“When The Action Ends, The Cameras Will Depart”: In Ferguson, As Elsewhere, Voting Is What Matters
In covering the violence engulfing Ferguson, Missouri, media routinely cite the following numbers to explain the frustration of the minority community there:
Ferguson’s population is two-thirds African-American, yet the mayor, five of the six City Council members and nearly the entire police force are white.
But there are other numbers. In the municipal election held last year, 52 percent of the voters were white — in a city, to repeat, that is 67 percent black.
The first set of numbers is related to the second.
Clearly, what we are calling a minority population is a majority. If most of Ferguson’s eligible African-American voters feel that the city government treats them unfairly, they have a simple remedy: They can elect a different city government.
Black city leaders have made this case, but their message has been lost in the drama of downtown burning and looting. Chaos afflicted this city in August after a white police officer fatally shot Michael Brown, an unarmed African-American. Chaos has descended again after a grand jury declined to indict the officer involved.
In between was a midterm election, in which only 42 percent of registered Ferguson voters turned out to cast ballots for the powerful office of St. Louis County executive. This participation was actually 10 percentage points below that of the previous midterm in 2010.
In the midterm elections nationally, blacks, Latinos, young people, single women and other generally progressive voting groups failed to show up in large numbers. Older white people did.
Of course, calls for civic participation are hard pressed to compete for attention with the world’s news cameras looking for excitement. The Ferguson rioters — a crowd no doubt swelled by opportunists of all variety — are not leaving much to save. When the action ends, the cameras will depart.
The purpose here is not to second-guess the grand jury’s decision. There were highly conflicting witness reports of what happened.
Nor is the purpose to advocate voting along racial (or ethnic) lines. Voters will ideally cast their ballots for candidates deemed most capable of serving their needs.
Nor must a police force perfectly reflect the racial makeup of a population, though, it must be said, Ferguson’s imbalance seems extreme. But again, Ferguson’s black community can change this situation by electing officials sensitive to their concerns.
It’s true that Ferguson’s municipal elections schedule doesn’t encourage turnout. These elections take place in April, far from the traditional voting day in November. They also occur in non-presidential years, when turnout by minorities and young people traditionally drops. In the most recent municipal election, only 12 percent of registered voters — white, black or otherwise — cast ballots. Voters can change those dates.
This poor showing frustrates civic-minded African-Americans advocating change in a normal, nondestructive way.
“Every time there’s an election, we have to show up,” Patricia Bynes, a local black Democratic official, told Reuters. “I don’t care if we are voting what color the trash cans are. We need to show up.”
At Brown’s funeral, a family member called on mourners to make themselves heard at the polls. But only 204 residents of Ferguson registered to vote from the time of the fatal shooting to the Oct. 8 registration deadline for voting this year — only 204 in a city of 21,000 people.
And as pollsters keep reminding us, what determines the end result isn’t how many people register to vote. It’s how many registered voters actually come to the polls on Election Day.
This can’t be said often enough. The power that matters in Ferguson — and everywhere else — is exercised in the voting booth.
By: Froma Harrop, The National Memo, November 27, 2014
“Racism: It’s The Law”: American Institutional Racism Conceals Itself From Those Who Prefer Not To See It And Aren’t Victimized By It
Smoke and fire, sirens blaring, horns honking, a sudden hail of bullets. This is what passes for the American dialogue on race and justice.
It’s hidden until it explodes.
“By 10 p.m., a St. Louis County Police squad car burned just down the street from the Ferguson Police Department, with spare ammunition ‘cooking off’ or exploding in the car,” the Wall Street Journal informed us.
Those who want to shake their heads in disgust can do so. American institutional racism conceals itself so neatly from those who prefer not to see it and, of course, aren’t victimized by it. And then every so often something sets off the public trigger — an 18-year-old young man is shot and killed by a police officer, for instance — and the reality TV that is our mainstream news brings us the angry, “violent” response, live. And it’s always one side against another, us vs. them. It’s always war.
