November 26, 2014
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The hard truths about American racism exposed by Ferguson aren’t
going away. That’s the case, even as the first African-American
president, Barack Obama, responding to Monday’s renewed rioting, said,
“Nothing of significance, nothing of benefit, results from destructive
acts.” Racism is real, Obama said, and he urged Americans to “mobilize,”
“organize,” find the “best policies,” and “vote.”
Yet on the
ground in Ferguson, where the white policeman who shot an unarmed black
man was exonerated by a local grand jury and went on national television
and said he would do the same thing again, Obama’s words stung. There
are specific and surprising reasons why the rage over Ferguson isn’t
going away. In the St. Louis suburb and across America, blacks and other
people of color still face embedded racism and second-class treatment.
Political leaders have not brought change; they have failed to curb
excessive policing and incarceration rates or create economic
opportunities and hope people can believe in.
“The uprising in
Ferguson was an inevitable reaction to the institutional racism coursing
through the area for decades,” wrote HandsUpDontShoot.com,
citing
the example of police padding municipal budgets by going overboard with
issuing traffic tickets to the poor, followed by even more punitive
arrest warrants if people have not paid their fines.
Here are eight terrible facts and trends about abusive policing and institutional racism laid bare by the Ferguson uprising.
1. Darren Wilson was trained to kill and did.
It was shocking that a local grand jury did not indict Ferguson Police
Officer Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown. But no one predicted
Wilson would go on TV and say he did as he was trained, and tell the
nation he would do it again. Wilson told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos
that he has a “clear conscience” and that he would have done the same
thing if he had faced a white assailant.
His lack of remorse is
not just maddening, but points to a problem that is much bigger than
Ferguson: how local police have become paramilitary machines with
officers trained, equipped and expected to shoot if they lose control of
a situation. Across America, one result is that victims of police
killings disproportionately look like Michael Brown and not like Darren
Wilson.
2. More black Americans are killed by cops. Police shoot and kill blacks almost twice as frequently as any other racial group, MotherJones.org
reported,
after examining piles of federal crime data. “Black people were about
four times as likely to die in custody or while being arrested than
whites.” MoJo said the majority of local police departments do not
report police killing figures to the FBI. “It’s also not clear that
Brown’s death—the circumstances of which remain in dispute—would show up
in the FBI’s data in the first place.”
3. Police are armed and trained to kill.
The militarization of local police has been growing ever since the
Pentagon and U.S. Department of Justice decided to give away surplus
weaponry from Iraq and Afghanistan. The heaviest weaponry is often used
by SWAT teams during drug raids, where as the ACLU has
noted,
communities of color are targeted for nighttime raids. They face few
consequences for making mistakes, such as maiming or killing people and
pets and ransacking homes and personal property. These same teams were
deployed in Ferguson to confront protesters after Brown’s killing in
August, exacerbating violence instead of quelling it.
As an ACLU
report
found, the rampant over-militarization is a national problem, not a few
“bad apple” local departments. The ACLU called it a “war without public
support,” filled with too many “unnecessary tragedies." Non-whites were
primary targets of SWAT raids. Blacks were
targeted
in 39 percent of raids, Latinos in 11 percent, whites in 20 percent.
There is little transparency about tactics, nor accountability for
mistakes.
4. Life in black America isn’t getting better. The
Ferguson protests are not in a vacuum, but come against a backdrop of
ongoing societal hardship, especially in black communities. Obama has
said that the U.S. is making progress on race issues, yet it’s hard, if
not impossible, to separate issues of race and class.
RawStory.com
cited
a long list of disparities that factor into the simmering rage that
boiled over in Ferguson and across the country. “The black-white
disparity in
infant mortality
has grown since 1950. Whereas 72.9 percent of whites are homeowners,
only 43.5 percent of blacks are. Blacks constitute nearly 1 million of
the total 2.3 million people
incarcerated. According to Pew, white median household wealth is $91,405; black median household wealth is $6,446—
the gap has tripled over the past 25 years. Since 2007, the black median income has
declined 15.8 percent. In contrast, Hispanics’ median income declined 11.8 percent, Asians’ 7.7 percent and whites’ 6.3 percent.”
5. White America really doesn’t get it.
These race and class divides are not widely seen as serious enough for
action by white Americans. When it comes to Ferguson, whites are quicker
to accept the storyline laid out by authorities. “Well-meaning whites
have, on the whole, failed to appreciate the origins of racial-ethnic
disparities in health, wealth, education, and incarceration—or to see
them as a problem,” RawStory’s Ted Silverman
wrote. “Many believe in justice, but feel perfectly comfortable when and where racial-ethnic inequality is the norm.”
6. The system defends itself, not the public.
The Brown family, protesters and civil rights advocates all wanted the
criminal justice system to take a fair look at what unfolded in August,
but kept getting signs that was not likely to happen. In August, police
leaked video footage showing Brown robbing a convenience store, which
was intended to smear his character and suggest that somehow Brown
deserved what happened in the subsequent confrontation with Wilson.
The grand jury proceeding was strange, legal experts
noted.
The prosecutor said he was being fair by bringing all the evidence to
the 12 jurors. But that tactic has been interpreted as a deliberate move
to overwhelm jurors and create doubts that would not lead to
recommending Wilson be charged. It is curiously parallel to what
unfolded in the Trayvon Martin murder case, in which experts
said Florida prosecutors didn’t really want to convict George Zimmerman.
7. Evidence suggests Wilson abused his license to kill.
Besides Wilson’s interview on ABC-TV, his grand jury testimony has been
released to the public. At the heart of his statements is the question
of why he kept firing his gun at Brown. Wilson said he was threatened
because it appeared that a stricken but enraged Brown was coming toward
him. Others said it appeared that Brown turned around after trying to
flee and was surrendering.
While that contradiction cannot be resolved, legal experts like the New Yorker’s Amy Davidson
said
that Wilson’s testimony suggested he shot to kill, and not to defend
himself. “What stands out is that once the second shot had been fired
and Brown had started to run, he no longer represented a deadly threat
to the officer or to anybody else. He was a large, bleeding, unarmed man
running down the street in an attempt to get away. Wilson, who chased
after Brown, was the one with the deadly weapon.”
8. If Wilson was scared, the law takes his side.That’s
the bottom line in Missouri law and jury instructions, which strongly
defer to the use of deadly force by on-duty police officers. Brown’s
attorneys had been hoping for a second-degree murder charge, when a
person knowingly causes the death of another. But grand jury
instructions in Missouri, which are read to the panel before it decides
whether to press charges, allow police to use deadly force if the
officer believes it is “
immediately necessary.”
That formulation almost always protects the police from prosecution for
using deadly force because they can say they felt theatened.
That’s
the storyline Wilson told the grand jury and also told ABC-TV, and
which underscores how the system is biased against admitting police
errors even when people are unnecessarily killed. The story of Michael
Brown and Darren Wilson is a prism reflecting many ugly truths about how
American society operates and victimizes blacks and communities of
color. That is why the nationwide protests will continue.
Steven Rosenfeld covers
national political issues for AlterNet, including America's retirement
crisis, democracy and voting rights, and campaigns and elections. He is
the author of "Count My Vote: A Citizen's Guide to Voting" (AlterNet
Books, 2008).
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