SOYMB blog gathers together various commentaries about the
Ferguson police-murder and the decision not to prosecute.
It takes a brave person to call a Jew racist if she or he
still hold a certain amount of antipathy towards Germans. Black folks’ negative
experiences with police have extended well beyond the time frame of Hitler’s
twelve year Reich, and even as those experiences did not stop seventy years
ago, or even seventy days ago, or seventy minutes. Whether we call it a war on
drugs, or “Operation Ghetto Storm” as the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement dubs
it, what we are dealing with is nothing less than permanent war waged by the
state and its allies on a mostly poor and marginalized Black and Brown
working-class. Five centuries in the making, it stretches from slavery and
imperialism to massive systematic criminalization. We see the effects on our
children, in the laws that make it easier to prosecute juveniles as adults; in
the deluge of zero tolerance policies (again a by-product of the war on drugs);
in the startling fact that expulsions and suspensions have risen exponentially
despite a significant decline in violent crime. Crisis, moral panics,
neoliberal policies, racism fuel an expansive system of human management based
on incarceration, surveillance, containment, pacification, lethal occupation,
and gross misrepresentation.
As we waited for the grand jury’s decision, a
twelve-year-old Black boy named Tamir Rice was shot and killed by police in
Cleveland because the officer mistook his toy gun for a real one. Tamir was
playing outside of Cleveland’s Cudell Recreation Center, one of the few public
facilities left that provide safe space for children.
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As we waited, Cleveland cops took the life of Tanisha
Anderson, a 37-year-old Black woman suffering from bipolar disorder. Police
arrived at her home after family members called 911 to help her through a
difficult crisis, but rather than treat her empathetically they did what they
were trained to do when confronted with Black bodies in Black
neighborhoods—they treated her like an enemy combatant. When she became
agitated, one officer wrestled her to the ground and cuffed her while a second
officer pinned her “face down on the ground with his knee pressed down heavily
into the back for 6 to 7 minutes, until her body went completely limp.” She
stopped breathing. They made no effort to administer CPR, telling the family
and witnesses that she was sleeping. When the ambulance finally arrived twenty
minutes later, she was dead.
As we waited, police in Ann Arbor, Michigan, killed a
forty-year-old Black woman named Aura Rain Rosser. She was reportedly
brandishing a kitchen knife when the cops showed up on a domestic violence
call, although her boyfriend who made the initial report insisted that she was
no threat to the officers. No matter; they opened fire anyway.
As we waited, a Chicago police officer fatally shot
19-year-old Roshad McIntosh. Despite the officer’s claims, several eyewitnesses
reported that McIntosh was unarmed, on his knees with his hands up, begging the
officer to hold his fire.
As we waited, police in Saratoga Springs, Utah, pumped six
bullets into Darrien Hunt, a 22-year-old Black man dressed kind of like a ninja
and carrying a replica Samurai sword. And police in Victorville, California,
killed Dante Parker, a 36-year-old Black man and father of five. He had been
stopped while riding his bike on suspicion of burglary. When he became
“uncooperative,” the officers repeatedly used Tasers to try to subdue him. He
died from his injuries.
As we waited, a twenty-eight-year-old Black man named Akai
Gurley met a similar fate as he descended a stairwell in the Louis H. Pink
Houses in East New York, Brooklyn. The police were on a typical reconnaissance
mission through the housing project. Officer Peter Liang negotiated the
darkened stairwell, gun drawn in one hand, flashlight in the other, prepared to
take down any threat he encountered. According to liberal mayor Bill DeBlasio
and police chief Bill Bratton, Mr. Gurley was collateral damage. Apologies
abound. He left a two-year-old daughter.
As we waited, LAPD officers stopped 25-year-old Ezell Ford,
a mentally challenged Black man, in his own South Los Angeles neighborhood and
shot him to death. The LAPD stopped Omar Abrego, a 37-year-old father from Los
Angeles, and beat him to death.
And as we waited and waited and waited, Darren Wilson got
married, continued to earn a paycheck while on leave, and received over
$400,000 worth of donations for his “defense.”
To many white Americans the police are the good guys but
that is not the black experience by and large. Like US soldiers in Afghanistan,
Iraq or Vietnam, police officers in many US towns and cities are there to
impose a law and order defined by the ruling elites. This law and order
occasionally protects the citizens in the towns and cities under occupation,
just like the US military occasionally protects the citizens of the countries
it occupies. Such circumstances, however, seem to be the exception and not the
rule. Whether it is cops arresting people for providing food to the hungry in
city parks or cops shooting down young Black men who refuse to obey their
orders to get out of the street, the essential mission of the police is
enforcing a dynamic that defines the lives of the disenfranchised as criminal.
