By Anna Daniels
It came as no surprise when St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch announced that police officer Darren Wilson was not indicted for the shooting death of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown this past August.
Ferguson’s African American residents expected the announcement, the local and state government was preparing for it and arrangements were made well in advance for the local, national and international media to cover it.
Since August,the St. Louis police force has been stocking up on riot gear in anticipation of the announcement. Last week Missouri governor Jay Nixon declared a preemptive state of emergency. Since August, Ferguson’s residents–Ferguson’s African American residents specifically– have been asked or told to behave themselves.
That message of how to behave has been delivered by a variety of voices and the medium has indeed become the message. Michael Brown’s parents released this statement last night, after the McCulloch’s announcement:
We are profoundly disappointed that the killer of our child will not face the consequence of his actions.
While we understand that many others share our pain, we ask that you channel your frustration in ways that will make a positive change. We need to work together to fix the system that allowed this to happen.
Join with us in our campaign to ensure that every police officer working the streets in this country wears a body camera.
We respectfully ask that you please keep your protests peaceful. Answering violence with violence is not the appropriate reaction.
Let’s not just make noise, let’s make a difference.
Governor Jay Nixon’s response to questions about his decision to declare a state of emergency was largely incoherent:
I’m trying to make sure that, that we move forward in a predictable, peaceful manner that plans for all contingencies that might occur, so that people of a disparate group of opinions and actions can be heard, while at the same time, the property and persons, person, persons of people in the St Louis region are protected. So I, it … I, I, prefer not to be a commentator on it. I’m making decisions as, in a, you know, to make sure that we’re all prepared for all contingencies, and I think this is another step, positive, you know, positive, predictable step towards preparing for any contingencies.
What appeared missing from his calculations was that there was never a substantive plan to address the way black residents felt about Michael Brown’s death and what it conveyed about their relationship with the Ferguson police force, or their feelings about the militarized police response to the protests in August, the violation of their civil liberties and limitations on press access.
President Obama’s speech last night was disappointingly flat. He acknowledged the “frustrations” of Ferguson residents who remain unconvinced that justice was served and asked them to peacefully and responsibly exercise the right to express themselves. Obama’s acknowledgement was devoid of any indication of his own experiences as a black man in the United States and that was not accidental.
Last night, made for TV theater unfolded in Ferguson. The plot had been decided upon well in advance by the Ferguson and St. Louis police, by Governor Nixon and the media. The issues of structural racism in Ferguson and across the whole country were avoided completely. Instead we were asked to do little more than to sit around in our living rooms and watch how black people behaved and how the police responded. This appalling construct will be discussed across the ideological spectrum as if it were the only story.
Of course it isn’t the only story. Congress has been incapable of passing a bill to demilitarize the police, despite the national outcry against the militarized use of force in Ferguson this past August. The lived experience of black residents in Ferguson goes largely unnoticed.
African-Americans in St. Louis are 2.5 times more likely to be unemployed, a larger racial gap in unemployment than all but three other metro regions. St. Louis County has some of the greatest disparities in public education in the country. In fact, children in Canfield Green, where Michael Brown was killed, don’t even attend school in Ferguson — which is an underfunded but accredited school system. Instead they go to the underfunded and unaccredited Riverview Gardens district, which is 98 percent African-American.
The Salt Lake City Tribune recently released a report that killings by Utah police outpace gang, drug and child-abuse homicides. Jamelle Bouie describes why Darren Wilson was never going to be indicted for killing Michael Brown.
The judicial system as we’ve constructed it just isn’t equipped—or even willing—to hold officers accountable for shootings and other offenses. Or put differently, the simple fact is that the police can kill for almost any reason with little fear of criminal charges.
Scenes of destruction in Ferguson will be played and re-played for audiences across the country until Black Friday shopping pushes all else to the margins. In the interim, we will see videos of hurled bricks, billowing smoke, a car on fire and shattered glass. We will have personal feelings about the behaviors that resulted in these scenes. We will be asked yet again to come together and heal as a society.
Centralia Pennsylvania
The call to come together and heal is a puny hollow effort, no matter how well intentioned. A fire has been burning under the abandoned mining town of Centralia, Pennsylvania since 1962, when a coal vein under an open mine pit was accidentally ignited. “The fire crawled, insidiously, along coal-rich deposits far from the miner’s pick, venting hot and poisonous gases up into town, through the basements of homes and businesses.” Residents were re-located. This fire will probably continue to burn for the next 250 years.
The shooting death of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin and the subsequent acquittal of George Zimmerman became a flash point for this country’s racialized policies. Critiques of stand your ground and stop and frisk laws and the unequal incarceration rates of African Americans have gained only minimal media attention. Beneath these latest manifestations of unequal treatment and justice denied lies the dark vein of our segregated past that has restricted equal access to housing, education and employment.
