His court date is next month.

Earlier this month, Crawford came to the aid of Robert Cohen, the photographer who took the famous shot, after St. Louis County police hit Cohen with pepper spray. Crawford hopes to take classes to become an emergency medical technician, according to the Post-Dispatch, and is considering getting a tattoo of that picture of himself.

He recently told HuffPost that he thinks all the videos and social media furor have helped ensure that the police abuse of the past year hasn’t been ignored.

“In some parts of the world, this is unfamiliar,” Crawford said. “The police crimes are very low, police officers are respectable in a lot of places. Every police officer isn’t bad. There’s a lot of good police officers out there who protect and serve. But you also have some who seem to not.”

Another protester whose image became famous, Rashaad Davis, was arrested on Aug. 11, 2014. Photographer Whitney Curtis captured a stunning picture (above) of Davis with his hands in the air being confronted by heavily armed police officers in riot gear and gas masks. The photo gathered attention after it ran in The New York Times, and Curtis eventually won a 1st place award from the National Press Photographers Association.

Another angle on that confrontation (below) was caught by Scott Olson, a Getty photographer and former Marine who was later arrested in Ferguson simply for leaving a designated “media zone.” Olson does not appear to be facing charges in connection with that arrest.

But Davis, 24, has been charged with “interfering” with a police officer in performance of his duties.

FERGUSON, MO – AUGUST 11: Police force protestors from the business district into nearby neighborhoods on August 11, 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri. Police responded with tear gas and rubber bullets as residents and their supporters protested the shooting by police of an unarmed black teenager named Michael Brown who was killed Saturday in this suburban St. Louis community. Yesterday 32 arrests were made after protests turned into rioting and looting in Ferguson. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Luke Nephew, a member of a group called the Peace Poets, is also facing an “interfering” charge, according to court records. Nephew previously wrote that he and others had been “talking, praying, listening, chanting” last August. Then “police broke into the crowd and started grabbing people,” he said, and everyone started to run.

“I was tackled to the ground,” he recalled. “Multiple cops jumped on me. One grabbed my face and smashed it into the concrete. I felt one of them slam his knee onto the back of my neck. All around, the police were doing the same thing to innocent people. My brothers were laid flat on the ground with automatic weapons pointed at their heads.”

Nephew wrote the lyrics to the song “I Can’t Breathe,” which has become popular in protest circles and was sung by road-blocking demonstrators in New York following the decision not to indict the officer who used a chokehold on Eric Garner. The Peace Poets did not respond to a request for comment.

Dennis Black, a legal observer originally arrested on a “failure to disperse” charge last year, has now been charged with “interfering” with a police officer as well. Rev. Melissa Bennett, who is often seen playing the drums during St. Louis area protests, was charged with “interfering” in connection with her October 2014 arrest, but that case was dismissed on Monday. A high school student who helped paint a mural on the Ferguson movement is facing an “interfering” charge.

And they are not the only ones whom St. Louis County authorities decided to prosecute for “interfering.” The number of people so charged is troubling. Christie Lopez, the Justice Department official overseeing the Civil Rights Division investigation into the unconstitutional practices of the Ferguson Police Department, noted in a 2010 paper on “contempt of cop” arrests that many federal settlement agreements require local law enforcement to track disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and other such charges that are frequently misused.

“There is widespread misunderstanding of police authority to arrest individuals who passively or verbally defy them. There is abundant evidence that police overuse disorderly conduct and similar statutes to arrest people who ‘disrespect’ them or express disagreement with their actions. These abusive arrests cause direct and significant harm to those arrested and, more generally, undermine the appropriate balance between police authority and individual prerogative to question the exercise of that authority,” Lopez wrote.

Ryan Reilly, one of the authors of this story, is facing charges, along with Wesley Lowery of The Washington Post, in connection with their arrests inside a McDonald’s in Ferguson on Aug. 13, 2014. Other journalists who recently received summonses from the St. Louis County Counselor include Tom Walters of the Canadian network CTV and Matty Giles, a New York Universityjournalism student. (Videographer Mary Moore still faces charges in Ferguson Municipal Court brought by a different set of prosecutors.)

