"It's legal to kill unarmed black men in America!" shouted the man with the gas mask, known as T. Dubb.
A portion of the crowd peeled off and sprinted toward the barricade. Several water bottles were hurled at the officers, who batted them away with plastic shields. The crowd began chanting obscenities.
After the pause for the prosecutor, the crowd had forgotten to obey the pause requested by the Brown family - 4.5 minutes of silence before protests began, to mark the 4.5 hours his body lay on Canfield Drive.
"I feel like the verdict was unfair, that it shouldn't have taken so long to reach it," said Duane Coats, a calm voice amid the cries and profane jeers, an elder with the Christian Faith Center. His task, he said, was to stop protesters from throwing bottles and persuade them to stick to peaceful actions. Protest organizers had deployed him and other clergy members to the likely hot spots in greater St. Louis to try to urge nonviolence.
"I need to be here with my people," Carlos Ball, another demonstrator, who was holding a poster with a picture of his brother, Cary, who he said was killed by police in St. Louis in 2013. "It's the same struggle. I've got two sons, nieces and nephews. If it takes my fighting for them so they can live and be peaceful, that's what I got to do."
Earlier, just before the announcement, the crowds were much sparser at locations that have become totemic stopping points for supporters and mourners. Rodney Jones took a 360-degree panoramic video of the corner of West Florissant and Ferguson avenues. He grew up here, moved a short distance away and came back to make sure his parents were safe.
"I came to see what the reaction is," he said. "This is uncharted waters for everybody."
Through his viewfinder, he could see knots of young men beginning to cluster in the parking lot of the McDonald's and in shopping strips where most of the businesses have plywood over the windows - a defense against possible looters - even though they remain open. The McDonald's was locked early on this night. So was the liquor store where Brown made his last stop before walking down Florissant, turning right on Canfield and encountering Officer Darren Wilson.
On toward Canfield, the boarded-up chop suey restaurant was doing a brisk business and planned to stay open at least until the decision was announced. "After that, I don't know," said the guy slinging chicken fried rice and egg-drop soup.
A small group of residents gathered on Canfield, beside the memorial of stuffed animals and flowers in the middle of the street. A man who would give only his middle name, Akeem, because he said he was too outspoken for his own safety, marched around the memorial hundreds of times in the hour before the decision was announced.
"They gotta stop killing black people for nothing," he said. At 30, he has a 1-year-old son. "Fifteen years from now, he could be walking down the street and he gets executed."
Protest groups said they had scouted locations around the area for demonstrations and civil disobedience. The clergy members fanned out to try to counsel calm amid gathering crowds. Legal observers were on hand to take notes on any confrontations with police. And young residents belonging to an activist collective called Copwatch carried video cameras to document police actions.
Unlike the first furious wave of demonstrations in the weeks after Brown's killing - which included looting, the burning of one business and occasional gunfire, and which also featured heavily armed police firing tear gas and rubber projectiles at demonstrators - this time, protesters and police have had 3 and a half months to plan and prepare. Organizers and authorities held out hope that the preparations, as well as recent negotiations over rules of engagement, would lead to more peaceful action in the streets after the grand jury decision.
Local protest groups have held thousands of hours of training for hundreds of supporters in peaceful direct action and understanding their legal rights. They have distributed information about jail support and lawyers.
County and state police, meanwhile, have been training in how to handle civil disobedience and de-escalate encounters with demonstrators. And they have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars stockpiling tear gas and riot gear. The National Guard was to be deployed at numerous locations, including shopping centers, to protect property.
The protest movement is sprawling and decentralized, a diverse coalition of newly engaged young activists and more traditional religious and social justice groups. Perhaps the largest cohort within the movement is young African Americans from the northern part of St. Louis County, which includes Ferguson and neighboring communities. But it also includes seasoned organizers from across the country who have been imparting their experience with colorful and creative tactics designed to get attention without violence. A defining feature has been the alliances forged across racial and class divides.
The activists are already looking beyond Michael Brown, who they see as one name in a tragic roster of young black males killed by police, including 12-year-old Tamir Rice, fatally shot by officers Saturday in Cleveland while carrying a toy gun. They fervently hope that the energy swirling in Ferguson will power a sustained movement to address racial profiling, how minority neighborhoods are policed, and other perceived injustices in the criminal-justice system.
