A split in Ferguson
The split screen on CNN provided an apt metaphor. The prosecutor was saying on the left side of the screen, as he exercised official power from inside the warm government building, that there would be no indictment of the white policeman who shot and killed the unarmed black youth.
The crowd on the right side of the screen—gathered in the November evening chill outside the building and looking powerlessly in, and mostly black—was angry over what the prosecutor was saying.
If you can’t see both sides of the stark cultural divide for which that split screen provided such an apt metaphor, then there is something badly awry in your ability to think honestly, fairly, objectively and productively. The first step in dealing with the dangerous trouble from Ferguson, Mo., is separating for judgment those screen images.
First we must look independently at the specific incident to see the seeming rightness of the official decision by the grand jury not to indict the white policeman. Then we must look independently at the social cancers of poverty and crime and neglect and institutional racism to sense the seeming justification for the bitter resentment of what that official decision represented more broadly.
We’ll not get anywhere until we can objectively accept what the policeman felt he had to do while also objectively seeing ourselves as complicit in the raging climate of alienation and distrust in which such incidents are inevitable.
First the incident itself: It appears from the record of grand jury-gathered information that a white officer cruising a black neighborhood where the police were not trusted told a couple of black youths walking in the middle of the street to get over to the sidewalk. One of the youths, the much-larger one, Michael Brown, balked and became verbally abusive toward the officer and even accosted the officer with fists through the opened window of the police vehicle.
So the officer, having by that point suspected Brown in a report of a convenience-store theft, called for backup and pulled out his firearm. The youth first slammed the door back on the officer as the officer tried to get out of the car. Then the youth fled and the officer pursued while commanding the youth to stop. The youth came back toward the officer in a way that scared the officer, who fired shots. As the then-wounded youth got close to the officer in what the officer perceived to be a menacing way, the officer fired his weapon several times and killed the young man.
The physical evidence indicated the youth had indeed physically entered the officer’s cruiser. Eyewitness accounts that the officer shot the youth in the back were proven wrong by physical evidence. Witnesses either recanted some of their initial versions of what happened or explained that they had merely repeated what they had heard.
So what should the policeman have done differently? Not advised the youth to get out of the middle of the street? So what’s the purpose of a patrol if not to keep a street clear? Abandoned the scene after encountering the youth’s abuse and resistance and physical attack? So what credibility would a patrolman be left with after that?
Let his passive self get attacked by a large, angry, wounded youth in the middle of the street, perhaps at risk of losing his firearm to his assailant? Is that how we want to constrain and imperil those we ask to keep public safety? Make a different decision somehow in the space of a few wild and horrifying seconds? Can we really expect a policeman to weigh carefully his options as a suspect first pounds him with fists and then runs hard, straight at him?
And what might the grand jury have done differently? Indicted the officer for the expedient purpose of keeping the peace? So should we use the criminal-justice system for convenience rather than actual justice? And wouldn’t that merely have deferred the angry reaction until the inevitable acquittal at trial? Or would you have wished as well for the expedience of actual conviction for the continued purpose of convenience?
Now to the reaction outside: What a crowd of black people heard was that a white policeman from a nearly all-white police force had come into their neighborhood and harassed, then shot and killed an unarmed black youth and gotten away with it in the decisive view of the white power structure represented by a white prosecutor speaking for a mostly white grand jury.
Those in the crowd felt their lives were valued less than the lives of others because they lacked representation in a power structure that clearly prioritized the protection of a white police killer over the memory and family of a black youth victim. And this was hardly the first time.
What all this comes down to is the white policeman’s fear and the black community’s anger. The psychologists and psychiatrists will tell you that fear and anger come pretty much from the same place, and that anger is often mostly a manifestation of fear.
So maybe there is common ground. Fear. Anger. Both.
Maybe we can bring white fear and black anger to the table in Ferguson and elsewhere. Maybe we put white fear and black anger on that table for their commonality to be revealed—for their mutual causes to be identified and, we can hope, attacked.
That might sound naïve. But the alternative is to sit back and wait for the next episode of real reality television, featuring fires and looting and tear gas and gunshots and a young black woman screaming, “Y’all should’ve seen this coming,” which was maybe the truest thing said all night.