A joint statement from the American Civil Liberties Union and several other organizations called the sudden flood of charges nearly a year after the Ferguson protests “a blatant violation of constitutional rights and an appalling misuse of our already overburdened court system.” The St. Louis County Counselor is mostly responsible for defending county officials from lawsuits. The office recently agreed to a settlement with reporter Trey Yingst, who wasunlawfully arrested by the St. Louis County Police Department in November.

A county spokesman told HuffPost that most of the new cases are “probably not even that serious.” The charges, however, could lead to arrest warrants for individuals who are unaware they’ve been charged or unable to make their court date — a very likely scenario given the length of time between the incidents and the prosecutor’s response.

“No matter what we do as lawyers, there are going to be … young people who end up with warrants or end up locked up because of this,” said Brendan Roediger, a law professor at St. Louis University.

Ryan Reilly reported from Washington; Mariah Stewart reported from St. Louis County.

A new municipal judge in Ferguson, Missouri, on Monday ordered sweeping changes to court practices in response to a scathing Justice Department report following the police shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown a year ago.

Municipal Court Judge Donald McCullin, appointed in June, ordered the withdrawal of all arrest warrants issued in the city before Dec. 31, 2014.

The changes come five months after the U.S. Department of Justice strongly criticized city leaders in its report, saying the police force and court worked together to exploit people in order to raise revenue.

The Justice Department specifically said Ferguson’s municipal court practices caused significant harm to many people with cases pending as minor municipal code violations turned into multiple arrests, jail time and payments that exceeded the cost of the original ticket many times over.

McCullin ordered that if an arrest warrant is issued for a minor traffic violation, the defendant will not be incarcerated, but will be released on their own recognizance and given another court date, the city said.

“These changes should continue the process of restoring confidence in the Court … and giving many residents a fresh start,” McCullin said in a news release.

He added that many people who have had driver’s licenses suspended will be able to obtain them and start driving again. In the past, the city’s director of revenue would suspend a defendant’s driver’s license solely for failing to appear in court or failing to pay a fine.

McCullin replaced Judge Ronald Brockmeyer, who resigned after being criticized in the Justice Department report.

The Justice Department launched its investigation into Ferguson’s police department and municipal court after the shooting death of 18-year-old Brown by white police officer Darren Wilson on Aug. 9, 2014.

Wilson was not charged in the shooting, and the incident triggered nationwide protests and widespread complaints of police mistreatment of black Americans.

Michael Brown’s parents filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the city of Ferguson on Thursday, opening a new chapter in the legal battle over the shooting that killed their son and sparked a national protest movement about the way police treat blacks.

Attorneys for Brown’s parents promised the case would bring to light new forensic evidence and raise doubts about the police version of events. Some of that evidence, they said, had been overlooked in previous investigations.

“The narrative of the law enforcement all across the country for shooting unarmed people of color is the same: That they had no other choice,” attorney Benjamin Crump said. “But time and time again, the objective evidence contradicts the standard police narrative.”

Brown’s parents, Lesley McSpadden and Michael Brown Sr., attended a news conference announcing the lawsuit outside the St. Louis County Courthouse. A tear rolled down McSpadden’s cheek as Crump spoke.

“It’s all part of the journey,” she said.

The case had been expected for months. If it comes to trial, the lawsuit could force a full review of all the evidence in the shooting and bring key witnesses to be questioned in open court, including Darren Wilson, the white officer who shot Brown. Wilson and former Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson were also named in the complaint.

Civil cases generally require a lower standard of proof than criminal cases. Jurors must base their decision on a preponderance of evidence, not proof beyond a reasonable doubt, which is the standard needed to convict in a criminal trial.

A Ferguson city spokesman declined to comment, citing the pending litigation. Messages left for an attorney for Wilson were not immediately returned.

Jackson declined to discuss the lawsuit, telling The Associated Press that he was unaware of it until a reporter told him and had not had a chance to review the allegations.

Brown, 18, was unarmed and walking in the street with a friend on Aug. 9 when Wilson told them to move to the sidewalk.

The lawsuit alleges that Wilson told the two to “get the (expletive) out of the street,” causing tension to escalate. Without the “unnecessary and unwarranted profane language,” the encounter would have been “uneventful,” it says.

Moments later, Wilson and Brown became involved in a scuffle through the open window of Wilson’s police vehicle. Wilson shot Brown after the scuffle spilled into the street.

