The head of the FBI once told me, nobody’s ever been here before. This has never happened before. So we don’t know where it’s going. — Thomas Jackson, former Chief of Police, Ferguson, Missouri
Twelve years later, the “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative is still being chanted in the streets. It was chanted in Minnesota during the ICE protests. It was printed on signs at protests across the country. And according to the man who stood at the center of the firestorm that created it, it was a complete lie from the very first moment it was broadcast.
In this episode of The Hero Next Door, former Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson sits down with Dr. Darcy Leutzinger and a panel of law enforcement and military professionals for an unfiltered account of what actually happened on August 9, 2014, and the months of violent unrest that followed. Jackson walks through the shooting, the riots, the media manipulation, the political betrayals, and the personal cost of leading a department through the longest-running violent civil unrest in modern American history.
A Renaissance Community, Not a Ghetto
The Ferguson that appeared on national television bore no resemblance to the town Jackson served. Before the cameras arrived, Ferguson was a middle-class and working-class community experiencing a genuine renaissance. Florissant Avenue was opening new restaurants and businesses. Housing ranged from starter apartments to mansions with ballrooms. The town had a horse ranch and one of the oldest organic farms west of the Mississippi.
“Children who grew up there were moving back into town,” Jackson said. “The impression that came across on the media was made up. It was manufactured.”
The city was roughly half white and half minority, with the largest Spanish-speaking Catholic parish in the St. Louis region drawing Latin American families from across the area. Jackson attended monthly meetings of nine neighborhood associations, knew the ministers and business owners personally, and ran bicycle and foot patrols specifically to keep officers accessible in apartment complexes and public housing.
August 9, 2014: The Day Everything Changed
Jackson was driving to visit his one-year-old granddaughter when the call came in. An officer-involved shooting. The officer was uninjured. The suspect, Michael Brown, was dead. A crowd was forming.
Jackson turned around, put on his uniform, and made a critical decision before he even arrived: he called St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar and asked him to take over the investigation to ensure independence. When Jackson arrived an hour later, Brown’s body was still in the street as county crime scene teams had not yet arrived. A crowd was growing tense. Then gunfire erupted behind the scene.
In the chaos, Jackson recognized a local activist named Anthony Shahid, a man he already knew and had planned to meet for lunch the following week. Shahid suggested something unusual: have Michael Brown’s mother walk with them around the crime scene tape asking the crowd for patience. It worked, temporarily.
The fragile calm collapsed when a county supervisor called in dog handlers who arrived in battle dress uniforms with German Shepherds and charged toward the crowd. “That looked like Selma,” Jackson said. The situation exploded.
The Birth of a Lie
While Jackson was trying to manage the scene, local media put Michael Brown’s friend Dorian Johnson on air live. Johnson claimed Brown had his hands up when he was shot. The story went worldwide instantly.
“It was a complete lie,” Jackson said. “Normally, when they got a story like that, they have to verify, they have to get other sources. And it just boom, it was out there and that was it.”
Later investigation proved many supposed eyewitnesses could not have seen what they claimed from where they stood. Both the county grand jury and a federal grand jury declined to indict Officer Darren Wilson, concluding the shooting was justified. Even federal investigators told Attorney General Eric Holder it would be “a good shooting” before the federal grand jury refused to charge Wilson despite intense political pressure.
Jackson recounts that when Holder received the news from his own FBI investigators, “Eric Holder dropped his head into his hands and said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’ Because he basically promised the world that he was going to get this officer.”
The Riots Were Not Protests
The night after the shooting, violence erupted across West Florissant Avenue. A QuikTrip was set on fire. Widespread looting followed. Gunfire occurred every single night for months.
“Another thing people don’t realize because of the peaceful protest narrative is that we had gunfire every single night,” Jackson said. “Every night there was shooting.”
Booking records proved what Jackson saw with his own eyes: most of those arrested were not Ferguson residents. They came from St. Louis, Chicago, and eventually from around the world. Anarchists treated it as a tourist destination. A bus of Japanese tourists pulled up, took photos at the shooting scene, and left. As weeks passed, rioters arrived with gas masks and shields, increasingly organized and increasingly violent.
Jackson describes chasing a yellow truck from a looted Walmart, where a suspect leaned out and fired directly at him and Chief Belmar. Two men eventually went to federal prison for seven years for plotting to bomb Jackson. The national media continued to call it “mostly peaceful protests.”
Media Manipulation and Information Warfare
Jackson reserves his sharpest criticism for national media figures who, in his assessment, knowingly lied about what they witnessed firsthand. He describes a prominent anchor who filmed officers in riot gear and crowds waiting for dark to throw rocks, then framed it on camera as militarized police confronting peaceful protesters.
“He knew he was lying,” Jackson said. “It was a straight-up lie.”
Ferguson was the first major event where social media outpaced law enforcement’s ability to respond. The department had used social platforms for parade announcements, not real-time counter-messaging during a crisis. The “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative circled the globe before anyone could correct it.
Jackson also describes funding from political donors sustaining the unrest by paying protesters directly. Fights broke out between paid demonstrators and idealistic protesters on the ground who did not realize what was happening around them.
Political Betrayal at Every Level
At the federal level, Eric Holder met with the Brown family and a Highway Patrol captain but pointedly refused to meet with Ferguson officials. After grand juries refused to indict, Holder launched a “pattern and practice” civil rights investigation that Jackson calls “a pack of lies,” relying on complainants who were not even from Ferguson.
At the state level, Democratic Governor Jay Nixon inserted Highway Patrol Captain Ron Johnson as a political face over Jackson’s head without notification. Johnson publicly said he was “ashamed to wear his uniform,” then was expected to lead officers into violent confrontations. No one listened to him.
Most critically, the governor promised National Guard support for the grand jury announcement night, then pulled it at the last moment. Jackson learned in a meeting at the U.S. Attorney’s office that “under no circumstances was the National Guard going to step foot into Ferguson because the governor wanted me gone and I didn’t step down.”
The Personal Cost
Throughout the unrest, Jackson served as both chief and his own public information officer. Media consultants came and went under death threats. His wife had to leave their home multiple times. His adult children abandoned social media to avoid being doxxed.
His brother organized a rotating security detail of special forces veterans, retired cops, and friends who sat in lawn chairs with rifles outside Jackson’s house every night. One panelist on the episode, a fellow law enforcement professional, confirmed receiving a call to “grab your AR” and sit on Jackson’s porch until dawn after intelligence suggested the Black Panthers planned to firebomb the house.
Jackson ultimately resigned on the fifth anniversary of his appointment, honoring his original commitment. On the night his resignation was announced, two officers were shot outside the police department in what he describes as a celebration by rioters.
The Damage That Never Healed
About a year after resigning, Jackson began suffering regular nightmares, waking up yelling or fighting in his sleep. At his brother’s urging, he began seeing a PTSD counselor who had already treated many Ferguson officers. He continues to see her periodically.
His message to law enforcement leaders today is direct: Ferguson became a template. Minneapolis and every major unrest event since then have been studied and replicated from what happened in Ferguson. Agencies must maintain a credible social media capability ready to deploy instantly during a crisis. And officers must understand that the demonization of police over the past 12 years has emboldened violence.
“People feel they’re justified in violence against the police, even deadly force,” Jackson said. “It’s more important than ever for our law enforcement heroes out there to be very vigilant, because there are people that just shoot them in the back.”
Things are not better. They are much worse. But Jackson remains proud of his service, the officers who held the line under fire, and the community that existed before the cameras arrived and the narrative machine turned it into something unrecognizable.
Watch the full episode on Proud American Studios.
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