Also like those US soldiers occupying foreign lands, it is very likely that
many individual cops believe they are doing good in the communities they
occupy. It is even possible (indeed probable) that in certain instances, the cops,
like those soldiers, are making a positive difference. Despite these instances,
however, the fundamental reason for their presence as occupiers is to protect
and serve those who make the laws, not those who suffer from their enforcement.
In colonial Virginia, slave owners were allowed to beat,
burn, and even mutilate slaves without fear of punishment; and throughout the
colonial period, police not only looked the other way at the commission of
brutality against black folks, but were actively engaged in the forcible
suppression of slave uprisings and insurrections. Later, after abolition, law
enforcement regularly and repeatedly released black prisoners into the hands of
lynch mobs and stood by as their bodies were hanged from trees, burned with
blowtorches, body parts amputated and given out as souvenirs. In city after
city, north and south, police either stood by or actively participated in
pogroms against African American communities: in Wilmington, North Carolina,
Atlanta, New Orleans, New York City, Akron and Birmingham, just to name a few.
In one particularly egregious anti-black rampage in East St. Louis, Illinois,
in 1917, police shot blacks dead in the street as part of an orgy of violence
aimed at African Americans who had moved from the Deep South in search of jobs.
One hundred and fifty were killed, including thirty-nine children whose skulls
were crushed and whose bodies were thrown into bonfires set by white mobs. In
the 1920s, it is estimated that half of all black people who were killed by
whites, were killed by white police officers. In 1943 white police in Detroit
joined with others of their racial compatriots, attacking blacks who had dared
to move into previously all-white public housing, killing seventeen. In the
1960s and early ’70s police killed over two dozen members of the Black Panther
Party, including those like Mark Clark and Fred Hampton in Chicago, asleep in
their beds at the time their apartment was raided. In 1985, Philadelphia law
enforcement perpetrated an all-out assault on members of the MOVE organization,
bombing their row houses from state police helicopters, killing eleven,
including five children, destroying sixty-one homes and leaving hundreds
homeless.
To be the physical representation of what marks a
neighborhood as bad, a school as bad, not because of anything you have actually
done, but simply because of the color of your skin? Surely that is not an
inconsequential weight to bear. To go through life, every day, having to think
about how to behave so as not to scare white people, or so as not to trigger
our contempt—thinking about how to dress, and how to walk and how to talk and
how to respond to a cop (not because you’re wanting to be polite, but because
you’d like to see your mother again)—is work; and it’s harder than any job that
any white person has ever had in this country. To be seen as a font of cultural
contagion is tantamount to being a modern day leper. Think about how you would
respond to the world if that world told you every day and in a million ways
before lunch how awful you were, how horrible your community was, and how
pathological your family. Because that’s what we’re telling black folks on the
daily. The constant drumbeat of negativity is so normalized by now that it
forms the backdrop of every conversation about black people held in white
spaces when black folks themselves are not around.
A disturbing number of whites manifest denialism. It is a
reflex to rationalize the event, defend the shooter, disparage the victim with
blatantly racist rhetoric and imagery, and then deny that the incident or one’s
own response to it had anything to do with race.
To deny that there was anything racial about sending around phony
pictures claimed to be of Mike Brown posing with a gun, or the one passed off
as Darren Wilson in a hospital bed with his orbital socket blown out and to
deny that there was anything racial about how quickly those pictures were
believed to be genuine by so many who distributed them on social media, even
when they weren’t, and how difficult it is for some to discern the difference
between one black man and another.
To deny that there was anything racial about how rapidly
many bought the story that Wilson had been attacked and bloodied, even as video
showed him calmly standing at the scene of the shooting without injury, and
even as the preliminary report on the incident made no mention of any injuries
to Officer Wilson, and even as Wilson apparently has a history of
power-tripping belligerence towards those with whom he interacts, and a
propensity to distort the details of those encounters as well.
To deny that there was anything racial about Cardinals fans
taunting peaceful protesters who gathered outside a playoff game to raise the
issue of Brown’s death, by calling them crackheads or telling them that it was
only because of whites that blacks have any freedoms at all, or that they
should “get jobs” or “pull up their pants,” or go back to Africa.
