By Atticus Morris
After hearing more than 3 months of testimony and sifting through thousands of pages of documents, a grand jury elected not to indict Darren Wilson, the white Missouri police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager.
Almost immediately after the testimony was released to the public, there were allegations that Ferguson Police botched several aspects of the investigation, including that: Wilson was allowed to wash away physical evidence before being examined; Wilson’s firearm wasn’t tested for fingerprints; the legal examiner didn’t take actual distance measurements at the scene because it appeared “self explanatory”; and that Wilson did not initially turn his weapon over to investigators. Also, St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch, who has deep ties to law enforcement and a history of favoring police in criminal cases, was alleged to have manipulated the evidence that was collected when he presented it to the grand jury.
But, leaving all of this aside, the truth is that, given that there were conflicting accounts from eyewitnesses, even if Wilson had been indicted, he almost certainly would have beaten it.
“It is really hard to convict a police officer,” Laurie Levenson, a former prosecutor who now teaches law at Loyola University in Los Angeles, explained in a recent interview with Talking Points Memo. “They get a super presumption of innocence.”
And as if the Wilson decision wasn’t enough to validate Levenson’s assertion, on Dec. 3 a New York grand jury declined to indict officer Daniel Pantaleo, even though he was filmed choking a black man named Eric Garner to death.
The St. Louis grand jury’s decision, while heartbreaking and thoroughly infuriating, was not particularly surprising to many. Even among those who protested, the outrage on display was more a function of an inevitable injustice than genuine shock— for instance, San Francisco activists pre-planned a demonstration in anticipation of Wilson’s exoneration.
It would seem that Michael Brown (or for that matter Eric Garner) is just another in a long, long list of black and brown men who were cut down by police officers without consequence. But is there nothing tangible then that can be gained from the events of the past three months?
Well, one lesson learned from the chaotic aftermath in Ferguson that we all can pretty much agree upon, is that police are outlandishly over-equipped with military gear and engage in SWAT tactics that are much more appropriate for a battlefield than our city streets. This fact was drilled home by the barrage of Third World warzone-like images of Ferguson, which arrived on our device screens. That “warzone” was a police reaction to the public’s reaction to Brown’s death, which means he has been instrumental in sparking a vital and long-overdue dialog about what in fact constitutes law enforcement.
And another, perhaps even more critical, discussion which has thankfully resumed concerns race and the demographic shifts the U.S. is currently undergoing.
For too long—probably since Brown v. Board of Education—the conventional wisdom, at least in official white America, has maintained that we are a “post-racial society,” where people somehow don’t see skin color and inequality no longer exists.
It’s a supposedly self-evident truth reflected in among other things, America’s first black president and first black attorney general. The Roberts Supreme Court has said as much, presiding over the dismantling of affirmative action in higher education, and more recently gutting provisions in the Civil Rights Act that had protected minority voters in southern states.
Of course in the Bay Area the Oscar Grants and Alex Nietos tell a very different story. The reality is that there are countless examples debunking the idea that this country has moved beyond race, from policies like New York City’s stop-and-frisk law and Arizona’s SB 1070 to the minority voter disenfranchisement in the South to the exploding prison population that is disproportionately black and brown.
While it may be a nice sentiment, the post-racial America is a myth, and a dangerous one at that, for just so long as it persists, for that long is it impossible to engage in a truly honest discussion of race.
It’s much too early to tell if Mike Brown’s death could be a catalyst for a better America, but it’s gotten us talking again, and he deserves at least that much.