A Letter from St. Louis: Ferguson, Injustice and Fire

A television image, broadcast around 10 p.m. on news channels in the U.S., exemplifies the events that unfolded shortly after a grand jury’s decision not to indict Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot Michael Brown to death. On one side of the screen — his figure ever-diminished and attempting, perhaps, to not convey his anger regarding the verdict — Obama stated, with little conviction, that violent protests would not be a good idea. On the other side of the screen, the camera focused on the protests taking place on West Florissant Avenue, Ferguson’s main street, showing the fires that began to consume cars and businesses. By the end of the night, 12 establishments — including a storage-rental space, an auto-parts store and a pizza place —would be destroyed by the fire. To understand this event, it would be necessary for a moment to avoid repeating either of the two viewpoints that seem to underscore every news report: the liberal reservations against any and all protests that move beyond their peaceful nature, and the sensationalist impulse that focuses on the explosiveness of the event rather than its cause. Instead, it would be necessary to focus on the root cause: an unjust judicial process plagued by abnormalities, which has stirred up racial tensions in the St. Louis area.

In a text published here in August, I highlighted some of the socioeconomic structures behind Michael Brown’s murder. Since then, the community has intermittently — and oftentimes intensely — participated in various protests, calling for justice or, at the very least, for the judicial process to take its normal course. That hope was lost on Monday. In a disconcertingly callous press conference, Robert McCulloch, St. Louis’ prosecuting attorney, announced that the grand jury summoned to decide whether or not to indict Officer Wilson determined that no charges would be filed on any of the five counts, which ranged from murder in the first degree to involuntary manslaughter.

According to various news reports, grand juries issue indictments in practically all cases, thus proving tremendously strange that it did not happen in this case. And, according to a report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, out of 162,000 federal cases, only 11 did not result in indictments. Even taking into consideration the fact that these are federal and not local cases, the decision is disconcerting. However, as pointed out in the FiveThirtyEight statistics blog, there are reasons to suspect that juries tend to side with the police in similar cases. Jeffrey Toobin, a legal analyst at The New Yorker, and jurist Paul Campos, among others, have pointed out significant abnormalities, which hint at preferential treatment toward Officer Darren Wilson on the part of Prosecutor Robert McCulloch, who was tasked with presenting the charges and instructing the jury. “For the sake of transparency,” McCulloch has released all documents used during the process. This in itself is unusual — when no indictment takes place, documents are typically sealed in order to protect the reputation of the absolved defendant — but it also represents a political strategy referred to as a “document dump:” The release of a huge quantity of unedited information, which dilutes the political impact of its content.

Nonetheless, various journalists — many of them with legal expertise — have found evidence that the documents have been manipulated. Lawrence O’Donnell, from the network MSNBC, reported on a grave legal error in which an assistant prosecutor from McCulloch’s office, Kathy Alizadeh, provided jurors with a legal statute on the use of excessive force within the state of Missouri from 1979, a statute that had in fact been revoked in 1980, having been connected to a statute deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. When a juror asked Alizadeh whether or not the Supreme Court had legal preponderance over the state of Missouri, instead of responding with a clear “yes” — a response that would have implied that the statute was null — Alizadeh simply said “just don’t worry about that.” Any way you look at it, it is clear that Prosecutor McCulloch and his staff did not do what prosecutors are supposed to do: Represent the accusing party. Instead of instructing the jury on the charges, they adopted a deliberately neutral position and followed procedures that made an indictment impossible. They acted as if they had been part of the defense team.

In this way, McCulloch’s actions were in keeping with a personal and legal record favorable to the police (and to white police officers) in cases with racial undertones. Many critics point to the fact that, when McCulloch was 12 years old, his father, a police officer, was murdered by an African-American suspect whom he was pursuing. Apart from this biographical fact, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that in nearly two decades as prosecuting attorney, McCulloch has dealt with other controversial cases. From these, a particular case from 2001 stands out, in which he declined to pursue charges against two police officers who fired 21 times against two unarmed suspects during an undercover investigation. People are also enraged by the support that Darren Wilson has received from the prosecution and the media, and by those who have donated money toward his cause. Wilson reaped the benefits of a campaign that raised more than $400,000, he married, and he declared that his conscience is clear. The conducts of both McCulloch and Wilson have been perceived by many in the Ferguson and St. Louis communities as signs of mockery.

