HERE are a series of reports with video on the situation in Ferguson, Missouri since officer darren wilson killed Michael Brown on Saturday, 9 AUG 14. Missouri state officials have removed the Ferguson police from their duties, replacing them with officers of the Missouri State Police and the FBI has begun an investigation. From the +PBS NewsHour .....
Police announced Friday morning that Darren Wilson is the officer who is being investigated in the shooting of Michael Brown. In a halting and sometimes disorganized statement, Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson announced that his department was releasing details of a strong-arm robbery that had occurred in the area prior to the shooting of Mr. Brown. Police were responding to a 911 call about the robbery when they encountered Mr. Brown. No details about the officer’s or Mr. Brown’s actions were released during the press conference. Packets containing some information requested by the press through FOIA were distributed at the statement.
Wilson has served on the Ferguson police force for 6 years, the New York Times reports. Wilson is now on paid administrative leave.
The press conference follows a night of reduced tensions between protesters and police officers, that many attributed to a handover of security leadership over to the Missouri State Highway Patrol. Led by Highway Patrol Capt. Ron Johnson, the team of officers engaged directly with protesters on Thursday night, marching with them through the streets of Ferguson, and listening to what they had to say.
The force also chose to avoid wearing gas masks, SWAT gear, or any other military-type equipment in an effort to de-escalate tensions. Reports from protesters and journalists seem to confirm that the change in tactics had a positive effect on the gatherings.
It
was a scene of utter chaos that riveted the nation’s attention. Stun
grenades and tear gas exploded in the streets of Ferguson, as heavily
armed police aimed weapons from armored trucks. Police said they used
force when a protest that began peacefully turned violent, with people
throwing rocks and firebombs.MAN: You must disperse immediately. This is no longer a peaceful protest when you try to injure people. You must disperse now.
JUDY WOODRUFF: With that, officers loosed the barrage of grenades and gas, sending the crowd fleeing.
MAN: We just said, “Hands up, don’t shoot.”
MAN: Is that all you were saying?
MAN: That’s all we were saying, “Hands up, don’t shoot.”
MAN: Were you in the front line up there?
MAN: In the front line, yes. And they just started shooting.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Both city and county officers were involved, and today they defended their actions.
Thomas Jackson is chief of the Ferguson police.
THOMAS JACKSON, Chief, Ferguson Police Department: There is gunfire. There are firebombs being thrown at the police. And I understand that what it looks like is not good. The whole situation is not good.
We would like the protesters to stop the violence. We certainly don’t want to have any violence on our part. We want this to be peaceful. If individuals are in a crowd that’s attacking the police, they need to get out of that crowd. We can’t individually go in and say, excuse me, sir, are you peacefully protesting? Are you throwing rocks? Are you throwing a Molotov cocktail? It’s a crowd.
JUDY WOODRUFF: The Saint Louis Post-Dispatch reported 10 people were arrested, among them, Saint Louis City Alderman Antonio French, who’d been chronicling events on social media, including several Vine video posts.
MAN: What do we want?
PROTESTERS: Justice!
JUDY WOODRUFF: French was released this morning.
MAN: Stop videotaping. Let’s grab our stuff and go.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery recorded this exchange with police, as he and a Huffington Post reporter were ordered to clear out of a nearby McDonald’s.
MAN: You don’t have time to ask questions. Let’s go.
The reporters were detained and later released without any charges. Separately, members of an Al-Jazeera America TV crew had to run for it, after police fired tear gas as they prepared for a live report. Today, the police chief denied the media had been deliberately targeted.
But the stark images from last night reverberated far beyond Ferguson. President Obama interrupted his vacation on Martha’s Vineyard.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: There is never an excuse for violence against police or for those who would use this tragedy as a cover for vandalism or looting. There’s also no excuse for police to use excessive force against peaceful protests or to throw protesters in jail for lawfully exercising their First Amendment rights.
And here in the United States of America, police shouldn’t be bullying or arresting journalists who are just trying to do their jobs and report to the American people on what they see on the ground.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Meanwhile, Missouri political leaders spent the day in Ferguson. U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill, speaking after a community gathering, sharply criticized police tactics.
SEN. CLAIRE MCCASKILL, D, Mo.: I think that the police response needs to be demilitarized. I think that the police response has become part of the problem, as opposed — as opposed to being part of the solution.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Police Chief Jackson rejected the criticism.
