According to Ferguson, Missouri police officer Darren
Wilson, the altercation that led to him pulling the trigger of his gun and
killing Michael Brown last August started when either Brown or his friend said
“Fuck what you have to say.”
Let’s be clear: everyone in the United States has the right
to say “Fuck you” to a police officer. I’ve done it myself a time or two, and
every single time, the police officer has stood there passively and taken it,
or returned the conversation to the subject, likely my jay-walking or breaching
of a police barrier.
Now at the point at which Brown or his friend “fuck-you’d”
Wilson, no one had committed a crime. All these kids had done was walk in the
middle of the street instead of on the sidewalk, something I remember doing all
the time when I was a teenager in Miami, Florida.
There seemed to be no reason for the interaction to turn
into an altercation, just as there seemed to be no reason for the altercation
to have turned into the killing. We can only imagine the deeply felt emotions
both Wilson and Brown must have had inside them that spurred this deadly
incident.
But as no crime was committed and Wilson proved clueless as
to how to cool down the situation, he should at the very least have lost his
job or been suspended for using poor judgment. Except for one thing—hassling
Black youths is a tried-and-tried-again police tactic throughout the United
States. Everywhere it seems as if young Black men have targets on their backs
when it comes to being stopped in the streets by the local constabulary.
Our indictment should start then not with Wilson, but with
the Ferguson police department and the exceedingly racist if widespread idea
that hassling young Black men helps to prevent crime.
As to the grand jury, I’m inclined to believe that the
members did a proper job of weighing the evidence before them and that they
bent over backwards not to reach a knee-jerk decision in favor of Wilson. But even
if the grand jury appears to have come to a proper decision given all the
evidence, Michael Brown remains a victim of institutional racism. Even if the
grand jury had indicted Wilson for manslaughter, Brown would still be dead,
still a victim of a system that treats minorities and the poor much more
harshly than it treats whites and rich folk.
The protests in the wake of the decision not to indict were
thus not about the decision not to pursue a criminal case against Darren Wilson.
The uprisings, both those planned and those spontaneous, were about the system
that routinely produces police shootings and beatings, virtually always of
minorities.
Sadly, since the Michael Brown case there have been
incidents of police shooting innocent bystanders in Los Angeles, Cleveland and
New York. In the Cleveland case, a child was killed after he pulled out a fake
gun. In a New York case, someone late at night in a public housing complex
entered a darkened stairwell at the very moment a rookie police officer was
walking up the steps. The police officer saw the body—but no gun—and shot. In
what looks like a complete whitewash, the New York police department is calling
it an “unfortunate accident.” Funny, the panicking rookie still had the presence
of mind to shoot to kill. In fact, the ironic but tragic coincidence in all
these cases is that the police officers are good enough shots to kill but not
good enough shots to hit the leg or arm or in some other way disable the
victim. Perhaps police departments should not teach their officers to shoot to
kill.
There is of course the possibility that the incidence of
police violence is actually low when you take into account the large number of
guns on the streets and the crime rate, which by the way has been falling
steadily for the past 25 years. For all we know, a hypothetical study might
prove that the number of police killing of innocent victims was actually quite
low. That still wouldn’t explain the fact that the innocent victims are almost
always minorities.
To say that more African-Americans are involved in violent
altercations with police because more of them commit crimes is a crude lie
based on a misreading of statistics. More whites than Blacks commit crimes,
just as more whites than Blacks are on welfare. Even if the percentage of
criminals is higher among Blacks than whites (to be expected since there are
always more criminals among impoverished groups), there are still more white
criminals committing more crimes.
So how come the victims of these police shootings or other
acts of violence such as death by chokehold are virtually always
African-American? For the same reason that I can say “fuck you” to a cop after crossing
the street on the red and my African-American male friends (all professionals
and graduates of Ivy League or Ivy League level schools) routinely get stopped
by police while driving their late model cars by for absolutely no reason.