This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, August 22nd, 2014.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Clashes between police and protesters in Ferguson, Missouri have consumed much of the last two weeks.

Today, Tim Lynch, director of the Cato Institute's Project on Criminal Justice, answered questions from Twitter about the ongoing events in Ferguson, Missouri.

Grace Yella Naryunda asks,

was sending in the National Guard a necessary action to recover peace

or an act of desperation which escalated? action to mess down in Ferguson and I think we've got all the officials down there

scrambling around trying to make themselves look good trying to improve the

situation but a lot of finger pointing obviously between the police chiefs

highway patrol the governor the attorney general so to me things were bad and the governor was looking weak. He was being criticized in the press so it looked like an act of

Desperation to me

Reporters kept calling me and asking me what do you think of this? You know what do you think the impact of the National Guard is going to be?

And I said it's really impossible to tell because we didn't know at the time they were calling me anyway,

you know, what their role was going to be.

We didn't know how many troops were going to show up.

We didn't know how they were going to be deployed.

We didn't know what the chain of command was going to be,

whether they were going to be reporting to the police or whether the police

were now going to be reporting to the National Guard.

So it was quite the mess.

All right, so we have another question here.

This is from Jim Bavard, at Jim Bavard on

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