While the verdict did not come as a total surprise — given McCulloch’s well-known inclinations — McCulloch’s arrogant press conference was the spark that lit the fire. Police presence has been strong since Gov. Jay Nixon summoned the National Guard, a move that inflamed city tensions even more. The militarization of the city this past week, the mass closing of schools and businesses in the wake of the verdict, and the strong mobilization on the police’s part intensified the level of protests. For this reason, The New Yorker named the events of the night of Nov. 24 as a “Chronicle of a Riot Foretold,” attributing the intensifying protests to the mobilization seen in days prior. In a newspaper heading that appeared shortly before the protests, the satirical magazine The Onion expressed the situation clearly and succinctly: “Heavy Police Presence in Ferguson to Ensure Residents Adequately Provoked.” The fire in Ferguson was the fire stoked by a week of cynicism and injustice.

Today, a few days after the fires, protests continue on the streets, though subdued. Careful review of documents pertaining to the legal process suggest cause for a federal case on grounds of human rights violations, something that Obama’s administration will probably not do. His administration has always been timid in regard to racial matters and, additionally, it lies in anticipation of strong opposition to its nomination for attorney general. An intervention by the Department of Justice would no doubt bring political consequences that President Obama would prefer to avoid. But anger subsists. A few media outlets are beginning to suggest that the way in which the police dealt with the protests deliberately provoked the fires in Ferguson, while Clayton — the wealthy, upper-class part — was more efficiently protected.

The community’s anger not only responds to an injustice, but to a general racism that treats African American lives as disposable: in his testimony, Darren Wilson described Brown as a “demon.” A dreadful creature, not a human being. This way of perceiving Brown is, of course, symptomatic not only of the police, but of society as a whole, which regards young African Americans as beasts, monsters, and demons on whose bodies one can empty one’s gun without consequence, since juries and prosecutors share the same fear, the same hatred. Two other cases — among many others — are proof of this. A few days ago in New York City, a rookie police officer named Peter Liang, under circumstances that remain obscure, pulled out his gun in a darkly-lit stairwell, and shot and killed Akai Gurley, an aspiring actor who had done absolutely nothing wrong. The police were not after him, and he had done nothing wrong except to be black and walk up a dark stairwell. Even New York City’s police commissioner recognized publicly that there was no reason for Liang to have fired his weapon. In Cleveland, Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy who was playing with a toy pistol, was murdered by two police officers who, based on an intuition that can only be explained as a mixture of paranoia and racism, interpreted his actions as a threat. As can be seen in a video distributed by the media, it took no more than two seconds for the police officers to decide to start shooting.

Under specific circumstances, Brown, Gurley and Rice were all victims of white police officers’ racism. Additionally, Brown was the victim of a judicial system that protects racists. Not by chance, one of the institutions that most vehemently defended Wilson was the Ku Klux Klan: The absence of justice was the symptom of a white supremacy that has yet to vanish.

Ferguson burst into flames in response and frustration toward this injustice. But there are glimmers of hope among the ashes. The owner of one of the damaged establishments, which unlike those that are corporate-owned did not have insurance to cover the damages, has received more than $200,000 in donations to rebuild her business. And in response to the closing down of schools, Ferguson’s municipal library remained open, allowing parents to bring their children to take refuge from fear and hatred and teachers to remain in touch with their students. It is important to keep these two specific events in mind above all others, since they show how a community victimized by racism, hatred, and injustice — a community that exploded with frustration in the face of institutional contempt — retains its humanity, allowing it to keep on resisting. “Black Lives Matter” is the new rallying cry for justice, in opposition to the racists who insist that “it was his fault,” that “he was a criminal” and that these “murders are the black community’s own fault.” Those lives that do not matter — the lives of Brown, of Rice, of Gurley and, also, of the students in Ayotzinapa and those in Tlatlaya, lives erased with impunity by the state and the police — are at the core of today’s fight for dignity and justice. A battle was lost in Ferguson, but to continue that struggle remains our immediate, urgent and long-term call.