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E. Steward Rhodes: We thought maybe, having declared a national emergency and deployed the National Guard, they'd do it right this time. But then it became apparent on Monday that the National Guard was only guarding government buildings. And locals confirmed that.We realized they're going to do the same thing as last time, leave people unprotected. We scrambled as fast as we could—crack of dawn on Monday—to get people together.You were in touch with locals on the ground?
There are Oath Keepers right there in the area. One of them… is a police academy instructor. He's a retired police officer. The other one was Sam. He trains the police snipers, SWAT teams. So both of them have contacts in the local police forces. They told us what's going on.
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Yeah, [the police] just didn't do their job. It's a no-brainer. You want to protect buildings against arson? What you do is you put a couple of guys on the roof with fire extinguishers and buckets. It's just logical common sense that hasn't been done.You were confronted by the police. On what grounds did they ask you to leave?
They said that we are not licensed security guards and that their local regulations require a license if you're going to serve as a security guard. But that regulation only covers paid security guards. So it doesn't apply to unpaid volunteers and there are plenty of other unpaid volunteers all over Ferguson who are guarding property, including the young black guys guarding the Conoco station down there, who are in the news as well. And they're doing a great job. So it's just kind of weird that we've been singled out.We're going to an emergency injunction probably tomorrow. Meanwhile… we have our retired police officers on the roofs. They're exempt from local regulations about security. [But] you shouldn't have to be a cop to do the right thing by your neighbors.Let's say you don't get an injunction for whatever reason. Would you just depend on the retired police officers, or would you go back in some other capacity?
We could [depend on the retired police], or we could choose to get back on the roofs and let them arrest us. So we'll see—not sure what we're going to do. But the thing is, the one thing we can't do is abandon these people.
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It's a repeat problem all over the country whenever there's civil unrest. When there's an emergency and the police are overwhelmed, whether it's the Rodney King riots or Katrina or right here, why is it that people standing up to protect themselves are deemed improper and punished? It happened to the Korean storeowners too in the Rodney King riots. They had to protect their stores, otherwise they'd have been burned to the ground. Yet they were persecuted by the local officials for doing so. Same thing here.Frankly, in Ferguson, what they're being told is you only have two choices: 1) a hyper-militarized police state to stop violence, including arson, or 2) let it go and burn the town down. Twenty different buildings have burned to the ground. That's a false choice.
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I think it's both. We get really good, positive press from the local paper there and right after that's when they showed up. So before that everything was fine; cops would give us thumbs-up. So what happened is I think the political brass at the top—the chief of police, governor in particular—I believe he was pressured from above. Of course, I don't know, but I think their behavior in the past is very politicized.We don't care about any of that. What we're going to do is make sure that Natalie's Cakes and More and the Chinese restaurant and the dentist and all the other shops that are right there are not burned to the ground. We have direct threats from arsonists saying they're going to burn those buildings to the ground. And it's not just about property. It's also about people's lives. There are apartments in those buildings above the shops where people live. If they were burned to the ground there'd be a lot of dead people, burned to death.
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Well, it's been mixed. Some of them… understand why we're there. Others are reacting emotionally, saying we're there to shoot black people and we're some kind of racist organization.
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We get a lot of bad press from the Southern Poverty Law Center and other groups that don't ever address us on the issues we actually stand for—that instead want to use smear tactics and false conflation, false association with people we have nothing in common with.Is there anything else you want to add?
All we're saying is that people have a right to not be burned to death and not have their shops burned down. The protestors have a right to stand up for their rights all the time. But… I mean, come on, Natalie's not guilty of anything, why punish her? Why break her windows? Why threaten to burn down her building? To us it's just evil.So we're going to stop that from happening. We're the strong protecting the weak until the weak can protect themselves. But we want them to protect themselves.Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.