THE DEATH OF MICHAEL BROWN

As many of you know by now, Michael Brown, an eighteen year-old African American, was recently shot to death by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis.  The above photo is that of his grieving mother, Lesley McSpadden, in the arms of the boy's stepfather, Louis Head.  This photograph has moved me deeply.  Only the very greatest painter would be able to depict raw grief more effectiviely than this.  It is an Urban Pietà.  If you can look at this face without great sympathy, you must change your life.

She said Michael was her firstborn son and best friend.  This is what she told a local news station, addressing the police:

  “You took my son away from me,” she told the television news station KMOV. “Do you know how hard it was for me to get him to stay in school and graduate? You know how many black men graduate? Not many. Because you bring them down to this type of level, where they feel like they don’t got nothing to live for anyway. ‘They’re going to try to take me out anyway.’ ”

Ms. McSpadden has obviously struggled her entire life so that her son and her other children could have a better life.  I can just hear those conversations  at home.  "Ma, that school is bad.  I wanna quit!"  "I didn't raise you to be no quitter, you hear me..."  That Ms. McSpadden's quote,"They're going to try to take my out anyway," possibly originated with her son is especially harrowing.

Having just left a convenience store, he was walking to his grandmother's house in the company of a friend, Dorian Johnson.  They were walking in the middle of the street.

I'm not sure exactly what happened; the investigation is just beginning.  But I intuited what probably did happen.  Mr. Johnson's recounting of the event, which I heard later, confirmed my suspicion.  

I imagined that the officer said something rude to the two young men.  Michael, who was minding his own business, probably became angry, and rightly so.  A United States citizen has the right to walk down the street unmolested!  He probably said something rude in return.

Mr. Johnson said the officer shouted at them, "Get the fuck on the sidewalk!"  This confirmed my initial suspicion.  (I would not like to bet my life on the verity on all of Mr. Johnson's account, but if I had to bet my life, I would believe everything.  He was quite convincing.)

When they refused to comply, the officer drove in front of them, turning his car perpendicular to the street, thus blocking their progress.  According to Mr. Johnson, the police officer grabbed Michael Brown by the collar.  Pushing and shoving ensued; the gun went off in the car, apparently wounding Mr. Brown.  He ran.  His friend hid behind a car, but could see what happened.  Michael, after being shot again, turned around and raised his hands in surrender.  He was then shot several times in the face and chest and died instantly.  This account was corroborated by someone who witnessed the fatal shooting from her balcony.  If this is confirmed, Mr. Brown was murdered in cold blood. The police do not deny that Mr. Brown was unarmed and that multiple shots had been fired by the officer.  

Mr. Johnson said there was no traffic, so it was ok to walk in the middle of the street.  Having been dissed, Mr. Brown possibly adamantly refused to comply with the officer's rude demand.    Mr. Johnson said he told the officer that they were only about a minute away from their destination, and would be off the street soon. (A way to save face?)

What if the police officer had said, "Hey guys, you're blocking the street.  You need to get on the sidewalk!"  Mr. Brown would be alive.

Mr. Brown, called by his friends "a gentle giant" was six foot four.  Did the officer assume that because he was big he was threatening?  Did he assume he was a drug dealer, a hood without a hoodie?

You're not supposed to die walking to your grandmother's house.  

Look, I am not fanatically liberal.  I was enraged by how some commentators treated George Zimmerman.  He is no angel, but he is not a racist thug as he was at first depicted by many.  (I wrote an essay about this on my blog entitled, "Travon's Law."   The guilty party in this case, in my opinion, was our crazy gun laws.)  

George Zimmerman had no business patrolling a neighborhood with a gun--even though Florida law, unjust in my opinion,  permits this.  But the police do have the right to patrol neighborhoods while armed--they have to, many urban areas, including Ferguson, can be very dangerous.  No doubt that the job of a policeman is very stressful; no doubt that many officers do a great job; I also have no doubt that a professional has at the very least failed to do his duty--that is, to protect the community-- when a man, minding his own business on his way to Grandma's, winds up dead.

Look deeply again at the face of Michael's mother in the photo.  The world is full of so much sorrow.  What are we going to do about it?



