By now, what's happening in Ferguson is about so many second-order issues - systemic racism, the militarization of police work, and how citizens can redress grievances, among other things - that it's worth remembering what actually happened here.
Michael Brown was walking down the middle of the street in Ferguson's Canfield Green apartment complex around noon on Saturday with his friend Dorin Johnson when the two were approached by a police officer in a police truck. The officer exchanged words with the boys. The officer attempted to get out of his car. At this point, two narratives split.
According to the still-unnamed officer, one of the two boys shoved him back into the vehicle and then wrestled for his sidearm, discharging one shot into the cabin. The two ran, and the police officer once again stepped from his vehicle and shot at the fleeing teenagers multiple times, killing Brown.
According to Johnson and other eye witnesses, however, the cop ordered the friends to "get the fuck on the sidewalk," but the teenagers said they had almost reached their destination. That's when the officer slammed his door open so hard that it bounced off of Brown and closed again. The cop then reached out and grabbed Brown by the neck, then by the shirt.
"I'm gonna shoot you," the cop said.
The cop shot him once, but Brown pulled away, and the pair were still able to run away together. The officer fired again. Johnson ducked behind a car, but the cop's second shot caused Brown to stop about 35 feet away from the cruiser, still within touching distance of Johnson. Multiple witnesses say this is when Brown raised his hands in the air to show he was unarmed. Johnson remembered that Brown also said, "I don't have a gun, stop shooting!" The officer then shot him dead.
After that, the narratives dovetail again. Brown was left where he died, baking in the Missouri heat for hours, before he was removed by authorities. The officer was placed on paid administrative leave.
Part of the reason we're seeing so many black men killed is that police officers are now best understood less as members of communities, dedicated to keeping peace within them, than as domestic soldiers. The drug war has long functioned as a full-employment act for arms dealers looking to sell every town and village in the country on the need for military-grade hardware, and 9/11 made things vastly worse, with local police departments throughout America grabbing for cash to better defend against any and all terrorist threats. War had reached our shores, we were told, and police officers needed weaponry to fight it.
Officers have tanks now. They have drones. They have automatic rifles, and planes, and helicopters, and they go through military-style boot camp training. It's a constant complaint from what remains of this country's civil liberties caucus. Just this last June, the ACLU issued a report on how police departments now possess arsenals in need of a use. Few paid attention, as usually happens.
The worst part of outfitting our police officers as soldiers has been psychological. Give a man access to drones, tanks, and body armor, and he'll reasonably think that his job isn't simply to maintain peace, but to eradicate danger. Instead of protecting and serving, police are searching and destroying.
If officers are soldiers, it follows that the neighborhoods they patrol are battlefields. And if they're working battlefields, it follows that the population is the enemy. And because of correlations, rooted in historical injustice, between crime and income and income and race, the enemy population will consist largely of people of color, and especially of black men. Throughout the country, police officers are capturing, imprisoning, and killing black males at a ridiculous clip, waging a very literal war on people like Michael Brown.
This sort of thing - especially on the north side - is what gets glossed over a little too easily when we try to fit a particular incident into a broader narrative. Ferguson is a small town of 21,000, mostly white until the 1960s, when whites fled anywhere but where they were. Today, Ferguson, which is a bit north of St. Louis, is mostly black; Ferguson and St. Louis County police are mostly white. That fits a metropolitan area flanked by two rivers that divide neighborhoods and regions by race, the sixth-most segregated in the United States.
To people, like me, from the coast - I'm from Maryland - St. Louis can seem like a blank in the the middle of the country, a place where people and even ideas get stuck on the way to somewhere better, or at least somewhere else. But St. Louis is like New York (the fourth-most segregated metro in America), or Los Angeles, or Miami, or Dallas, or Washington, DC, only more so. Far from a blank, St. Louis is often regarded as the most American of America's cities.
"It is a microcosm of the rest of the country," Sultan said. "If this can happen in St. Louis, it can happen in any city."
It does. On August 5 in Beavercreek, Ohio, 22-year-old John Crawford was killed in a Walmart when a toy gun he had picked up from inside the store was apparently mistaken for a real gun. LeeCee Johnson, who had two children with Crawford, said that she was on the phone with him, and that his last words before she heard gunshots from police officers were, "It's not real."
On July 17 in Staten Island, New York, 43-year-old Eric Garner, a well-known presence in the neighborhood who sold illicit cigarettes and kept an eye on the block, was killed after breaking up a fight when NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo used an illegal chokehold on the asthmatic man. "I can't breathe," he said, before he died. "I can't breathe."
On the night of September 14, 2013 in Charlotte, N.C., 24-year-old Jonathan Ferrell was killed after getting into a car accident. He climbed out of the rear window of the car, stumbled to the nearest house, and banged on the door for help. The homeowner notified the police, who showed up to the house. Ferrell was tased, and then an officer named Randall Kerrick shot and struck Ferrell 10 times.
There was Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla., and Oscar Grant in Oakland, Calif., and so many more. Michael Brown's death wasn't shocking at all. All over the country, unarmed black men are being killed by the very people who have sworn to protect them, as has been going on for a very long time now. It would appear that cops are not for black people, either.
This photo, in which Brown was flashing a "gang sign" - a peace sign, actually - was presented as proof that the teenager was a thug; his friends and family now not only have to work through their grief, but against a posthumous slur campaign. Johnson described his friend in an MSNBC interviewas cool and quiet. Brown's uncle, Bernard Ewings, said in a Sunday interview thatBrown loved music. Brown's mother, Leslie McSpadden, said that he was funny and could make people laugh. He graduated from high school in the spring, and was headed to college to pursue a career inheating and cooling engineering. Monday would have been his first day.