To deny that there was anything racial about sending money
to Darren Wilson’s defense fund and then explaining one’s donation by saying
what a service the officer had performed by removing a “savage” like Brown from
the community, or by referring to Wilson’s actions as “animal control.”
To deny that there was anything racial about reaction to evidence of some pot in Brown’s lifeless body, as with Trayvon’s before him, even though whites use drugs at the same rate as blacks, but rarely have that fact offered up as a reason for why we might deserve to be shot by police.
To deny that there was anything racial about reaction to evidence of some pot in Brown’s lifeless body, as with Trayvon’s before him, even though whites use drugs at the same rate as blacks, but rarely have that fact offered up as a reason for why we might deserve to be shot by police.
To deny that there was anything racial behind the belief
that the head of the Missouri Highway Patrol, brought in to calm tensions in
Ferguson, was throwing up gang signs on camera, when actually, it was a hand
sign for the black fraternity of which that officer is a member; and to deny
that there is anything racial about one’s stunning ignorance as to the
difference between those two things.
To deny that there’s anything at all racial about the way
that even black victims of violence—like Brown, like Trayvon Martin, and dozens
of others—are often spoken of more judgmentally than even the most horrific of
white perpetrators, the latter of whom are regularly referred to as having been
nice, and quiet, and smart, and hardly the type to kill a dozen people, or cut
them into little pieces, or eat their flesh after storing it in the freezer for
several weeks.
Kill a Black then blame the corpse.
And most of all, the reflex to deny that there is anything
racial about the lens through which we typically view law enforcement; to deny
that being white has shaped our understanding of policing and their actions in
places like Ferguson. It, too, is evident what the system thinks about black
folk. Surely this land of broken promises isn’t what Martin Luther King had in
mind. America’s first black president says that first and foremost, we must
“respect the rule of law.” Wait. Patience. Stay Calm. “This is a country that
allows everybody to express their views,” said Obama, “allows them to
peacefully assemble, to protest actions that they think are unjust.” Don’t
disrupt. Justice will be served. This is America. Every exonerated cop,
security guard, or vigilante enrages. The grand jury’s decision doesn’t
surprise most Black people because we are not waiting for an indictment. We are
waiting for justice—or more precisely, struggling for justice. Black people want
law and order, but the police have shown a consistent disrespect for the law,
flagrantly violated the Constitution, and operated with little to no
accountability. Instead, the police operate as a rogue outfit, their actions
create disorder and fear. Furthermore, failure to indict effectively exonerates
the police force, providing a pretext for the police to ramp up violence and
repression in response to the legitimate expression of anger and frustration
over the government’s failure to protect Black lives and ensure justice.
It has been fairly obvious from the beginning that Darren
Wilson, the killer of Michael Brown, was not going to be indicted by a Bob
McCullough-led grand jury. Political and legal authorities in the area have not
been preparing for a trial but for a war. District Attorney Robert P. McCulloch
has never indicted a cop in his life. The optimists were expecting a miracle.
White folk in St. Louis bought more guns and ammunition, stockpiled on plywood
to cover store windows, installed alarm systems and window bars, stocked up on
food and water. Governor Jay Nixon declared a state of emergency, calling up
National Guard forces from across the state and beyond, training the state
militia for riot control and counterinsurgency. The federal government has
dispatched FBI agents, some presumably undercover operating inside protest
movements. All the forces are being deployed against protesters and the Black
community more generally, and the governor has requested more National Guard
troops. Past and present police violence in the area gave Brown and Johnson
good reason to fear Wilson. The prosecution turned what may have seemed like a
reasonable act of self-defense on the part of a startled and angry
eighteen-year-old kid into an “assault of a law officer in the first degree.”
That Wilson feared for his life was all he needed to justify lethal force.
The Black community of Ferguson and adjacent communities
experience war every single day, in routine police stops, fines for noise
ordinance violations (e.g., playing loud music), for fare-hopping on St.