August 20, 2014--An Update

I am providing an update to my "The Death of Michael Brown" blog.   Today is August 20th, 11 days after Brown was killed in Ferguson by a white officer.  Community protests have continued unabated since the day of the killing, most of them peaceful.  As the above picture indicates, the police responded with overkill.  (The police were indeed needed--there was some looting.  But most of the protests were peaceful, although the anger of the community was usually very apparent.)  The above picture recalls to mind the brave, peaceful protester standing up to a tank at Tiananmen Square.  The initial  hypermilitary response to the situation was disgraceful; a scene like the above should not occur in the United States.

That much is beyond dispute.  There has been a lot of new information, some of it quite ambiguous.  I stress the fact that I am not a journalist and have not visited Ferguson; nevertheless I feel it is important to write about it.  I also reiterate that I don't know exactly what happened; no one does at this point.  I await further details.

Some new developments:

The police released a video that--convincingly--shows that Michael Brown committed a robbery at a nearby convenience store minutes before he was killed.  There might be extenuating circumstances behind this event, we don't know.

An autopsy report revealed that Mr. Brown had been shot six times; four times in the arm, and twice in the head, the last one causing the fatality.  This shot entered the top of the skull indicating that Mr. Brown had been leaning over at the time of the shooting. All shots entered the front side of the body.

The police announced the name of the officer who shot Mr. Brown, Darren Wilson, who has been on the police force for six years, four of them in the Ferguson community.  There had been no prior complaints against him.

A friend of Mr. Wilson's called into a radio station and gave his side of the story.  According to this version, Mr. Wilson told the two youths to get on the sidewalk.  He then realized that the two fit the description of the suspects in the robbery.  He backed up the car and tried to get out.  Mr. Brown blocked him from getting out twice.  A struggle ensued during which Mr. Brown went for the officer's gun.  A single shot went off, injuring Mr. Brown, presumably, in his right arm.  Officer Wilson then got out of this car with his gun drawn and yelled, "Freeze!"  Mr. Brown didn't freeze; he "bum-rushed" the officer instead.  This is when the police officer fired several more shots, killing Mr. Brown.

This, of course, could be a lie.  It is also possible that it contains truth, if not the whole truth.  The police have lied before. It is also undeniable that the testimonies of witnesses are not always reliable.

There will be a thorough FBI investigation which will include an additional autopsy.  This is good news.  It would also be good news if the local prosecutor recuses himself from the case. He is closely tied to the local police force, and does not have the trust of the community.

The officer had the impression that Mr. Brown had been "on something,"  It has since been confirmed that toxicology results came back positive for marijuana. (It is important to note that blood will test positive for marijuana for a prolonged period after use.)

Why six shots?  How could Mr. Brown, even if he had recently smoked a joint, be crazy enough to charge an officer who was pointing a gun at him?  So many questions remain.

Some witnesses seem to corroborate the officer's story; others insist that Mr. Brown was trying to surrender when he was shot.

This case, like life, is turning out to be more ambiguous than I had thought.  (Just because Mr. Brown was no Li'l Red Riding Hood on his way to Grandma's doesn't make this a tale of a Big Black Hood on an inevitable trip--to the morgue.  Mr. Brown had many admirable qualities; at the time of his tragic death, he was about to begin college.) We need answers, but, most important, the all-too-frequent toxic relationship between the community and the police must be changed, no matter what the investigation reveals.  (African Americans  in Ferguson--and elsewhere--are stopped by police in numbers wildly disproportionate to their percentage of the population.)

What isn't ambiguous are the not-at-all rare cases of harassment of the people of Ferguson by a nearly all-white police force.  (The police are apparently now making some long overdue efforts to increase the diversity of officers.) Another non-ambiguity is the tragic loss of a young man's life.   We have no choice but to deal with ambiguities.  (Even after a full investigation, some ambiguities in this case  might remain.) The non-ambiguity of systemic racism, however,  is another matter; it continues to be an extremely unfortunate fact.

Further updates will follow.

Final Update: November 24, 2014

As everyone by now knows, the grand jury in the Michael Brown case, voted, after months of hearing testimony, not to press charges against Darren Wilson, who shot Michael Brown to death,

During a recent meal, my nuclear family (one white, me; one brown, my wife; and one black, our adopted son) felt fairly certain that Mr. Wilson would not be indicted.  (This does not mean, of course, that we thought this was the right decision.)

