There are continuing demonstrations in Ferguson, Missouri, resulting from the 9 August police murder of African American teenager Michael Brown.

On 30 August, the central demand of a large march was for the local prosecutor, Robert McCulloch, to resign for his failure to bring charges against Darren Wilson, the white cop who killed Brown.

The mood of the marchers reflected the widely held view that McCulloch and the police want to drag out the “investigation” until the demonstrations abate and national news coverage dies down. The likely result will be a whitewash of the case.

Even if charges are brought, it is unlikely there will be a conviction of Wilson. When police are charged in cases where they have used deadly force against Blacks in the US, juries usually acquit or cannot reach a verdict.

There still are national repercussions of the Ferguson murder.

On 23 August, thousands marched in Staten Island, part of New York City, to protest the police killing of an unarmed Black man, Eric Garner, in July. The action was led by Reverend Al Sharpton, who has been outspoken since the killing.

Garner, a 43-year-old African American father of six, was choked to death by police. His crime? The police charge he was selling “loose cigarettes” on the street. So they placed him in a chokehold, wrestled him to the ground, and ignored his pleas of “I can’t breathe”.

The whole scene was caught on a cell phone video by Ramsey Orta, and was aired on national TV. For some unclear reason, the police later arrested Orta and his wife.

At the march, Amy Goodman of “Democracy Now!” interviewed Garner’s daughter Erica. “My dad was a loving man,” she said. “He was a humble man, and he was a nice man … Seeing the videotape, I was very traumatised … [S]eeing my father die on national TV was just horrible.”

One 12-year-old held a sign saying, “No justice, no peace. Rest in peace, Eric Garner, Mike Brown, Travon Martin, Sean Bell, all the fallen soldiers” – referring to some of the many young Black men police and vigilantes have killed across the country.

One young woman was asked what she hoped the protest would achieve. “To live until I’m 18 and not get shot. You want to get older. You want to experience life. You don’t want to die in a matter of seconds because of cops.”

The march was endorsed by two unions, the United Federation of Teachers and Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union. Some racist members of both unions attacked this decision, claiming to support their “union brothers” in the police.

While police are recruited largely from the working class, they are trained and hardened to be foes of the working class. Their role as strikebreakers is only one way this is manifested.

The Police Sergeants Benevolent Association took out large ads in the New York Times and New York Post attacking Mayor de Blasio for allowing the march to take place.

A reporter for the New York Times noted, “In the weeks since Mr. Garner’s death, some officers have chafed at the elevated profile of the Rev. Al Sharpton … Though [the ad] did not mention Mr. Sharpton by name, it criticized Mr. de Blasio for offering a ‘public platform to the loudest of the city’s anti-safety agitators’.”

The day the cop ad appeared, Sharpton was in Ferguson to attend the funeral of Michael Brown. Some 2,500 packed into the sanctuary of the Friendly Temple Missionary Baptist Church to say goodbye. Another 2,000 were in overflow rooms, and hundreds more were outside, singing “We Shall Overcome”.

Brown’s casket was topped by red roses, echoing the hundreds of roses laid on the street where he was killed, along with the red Cardinal baseball cap he wore when he was shot.

The families of Travon Martin and Sean Bell were in attendance, joining the Brown family. Travon Martin was the unarmed Black teenager murder by a racist vigilante in Florida in 2012. The killer was found “not guilty” in a travesty of a trial.

Sean Bell, another unarmed young Black man, was killed in 2006 when three men were shot at a total of 50 times by New York City police, killing Bell the morning before his wedding and severely wounding two of his friends. Three of the five detectives involved in the shooting were tried and found not guilty.

Travon Martin’s lawyer, Benjamin Crump, spoke at Brown’s funeral, recalling the infamous Dred Scott Supreme Court decision of 162 years ago, which upheld slavery and declared that Blacks were not citizens or even people covered by “We the People” in the Declaration of Independence.

In one of history’s ironies, Dred Scott is buried down the same street in Ferguson where Michael Brown was shot.

Sharpton spoke, “This is about justice. This is about fairness.” The crowd rose to its feet with shouts of agreement when he continued, “America is going to have to come to terms with, there’s something wrong that we have money to give military equipment to police forces, but we don’t have money for public education and money to train our children …

“How do you think we look [to the world] when young people marched non-violently asking for the land of the free and the home of the brave to hear their cry, and you put snipers on the roof and pointed guns at them?”

Sharpton also referred to the fact that in a three-week span, there was a video of an unarmed Black woman in California flat on the ground while a Highway Patrolman kneeled on her and punched her 15 times, a video of the choking to death of Garner and then a video of Michael Brown’s body lying on the ground for four hours after being shot to death.

Following the funeral, the cortege was greeted by people lining the street on the way to the cemetery, with their hands above their heads, repeating the rallying cry, “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!”

Since the funeral, demonstrations in Ferguson have been peaceful, as the police have pulled back from the military-style assaults they used to break up earlier protests.