Three months after police officer Darren Wilson killed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, setting off what became the Black Lives Matter movement, Wesley Bell — the current St. Louis prosecutor running to unseat Rep. Cori Bush — told a local news radio show that there wasn’t a strong racial divide in Ferguson.

Bell, who was serving as a municipal court judge and community college professor at the time, said he hoped Brown’s killing would “wake some people up” to get Black residents more engaged in their community and that the real “tragedy” of the situation was that the prosecutors hadn’t shared Wilson’s side of the story with the public, which was fomenting distrust in the process.

In Bell’s opinion, not releasing evidence that spoke to “the officer’s side of the story” was a mistake on the part of the prosecution. “To me that’s the tragedy of it — is that months later, I can’t even tell you whether I believe the officer should be indicted or not, because I don’t have the evidence,” Bell said.

Bell is now running with more than $8 million in backing from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee against Bush in the Democratic primary next week in Missouri’s 1st Congressional District. Bush rose to national prominence as a Black Lives Matter organizer in Ferguson. Bell was elected to Ferguson City Council in the first election following the surge of local protests, beating out a candidate supported by protester groups, and went on to unseat the St. Louis prosecutor, Bob McCulloch, whom he criticized in this interview for his handling of the Brown case.

Bell made the comments about Ferguson in November 2014 on the Nick Taliaferro Show, which went off the air in 2017. At the time, Bell was a municipal court judge in the small St. Louis suburb of Velda City, which was sued in 2015 in a federal civil rights case over running an unlawful bail system.

Brown’s killing wasn’t unique to Ferguson, Bell said during the radio segment. “These are issues that have been plaguing our country since the beginning of our country. So when I hear, ‘Well it’s just Ferguson, it’s just Ferguson,’ even in this area, it’s not just Ferguson. These........

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