Louis’s light rail system, for uncut grass or unkempt property, trespassing,
wearing “saggy pants,” expired driver’s license or registration, “disturbing the
peace,” among other things. If these fines or tickets are not paid, they may
lead to jail time, the loss of one’s car or other property, or the loss of
one’s children to social services. The criminal justice system is used to exact
punishment and tribute, a kind of racial tax, on poor/working class Black
people. In 2013, Ferguson’s municipal court issued nearly 33,000 arrest
warrants to a population of just over 21,000, generating about $2.6 million
dollars in income for the municipality. That same year, 92 percent of searches
and 86 percent of traffic stops in Ferguson involved black people, this despite
the fact that one in three whites was found carrying illegal weapons or drugs,
while only one in five blacks had contraband. Defenders of the status quo always
deflect critiques of state violence by citing the number of intra-racial
homicides in low-income Black communities. Who can forget former New York Mayor
Rudy Giuliani’s recent quip to Michael Eric Dyson on “Meet the Press”?: “White
police officers wouldn’t be there [in black neighborhoods] “if you weren’t
killing each other.” Racist bluster, to be sure, but such assertions have
succeeded in foreclosing a deeper interrogation of how neoliberal policies
(i.e., dismantling the welfare state; promoting capital flight; privatizing
public schools, hospitals, housing, transit, and other public resources;
investing in police and prisons,) are a form of state violence that produces
scarcity, environmental and health hazards, poverty, and alternative (illegal)
economies rooted in violence and subjugation. If the police are charged with
keeping the peace and protecting citizens, but instead have contributed to the
“epidemic” of violent deaths, then a case can be made for the complete
withdrawal of the police from Black and Brown neighborhoods. The police are
trained for combat and often regard the youth in low-income communities of
color as potential enemy combatants. This is why the killing of “innocent”
Black men in dark stairwells, Black women with kitchen knives, or little boys
brandishing toy guns are not accidents. Cops patrol these areas with their
weapon close at hand; behind every shadow lurks a suspect, and in war it is
kill or be killed.
The Black Panther Party correctly saw the police as an
occupying army, made up primarily of individuals from other, mostly white and
suburban, communities. Their job was to keep the poor and non-white citizens in
Oakland under their control. Violations of individual’s civil rights and
liberties was a common aspect of this mission. The Panthers’ understanding of
the role played by the Oakland police force in Oakland applied to virtually
every other non-white community in the United States in the 1960s. The tragic
truth is that very little has changed. Urban police forces may have a
percentage of African-American officers these days, but the role of the forces
employing those officers remain the same; to enforce an economic and political
system built on the subjugation of Black people. Community development in the
ghetto is new for profit jails, judges, courthouses, police stations, police
and military equipment, not new jobs and job training, not new schools and
teachers.
Did you really believe Darren Wilson was going to be
indicted for murdering Michael Brown? Did you think a cop was going to face a
trial for gunning down a young man he thought should be arrested? Do you think
the law treats all people equally - civilian and cop, rich and poor, black and
white? Police officers, McCulloch said, are given much more leeway than
civilians when it comes to shooting people. Recent history certainly proves
this. It seems that all a cop has to do is “fear for his safety” and he can
fire at will. Like James Bond, a police badge has a license to kill.
Aren’t white people shot down by cops, too? Don’t
disenfranchised whites end up in jail the same as Black and Brown folks? The
answer is of course yes. However, it seems not only reasonable but necessary to
state that if Michael Brown was a white youth, Darren Wilson would probably not
have killed him. Indeed, one wonders if he would have even bothered to stop him
for walking in the street. According to a study published by ProPublica on
October 10, 2014: “The 1,217 deadly police shootings from 2010 to 2012 captured
in the federal data show that blacks, age 15 to 19, were killed at a rate of
31.17 per million, while just 1.47 per million white males in that age range
died at the hands of police….Blacks are being killed at disturbing rates when
set against the rest of the American population.” USA Today reported that
Blacks are arrested 10 times more than of Whites.
The murder of Michael Brown has now been justified and sanctioned
by this nation of laws. So are the deportations of immigrant parents resulting
in the breaking up of families; so is the incarceration of thousands for
smoking marijuana; so is the destruction of the environment by energy companies
and their Wall Street backers; and so are the millions of deaths caused by US
military interventions around the world. The Third Reich wrote laws, too. They
resulted in the murder of millions. Just being a nation of laws means nothing.
What matters is who those laws serve. It is up to you to determine who is
served by the law that allowed Darren Wilson to murder an unarmed civilian.
Lou Downey, co-founder of the Stop Mass Incarceration
Network, explained "Everyone has to take a side in this fight—Are you with
the police who murder Black youth and the system that gives them a stamp of
approval? Or are you with the people who are standing up and saying NO MORE to
this shit?"
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