THOMAS JACKSON: The whole picture is being painted a little bit sideways from what’s really happening. And it’s not military. It’s tactical operations. It’s SWAT teams. That’s who’s out there, police. We’re doing this in blue.
JUDY WOODRUFF: In a statement, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder also voiced concerns about police actions, and said the Justice Department has offered to provide technical assistance with crowd control.
The night’s events in Ferguson have swept across the Web in a torrent of videos, tweets and retweets. The chant of “Hands up, don’t shoot” had already morphed into a rallying cry on social media. This morning, Howard University in Washington, D.C., posted a photo on its Facebook page, showing scores of students with hands raised and the hashtag #HandsUpDontShoot.
Similar photos from across the country also circulated online.
PROTESTERS: Don’t shoot!
PROTESTERS: Hands up!
PROTESTERS: Don’t shoot!
JUDY WOODRUFF: At the same time, the investigation continued into the incident that started all this, Saturday’s shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown.
The identity of the officer who fired the fatal shot remained a point of contention. Authorities again said they’re not ready to release the name, due partly to death threats. At one point, a Twitter account associated with the activist group Anonymous did publish a name that it said was the officer in question. That was flatly denied by police, and Twitter later suspended the account.
We explore how some of these issues and images are resonating around the country.Eric
Liu is an author, educator, former White House speechwriter, and
founder of Citizen University, which promotes civic activism. And Jelani
Cobb is an associate professor of history and director of the Institute
for African-American Studies at the University of Connecticut. He is
also a contributor to “The New Yorker.” He joins us from Saint Louis.
Jelani Cobb, I want to pick up from something that the former mayor of Ferguson told Judy a few moments ago, which is, this could happen anywhere.
You have been on the streets of Ferguson for the last few days. Do you agree with that?
JELANI COBB, University of Connecticut: Well, I think recent history shows that not only that it could happen anywhere, that it has happened in several other places.
There are some really terrible overlaps here, one of which is a striking irony that Tracy Martin, the father of Trayvon Martin, who was slain two years ago under circumstances I think we’re all familiar with, he was scheduled to actually be in this area for an event that will take place on August 24 promoting nonviolence called Peace Fest.
And he agreed to attend this program weeks before Michael Brown was killed. He’s now entering — coming here under very different circumstances. So we have seen all these things happen before.
That notwithstanding, I think it’s very troubling to say, in the context of a community that’s grieving, that’s devastated and that certainly feels a great deal of resentment about the way in which it’s being policed, that there is nothing atypical about what’s going on here, that this is just something that could have alighted anywhere, but it just happened to be here.
GWEN IFILL: Eric Liu, I want you to pick up on that. Why would it not be atypical? And does that explain some of the depth of the anger we’re seeing?
ERIC LIU, Co-Author, “The Gardens of Democracy”: Well, I think one of the questions that protesters have been chanting in Ferguson is very simple: What if it was your town?
And I think a lot of people all across the country watching things unfold over the last few days are beginning to really reckon with the fact that this is not only the product of the extraordinarily segregated and charged circumstances that you might find in Ferguson, but that in every town in this country right now, there is alienation.
In every town in this country, there are young people who, because of the color of their skin, are receiving brutal mistreatment by law enforcement. And there are communities all across this country right now where people across lines of race and class simply do not see each other, do not — they may pass each other, but they don’t really see one another.
And I think, in that sense, we’re all reckoning with the possibility or the reality that in every town in the United States right now, the potential for this kind of understanding and this kind of tragedy exists. And part of our responsibility, I think, is to figure out what we can do, whatever town we live in, to ensure that what’s unfolded in Ferguson doesn’t unfold again where we live.
GWEN IFILL: Jelani Cobb, it seems almost like that, in the last 24 to 48 hours, this has gone beyond the simple question of what happened to Michael Brown to something else. It seems to have touched another cord.
And I wonder whether it feels that way to you too, or whether the anger seems very, very focused around that singular event?
JELANI COBB: No, no doubt this became a very different story just even in the 48 hours that I have been here.
Initially, this was very much focused on the circumstances around the death of Michael Brown. But now it’s expanded into, you know, bigger questions about policing, questions about militarization of police, as you talked about in your early segment — earlier segment.
I had a conversation with community activists and people who live in the area where Mr. Brown was killed, and they talked about economic disenfranchisement and a whole array of other things that touch upon what’s really going on in this community.
And, if I can, I will say one thing in addition to this. One of the things that I have heard over and over again when I talked to people out in this community, and I said, you know, what exactly do you want in the short-term, what do you want immediately, what do you think would pacify some of the anger that you see happening in these communities?