By all accounts, Brown was One Of The Good Ones. But laying all this out, explaining all the ways in which he didn't deserve to die like a dog in the street, is in itself disgraceful. Arguing whether Brown was a good kid or not is functionally arguing over whether he specifically deserved to die, a way of acknowledging that some black men ought to be executed.
To even acknowledge this line of debate is to start a larger argument about the worth, the very personhood, of a black man in America. It's to engage in a cost-benefit analysis, weigh probabilities, and gauge the precise odds that Brown's life was worth nothing against the threat he posed to the life of the man who killed him. It's to deny that there are structural reasons why Brown was shot dead while James Eagan Holmes - who on July 20, 2012, walked into a movie theater and fired rounds into an audience, killing 12 and wounding 70 more - was taken alive.
To ascribe this entirely to contempt for black men is to miss an essential variable, though - a very real, American fear of them. They - we - are inexplicably seen as a millions-strong army of potential killers, capable and cold enough that any single one could be a threat to a trained police officer in a bulletproof vest. There are reasons why white gun's rights activists can walk into a Chipotle restaurant with assault rifles and be seen as gauche nuisances while unarmed black men are killed for reaching for their wallets or cell phones, or carrying children's toys. Guns aren't for black people, either.
And then the protest turned violent, as some citizens began to break into, loot, and set fire to storefronts in their own community.
Police officers shot tear gas and rubber bullets. Thirty-two people were arrested that night. Two policemen were injured. There was nothing easy to make of it. It was a senseless and counterproductive attack on the community; it was the grief-stricken flailing of people who knew it could have been them, or their friends, or their brothers or sons. Whatever it was, it was met with force.
On Monday morning, Sultan went back to Ferguson, where she witnessed citizens cleaning up debris from the night before. Some were shocked by the violence; others said that they'd been backed against a wall, forced into necessary evil. Sultan interviewed an 11-year-old boy about the rioting. "It seems like police are about to go to war with the people," he said.*
On Monday night, police again took the streets as demonstrators again marched in nonviolent protest, holding their hands high. Police again fired rubber bullets and tear gas, and again blocked off the main streets, not allowing anyone in or out. Police were photographed sweeping into side streets, and pointing guns over fences into backyards. It spilled over into today. They ran helicopters and drones over all of it; they shot tear gas; they ran up on citizens with guns drawn.
"Return to your homes," they yelled over megaphones.
"This is our home," the people of Ferguson answered. There wasn't - there isn't - much more to say.
Reader Comments
- People in America, are routinely pulled over- to this day- for DWB;; not for DWW.
(Driving while Black; DWWhite). Growing up in the South, we were routinely pulled over and 'harassed' for DWS (Driving with Surfboards.) [At age twenty, a friend and I counted up the times we'd been pulled over. we could only come up with nineteen different events. They yielded countless searches but we were more savvy than that.
And yet, the likelihood of being pulled over for DWB still is higher. Thus there does exist a greater risk for blacks than whites in theseparticular situations which likely involve 50+% vehicle stops by cops.
So it's NOT an irrelevant detail. I've often been prretextually pulled over...but never for DWB. (In my youth, i'd been through well over 100 such 'stops' which yielded two? tickets.) DWB - here WWB - is flatly a more dangerous existence.
R.C.
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That said, I don't think the PTB are racist, they are against anybody who gets in their way. And as many white people haven't been paying attention to the signs, because they couldn't care less, they will reap what they sow. They will be treated the same way the police have treated blacks for God knows how long. As misterenigma pointed out it has already started.
There is always an element of society that will take selfish advantage of protests and civil unrest. They are the ones that the police count on to allow them to act out forcefully.
I have been involved in many protests, all of them peaceful luckily, but I know how quickly things can degenerate into violence and self-service.
Unfortunately, it is necessary to allow this behavior to occur. In the effort to be as STO as possible, one must not impose upon the free will of others, violent rioters and police officers alike.
This is all a part of the sequence of events that will lead to the final reckoning and this drama must come to completion in order for the proper climate to be reached.
Do we need to be happy about the current social climate? No.
Do we need to feed the machine ourselves in order to quicken the evolutionary process? If you feel drawn to that lifestyle, then yes.
The point that I am making is that this is all a part of the pattern. We are all where we need to be when we need to be there. It is sad that this young man had to die, along with all the others who have died violently in order to fulfill their roles. It is also sad that those who have sworn oaths, however hollowly, to protect and serve are now encouraged to judge and execute without the proper amount of worldly experience to judge accurately, without prejudice.
If I am called to die in order to spark consciousness, then so be it. Yes, I am a white male. Yes, I live in an area where it is still considered a boon to be so, but even here this attitude is changing. Not long from now, I suspect that I will no longer be of the "preferred class".
Very soon, the "preferred class" will be whichever one will provide the most drama for the machine to chew on and spit out, only to move on to the next.
The goal of the PTB at this point in time is to create as much social drama possible, to stir up emotion and allow the lowest common denominator of the current social order to act out. Then the "lawkeepers" can justify their psychopathic behavior while in turn creating an environment of confusion and fear.
The Lizzies love this type of social disorder, they all grow fat on our fear and anger and they will be well-fed when the time comes to reveal themselves for what they truly are. In contrast, those who serve the Light will be malnourished and appear weak in the eyes of the unenlightened.
This will be a very violent time and it will be up to those who have seen the Light to hold strong and not succumb to the more negative reactionary emotions. Hold strong to who you are in spite of what mainstream society would have you be.
Those who 'See' are going to be very vital to the coming transition and it is a heavy onus to be the harbingers of Truth.
"Though we may not be together in a physical sense, we are all one together in Spirit. Fear not the reaper of lost souls, for he is only interested in those that will provide him the best meal, and honesty, fortitude and integrity are as sour grapes in his mouth." - AK