“But what is justice in a nation built on white supremacy and the destruction of black bodies?” Mychal Denzel Smith wrote in The Nation the day after the grand jury announced that police officer Darren Wilson would not be indicted. “That’s the question we have yet to answer. It’s the question that shakes us up and makes our insides uncomfortable. It’s the question that causes great unrest.”
What is justice, indeed? And beyond that question are the real questions, perhaps unanswerable. What is healing? What is peace?
If the officer had been indicted for Michael Brown’s killing and then convicted on one charge or another, maybe that would have been justice, in a “case closed” sort of way. In our limited legal bureaucracy, “justice” means nothing more than punishment. Even when such justice is done, it changes nothing. The state’s “interest” has been satisfied, and that’s all that matters. The terrible loss suffered by parents, friends and community would remain a gaping wound. And beyond that, the social brokenness and racism that caused the tragedy in the first place would remain unaddressed, unhealed.
But not even that minimal justice was in the cards for the loved ones of Michael Brown or the occupied community in which he lived — because that’s not how it works. Officer Wilson, whatever he did inside or outside the state’s rules on the use of lethal force when he confronted Brown on the afternoon of Aug. 9, was just doing his job, which was controlling and intimidating the black population of Ferguson. He was on the front line of a racist and exploitative system — an occupying bureaucracy.
The New York Times, in its story about the grand jury’s decision, began thus: “Michael Brown became so angry when he was stopped by Officer Darren Wilson on Canfield Drive here on Aug. 9, his face looked ‘like a demon,’ the officer would later tell a grand jury.”
This sort of detail is, of course, of immense value to those who sympathize with the police shooting and accuse the black community of endemic lawlessness. See! Michael Brown wasn’t just a nice, innocent boy minding his own business. He and his companion were trouble incarnate, walking down the middle of the street spoiling for a fight. He was Hulk Hogan. The cop had no choice but to shoot, and shoot again. This was a demonic confrontation. Politeness wouldn’t have worked.
If nothing else, such testimony shows the stark limits of our “who’s at fault?” legal system, which addresses every incident in pristine, absurd isolation and has no interest beyond establishing blame — that is to say, officially stamping the participants as either villains, heroes or victims. Certainly it has no interest in holistic understanding of social problems.
Taking Wilson’s testimony at face value, one could choose to ask: Why was Michael Brown so angry?
Many commentators have talked about the “anger” of Ferguson’s black community in the wake of the shooting, but there hasn’t been much examination of the anger that was simmering beforehand, which may have seized hold of Brown the instant the police officer stopped him.
However, an excellent piece of investigative journalism by Radley Balko of the Washington Post, “How municipalities in St. Louis County, Mo., profit from poverty,” which ran in September, addresses the issue head-on. He makes the point that local municipal governments, through an endless array of penny-ante citations and fines — “poverty violations” — torment the locals for the primary, or perhaps sole, purpose of keeping their bureaucracies funded.
“Some of the towns in St. Louis County can derive 40 percent or more of their annual revenue from the petty fines and fees collected by their municipal courts,” Balko writes. The fines are mostly for traffic offenses, but they also include fines for loud music, unmown lawns, “wearing saggy pants” and “vague infractions such as ‘disturbing the peace,'” among many others, and if the person fined, because he or she is poor, can’t pay up, a further fine is added to the original, and on and on it goes.
“There’s also a widely held sentiment that the police spend far more time looking for petty offenses that produce fines than they do keeping these communities safe,” Balko writes. “If you were tasked with designing a regional system of government guaranteed to produce racial conflict, anger, and resentment, you’d be hard pressed to do better than St. Louis County.”
Regarding the anger and resentment in communities like Ferguson, he quotes a longtime racial justice activist, Jack Kirkland, who says, “I liken it to a flow of hot magma just below the surface. It’s always there, building, pushing up against the earth. It’s just a matter of time. When it finds a weak point, it’s going to blow.”
And when it blows, we get to watch it on TV: the flames, the smoke, the rage, the ammo “cooking off.” This is what institutional racism looks like when we finally notice it.