Images of a burning car in Ferguson are a misleading representation of what has gone wrong in that quintessentially American town. There is little context provided about the open pit, the dark ancient vein beneath it and what smolders there.
November 25 San Diego Demonstrations in Response to the Missouri Grand Jury Decision
Downtown: 5:30- 7-30 pm Edward J. Schwartz Federal Building at 880 Front St
City Heights: 6:00 pm City Heights/Weingart Library and Performance Annex at 3795 Fairmount Ave.
Anna Daniels
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The most arresting part of McCulloch’s statement, & one I have yet to see receive any comment, was his saying he did not make the presentation personally to the Grand Jury. In the biggest case of his life, he assigned the task to subordinates. What kind of message did that send to the jurors?
Ferguson’s and St. Louis County’s earliest responses to the shooting of Michael Brown have been a succession of leaks favoring the shooter’s version of events and delays in the grand jury’s announcement of the decision. Big Media was telling us that tension was high, and the videos of St. Louis County cops in riot gear and armored vehicles seemed designed to add to that tension. Big Media failed to mention Trayvon Martin’s death and the exoneration of his killer, nor did Big Media choose the speak of other atrocities in Cleveland and Denver. It presented tapes of a prosecutor before the Grand Jury attacking witness’ testimony in that snarky way we find all over am talk radio these days, as if she was just doing her job.
So, the whole operation has been calculated to awaken law and order rednecks and their manipulators to the chances of a race war and damage to property.
It seems to me the videos collectetd last night outside the Police Station made so very clear the vast gap between a people who’ve been taunted and abused by authority and the failure of their putative leaders to even nearly respect the laws of that authority.
St Louis County and its apologists will appear in the history of civil rights in the same way Joe Arpaio has, and Bull O’Connor and George Wallace did so many years ago. Governments and media are failing.
Racism is in our DNA. It will take a lot of work over the lifetime of this country to
mitigate it. It’s less virulent than it once was, but it’s with us still, and it’s best addressed by working together on worthwhile goals.. Don’t ask me what: pretty much anything will do the trick.
I would have liked to hear the Prosecuting Attorney’s entire speech last night — why did they wait until nighttime to release the decision? — but NPR cut away to ask some reporter on the street to describe the beginnings of mayhem. Don’t trouble us with the facts of the actual case.
Who was out there shooting guns in the darkness and lighting storefronts on fire? If the cops had NOT been present, they would have been indicted for dereliction of duty. Many here seem to know it all, have all the answers. Personally I don’t know much except that education matters: it helps people appreciate life, get a decent job, establish a home, live by some values, influence outcomes by exercising the franchise.
In the not-so-wonderful 1960’s I remember surging angry crowds and getting spat on at a memorial in St. Louis’ Forest Park after Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered. I remember having to cross National Guard lines in Cleveland to pick my husband up from work at the University Hospital on the edge of the terrible Hough riots. Violence and torching an entire community is unacceptable, inexcusable, profoundly counter-productive — if eradicating racism is the goal.
A week ago I watched a DVD of Spike Lee’s prescient film from 25 years ago, “Do the Right Thing.” I recommend it.
Racism is not in our DNA, any more than is competitiveness, aggression, war, etc. Everything good & bad is taught & learned behavior, except perhaps for “fight or flight” instinct, which is what Michael Brown did when he ran away from Darren Wilson’s War.
“We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
When all else fails, read the instructions. The only problem is that the instructions were originally restricted to only white men who owned property. It took a lot of decades to start to open it up to all men, let alone women. Maybe we need to go back and write another declaration of interdependence and caring. Seems we need an addendum to the original instructions.
While we are at it, we need to revisit some of the other precepts that have been either ignored or warped. Right to privacy –which as one gentleman pointed out in the later portion of the new movie, “Citizen Four” is really about an abridgement of our liberty because you can’t have liberty if you can’t have a conversation with someone in private.
And the right to unreasonable search and seizure. And the right not to be profiled and stopped and questioned because you are ambulating on the designated public right of way at night (must be up to no good, hey why you got that hoody up? It ain’t cold).
Then the festering burning beneath the ground poisonous gas emitting vein of not just prejudice but deeper still authority to abuse authority. You issue a peace officer a lethal weapon and then wonder why someone gets hurt or killed. Kubrick delved into the distorted symbiosis that can occur between law enforcers and law breakers in “A Clock Work Orange”.
I don’t know if camera’s are going to do it, but something has to check the use of triggers on these weapons. Once you empower the bullet, it is too late. And, oh so tragic.
We are paying an ever increasing high price for our personal and national security. We give away our liberty in exchange for a promise of safety. I remember serving as a safety when I was hot stuff in the sixth grade. Got the badge, write the tickets. Do what I say and don’t challenge my authority. Wow, everything but the brown shirt.
Law and order has to go both ways. Having a prosecutor dedicated to interpreting the law as it has been enforced without a separate unbiased review process is just more fuel for the fire, down below and up above.