The St. Louis Post-Dispatch is reporting Darren Wilson, the Ferguson police officer who fatally shot Michael Brown August 9, has resigned from the Ferguson Police Department.

In a telephone interview Saturday evening, Wilson said he resigned after the police department told him it had received threats that violence would ensue if he remained an employee.

“I’m resigning of my own free will,” he said. “I’m not willing to let someone else get hurt because of me.”

He said resigning was “the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.”

On Monday, a grand jury decided not to indict Wilson in Brown’s death.

Read Wilson’s resignation letter:

I, Darren Wilson, hereby resign my commission as a police officer with the City of Ferguson effective immediately. I have been told that my continues employment may put the residents and police officers of the City of Ferguson at risk, which is a circumstance that I cannot allow. For obvious reasons, I wanted to wait until the grand jury made their decision before I officially made my decision to resign. It was my hope to continue in police work, but the safety of other police officers and the community are of the paramount importance to me. It is my hope that my resignation will allow the community to heal. I would like to thank all of my supporters and fellow officers throughout this process.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch adds:

Anthony Gray, an attorney representing the Brown family, said he believes Wilson was acting merely for his own benefit.

“It’s probably in his best interest to sever his ties with the Ferguson community, as well as the Ferguson police department,” Gray said. “I think this incident has severely compromised his ability to police in the way he was paid to do by the city.”

Watch a news report on Wilson’s resignation AFTER THE JUMP…(autoplay)

And if you missed our coverage of LGBT organizations reacting to the grand jury decision, click here. 

Indian police initiated a “crackdown” on public begging that resulted in the jailing of 167 hijras, which are transgender Indian women and also third gender identifiers, in a Hoysalas beggars colony located on the outskirts of Bangalore reports The Advocate and LGBT Indian news source Orinam. The crackdown began a day after Bangalore’s Pride parade concluded. An anti-begging law enacted in 1975 under the Karnataka Prohibition of Beggary Act declares that detained beggars must go to a “relief center” for “rehabilitation” and stay there for a total of three years.

Fortunately, police later released all 167 hijras after they wrote guarantees saying that they will no longer ask strangers for money or food however, India’s LGBT community believes the crackdown is a response directed toward the community after protests staged at Bangalore’s Pride parade denounced the recriminalization of homosexuality that occurred in December 2013. Nearly 2,000 hijras and their supporters marched to the town hall on Wednesday to protest the actions of police after the crackdown sweep that occurred on Monday.

Orinam is calling for an inquiry, claiming that many of the hijras were not actively begging-many were going about their daily chores at the time they were taken into custody. Orinam also claims police barged into hijra homes, dragging them out onto the street. Critics of the anti-begging law claim that it makes looking poor a criminal act, leaving hijras susceptible to incarceration because they’re often considered “untouchables,” that do not have access to certain forms and levels of employment. Although all 167 of those detained were quickly released, many are fearful that hijra arrests will continue in the coming weeks.

Film maker and photographer Luigi Storto released a trailer almost a year ago for his film “Naleena,” about hijra life and the unique procedure a hijra undergoes to “renounce” one’s gender. Watch the intriguing trailer, AFTER THE JUMP…