Which City Is Next In The Double Standard on Race and the Law?
I was almost speechless when the St. Louis County autopsy report indicated that Michael Brown, an unarmed African American teen who was set to be in college last week, was shot six times by White Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson on Aug. 9.
I was almost speechless because Brown could have been any of us locked in a police encounter in a suburb that frowns upon Black boys and men or any semblance of diversity. You get pulled over by the cops in some suburban towns and you are forced to speak or act in a certain way because of fear that even declaring your constitutional rights or asking why you are pulled over might trigger a hard exchange that could lead to a rogue and/or racist police officer to go for his gun and then later declare that he acted in self-defense.
The report further indicated that were no signs of struggle between Brown and the officer and that all of the bullets directed at the Black teen were not prompted by a life-threatening situation, but they went through Brown’s body including bullets to his head and down through his brain.
If this is not a ghastly act of cold-blooded murder, what is it?
Meanwhile, the Justice Department, thankfully under the strong leadership of Attorney General Eric Holder, is conducting its own investigation after opening a civil rights probe into Brown’s death. Holder has designated medical examiners from the Pentagon to carry out another autopsy into the killing of Brown at the request of the bereaved family.
The Ferguson Police Department is shamefully playing damage control, first by revealing a surveillance tape alleging Brown was involved in a convenience store robbery. Ironically, the officer who killed Brown, according to Ferguson’s own police chief, Thomas Jackson, did not know that 18-year-old Brown was a suspect in the cigarette robbery. So why then did the police department make the tape public against the advice of the Justice Department? It had nothing to do with Brown’s killing.
The police department revealed the tape in concert with the age-old character assassination game — show that the suspect in question is criminally inclined and has no credibility. The revelation of the surveillance video, a deliberate smear campaign which has no bearing whatsoever on the case, further exposes the incompetence of the Ferguson Police Department and its racial double standards. The department was quick to release the tape, but took plenty of time before revealing the name of the officer who committed what Rev. Jesse Jackson calls “a state execution.” Brown’s body was lying on the ground for hours before it was attended to.
The only crime Brown was accused of that ended his life, according to the Ferguson police boss, was “walking down the middle of the street blocking traffic.” Even that narrative is now in dispute given how the police have been acting in the wake of the murder that has drawn nationwide protests and brought the town of Ferguson to its knees.
To put it bluntly, we can’t trust what is coming out of the mouths of Ferguson police or the county where the district attorney has chastised the governor for getting involved in the case by trying to maintain calm and assure public confidence. The inherent bias and contempt against any effort at getting to the truth displayed by the local law enforcement apparatus in Ferguson is mindboggling.
Even journalists simply trying to do their job were not spared by the troubled and recalcitrant Ferguson police who subjected reporters under a First Amendment assault by sometimes firing tear gas at them, confined them in vehicles without allowing them to leave, etc. The police clearly did not want any truth to get out.
But we need to remind the Ferguson Police Department that we do not live in a dictatorship. We live in a democracy and it is dangerous when police feel they can pounce on journalists with impunity for trying to report the news. It shows the arrogance of the Ferguson police force and what it has gotten away with for so long. But its reckoning day has come. Ferguson will never be the same.
That is why I welcome the Justice Department’s swift involvement and Holder’s stern warning that the investigation will be thorough and swift assuring those who no longer have faith in our criminal justice system that there is room to believe that the system can be fair to people of color.
But beyond Brown’s death there is something rotten in Ferguson that has been exposed as part of a complex problem about race and inequality, and thus suggests why the police department has acted the way it has without any form of accountability. In a town of 21,000, Blacks make up 69 percent of the population compared to 29 percent White, and only three of its 53 police officers are Black. That explains why Blacks account for 86 percent of the traffic stops and over 90 percent of the arrests from those stops.
The system of governance in Ferguson is democracy at its worst because the majority status of Blacks in that community did not translate to the notion of getting the consent of the governed. Democracy, as Abraham Lincoln noted in his Gettysburg address, is a “government of the people, for the people and by the people.”
What we have in Ferguson is an oligarchy because the majority is not governing. If the consent of the governed mattered in Ferguson, there would be checks and balances in the system to mitigate the circumstances that led to Brown’s death. But when you have a system that provides no economic or political power to its majority population, and the power structure comes from the minority population, it sets the precedent for living dangerously. It manifested in the killing of Brown and has been shown in the brutal ways that Ferguson police have been attacking journalists.
What we have in Ferguson can best be described by what Jeff Smith, an assistant professor of urban policy at the New School and a former Missouri state senator, wrote in a New York Times editorial titled “In Ferguson, Black Town, White Power.”
The bitter lessons from Ferguson should remind other police departments that their men and women are supposed to be peace officers not trigger happy cops.
The death of Michael Brown is a powerful reminder of the continuous calamity over shades of freedom for Blacks and people of color to this day and ironically in the Obama era. The late African-American jurist and former chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, A. Leon Higginbotham, rightly documented in his book aptly titled “Shades of Freedom: Racial Politics and Presumptions of the American Legal Process,” a litany of unequal treatment in our criminal justice systems.
That is why many Blacks have reason to be concerned about whether justice will be meted out in the Brown case and continue to ask why the officer who killed the young man has not been arrested. Thus it is important that the Justice Department intervened because the history of the law is a history that has too often produced a biased verdict against Blacks and others. That is a fact and is a history we must never forget. We expect the criminal justice system to work for all without fear or favor and not to enforce the perceived inferiority of one class of people over another class. The persistence of racial superiority that we see displayed by certain officers of the law should be condemned. What happened in Ferguson is a crime against humanity and we should see it as such. Nothing else.
Bankole Thompson is the editor of the Michigan Chronicle and author of a forthcoming book on Detroit. His most recent book, “Obama and Christian Loyalty,” deals with the politics of the religious right, Black theology and the president’s faith posture across a myriad of issues with an epilogue written by former White House spokesman Robert S. Weiner. He is a senior political analyst at WDET-101.9FM (Detroit Public Radio) and a member of the weekly “Obama Watch” Sunday roundtable on WLIB-1190AM New York. Email bthompson@michronicle.com or visit https://www.bankolethompson.com.
“We expect the criminal justice system to work for all without fear or favor and not to enforce the perceived inferiority of one class of people over another class. The persistence of racial superiority that we see displayed by certain
officers of the law should be condemned. What happened in Ferguson is a crime against humanity and we should see it as such. Nothing else.”