By: Robert Koehler, Syndicated Columnist; The Huffington Post Blog, November 27, 2014
“Is This Just The Beginning?”: Raging Protesters Set Ferguson on Fire
It’s nearly impossible to capture the pain, frustration, and sadness in Ferguson following the announcement that a white cop will not be charged for shooting an unarmed black teen three months ago. But if the faces partially hidden by gas masks and bandanas are any indication, last night’s events can be summed up by one simple word: rage.
“I guess it’s legal for police to kill unarmed black men now,” said one woman, defiant but in despair.
For many of those gathered, the grand jury’s verdict didn’t even really matter—it was the expected outcome of a system that works against them. “We already know what they’ve decided,” said one man outside the Ferguson Police headquarters before St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch had approached the microphone.
A few optimistic souls had not yet given up hope. “It’s never happened, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen,” said one. But when the announcement came, there was no surprise: Officer Darren Wilson will not stand trial for killing a teenager.
The reaction of the crowd wasn’t a surprise either. It started with chants. Then taunts. A few water bottles tossed at police. Tear gas. Smoke. Random gunfire. Arson and looting.
They flipped a cop car and torched it not far from the police station; flames reflected in the glass of storefronts that hadn’t been boarded up in the downtown shopping district, which is dotted with “Welcome to Historic Ferguson” signs. They fled from tear-gas canisters hissing through the air underneath the words “Seasons Greetings” that joined white lights and garlands on street lamps.
The crowd began to chant: “We gonna burn the shit down.”
A few protected stores from fellow residents and one man pleaded tearfully as water bottles flew over his head at police, but a mob mentality took over on South Florissant. That was nothing compared to the utter destruction going on across town. There, on the strip of West Florissant, which is now so familiar to protesters and TV news viewers, the night sky was lit by an inferno. Several, in fact. A storage building became a ghostly concrete frame lit bright orange. A small fire in an auto parts store created explosions that quickly got out of control. Black smoke rolled through the front door and the entire structure was gone to Hell in minutes. Business owners swept up glass in front of their barber shop. Next door, a strip mall popped and hissed as unknown accelerants aided in its fiery destruction.
“This was probably worse than the worst night we ever had in August,” said Jon Belmar, chief of the St. Louis County Police Department, who claimed to have heard 150 gunshots.
In truth, the genesis of these scenes that shocked the country came three months ago when residents of the apartments on Canfield Drive saw Mike Brown lying motionless and bleeding while Ferguson’s cops looked on.
Anger rose through the summer, as the names of more victims added fuel to the fire; starting as Twitter hashtags and making their way on to signs and T-shirts worn by the protesters in Ferguson—VonDeritt Myers and Kajieme Powell. Eric Garner and Ezell Ford. Then last week, a 12-year-old in Cleveland shot dead for holding a toy gun. A 28-year-old gunned down in a dark, New York City hallway by a rookie cop who apparently made a fatal mistake.
They were all Mike Brown, said the protesters. “We are,” the chant goes, “Mike Brown.”
The chanting—so much a part of protests here for the past 100-plus days—was sporadic through Monday night. As looters roamed, you could hear a few of the refrains that have defined this situation, most notably “No justice, no peace.” The phrase took on a greater sense of immediacy as chaotic midnight approached, with the streets belonging mostly to whomever wanted to take them. For a while it seemed like the cops didn’t. The destruction appeared random; it’s impossible to tell why some businesses were spared and others were torched. Although in at least one instance, there was discussion of saving black-owned shops. The Ferguson Burger Bar—a favorite among protesters—was spared despite having never boarded up. Across the street, Ferguson Market and Liquor, the convenience store that was home to Brown’s alleged robbery, was again wide open to pillagers. The tear gas smoke that consumed West Florissant in August—a sign of police oppression for some—was replaced by black plumes coming from the burning businesses.
Protesters simply trashed the place. But I didn’t see any smiles. It was an unfiltered anger that drove them to bust windows and set the flames that would consume a recognizable portion of their community. For the most part, the police simply backed off. And with the streets filled with protesters, gunfire ringing out in the air, the situation was too dangerous for firefighters to do their job.
