Ferguson, MO has been the focus of intense media coverage over the past several months following the shooting death of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer under - shall we say - questionable circumstances. The power structures of the city basically did everything wrong that could be done wrong, and then invented some new things to screw up and turned the city into a simmering pot of rage, resentment, frustration, and lots and lots of cameras.
But what happened was desperately needed in an age when the Supreme Court hosts 5 rich, white men from privileged backgrounds and gated-community-lives who can say - with straight faces - that racism is no longer a problem in this country. What happened very quickly was national focus on the insane militarization of our domestic police forces, the ongoing racial tensions and political disenfranchisement of minorities, and the appalling dehumanization of American citizens by the very institutions we peddle around the world as the benchmarks of civilization and stability.
We saw a suburban police force roll out tanks and weapons of war against protesters who were mostly peacefully demonstrating against generations of feeling preyed upon or abandoned by the police who are supposed to protect them. In spite of the media's moth-to-flame attraction to the small number of violent protesters and straight up looters, most of the protests were peaceful, organized, cogent, and most of all - valid! The citizens of Ferguson had valid cause to protest, and had an important message for communities all over the country.
But yesterday the decision by the grand jury came out and they did not indict officer Darren Wilson on criminal charges in the death of Michael Brown. Cameras and police departments everywhere braced for riots and protests and other dramatic reactions. While the truth for the families of those directly involved is that it was an individual decision about personal justice and accountability, I'm glad that Darren Wilson was not indicted. If he had been, then the sounds of protest and real issues would have been drowned out by a focus on singular justice (or retribution, depending on your perspective).
The criminal justice system is laser-focused on the particulars - the individual defendant, victim, situation, fact patterns. A trial would have brought forth unflattering facts about the victim, leading to further resentment and feelings that a dead teen is being villainized without being able to defend himself. The family would have been held in that moment in time for months - reliving and reliving and reliving the moments leading up to the death of their child. And in the end, the statutes governing police action may not have yielded a conviction anyway. All of which would have kept Ferguson (and everyone else paying attention) focused on THAT situation and THAT outcome. And if the outcome was not what the public wanted, the reactions could have been exponentially worse and infinitely less impactful.
But the silver lining of this tragic death has been the mobilization of the community and the willingness to demand that the rest of the country see them and hear them and experience life in an American suburb where police respond to people with preparations for open war in America's streets. Everyone looked to Ferguson and saw institutional racism, political disenfranchisement, and basically the total breakdown of relations between citizens of an American town and the police and power structures who are supposed to protect them.
And that is what we need to continue talking about. About the role of domestic police as separate from the military, about why suburban police departments are armed to the teeth with the implements of war and willing to use them on our own people. About why - in 2014 - black communities are still governed by white institutions and why they don't seem to understand how to interact with each other. About why voting rates and political involvement in such communities remain so abysmally low that the power structures remain stagnant. About whether police will behave differently if they are on camera (all evidence points resoundingly to YES!) and why money was spent on military hardware instead of body cameras. About why entire communities feel that the police are the enemy and how the rest of us don't understand that they're actually right in many cases. And about how police deal with these problems in their own ranks. Most police officers are dedicated, caring, brave, and successful in their roles, but when it goes wrong, it goes viciously wrong.
None of this would have been heard if Darren Wilson faced a trial. Now that the incident in isolation is over, the conversation can move on from assigning a level of blame to a single bad actor and on to the more substantive, institutional conversations that we desperately need to have. And hopefully this allows Michael Brown's family to continue bringing attention to the issues more than to the tragedy of the individual shooting. Michael Brown was someone's son, but he is now more than that. He is a symbol of what has gone wrong and what has failed to go right. He shouldn't be a martyr - it does no good to pretend he was a spotless cherub in a harsh world. He was a flawed person, a young person who didn't make good decisions all the time - like most of us. To a greater or lesser degree, most of us can find an incident in our lives when we were just glad no one saw that. That's life. We all do bad things, make bad decisions, make mistakes and we move on and hopefully learn from them. I personally think our social drive to find perfect, spotless, lily-white politicians to elect 'representatives' is an absurdity of counter-productive impulse, but that's another blog. Michael Brown may have done something wrong, but in America, you shouldn't fear being shot dead for that. More importantly, when people respond to things, the police should not be rolling out Tianamen Square style over-responses. The police should be able to relate to the population and bring peace. In Ferguson, the police made everything worse and that is what we need to be talking about.
And I truly hope that we do. We will all benefit from taking a step away from using local police forces as mini-armies. That's not their role and we have no grounds to peddle the American Way in other countries when we can't even distinguish between police and military on our own streets.
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