Anonymous hacks Ferguson police dispatch tapes
The tape is from St. Louis County dispatch — but the officer who fired the shots works for Ferguson's police department. Discussion of the shooting begins at 11:26, when a dispatcher mentions hearing about the incident "on the news," and at minute 44, which contains audio from 1:35 p.m. - 2:05 p.m., the dispatcher says "we are switching over to the riot channel."
https://soundcloud.com/theanonaudio/fergusontapes
It's likely any chatter regarding the actual shooting will be found in the Ferguson Police Department's audio dispatches. Those have yet to be released — Ferguson's Police Chief Thomas Jackson says the 911 tapes were still being processed during a press conference on Wednesday, and apologized that it was taking so long.
Reached over email, St. Louis Police spokesperson Brian Schellman tells Mashable, "We are aware of this and are currently investigating it."
Asked if he has any indication if they were real, or any clue how they were obtained, Schellman responded, "That's what our investigators are looking into now. The answer to both of those questions."
The St. Louis County Police Department is currently in charge of the shooting's investigation. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has also opened a civil rights investigation into the shooting.
"We have released these tapes to the public so as they are able to get a sense of the atmosphere the moments before and the hours after Mike Brown was shot," an Anonymous spokesperson associated with the leaks told Mashable.
"The public needs to understand that there were faults in the response to Mike Brown's shooting. For example, crowd control was requested but there was no mention of a shooting. The dispatcher was notified from a caller and Ferguson PD said they had no idea what was going on. This is all in the tapes," the spokesperson said.
The group explains the scanner audio, which is almost two hours long, was lightly edited to remove quiet periods in its description on YouTube:
We are Anonymous.
These files compiled in this video contains audio of St. Louis police dispatch from the date of August 9th 2014, the day Mike Brown was murdered by a Ferguson PD officer. We have released these tapes to the public so as they are able to get a sense of the atmosphere the moments before and the hours after Mike Brown was shot.
These raw audio files have been compiled and long quiet moments have been cut down. Time stamps are available within the video.The group had promised to release the tapes on Wednesday, but ran into technical problems uploading the tape.
"We apologize for the delay, file size is rather large. Continue to stay tuned in, we will notify you immediately," the Twitter account @TheAnonMessage message tweeted just after 2 p.m. ET on Wednesday. "It's not my fault YouTube servers take forever to process."
The website of the St. Louis suburb has also been experiencing cyberattacks since the shooting, but Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson said on Wednesday that those won't sway him into releasing the officer's name who shot Brown.
The officer has not been identified, though Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson said the officer had been with the Ferguson police force for six years.
Jackson said someone burrowed into the website and shut it down for much of Monday, two days after the 18-year-old Brown was killed. Brown's death has stoked racial tensions, violent protests, and looting, along with calls for police to release the offending officer's name so his background could be reviewed.
Jackson said he was unaware of whether the hackers obtained any personal information about police officers from its website. Ferguson, a predominantly black city of roughly 20,000 residents, is about 8 miles northwest of St. Louis.
Investigators have released very few details about the shooting; the events that unfolded on Saturday are still in dispute. Officials only said that a scuffle began after an officer asked Brown and another man to get out of the street, and that the officer's weapon fired at some point inside a patrol car. Witnesses say Brown had his hands raised when the officer repeatedly shot him.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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