Rare News Desk
The images from Monday night in Ferguson were horrifying. There were riots, there was looting. Buildings and cars burned after a grand jury failed to indict Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson on any charges related to his shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown on August 9.
Videos by Rare
Nothing – nothing! – excuses punishing innocent people, and innocent store owners for your frustrations about the state of policing and criminal justice.
And nothing justified 9/11, yet certain smart folks like former Rep. Ron Paul have reminded us of why it happened. It’s called blowback. There’s no reason to think it can’t happen at home when a combination a people seriously mad about a perceived police abuses and more opportunistic loot-inclined folks come together to produce a perfect storm of smoke, fire, tear gas and mayhem.
The evidence that the public has so far been given doesn’t make Michael Brown look great. Yet Wilson’s grand jury testimony fundamentally doesn’t feel right. Even Ezra Klein, who believes anything that was fed to him in chart form, is having trouble with Wilson’s description of events.
Unless Brown was legitimately psychotic or on something a lot stronger than marijuana, the idea that he charged at Wilson again and again, and actually said “you’re too much of a pussy to shoot me” feels dubious.
You might disagree. And that’s OK because literally nothing the Ferguson Police Department did inspired confidence. As Jonathan Blanks noted earlier at Rare, “rule of law” did practically everything it could to earn our rank disrespect in Ferguson.
Ferguson PD left a young man’s body in the street for more than four hours. When protests began against the shooting, they got in military vehicles and soldier-like uniforms and went to work. Protesters’ rights to free assembly were taken away with tear gas. A no-fly zone was declared to keep out the eye-in-the-sky cameras.
Video evidence would be helpful, but there is none. Witnesses — some of whom contradict Wilson, some who don’t — are notoriously bad at remembering what happened.
So all we have is trust in the system. And in places like Ferguson, the poor and minorities have been given very good reasons not to trust the criminal justice system.
Blowback is not a moral term. It does not and can not excuse the looting. It doesn’t mean that Darren Wilson should be arrested or delivered to an angry mob. It simply means that something has gone horribly wrong with American police and with Ferguson’s finest in particular. This is the horrible, predictable result.
Fixing the impression that cops do not serve the community is going to require said cops do the hard work of actually serving their communities. Deescalating the war on drugs, civil asset forfeiture, and revenue-building, draconian fines for the poor would help.
We also need a return to community policing. Beat cops who walk and know their neighbors is vital for reform.
And it’s time to bury the warrior cop. Fraternal Order of Police executive director Jim Pasco tried to shrug off criticism that Ferguson PD were kitted out like soldiers by saying “It’s not what the equipment looks like, it’s what its utility is.”
Wrong! Cops meeting a protest by riding in something called a Mine-Resistant, Ambush-Protected vehicle that is so heavy it damages regular streets is not about utility. Do this too often and police presence starts to feel like an occupation. And nobody likes being occupied.
If the unrest continues, let’s not do what we did after 9/11 and cover our ears and ask “why do they hate us? How can they do that to us?” Government and police agencies are hurting people, and making them angry, and they’re showing it. Most of them peacefully, a few of them less so.
At the end of the day, we’ll never know all the particulars of happened between Darren Wilson and Michael Brown. But the people have been given little reason to believe justice was done.
If nothing changes, the same distrust will be there again next time, with worse results.
