I'm not sure there is anything anyone can do in a riot situation of this nature, everyone was reacting emotionally with a very limited amount of facts. The community decided what happened and reacted, and I do believe that the looters were not from the community - County even said that they had social media reports of them talking about doing it.
The Chief set out staging areas incase shit hit the fan, but he stayed uninvolved thinking that was the best way to not flame the flames of anger. I think he made the right call, standing back and letting the community express the anger of what they perceive(d?) as injustice and brutality - it's apparently been a long standing issue with the community and the police being too 'hostile' to them. It wasn't until the looting got really serious that the Chief did anything - somewhere out there, there is a video of the officers standing there watching as stores are looted and burnt. -- I can't imagine how hard that was for the good officers watching someone else's livelihood going up in smokes and being told to stay out of it.
Anyway, that said he was left with no choice on the matter, the looting got worse, the burnings started. I saw a report that 24 police vehicles were destroyed in the riot, some 13 businesses looted, and the fires (no idea how many.) At some point, as the Chief charged with protecting the interest of the people, there is NO choice but to move in with riot shields and 'military' force. It has to happen because the only other choice is to just let, what they probably felt were community outsiders due to social media, destroy everything. It had to be stopped and I don't know how they managed to do that using only rubber bullets and smoke bombs or w/e.
Personally, I was impressed with how the Ferguson Chief handled things. A lot of people are complaining about not giving out the name of the officer involved, not really coming forward with information on the incident, etc., but you cannot blame 'him' for that. He wasn't in charge of that stuff. The FIRST thing the chief did is ask county to come investigate the situation, because they all know there's a police/community issue, they've admitted it on camera even, and said they're trying to work at it, but they don't know what to do other than trying to pull in more 'community representative' officers to try to regain the publics trust.
I can see why they are having trouble hiring though, the community isn't exactly full of officer material. (Hear me out, before you go off calling me a racist.) There's an education problem in the community, there's crime problems, and most difficult to over come for building trust with the community is that there's already a huge distrust of police. So even those folks in the community who might have potential to become an officer, likely do not have any desire to 'turn against their community' in their eyes.
In a long term solution to repair that distrust, it would likely take a group of people from the community to go in together and become officers in order to even begin to put a dent in that 'distrust' that's built up over the years. Adding one or two here and there isn't going to do anything because the community would very likely look upon them as turncoats and consider them corrupted. The only other possible 'solution' I can come up with is probably a bit far out of the box for people to buy into: basically letting the community 'vote' on which officers are policing their district. (That wouldn't solve their distrust of the higher ups, but maybe it could start to bring back trust on the streets.)
