The protests over the August shooting in Ferguson, Missouri
have become the subject of national and international attention. Rather than
set the controversy over this tragic incident to rest, the grand jury decision
that the evidence did not warrant indicting former police Officer Darren Wilson
has itself incited further outcries, demonstrations, and riots. Those protesting have had two interconnected
levels of concern. The first is their belief that in this particular case the
officer gunned down a young man without cause (or without sufficient cause).
The second level is the perception that this one case is part of a broader
pattern of police profiling and mistreatment of black men.
Regarding the particular incident in question, the available
facts indicate that the grand jury made the correct decision. The officer's
account was coherent, while claims that he simply murdered Michael Brown were
mutually contradictory. In some cases, the "eyewitnesses" confessed
to giving false testimony and to making up their assertions. Most importantly,
the forensic evidence supported a key part of the police officer's version of
the events, substantiating his claim that Michael Brown had attempted to grab
the officer's gun. It is not completely clear what happened after that, or that
Officer Wilson's only option was to fire multiple shots into the young man. But the argument that maybe the officer could
have avoided killing the young man is not strong enough to justify a trial. It
certainly does not justify angry shouts that the grand jury's reasonable
decision was "unjust" or crowd demands that the police officer must
be indicted and then imprisoned. But many people have already committed
themselves to the image of Michael Brown as a martyr for civil rights.
Presented with facts that do not fit this narrative, they seek to reject the
facts as manufactured or manipulated by a scheming prosecutor or a judicial
system intent on exonerating a murdering police officer.
It is true, though, that the police do concentrate their
enforcement efforts disproportionately on lower-income minority neighborhoods
and that the police are much more likely to stop blacks, especially black men,
than they are to stop whites. The police often do tend to treat those
neighborhoods as occupied territory in a war, rather than as the communities of
citizens to be served and protected. The black men they stop are not only those
guilty of crimes, but also innocent and respectable individuals.
Understandably, this provokes resentment.
But why does this pattern exist?
To attribute it to a bad "system," as some of the protesters
do, is to say nothing at all.
Anyone who has a chance to have candid conversations with
taxi cab drivers will get some insight into the causes of conscious and
unconscious racial profiling. I have talked with drivers who have frankly
admitted that they will not pick up any young black men and that they are
cautious about picking up black men in general. The cab drivers also say that
they try to avoid calls to pick up passengers in black neighborhoods. This discriminatory behavior is not due to
prejudice. The cab drivers do not want
to be robbed or shot. Unfortunately but realistically, the best way to avoid
being robbed and shot is not to go into lower-income black neighborhoods or to
pick up black men. While black men
constitute only about 6 percent of the total US population, they commit most of
the nation's murders. Although most murders by whites or blacks involve victims
of their own races, the overwhelming majority of interracial murders are black
on white. Other violent crimes also show
racial disproportions, and, accordingly,
minority neighborhoods frequently have remarkably high crime rates. This
disturbing situation can be verified by consulting the FBI's Uniform Crime
Reports, the National Crime Victimization Survey, or simply by reading local
and national newspapers.
As a general rule, if cab drivers will not stop for you, the
police will. The high crime rates among black men lead policemen, regardless of
race, to associate black men with crime and, in many contexts, to treat young
black men in particular with suspicion.
Just as the cab driver may not stop for the fellow on his way to work or
to volunteer with a charity organization, the police may indeed stop
irreproachable individuals, as well as gang members or muggers. Because violent crime occurs so much more
often in economically disadvantaged black neighborhoods, the police focus on
these locations. If law enforcement acts like an army of occupation in a war,
this is frequently because the neighborhoods often have the characteristics of
war zones, including, even, children dying in the crossfire of automatic
weapons in the hands of fellow residents.
The more that police interact with any group of people, the more likely
it is that they will be on the receiving end of all kinds of police treatment,
both justified and unjustified.
It may well be that the police strategies could be more
effective than they have been. Community policing, with officers establishing
personal connections with residents, could help. The police can never be too
well trained. There are, of course, bad policemen - quis custodiet custodes is a perennial problem. Police
departments do need effective and responsive ways to investigate and punish
those in their ranks who violate the rights of citizens. But we should not
forget that the heart of the problem is the social disorder with which the police are dealing, fairly or
unfairly, effectively or ineffectively.
The issue of why social order has disintegrated so much in
minority neighborhoods is more complicated than I can deal with here. It is not
just a heritage of historical discrimination because that has existed for a
long time and is much less today than in the past. It is not just poverty,
because the violence is now greater than it was when the poverty was more
intense. The fact that nearly 70 percent of black children have been born out
of wedlock in recent years is undoubtedly part of the problem, although the
extent to which it is a cause or a symptom of disorder is open to question.
The Ferguson revolt itself (which has spread to other
locations) can be taken as part of this larger problem of social order. While
people do have the right to peaceful assembly and to express any opinions they may
hold, no one has any right to block traffic, impede entry to stores, loot and
burn businesses, or smash and overturn cars. We can try to de-militarize the police and we
can try to move the police away from behaving as an occupying army. But not
while people are turning parts of the nation into a battlefield.
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