Eugene Fischer

Tag: Darren Wilson

Tabclosing: Ferguson Edition

Season's Greetings

Reuters/Jim Young

  • “Officer Darren Wilson’s Grand Jury Testimony” – The New York Times with relevant excerpts from the released testimony. It is, unsurprisingly, full of dehumanizing imagery right in line with the racist stereotype of the monstrous black man.

    And when I grabbed him, the only way I can describe it is I felt like a five-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan.
    […]
    The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that’s how angry he looked. He comes back towards me again with his hands up.
    […]
    At this point it looked like he was almost bulking up to run through the shots, like it was making him mad that I’m shooting at him.

  • “On Being a Black Male, Six Feet Four Inches Tall, in America in 2014” – W. Kamau Bell on the lengths men in big, black bodies have to go to seem unthreatening. Notable is that, at 6’4″, Bell is the same height as Michael Brown was. And Darren Wilson is.
  • “Barack Obama, Ferguson, and the Evidence of Things Unsaid” – The always-crucial Ta-Nehisi Coates on the historical trends evident in the President’s response to the grand jury’s failure to indict. The subtitle of the piece is “Violence works. Nonviolence does to.” Which leads me to…
  • “In Defense of Looting” – Willie Osterweil writing for New Inquiry, and making many important points. I don’t know that I agree with all of them, but I agree with a lot. My position on looting was best captured by someone on twitter who, in linking to this same article, said she was “anti-anti-looting.” (And the article itself has a footnote about the clunky yet necessary phrase, “not-non-violent.”) That’s where I am. When systemic protections have failed a community as profoundly as the police have failed the citizens of Ferguson, there should be a severe cost and a varied response. Nelson Mandela was, by his own admission, a saboteur and a terrorist. After the cops get away with killing and demonizing an unarmed child of your community, I understand the desire to set flame to a squad car, or smash a window. I’m not for it, but I get it, and I’m deeply suspicious of the motives of those in power who hand-wring about how terrible looting is while police seem able to kill with impunity.
  • “Ferguson Shows How the Police Can Kill and Get Away With It” – Molly Crabapple on just how severe this problem is, and how the people marching in protests “are too clear-eyed to accept courts rigged in favor of murderers. They do not believe that victims must only respond with passive grace.”
  • Finally, when something makes me as angry as this does, I try to give money to people I believe might know better than I do how to take action against it. I’ve donated to the NAACP, the ACLU, and Amnesty International, and would encourage others to do the same.

 

No Justice for Mike Brown

Last night St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCullouch gave a long, rambling press conference in which he announced that the grand jury decided not to indict Darren Wilson for the killing of Michael Brown. McCullouch, sounding more like a defense attorney than a prosecutor, repeatedly blamed social media and “the 24-hour news cycle” for the civil unrest which followed the shooting, and rather callously said of the grand jury that they “gave up their lives” to look over evidence in the case.

That last bit was necessary because he, as prosecutor, declined to take a position on whether or not the grand jury should indict. Here’s a Vox article on what that means, complete with this important quotation for former federal prosecutor Alex Little:

So when a District Attorney says, in effect, “we’ll present the evidence and let the grand jury decide,” that’s malarkey. If he takes that approach, then he’s already decided to abdicate his role in the process as an advocate for justice. At that point, there’s no longer a prosecutor in the room guiding the grand jurors, and — more importantly — no state official acting on behalf of the victim, Michael Brown…

Then, when you add to the mix that minorities are notoriously underrepresented on grand juries, you have the potential for nullification — of a grand jury declining to bring charges even when there is sufficient probable cause. That’s the real danger to this approach.

Mr. Little isn’t the only lawyer questioning the way this was handled. The National Bar Association almost immediately released a statement questioning the result, and requesting the U.S. Department of Justice to bring federal charges against Darren Wilson.

It’s crucial to remember: the grand jury has nothing to do with saying whether Darren Wilson was guilty or innocent. An indictment is just about whether or not to have a trial at all. By declining to indict, the grand jury declared that no crime was even committed in the fatal shooting of an unarmed 18-year-old, and the issue of Darren Wilson’s guilt or innocence need never be addressed.

The most important statement last night comes from Mike Brown’s family, who said,

We are profoundly disappointed that the killer of our child will not face the consequence of his actions.

While we understand that many others share our pain, we ask that you channel your frustration in ways that will make a positive change. We need to work together to fix the system that allowed this to happen.

Join with us in our campaign to ensure that every police officer working the streets in this country wears a body camera.

We respectfully ask that you please keep your protests peaceful. Answering violence with violence is not the appropriate reaction.

Let’s not just make noise, let’s make a difference.

Let’s make a difference indeed. Let’s take military equipment out of the hands of the police. Let’s put a body camera on every cop in the country. Let’s do it in the name of Mike Brown and the many, many other victims of racially motivated police brutality. And let’s start with solidarity. There are are protests tonight all around the country, with a list aggregated here. I know where I’m going to be.