Some witnesses said Brown appeared to be trying to surrender, but Wilson said Brown was moving toward him aggressively, forcing him to shoot.

The attorneys said they planned to cite Wilson’s own initial comments to a supervisor in which, according to the lawsuit, he said Brown had his arms raised moments before the shooting.

Brown’s death led to weeks of sometimes-violent demonstrations and spawned a national “Black Lives Matter” movement seeking changes in how police deal with minorities. In the end, local and federal authorities ruled that the shooting was justified.

In the months since Brown was killed, unarmed blacks have been fatally shot by police in Wisconsin, California, Oklahoma, South Carolina and elsewhere. Unlike Brown’s death, some of those shootings were caught on video.

A St. Louis County grand jury and the U.S. Justice Department declined to prosecute Wilson, who resigned in November. But the Justice Department released a scathing report citing racial bias and racial profiling in the Ferguson Police Department and in a profit-driven municipal court system that frequently targeted blacks.

After the report, several city officials resigned, including Jackson, the city manager and a municipal judge. The municipal court clerk was fired for racist emails, and two police officers resigned over racist emails of their own.

Crump and another attorney for the family, Daryl Parks, said the lawsuit will include evidence that was ignored by the grand jury and the Justice Department, including bullets allegedly fired by Wilson found in buildings.

Civil suits often unfold much differently than criminal matters.

Two decades ago, football star O.J. Simpson was acquitted of the slayings of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman. But a civil jury awarded the Brown and Goldman families $33.5 million in wrongful-death damages.

The family of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed man killed by New York police in 1999, settled with the city for $3 million in 2004 after filing a $60 million lawsuit. The city did not admit any wrongdoing. The settlement came after four officers indicted in his shooting were acquitted of second-degree murder and reckless endangerment.

Wrongful-death lawsuits have been filed in other recent high-profile cases, too.

In New York, the family of Eric Garner is seeking $75 million in damages. Garner, who was black and had asthma, died in July after a white plainclothes officer applied what a medical examiner determined was a chokehold. Garner was accused of selling loose, untaxed cigarettes on a city street.

Following months of protest for the killing of unarmed Ferguson resident Mike Brown, a recent US Department of Justice audit of the Ferguson Police Department inadvertently revealed Missouri police in neighboring cities directly benefiting from property they seize.

Missouri uses the “lowest legal standard” to seize property, according to the Institute for Justice. An officer in Missouri who attempts to seize an asset is supposed to be required to prove with reasonable cause that it was connected to a crime, but many have criticized the guidelines for how that connection is established.

Keep Columbia Free, a citizens rights group based in Columbia, Mo., describes asset forfeiture as “the means by which the government circumvents the Fourth, Fifth and Tenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution to steal property from its citizens as it makes unreasonable seizures without due process and overrides the Missouri Constitution.”

Missouri is one of eight states with laws that are intended to prevent police from directly benefiting from property they’ve seized, however a federal program called Equitable Sharing has allowed police to get around these restrictions. This program allows police seizures processed through the federal government to be given almost entirely to participating law enforcement agencies, creating an absurd incentive to link as much property to alleged crimes as possible, or to wait until certain crimes become profitable until enforcing the law.

Keep Columbia Free founder Mark Flakne explained the difference between criminal and civil types of asset forfeiture, noting that criminal asset forfeiture shouldn’t be confused with civil. In criminal cases, property can be seized after a person has been convicted of a crime. When an innocent owner sets out to reclaim his or her previously owned property, he or she must prove the property’s innocence in relation to the alleged crime. Because property owners must prove their innocence, as opposed to an accuser proving their guilt, attempting to get property back is often not even worth the hassle.

“Let’s say that you have $5,000 cash seized, but it’s going to cost you $10,000 in legal fees to fight the government for your money back. What happens? What are you going to do?”

—Mark Flakne

Despite the Missouri Constitution’s guidelines which are intended to make sure seized assets go to local education funding, police continue to benefit from the seizures they make. The USDOJ audit showed the Columbia Police Department received a total of $349,617 from federal equitable sharing funds since 2010.

Equitable sharing fund expenditures since 2010 total $269,534. The money was spent on police force functions, including investigation tools, equipment, and an armored personnel carrier. About $80,000 in funds received were not recorded as being spent.