A year after Michael Brown's death, protesters remain as furious as ever at police and refuse to say if a cop can ever be justified in using force.

FERGUSON, Missouri—If there is any growing national sense of weariness over the unrest and protests in Ferguson, it was personified by a white Army veteran talking with an activist here Monday night.

"When you guys first started all this, I was with you. I hate the pigs, too!" said the man, who wouldn't give his name but had no problem speaking his mind.

In the year since Michael Brown's death here, the movement known as Black Lives Matter has had success in raising consciousness but not lowering black America's temperature, still boiling at injustice.

"At first they seemed like they had some meaning," the veteran said, "but now they just seem destructive and pointless. Is the idea just to piss everyone off? Because that's what's happening."

"It is to piss people off!" Hermz, a protester from Atlanta, replied. "In order for there to be a paradigm shift, there has to be a sacrifice."

But the Army vet, with his long gray hair and motorcycle vest, wanted to know what the movement is concretely trying to accomplish.

"What's the next level? I don't understand how out of all this confusion and tearing up people's buildings that don't have shit do with your problems makes anyone help you."

Hermz didn't have a direct answer, but prominent activist Deray McKesson did: end mandatory minimum sentences, reform drug laws, put body cameras on all police, task independent bodies with investigating shootings by police.

That final demand has already been met in at least one instance: A Justice Department report found insufficient evidence to charge Officer Darren Wilson with wrongdoing for killing Brown, supported Wilson's account, and echoed most grand jury testimony that Brown attacked Wilson inside his vehicle before Wilson killed him.

So McKesson and Black Lives Matter got the independent investigation they wanted, just not the conclusion they sought. (McKesson insisted the report only cleared Wilson of violating Brown's civil rights.) For the movement, Wilson will never be justified in killing Brown. Furthermore, McKesson said he did not believe that any of the police shootings "that have gained national attention this year" were justified.

As for the one Sunday night, in which 18-year-old Tyrone Harris Jr. was shot after allegedly firing on police, McKesson demurred.