Is Law Enforcement Racist?

A teenager named Michael Brown was shot dead by a police officer in Missouri last summer.  He was black.  The officer was white.  The youth was unarmed. Conclusions were drawn that were likely inevitable in a country in which race relations have their roots in the enslavement of Africans, brought to the New World to perform hard, forced labor.

Was this really about skin color?

Rewind to the early 1970s.

I was a teenager in Philadelphia, a student at an academic high school then considered one of the best in the country.  One day after school I was waiting at the bus stop on the edge of the school's grounds.  Some time in the last day or so a car had struck the pole holding the bus stop sign, which was now bent over to an angle of about sixty degrees with the pavement.  I straddled the pole and leaned back against it, there reclining while awaiting the bus.

A police cruiser stopped, and the officer, disturbing my reverie, barked, "Get off that pole!"  I looked in his direction, perplexed and a bit annoyed.  "What?"

"Get off that pole!  That's destruction of public property!"

I said the '70s equivalent of "Dude?  Seriously?" - explaining that the pole had obviously been hit by a car, and it was ridiculous to think that I had the strength to bend this solid metal cylinder.

The officer was disinclined to engage in thoughtful discussion.  I had questioned his authority.  He ordered me into the cruiser and drove to a police station, where I was placed in a holding cell.  A few hours later my mother appeared to pick me up and take me home.

I was not arrested or charged, and I acquired no record of violating the law.  I did, however, learn a valuable lesson about what is, and what is not, a sensible way of responding to an order from a police officer.  Questioning authority is risky.

A young man in Missouri last summer was told by a police officer to get off the street and walk on the sidewalk instead.  His response, like mine, was to question authority.  I could have told him that was a bad idea.

The sequence of events that followed was tragic - and resulted in the young man's death.  A grand jury spent many hours hearing testimony and reviewing physical evidence and drew the conclusion that there was insufficient evidence to indict the officer.  I have not heard the testimony or reviewed the evidence myself, and so I cannot draw an independent conclusion.  News reports suggest to me, however, that the investigation was thorough, and our legal system must be trusted to reach conclusions that are fair, even if they do not satisfy everyone - indeed, even if they satisfy no one.

The reaction in Missouri to the shooting last summer included looting and rioting.  The reaction to the the grand jury's conclusions has been worse: more rioting, more looting, numerous cars and buildings set ablaze.  The property damage will likely total in the millions of dollars.  The damage to the collective psyche of the community cannot be tallied.

The population of Ferguson, Missouri is about two thirds black.  The police department, nearly all white, has only a small handful of black officers.  The fact that the officer was white and the young man questioning his authority was black was, as a matter of statistical probability, to be expected.  One can argue that a police force should mirror the community it serves.  But often it does not, and yet the police and the citizens must still engage each other in ways that are positive and constructive.

Michael Brown, according to the accounts available to the public, not only questioned authority but responded in a hostile, aggressive manner.  There was a scuffle.  Brown's conduct was described as threatening.  The officer said he feared for his physical safety.  Brown was a big fellow, with an intimidating physique.  His size, and his behavior, were such that the fact that he was unarmed did not figure into the officer's reactions.

Michael Brown has been variously described as a congenial and docile boy and as a thuggish delinquent.  We have all read the news accounts and have drawn at least some tentative conclusions of our own as to what he was really like.  But we did not know him, and we did not know officer Darrin Wilson.

It is easy to believe that what happened between Brown and Wilson was largely determined by the color of their skin, or by the tension between law enforcement and the community when the police department and the citizenry are demographically on opposite sides of a racial divide.

I do not doubt that race can be a factor in such incidents. But this particular incident started with a response by a teenager to a command from an officer of the law.  That response was not one of respectful obedience.  A response by a teenager to a police officer that is not one of respectful obedience is a bad idea.  I learned that the easy way, if spending a few hours in a holding cell and then having to explain oneself to a mother who was every bit as authoritarian as the police officer can be described as easy.

But compared to what happened in Ferguson, Missouri last summer, my lesson came cheap.  Michael Brown is dead.  And last night Ferguson was ablaze.  It may be partly about race - anyone who says race played no role is naive and will be branded a fool.  But it is also about teaching our children that the command, "Question authority" comes with a responsibility to do so prudently. It is not something to do in interactions with police officers to whom we have assigned the responsibility to exercise authority in maintaining order in our communities - and who must spend all day, every day, dealing with persons who question authority, often in belligerent ways, and sometimes in ways that put an officer's personal safety at risk.

We have much to do in this country to bridge the racial divide whose roots go back to the slave trade.  Thomas Jefferson, prescient in his foretelling of the Civil War, said the question of slavery awakened him with terror, "like a fire bell in the night."

A century and a half after the Civil War, that bell is still ringing, and the fires are still blazing, this time in Ferguson, Missouri.  We had better get to work.