We’re on day eight since Michael Brown, 18, was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, MO. Sunday, a former New York forensic examiner reported that Brown had been shot at least six times, twice in the head. [icopyright one button toolbar]
“In my capacity as the forensic examiner for the New York State Police, I would say, ‘You’re not supposed to shoot so many times,’ ” said Dr. Baden, who retired from the state police in 2011. “Right now there is too little information to forensically reconstruct the shooting.”
First, the back story
The confrontation began Saturday at 12:01 p.m. and was over in three minutes. The Ferguson police confirmed last Sunday that Brown was unarmed. Nor did he have a criminal background.
On Friday, police finally released the name of the officer who shot Brown: Darren Wilson, 28, a six-year veteran of the force. Brown was stopped, according to Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson, because he was jaywalking, “blocking traffic” as he and a companion walked down the middle of the street.
Earlier on Friday Jackson had told reporters that Wilson “confronted Brown after the teenager was identified as the main suspect in a convenience store robbery.”
After shooting Brown, Wilson did nothing:
“The officer doesn’t attempt to resuscitate,” Johnson’s attorney, former St. Louis mayor Freeman Bosley Jr., said in an interview Saturday. “He does not call for medical help. The officer didn’t call it in that someone had been shot.”
Brown’s body then lay on the street for hours, much of that time uncovered.
Fuckfuck fuck pic.twitter.com/UpPNMEzuwf
— Bruh. (@TheePharoah) August 9, 2014
No wonder then, that Amnesty International has intervened:
JUST IN: Amnesty International just announced they've sent human rights team to #Ferguson; first time they've done that in the US.
— PzFeed Top News (@PzFeed) August 18, 2014
A segregated mindset?
After being out (and offline) most of Sunday, I checked into Facebook and learned about the autopsy. My heart hurt, literally and figuratively, as I told friends that reading the NY Times story about the autopsy led me to think about the Smokey Dalton novels set in Chicago post-Martin Luther King murder.
Media organizations have reported widely:
- Ferguson has a population of about 21,000, of which about 60% are black
- Ferguson has 53 police officers; only three are black
- Although 9-out-of-10 searches and car stops involved blacks, only 1-in-5 were carrying contraband. Of the other 1-in-10 stops involving whites, 1-in-3 were carrying contraband.
Those stats reinforce a perception of the St. Louis community as being unjustly segregated.
A militarized police force
Many Americans watched in horror as images from Ferguson seemed to reflect a reality more like Iraq or Beruit than the heartland of the country. How did this happen? And what does it mean to put military equipment and weapons in the hands of local law enforcement officials, who then treat that equipment as every-day-use?
America’s first special weapons and tactics team (SWAT team) was born in Los Angeles in 1967. Once the Vietnam war protests ended and the federal government set its eyes on curtailing illegal drug use, the teams “became increasingly integrated into normal crime-fighting, and especially into the war on drugs.”
In the 1990s, surplus military equipment — as well as grants — began pouring into the states as part of the Department of Defense 1033 program. (Our tax dollars at work.)
In the past five years, the Department of Homeland Security has funneled $69 million into the state of Missouri.
Moreover, the Pentagon is also playing sugar daddy.
But what’s really driving the spectacle of militarized local police is that spigot of money that was turned on after Sept. 11, 2001, when a federal government abashed to have missed so many warning signs for those devastating attacks acted as if that massive failure could be washed away by sparing not a cent in preventing the next one.
Ferguson – remember, with a population of 21,000 — received two tactical vehicles (Humvees) last year as well as a generator and a trailer. That list may not be exhaustive.
The expense hasn’t come without criticism:
In 2012, Sen. Tom Coburn (R., Okla.) complained that more than $35 billion had been spent since 2003, some of it on “questionable items.” He specifically criticized “tank-like” BearCats for local police, noting that the grant application from one small New Hampshire town cited “protecting the town’s annual pumpkin festival” as a reason why the armored truck was needed.
Lenco Armored Vehicles., the Pittsfield, Mass., maker of the BearCat, the armored vehicle most popular with law enforcement, distributes about 100 of them a year to local police departments, many of them federal-grant recipients, said Lenco President Len Light. Typically, police visit the company to learn the technical aspects of the vehicles, which are mostly used by specialized tactical teams.
Unsafe in any case
A pall of distrust has settled over Ferguson, leading cops to treat journalists like an enemy, from arresting reporters to threatening them.
We were lost. A cop pointed a gun at us because we were running, trying to stay away from the tear gas and flash bombs behind us.
— Joel D. Anderson (@blackink12) August 18, 2014
It occurred to me those officers had no way of knowing I was media. Not that they would have cared. I had to put my hands up and move slowly
— Joel D. Anderson (@blackink12) August 18, 2014
The cops continued to yell at us from across the street. I couldn't understand them. I just kept my hands up, & yelled at others to do same
— Joel D. Anderson (@blackink12) August 18, 2014
Now what?
The injustices highlighted in Ferguson are not confined to Ferguson. Nor will they be resolved by random acts of violence. They might not even be resolved by time.
- The DOJ needs to set policy guidelines for police department composition
- Congress needs to curtail DHS grants and Pentagon give-aways.
There’s no guarantee that removing firepower will reduce an individual’s knee-jerk reaction, one that could easily snuff out an innocent life. But if it’s gone, you can’t use it nor can it affect your general sense of fear or power.
Known for gnawing at complex questions like a terrier with a bone. Digital evangelist, writer, teacher. Transplanted Southerner; teach newbies to ride motorcycles. @kegill (Twitter and Mastodon.social); wiredpen.com