What I Saw in Ferguson
BY JELANI COBB
Nothing that happened in Ferguson, Missouri, on the fourth night since Michael Brown died at the hands of a police officer there, dispelled the notion that this is a place where law enforcement is capable of gross overreaction. Just after sundown on Wednesday, local and state officers filled West Florissant Avenue, the main thoroughfare, with massive clouds of tear gas. They lobbed flash grenades at protesters who were gathered there to demand answers, and, at times, just propelled them down the street. That they ordered the crowd to disperse was not noteworthy. That the order was followed by successive waves of gas, hours after the protests ended, became an object lesson in the issues that brought people into the streets in the first place. Two journalists, Wesley Lowery, of the Washington Post, and Ryan Reilly, of the Huffington Post, and a St. Louis Alderman, Antonio French, were arrested. (The journalists were let go without charges; the alderman, as his wife told reporters, was released after being charged with unlawful assembly.) What transpired in the streets appeared to be a kind of municipal version of shock and awe; the first wave of flash grenades and tear gas had played as a prelude to the appearance of an unusually large armored vehicle, carrying a military-style rifle mounted on a tripod. The message of all of this was something beyond the mere maintenance of law and order: it’s difficult to imagine how armored officers with what looked like a mobile military sniper’s nest could quell the anxieties of a community outraged by allegations regarding the excessive use of force. It revealed itself as a raw matter of public intimidation.
Whatever happened to Michael Brown in the moments before he died has become secondary to what the response to his death has revealed. The name of the officer who shot him remains unknown. Even the number of times that Brown was shot has not been disclosed, despite the completion of a preliminary autopsy. Jon Belmar, the St. Louis County Chief of Police, justified withholding the officer’s name by citing a deluge of threats against the department and noting that he has not been charged with a crime. In the same press conference, Belmar released the name of a nineteen-year-old young man who was shot in the head by a police officer during the previous night, who Belmar said brandished a firearm during a protest. The young man remains in critical condition, but, if he survives, he will be charged with felony assault of a police officer. Belmar stated that he saw no reason to doubt the officer’s version of the events.
Two days earlier, the police department had pledged to investigate Brown’s death while simultaneously stating that the shooting was the result of a struggle in which Brown allegedly went for an officer’s weapon. They had, at that point, not interviewed the witnesses who claimed that Michael Brown was shot down while running away or attempting to surrender. Inside of a week, two black teen-agers have been shot by police and, in both instances, the bureaucratic default setting has favored law enforcement, fuelling a perception that the department is either inept or beholden to a certain nonchalance about the possibility of police brutality.
I watched the events that led up to the eruption of tear gas with Etefia Umana, an activist who is chairman of the board of an organization called Better Family Life, and who lives about fifteen hundred feet from the spot where Brown was shot. Umana explained to me that the durable anger in Ferguson is fuelled by the enigma of the officer’s identity and the perceived possibility that, should the department fail to bring charges against him, his name may never be known. Umana, who is forty-three years old, has worked on grassroots development projects in the area for the past twenty-six years, but even he has been surprised by the depth of the anger about Brown’s death. “There’s not a tradition of unrest in St. Louis,” he said to me. “Even in the sixties, when the rest of the country was exploding, you didn’t have that kind of thing here. And if there was some kind of problem it almost never lasted more than a day.” Neither the police nor many of the residents expected the fury to remain undimmed over the past four days. When I spoke to Umana and Malik Ahmed, the C.E.O. of Better Family Life, they acknowledged that the anonymity of the officer may have something to do with the death threats, but said that it also would make it easier for the department to avoid scrutiny until an official narrative has been crafted. “Nobody out here believes that young man actually went for the officer’s gun,” Ahmed told me.
more
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/saw-ferguson
= new reply since forum marked as read
There's a Reason You Separate the Military and the Police
One fights the enemies of the state,the other serves and protects the people.
When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people.
William Adama
