Ferguson: How Did We Get Here?

A police officer in Ferguson, Missouri shoots an unarmed teenager dead (the facts) and suddenly the streets of a small suburb of St. Louis look like something from a near-future dystopian nightmare: Frightened people raise their hands before snarling dogs, masked men in riot gear level guns at women and children, clouds of tear gas sweep the streets.

How did we get here?

 
Unfortunately, the events in Ferguson are nothing new. These events and the controversy surrounding them are recurring symptoms of many underlying problems that have plagued America for a long time: abuse of authority, racial inequality, economic disparity, fetishism of violence, imbalance of power, opaque bureaucracies, and unhinged debate.

I began to pay more attention to these types of tragedies while living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Ferguson was nothing unusual in the news out of San Francisco and Oakland. Police officers were regularly shooting an unarmed man, often innocent and black. It played out the same way every time: Communities would flood the streets in protest, ne’er-do-wells would loot and break car windows, the officers involved would go on leave while an investigation was carried out. Soon after, the officers would return to duty without further punishment or reprimand.

It was clear who had the power and who had none.

The lede of an editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch summed up this feature of American justice nicely immediately after Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson:

“Michael Brown didn’t get due process. The still unnamed police officer who shot the 18-year-old black teenager dead in Ferguson will get plenty of it.”

Something often lacking from the narratives of the radicals and rabble-rousers I follow on Twitter is an admission that the police serve a necessary function, often risk their lives in doing so, and must make split-second decisions in fraught circumstances. If society at large extols them as heroes, it is because they often are.

Except when they aren’t.

And this is missing from the narratives of the police’s habitual defenders. While many, perhaps most, officers do their best to protect and serve, many do not. We know this better than ever because the prevalence of mobile technology ensures their deeds are caught on camera and uploaded online. Everyone saw the New York City Police strangle Eric Garner last month as he lay face down, hands shaking helplessly, repeatedly saying, “I can’t breathe!”

Similar videos are coming out all the time thanks to radicals, rabble-rousers and everyday people just standing around.

What is needed isn’t indiscriminate condemnation of law enforcement, but reform. Some police departments have instituted changes--when I lived in the Bay Area, San Jose tested head-mounted cameras to record every encounter between officers and the public--but a lot more needs to be done. Investigations need to be impartial and transparent, and when wrongdoing is found, punishment must have teeth.

To the extent that any one of us could find ourselves or our family members the victims of excessive force and be unable to do anything about it, not one of us should hesitate to declare--as many protesters and other voices of dissent have--that we are Michael Brown. We are Eric Garner. And we should stand in solidarity in calling for a change in our nation’s systems of power so those who often kill with immunity may no longer do so.