The
St. Louis County grand jury’s decision not to indict the white police
officer who in August shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black
teenager, would have generated widespread anger and disappointment in
any case. But the county prosecutor, Robert McCulloch, who is widely
viewed in the minority community as being in the pockets of the police,
made matters infinitely worse by handling this sensitive investigation
in the worst possible way.
First, he refused
to step aside in favor of a special prosecutor who could have been
appointed by Gov. Jay Nixon of Missouri. He further undermined public
confidence by taking a highly unorthodox approach to the grand jury
proceeding. Instead of conducting an investigation and then presenting
the case and a recommendation of charges to the grand jury, his office
shifted its job to the grand jury. It made no recommendation on whether
to indict the officer, Darren Wilson, but left it to the jurors to wade
through masses of evidence to determine whether there was probable cause
to file charges against Officer Wilson for Mr. Brown’s killing.
Under
ordinary circumstances, grand jury hearings can be concluded within
days. The proceeding in this case lasted an astonishing three months.
And since grand jury proceedings are held in secret, the drawn-out
process fanned suspicions that Mr. McCulloch was deliberately carrying
on a trial out of public view, for the express purpose of exonerating
Officer Wilson.
If
all this weren’t bad enough, Mr. McCulloch took a reckless approach to
announcing the grand jury’s finding. After delaying the announcement all
day, he finally made it late in the evening, when darkness had placed
law enforcement agencies at a serious disadvantage as they tried to
control the angry crowds that had been drawn into the streets by news
that the verdict was coming. Mr. McCulloch’s announcement sounded more
like a defense of Officer Wilson than a neutral summary of the facts
that had led the grand jury to its conclusion.
For
the black community of Ferguson, the killing of Michael Brown was the
last straw in a long train of abuses that they have suffered daily at
the hands of the local police. News accounts have strongly suggested,
for example, that the police in St. Louis County’s many municipalities
systematically target
poor and minority citizens for street and traffic stops — partly to
generate fines — which has the effect of both bankrupting and
criminalizing whole communities.
In this context, the police are justifiably seen as an alien, occupying force that is synonymous with state-sponsored abuse.
The
case resonated across the country — in New York City, Chicago and
Oakland — because the killing of young black men by police is a common
feature of African-American life and a source of dread for black parents
from coast to coast. This point was underscored last month in a grim
report by ProPublica,
showing that young black males in recent years were at a far greater
risk — 21 times greater — of being shot dead by police than young white
men. These statistics reflect the fact that many police officers see
black men as expendable figures on the urban landscape, not quite human
beings.
We
get a flavor of this in Officer Wilson’s grand jury testimony, when he
describes Michael Brown, as he was being shot, as a soulless behemoth
who was “almost bulking up to run through the shots, like it was making
him mad that I’m shooting at him.”
President
Barack Obama was on the mark last night when he said, “We need to
recognize that this is not just an issue for Ferguson, this is an issue
for America.” The rioting that scarred the streets of St. Louis County —
and the outrage that continues to reverberate across the country —
underlines this inescapable point. It shows once again that distrust of
law enforcement presents a grave danger to the civic fabric of the
United States.
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