La Salle Professor: 'There Are Hundreds Of Fergusons All Over The Country'
By Gary R'nel
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- The Michael Brown case in Ferguson, Missouri has shown us all that racial tensions are as high as they have ever been.
Charles Gallagher PhD, chair of the Sociology, Social Work and Criminal Justice Departments for La Salle University, told WPHT evening host, Gary R'nel how we live in an "unbelievably segregated society" and that the racial conflict, along with the ensuing riots, are not something that will be exclusive to Ferguson.
"There are hundreds of Fergusons all over the country just waiting to explode. There is enormous amount of racial tension between what are typically white police forces and black constituents that feel that they are not listened to, not part of the process, not part of the power structure. I see this happening, you know a month or two from now, somewhere else in the Midwest or somewhere else where there's enormous amount of white flight, where the tax base has eroded, where the schools are failing, where people feel that they have absolutely no voice in their local governments, because they're white controlled and this thing is going to just repeat itself. "
Gallagher points out that in hard times, it does not take a large group of people to leave an impact on a neighborhood.
"You only need a handful of people, you know, bad apples, to really do a lot of damage to a community."
But when there is a mob of people, he decries the response that had been taken in Ferguson in the past, with what he calls a "militarized police force".
"The fact is that I don't want to live in a police state. I don't want to walk through a downtown where everybody is in tank and a machine gun is on every corner. The police presence in of itself is basically seen as a problem (among the black community.)"
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