The Protests in St. Louis, Missouri

They say that history repeats itself: A few days ago, a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, shot an 18-year-old black teenager to death on a city street. Of course, since similar events have happened in this country in the past, this should come as no surprise.

What is interesting, once again, is the training the police receive in their academies in the United States: to shoot to kill whenever they feel or expect the slightest threat from a citizen, regardless of whether they are armed. No shooting with the intention to immobilize the subject; no, shoot at the heart. It is true that law enforcement officers sometimes have to face highly violent individuals, but in the vast majority of cases, it would be possible to shoot to only cause a paralyzing effect.

I remember that, years ago, an elderly Cuban man, completely insane, confronted a Miami police officer with a machete in his hand; the officer, without thinking twice, shot the elderly man, killing him instantly. He could well have shot him in the arm or the leg, which would have eliminated any threat against his safety. But he did not do that: He shot to kill.

In the United States, in general, police officers do not think of themselves as the gods’ envoys, but as being gods themselves. In this country, if a police officer stops you in the street, the best thing you can do is to stop immediately, without even inquiring about the reason for the order. If you start arguing with the officer, it is likely that you will at least be arrested, and if you are arrested, you had better accept the arrest humbly, because you may otherwise be accused of resisting arrest and be thrown into jail.

Many years ago, having just arrived in this country, I had several personal experiences with police that I’d rather not remember. Those experiences taught me the simple lesson that if a police officer stops me for whatever reason, the best thing to do is to keep my mouth shut, and if there is something to argue about, do so in a courtroom before a judge.

The riots that have been occurring over the last few days in Ferguson, a city close to St. Louis, were caused by a simple order to stop issued to a young black man who was walking down the street. Apparently, the officer told him to stop and he, instead of obeying, struggled with the agent, according to the police version. The details of the incident are not fully known yet, but what matters is that the young man was not armed, and yet, the officer’s shots killed him.

Of course, the reaction from the black community was to be expected. They came out to protest peacefully in the streets, and the police tried to prevent that action using excessive force, which led to the protest turning violent, resulting in the looting and burning of shops by protesters, as well as tear gas and rubber bullets being fired by the authorities. The city streets looked like a war zone. Needless to say, when the police used force to try to control the protests they achieved the opposite result.

Police in the United States are supposedly meant to keep order, respecting the right of the civilian population to protest peacefully, but this time they came out carrying military weapons and equipment donated by the Pentagon from Iraq War surpluses. Instead of coming out to keep order, it looked like they had come to fight the enemy. Events in this American city were reminiscent of the era when the Civil Rights Act was signed, seeing black citizens in the streets destroying whatever they could find and police officers in military gear dealing blows left and right.