So Ferguson watched itself burn.
For the young man’s defenders, this country’s sins—past and present—are the reason for his death and subsequent slandering in the media. The loss of his life, and all the others from this summer, back to Trayvon and well before that, are part of a pattern. But for one young woman, who recognized her chance to give a passing quote, Brown’s death is indicative not of an ending, but the start of something. What that is remains unclear.
In front of an engulfed auto parts store, surrounded by mayhem, she shouted five words before disappearing into the crowd: “This is just the beginning.”
By: Justin Glawe, The Daily Beast, November 25, 2014
“Darren Wilson Walks”: No Indictment For Michael Brown’s Killer
Officer Darren Wilson will not face charges for the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The news came on Monday evening, when prosecutor Robert McCulloch announced that a twelve-member Grand Jury had declined to deliver an indictment.
The news brought to a close three months of deliberation, but not the controversy over what happened that day—or the national conversation over race and law enforcement that Brown’s killing started.
The August 9 shooting of Brown, who was black, by Wilson, who is white, set off protests and violent confrontations with police that lasted weeks. Behind those protests were long-standing grievances against Ferguson police and its political establishment. Residents of Ferguson, roughly two-thirds of whom are black, said they were routinely mistreated by members of the police department, which is overwhelmingly white. Among the evidence they cited: Statistics showing that African-Americans constituted a disproportionate share of traffic stops (86 percent) last year.
But exactly what happened on the streets of Ferguson that August day has never been clear. Everybody agrees that Wilson stopped Brown and a friend in the middle of the street—and that some kind of altercation followed. But there are different stories about when exactly Wilson shot Brown and under what circumstances. A key question has been whether Wilson felt that Brown posed a threat, to either the officer or to others.
The Grand Jury considered five separate charges, ranging from involuntary manslaughter (which is basically killing because of recklessness, and carries a maximum sentence of seven years) all the way up to first degree murder (which is basically killing with premeditation, and carries a maximum penalty of life). McCulloch, in a prepared statement, said that the Grand Jury became convinced by reams of evidence—including physical evidence and eyewitness testimony—that Wilson had reasonable grounds for shooting.
He added that eyewitness testimony was sometimes contradictory, and that some people changed their stories once confronted with physical evidence that undermined it. McCulloch also chastised media for reporting incomplete or incorrect evidence while the Grand Jury was deliberating.
McCulloch expressed sympathy for the Brown family and recognized that some would not accept the verdict. “I join with Michael Brown’s family,” McCulloch said, “in urging everybody to continue the demonstrations, continue the discussions, and address the problems in constructive rather than destructive way.”
By the time McCulloch made his announcement, most observers expected the Grand Jury to decide as it did. As Yishai Schwartz has explained in these pages, the law in Missouri and other states makes it difficult to convict police officers of murder, at least when the officers claim they acted in self-defense. As Gabriel Chin, a professor at the University of California-Davis, told the New Republic
The Ferguson grand jury’s decision not to indict was no surprise. “A grand jury will indict a ham sandwich,” the saying goes, but that never applied to police. Of course, society requires police to carry guns and orders them to use them when necessary; therefore, they get the benefit of the doubt in close cases. I can’t recall an on-duty police officer being charged for homicide without clear and strong evidence of criminality; ambiguous, unclear, even suspicious circumstances are insufficient.
But critics have worried that McCulloch—who has close ties to the police department and whose father, a former officer, was killed by an African-American—would not pursue charges as vigorously as he could. McCulloch presented the Grand Jury with a wide array of evidence, without pushing them in one direction or the other. He also had Wilson testify in person. These choices were in some ways true to the original idea of a Grand Jury, which is supposed to be an investigative body. But they are relatively uncommon these days, since prosecutors more commonly use Grand Jury proceedings to build a case for indictments—leaving ultimate decisions of guilt and innocence to a trial. According to Chin,
If the prosecutor had wanted to bring charges, he could have proceeded by filing an information charging the officer with an offense, which would have resulted in a preliminary hearing before a judge who would have determined whether probable cause existed. To proceed by grand jury rather than information and preliminary hearing meant that the prosecutor believed charges were unwarranted, but that he wanted the grand jury to at least share responsibility for the decision. Under the circumstances, there is every reason to think that the prosecutor presented all relevant facts; early on, the prosecutor said he expected the testimony and other evidence to be released; if the presentation was biased or half-hearted then there will be consequences.
