What Ferguson taught me
Breaking news reveals Mike Brown, the teenager who was shot and killed by police in Ferguson, was the primary suspect in a robbery.
What impact does this have on how I feel about Ferguson?
The truth is, not much. What I am interested in is how he died.
The officer shot him while he was 35 feet away. Then, there are conflicting reports, but it is suggested by eyewitnesses that Brown was getting down on the ground with his hands up when the officer shot him several more times. It has been confirmed that Brown was unarmed.
It is that series of events which I have always found the most troubling.
Suspects have rights— even people who resist arrest, which is illegal and in many cases stupid. There is a question of proportionate use of force. Many have pointed out that suspects of mass murders including Jared Loughner and James Holmes were taken alive, while heavily armed. Brown was unarmed, and at the time he was shot there is an open question of whether or not he represented an imminent threat to the police officer.
I do not claim to know what it is like to be a police officer. It is a job I would not want. I believe the officer in question, Darren Wilson, did not set out to kill Mike Brown when he caught up to him and told him to get on the sidewalk.
But.
In the United States of America, we have a right to ask whether or not this incident was a violation of Mike Brown’s rights.
We have a right to ask how and why someone who is suspected of stealing a box of cigars ends up dead on the street in the middle of the day at the hands of law enforcement. Minor incidents do not always escalate into major ones. It is our duty to conduct a full investigation into why they do when they do.
Why? Because I believe it is tragic when someone loses their life, even if that person is a suspected criminal. Because when we get too complacent about who deserves the benefit of the doubt, we reinforce the notion that those in power can do no wrong.
What I have learned is that there are many people in this country, who would rather not investigate, who would rather me and all of the other people who are upset about this focus on the fact that Mike Brown was a suspected criminal, that a bunch of people engaged in looting and rioting, and a small number of people were violent towards the police during demonstrations. If we focus on those things, the circumstances of Mike Brown’s death become not something we should question, but something we should shrug off as an unfortunate by-product of a dangerous job. If we focus on those things, we get to side-step questions about whether or not antagonistic community-police relations and the militarization of the police are problems. We get to sweep under the rug once more the intersections between cultural mistrust of law enforcement, histories and perceptions of racial bias, and economically depressed and resource-deprived communities. We get to say that minorities could simply avoid all this by acting differently. We get to minimize the fact that peaceful protesters’ and reporters’ rights were violated.
Even though I have read numerous accounts of protesters and reporters who articulated perfectly that this is not just about the legality of the death of Mike Brown, but a status quo that no longer works, they will undoubtedly be ignored or forgotten by those who have the luxury to forget. Ferguson taught me that once again we are not ready or willing to think differently.