One, Two Policy Mistakes in Ferguson

A young — yes, a young African American — man lay dead on the street. A policeman — yes, a white — policeman was alive with gun in hand, adrenalin flowing, heart pounding, mind racing. That hot gun was one of the tools of his trade.

I raise two questions: Why was the policeman white? Why not black? To be sure, we do not want a world where white policeman police white folk and black policeman police black folk. But the number of white police is way out of proportion to demographics in Ferguson (50/53 are white), and it leads me to another question: What would have happened in Ferguson if greater representation of African Americans were found among Ferguson’s police force? I suspect what happened would not have happened. That’s a policy mistake. If more African Americans were present it would indicate greater integration already and less tension.

[Image from the cover of The New Yorker.]

The young man, Michael Brown, robbed a store just prior to his fatal encounter with the policeman. The policeman was almost certainly alerted to Michael Brown because of the robbery.

Then they encountered one another.

The young man, Michael Brown, was unarmed and no one has ever said the policeman thought Michael Brown had a gun. Michael Brown was a big man, and if the story is true (and we only know what has been reported), he physically tussled with the policeman prior to the shooting. The policeman reported Michael Brown’s size and strength were intimidating and he used far stronger terms than that too. The report is that Michael Brown, after the tussle, walked away and then began to return.

Then the policeman, because of his judgment as a trained police officer, determined his life was in enough threat to shoot Michael Brown to end the threat.

A second mistake in Ferguson is a policy mistake boiling over the hot cauldron of racial injustices, the deep context at work in everything that happened in Ferguson. The second policy mistake is shoot to kill or at least until the person goes down (which is close enough to “kill”). Darren Wilson, according to the grand jury, acted within the prescriptions of police officers. That gun is in its holster to be used, not to strike fear into people, not to slow people down, not to wound, but to end threat and bring down and kill. [See here.]

Michael Brown did not need to die. That’s the injustice of Ferguson but shooting and killing is permissible action for a policeman. But far more: A young black man dying at the hands of a white officer is an image that haunts America’s system of justice and injustice. What he did deserved to be stopped but “stopped” is not the same as “dead.”

Police can use deadly force when they have probable cause that a given person (Michael Brown) could cause serious bodily injury or is a threat of death to the police or to others. Wilson believed Michael Brown was that kind of threat and needed to be stopped — with a gun. Police are taught to aim at the torso, not the midsection or legs. Here is Illinois’s Peter Jirasek:

Peter Jirasek, a retired police sergeant and criminal justice educator from Illinois, explained that the concept of shooting to wound would not hold up under Tennessee v. Garner. Jirasek said it’s unfair to simply state that officers are trained to kill when lethal force is justified in some cases and discouraged in others by law.

“If you only seek to wound someone by shooting, you do not have justification to shoot at all,” Jirasek said. “An attempt to shoot to wound all too often can end up in death. It does no good if a police officer says, ‘I was just trying to wound and ended up killing somebody,’ because that officer now faces criminal prosecution, not to mention a civil lawsuit. And the law will say the officer better be justified in using deadly force.”

Jirasek added that tasers and bean bag rounds have been instituted as lesser forms of force if an officer needs to bring a suspect into compliance but has no reason to use deadly force.

It no small source of bewilderment to me that police, like Darren Wilson, don’t discern whether deadly force or wounding (taser, bean bag) force are what is most needed. Can’t a policeman, operating under current regulations, choose to wound instead of kill? This is what I mean: Can’t the officer shoot and watch enough to know when the job is done — before bullets are peppered into a person going out of threat? Of course, fear and adrenalin and the amygdala are all fired into high gear, but officers are trained to constrain their violence. Shooting an unarmed man that many times, while going down, goes well beyond constraint. If they are going to carry and use guns, can’t they learn not to kill unless they have to?

Yes, I understand any law that would restrict shooting to wounding would expect more of an officer than is genuinely realistic and create a nightmare for our justice system. But that doesn’t stop an officer from discerning in the charged situation that he or she has ended the threat. [And Yes, I’m for no guns, but I’m not contending for that here.]

Had wounding force been Wilson’s personal determination, Michael Brown would be alive, his parents would have a living son, and Ferguson’s businesses would not lie in burnt ruins.

Behind everything at Ferguson is the tale of two scripts, one turning the event into a symbol and the other ignoring the symbol.

All of this happened in an America charged with racial injustices that have formed themselves into structures. (Here’s a good post about missing the big picture and the need to see systemic issues by Thabiti Anyabwile. A more robust rebuttal of Voddie Baucham can be seen here.)

Here’s what we need to remind ourselves of: Past injustices transform every event like the one in Ferguson into symbolic injustice and create scripts. Systemic scripts exist because systemic injustices and systemic justices exist. What we need is a script that creates justice for all.

Debating details of individual decisions diverts from the symbol and doesn’t undo the scripts.

The symbol must change so the script can change. Or perhaps we should say a different culture might create a different script and therefore a new symbol, one of equality.

The church can do its part by becoming a community-culture the world usually wants for itself. It has a script that can counter the current script, but that script becomes invisible if the symbol remains the same every Sunday.