The prosecutor did err in his statement when he said “The duty of the grand jury is to separate fact from fiction.” The grand jury is obliged to determine whether there is probable cause, not what the actual truth is.
National polls have found a sharp racial divide on the case, with non-whites much more likely to favor indictment. It would have taken the votes of nine grand jurors to make Wilson stand trial and just three of the jurors are African-American. But it’s not clear whether voting broke down along racial lines and, at this point, nobody but the jurors know what evidence was made available—and how convincing it might have been. McCulloch has said he plans to make the evidence public, for the sake of transparency—maybe as soon as tonight.
This is not the end of the legal saga. Wilson is subject to a federal investigation, to see whether he violated Brown’s civil rights. Most experts think he’s unlikely to be charged, as that’s even harder to prove than the direct criminal charges.
But the Ferguson police department is also under investigation, from the Justice Department, and that investigation could very well end in some kind of “consent decree” under which the police changed policies under close federal supervision. It’s happened that way in other jurisdictions where police have come under attack for mistreating racial minorities—and, as Rebecca Leber has noted, many experts think such arrangements have produced better policing and improved community relations.
By: Johnathan Cohn, The New Republic, November 24, 2014
“Inflicting Terror”: In Ferguson, A Militarized Police Force Isn’t Necessary For Suppression
Nearly every night in Ferguson, a group of protesters gathers in front of the police department demanding justice for Michael Brown. The size of the demonstration has varied, depending on people’s availability and on the weather conditions, but the dedication to protesting has remained consistent since Brown’s death.
In these days leading up to the announcement of whether a grand jury has indicted Darren Wilson for killing Brown, everyone is on edge. The uncertainty of when the decision will be released to the public, coupled with Missouri Governor Jay Nixon’s declaration of a state of emergency, has left plans for action up in the air and the quest for justice without answers. But the people still show up to police departments.
The anxiety has only been exacerbated the last few nights in Ferguson, as those protests have been met by a show of force on the part of the Ferguson police department. The night I was there—Wednesday, November 19—there were no more than about forty protesters at any given moment, met with police presence of equal or greater number. Of course, the major difference was that the police stood armed, in riot gear, and the protesters had only their bullhorns, chants and emotion.
It remained relatively calm for a time. The police, lined up as if to block the passageway to the department doors, already unavailable to anyone because of the metal barricade, played a game of cat and mouse, advancing a few feet and backing protesters up, before retreating themselves. Things escalated when during one of their advances they arrested a young man who had shown up to livestream the event.
The police advanced further as the protesters took to the streets, directing traffic away from their action. Protestors ran to what they thought would be a safe space across the street, but a few weren’t lucky enough to make it. At least five people were arrested that night, mostly for unlawful assembly as well as resisting arrest.
Aside from the chanting, there was no provocation of the police on the part of the protesters. There was one instance of an object being thrown, a water bottle, but other protesters quickly handled it: the person responsible, dressed in all black from head-to-toe, including a black mask that obscured their face, was run off of the protest site and heckled as an agitator who was putting the lives of the protesters at risk.
“If the media wasn’t out here, they’d have arrested us all,” one protester remarked.
A similar scene played out on Thursday evening, with the lesson here being that a militarized police force isn’t necessary to inflict terror. The police have proved themselves violent even without the use of tanks and tear gas. The people’s right to assemble peacefully won’t be protected. The Ferguson police department hasn’t taken any of the national or international criticism they have received to heart. And as the announcement of the decision on whether to indict Wilson dangles in some unknown future, the anxiety builds and takes an unknowable psychic toll on the most dedicated protesters.
But their resolve to see this through is strong.
By: Mychal Denzel Smith, The Nation, November 21, 2014
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