We weren't witnesses to Mr. Brown's death.  So many ambiguities remain!  I believed from the beginning that  Robert McCulloch, the prosecutor in charge, was a poor choice to lead the grand jury.  He has, reportedly, a long history of (always?) siding with the police.  It would have better if he had recused himself and allowed a prosecutor with a reputation of being more impartial to take his place.  

I was suspicious that the grand jury, composed of 75% whites and 25% blacks,  needed a 75% majority for an indictment on any charge.  How convenient!  But we later found out that the jurors were chosen at random; not an unreasonable mixture when one takes into account that the county is 70% white.

I was convinced from the outset that the accusation that Wilson shot Brown while the latter raised his hands in surrender was inaccurate.  (How could a man who had been shot many times in the right arm raise both hands?)

Mr. Wilson, of course, might be telling the truth Then again, he might not. We will, of course, never hear Mr. Brown's account of the event.  (I am not certain what the statistics are--nobody really knows--but if the numerator were all lethal shootings by the police for which the officer, the major witness, lies, and the denominator  were the total yearly cases of police shootings for which the officer is the sole witness, the result would certainly be significantly more than zero.  Especially in neighborhoods were minorities have a numerical majority.) I still find it hard to believe that an unarmed man would charge an officer who had been shooting at him.  Logic dictates that one would either surrender or run for cover.  People aren't logical, this is true; but running towards an officer with a gun is downright suicidal.  I doubt if Mr. Brown wanted to die.

I wonder if Mr. Brown would have been killed if he and the officer had been of the same race.  I recently watched a video, posted by a black man, of a white officer talking down a disturbed white man who was waving a semi-automatic weapon in the middle of a street.  It took the officer over an hour to convince the man to give up his weapon--he did an admirable job.  The man who posted the video wryly commented that if the guy with the weapon had been black, he would have been blasted out of existence within five minutes.  He is quite possibly right.  Although most officers are undoubtedly good and provide essential services to the community, one can hardly assert that whites and blacks are treated equally. Things are, I think, getting better; there is, however, a long sorry history of abuses. That history, unfortunately, has not yet been sufficiently transcended. Terrible injustices continue to occur--Black males, for instance, are shot by the police at a rate of twenty-one times that of whites.  No wonder why so many are incensed!  ("Don't judge any man until you have walked two moons in his moccasins."  And never by the amount of melanin in a person's skin. This applies to everyone. Perfect advice, which we very, very imperfectly follow.)

Our condolences go to the family of Michael Brown. 

We Americans are individualists; we tend to see the trees and ignore the forest. This tends to make us much too concerned about retributive justice in individual cases, rather than in prevention.  We should focus on much needed changes.  Some examples of how to improve lives in Ferguson: all policeman should be equipped with body cameras, everywhere; members of the Ferguson police force should be as diverse as the community they serve; communities should not be able to balance their budgets by harassing people.  (In Ferguson there were more outstanding warrants for people than there were people.  Most of them were for minor traffic violations.  If you didn't pay the fine, which many could not afford; then, if you didn't go to court, you could be thrown in jail and lose your job.  It is proven that blacks are much more targeted for this harassment than whites)  Changes must be made now.

I am, however, neither hopeless or very optimistic.  The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.  We are asking for trouble, and will get it. Political foolishness, however, doesn't last forever.  There is always reason to hope. Ever so slowly, much too slowly, racism is declining.  (On the other hand, inequality is increasing.)

Unfortunately, we're not very good at learning from tragedies.  For instance, I would have like to have seen the passage of a "Travon's Law" which would make it a crime if an untrained man played cop by patrolling a neighborhood while armed with a gun.  That's asking for trouble.  (See my article, "Travon's Law" by googling that title along with my name.) Nothing has changed.

An insane man gunned down thirty-two kids in an elementary school.  To allow a private citizen the purchase of a semi-automatic weapon and 30-round clips is just as insane.  Again, nothing has changed. What is wrong?  Plenty.

I am convinced, however, that people are basically good and progress will be made. That nothing has changed does not mean nothing can change.  It's up to us.  All of us.