Apathy amid killings

On Wednesday, authorities in a small South Carolina city where 47 percent of the population is black but 80 percent of the police department is white announced that a white officer had been B ch al r t ge im dw or it e hm Su n rder in the killing of an unarmed black man, who was shown on a video fleeing when he was shot to death.…

How could something like this happen? After Michael Brown, an unarmed African-American teen, was shot and killed by a policeman in Ferguson, Mo.; after Eric Garner, an unarmed AfricanAmerican man selling loose cigarettes, was choked to death by a police officer in Staten Island; after Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old African-American boy who was playing with a pellet gun, was shot and killed by police in Cleveland? After months of protests nationwide and Justice Department investigations, how could something like this still happen?

The sad answer to that also came on Wednesday, in Ferguson. That suburb of St. Louis had seen massive demographic change during the last few decades, with the African-American population rising from 25 percent in 1990 to 67 percent in 2010. Yet the power structure of the city of 21,000 people remained predominantly white.…

Wednesday was that community’s chance to set matters straight: a municipal election.…Yet only 30 percent of the city’s eligible voters bothered to cast ballots.…

If what happened in Ferguson isn’t enough to get the people of Ferguson involved, what hope do we have that the rest of the nation could stand together and demand change?…