Please Don’t Shoot

Before their football game last Sunday, five St. Louis Rams players came onto the field with hands raised in surrender, indicating “Please don’t shoot.” The violent death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, a St. Louis suburb, has forced an uneasy dialogue about whether whites and blacks can live together in peace. But this dialogue ignores the reality that many whites and blacks live in blatantly different worlds.

Outraged citizens blocked streets and shopping malls. Most of the protesters were young African- Americans angry at the decision not to press charges against Darren Wilson, the white policeman responsible for the fatal shooting of the unarmed Michael Brown on Aug. 9. Demonstrators keep marching in the hope that something will change this time to keep their protest alive. It seems outrageous that there will be no public airing of the event, and that the shooter openly declares he has a clear conscience. In eulogizing Brown, Al Sharpton said that Michael would be remembered for changing police behavior in America.

Young African-Americans live precariously. Last month a Cleveland police officer shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice to death as he brandished a realistic looking toy pistol. In New York, an official killed 28-year-old Akai Gurley in a dimly lit stairwell. Gurley was unarmed. The investigative website ProPublica.org calculates that a young black male is 21 times more likely to be shot by police than a white male.

A Pew Research Center survey showed 80 percent of African-Americans thought that Brown’s violent death raised questions about race relations in the United States, while only 37 percent of white respondents held that opinion. Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York City, pointed out that most black shooting victims were shot by other blacks. He also remarked in a television debate with a black sociologist that white police officers wouldn’t have to go into predominantly black areas so often if there weren’t so much black-on-black crime.

MLK’s Legacy

Testimony leading to that grand jury decision is now posted on Internet websites such as Stlpublicradio.org and is searchable by quotation. It concludes that the fatal shots were fired legally because Brown threatened officer Williams. Or did the officer open fire on a cooperative teenager?

It’s been said that district attorneys in the U.S. have so much influence on grand juries that they could get them to “indict a ham sandwich.” The remark refers to the fact that behind closed doors, laypersons generally vote to indict if that’s what the district attorney wants. The decision isn’t about guilt and innocence but whether there is sufficient reason to warrant a jury trial. St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCullough is considered to be biased toward the police. Benjamin Crump, the Brown family attorney, had been predicting for weeks that McCullough would choose not to prosecute Wilson.

When it concerns police brutality, the law is not a neutral institution. Police officers are rarely indicted. A deadly shooting can always be justified by claiming the officer felt mortally threatened. The same argument also holds in the question of carrying a gun: George Zimmerman walked out of court a free man because he claimed he felt threatened. To the Ferguson demonstrators, reassurances from the White House leave a bitter aftertaste.

Even more so when they are strengthened by reproaches such as calling for constructive dialogue (McCullough), and scolding demonstrators, telling them the destruction of property is never excusable (Obama). Shortly before his assassination in 1968, civil rights leader Martin Luther King put it another way: “It is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society.” President Lyndon Johnson appointed a commission to look into race relations in 1957. Among its findings: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”

Raisins in the Sun

Obama says much progress has been made, but the concept of race still has a lot to do with empowerment. In that area, whites clearly have the advantage, as shown by poverty data, unemployment figures, education — and incidents of police brutality. What happens to a dream permanently deferred? That question was asked by poet Langston Hughes over 60 years ago in his collection “Montage of a Dream Deferred”:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore—

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over—

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

At the beginning of the week, Obama announced a $263 million program that includes, among other things, personal minicams to be worn by police officers, plus the institution of a new commission on police practices to be headed by Charles Ramsey, Philadelphia Chief of Police. As chief of police in Washington, D.C., Ramsey ordered the arrest of more than 600 opponents of globalization in 2000. The city was sued for false arrest and police brutality and ended with an out of court settlement of $13.7 million.