WaPo: Darren Wilson and guilt by association
Colbert King highlighted something in his Saturday column that leapt off the pages of Darren Wilson’s testimony for me, too. The now-former Ferguson police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown on Aug. 9 was asked about his “relationship with the residents” of the unarmed teenager’s apartment complex. Not only did the prosecutor’s questions strike me as hand-holding, but also Wilson’s broad-brush responses made my skin crawl.
Q: Did you guys have a volatile, well, how can I put this. Did you not really get along well with the folks that lived in that apartment, not you personally, I mean the police in general?
Wilson: It is an antipolice area for sure.
Q: And when you say antipolice, tell me more?
Wilson: There’s a lot of gangs that reside or associate with that area. There’s a lot of violence in that area, there’s a lot of gun activity, drug activity, it is just not a very well-liked community. That community doesn’t like the police.
Q: Were you pretty much on high alert being in that community by yourself, especially when Michael Brown said, ‘[expletive] what you say,’ I think he said?
Wilson: Yes.
Q: You were on pretty high alert at that point knowing the vicinity and the area that you’re in?
Wilson: Yes, that’s not an area where you can take anything really. Like I said, it is a hostile environment. There are good people over there, there really are, but I mean there is an influx of gang activity in that area.
What Wilson said is barely a few moments in his testimony, but its ugliness is in keeping with his overall tone about Brown. That nice bit about there being “good people over there” after trashing the entire community is no antidote to the poisoned opinion of the grand jury.
Alexandra Natapoff, associate dean for research and professor of law at Loyola Law School, was equally unamused. I had the good fortune of spending Thanksgiving with the associate dean for research and professor of law at Loyola Law School. Natapoff is also an expert on criminal informants and the author of “Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice.” Her current work is on misdemeanors and their effect on the criminal justice system, which I will get to in another post because of its connection to Ferguson.
“In some ways, we can understand Wilson’s response as classic guilt-by-association, and it’s one of the great complaints that African American neighborhoods have had for decades,” Natapoff told me. “Police officers have been told by authorities as high as the Supreme Court that they can draw inferences in high-crime neighborhoods or low-income or urban neighborhoods,” she continued, referring to the 2000 Supreme Court case Illinois v. Wardlow. This has “permitted police to drive devastating conclusions by the mere fact that the young person happens to live there.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2014/12/01/darren-wilson-and-guilt-by-association/
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