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Police Groups Report Progress In Talks With Rams

Rams media

The St. Louis Police Officers Association and the St. Louis County Police Association report progress following a meeting with leaders of the St. Louis Rams to discuss the public display by five players of the "hands-up-don't-shoot" gesture used by Ferguson protesters.

The St. Louis police group earlier had called the players’ actions “inflammatory’’ and anti-law enforcement.  The players were acting in support of Ferguson protesters, who have contended that Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson should have faced a trial after the fatal shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown.

Protests, some involving property damage, have been held locally, nationally and worldwide since a St. Louis County grand jury announced Nov. 24 that it was not going to indict Wilson.

The police groups called the talks with the Rams “productive but very preliminary.”  The meeting ended with an agreement to continue the dialogue.
St Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson was involved in the meeting. Rams executives previously talked by phone with St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar prior to the meeting.

St. Louis Police Officers Association business manager Jeff Roorda said in a statement, "We made some progress today and we had a healthy interaction with the Rams.  We feel strongly that they better understand our perspective and the perspective of the law-abiding citizens that support law enforcement…”

Jo Mannies has been covering Missouri politics and government for almost four decades, much of that time as a reporter and columnist at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She was the first woman to cover St. Louis City Hall, was the newspaper’s second woman sportswriter in its history, and spent four years in the Post-Dispatch Washington Bureau. She joined the St. Louis Beacon in 2009. She has won several local, regional and national awards, and has covered every president since Jimmy Carter. She scared fellow first-graders in the late 1950s when she showed them how close Alaska was to Russia and met Richard M. Nixon when she was in high school. She graduated from Valparaiso University in northwest Indiana, and was the daughter of a high school basketball coach. She is married and has two grown children, both lawyers. She’s a history and movie buff, cultivates a massive flower garden, and bakes banana bread regularly for her colleagues.