I really don't care what the hell is going on there and who did what, so much as I care about cops having to follow the law too. If Michael Brown was surrendering, he shouldn't have been shot while surrendering. That's also what the FBI is investigating. 

I'm sure some people will find the following offensive; criminals do have rights, they have the same rights we do and if we don't hold law enforcement accountable to the standards set forth in the Bill of Rights (amendments 1, 3-6, 8 and 9-- notice that half of them deal with specifically limiting the scope of judicial and law enforcement power in this country) and the Constitution (particularly 14) then we are in some deep shit eventually -- they can do it to us too, even if some of us don't think it could ever happen to us or cops will intrinsically recognize a decent ordinary citizen. I'm one of those, and I got hauled over and fucked with, so I don't have that illusion anymore. It's why I take it seriously when the rights of a person that seems questionable are violated; those are my rights too.

In any protest situation, you'll find members of the protest or criminals looking for an opportunity to pull shit. That doesn't invalidate the point being made, or justify the attacks on reporters and individuals not engaging in violence. Again, the Constitution. If law enforcement officers don't want to follow it, they need to resign. If they won't resign, they need to be removed from power. We have mechanisms like federal court and the FBI to prevent that removal from being a messy ad-hoc affair that involves people taking the law into their own hands, because what you get from that is what you see in Ferguson.