And they said, we would like for the officer to be named, and we would like for there to be transparency in the process in which he is being investigated. And I have heard that again and again.
And so I think what the police department may not have recognized or maybe recognized too late was the steadfast insistence that they wouldn’t name the officer was going to fuel another set of problems that, based upon what I have heard, even people who are activists and people who are police officers have all been taken by surprise at the extent to which there has been a kind of durable anger, that people were not satisfied just to go out and protest for one day, but they came out the next day and the next day and the next day, and have pledged to continue to do so for the amount of time the officer remains anonymous.
GWEN IFILL: Let’s talk about this idea of durable anger, Eric Liu.
One of the things that has been making the rounds of social media is pictures of people putting their hands up in the air and saying, “Hands up, don’t shoot.” We heard a gentleman say that in one of our earlier pieces tonight.
Does that speak to people beyond who is in the street, this idea that you can be — say, I cede all my power to you, and still become a victim?
ERIC LIU: I want to be specific.
That image that is circulating on the Internet is of African-Americans with their hands up. “Hands up, don’t shoot.”
And I look at that picture and I am both stirred and shamed. I’m stirred because I feel a deep sense of connection that, in the United States in 2014, this is happening. But I feel shamed as well that we’re not able to have a conversation about this and about the conditions of unequal justice that unfold without it becoming quickly polarized and quickly partisan.
And the reality that’s interesting right now and part of why this has become a national story and a national phenomenon is that, as Jelani Cobb was just saying, the response of the police in Ferguson to the protesters, the ways in they have, in heavy-handed manner, run roughshod over freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, over the right simply of young people to be African-American and out in public has been shocking to the conscience.
And it raises a very simple question of, what country is this? There is something deeply striking about how un-American these images seem. And I think one of the challenges that we face right now is that it’s only un-American if we stand up and do something and say something about it. If we just turn away, avert our gaze and say, wow, that’s something awful that is happening in that part of the country or that weird community, then, in fact, norms set in where we tolerate this.
And I just want to take a moment. That image of people saying, “Hands up, don’t shoot,” today, 50 years after the signing of the Civil Rights Act into law, 49 years after the Voting Rights Act, the fact that this is still happening is an abomination. And I say that, of course, as an American. You don’t have to be an African American to say that, just as an American.
GWEN IFILL: Jelani Cobb, where does — where does political leadership come in, in this? We have waited and saw the governor speak today. The mayor has spoken, the attorney general, the president.
Has it been sufficient, and does it matter?
JELANI COBB: I think, you know, again, I don’t live in this community, but based upon what I have heard from people in the interviews, I have talked to a couple of dozen people at this point, and, you know, the thing that I heard very frequently is that they felt that the political leadership was ineffectual, that people had come too — it had been too little, too late.
There were questions yesterday about whether or not the governor would be involved, whether or not they would bring the National Guard in. There were all kinds of things people were wondering about how this would be handled.
And it also seemed that, you know, on the ground, there was a kind of ad hoc quality. So, out there, people kind of saw the kind of line of defense, where there were lots of officers who were blocking the area where the QuikTrip stood. But what you couldn’t see unless you were up close was that there were officers from different municipalities.
There were state people. There were local people. And it seemed as if there was a kind of overlap. You could kind of wonder what the central command was, who was calling the shots and what the real strategy was.
Now, that said, I think there is another thing to be added, two quick things.
GWEN IFILL: Briefly.
JELANI COBB: One, this has not solely been black. There have been people of — black and white people who have been out there protesting about what happened. And people are very for them — it was very important to them to convey that.
The other is that the people who were in riot gear, I don’t think that was what incensed people. People were — and there were many people in the community who didn’t want to see more rioting. But the idea that there were police officers who were on top of armored vehicles with assault rifles mounted on tripods and pointed at the crowd did nothing to convey that this was a group of people who were interested in preserving law and order. It seemed much more like a group of people who were there to intimidate.
GWEN IFILL: Jelani Cobb and Eric Liu, thank you both for your observations.
JELANI COBB: Thank you.
ERIC LIU: Thank you.
GWEN IFILL: We continue our coverage on Ferguson, Missouri, online.
The
photos of military vehicles dispatched in the streets could have come
from a war zone, but it’s Ferguson, Missouri. Community members are in a
tense stand-off with law enforcement days after an unarmed
African-American 18-year-old named Michael Brown was shot and killed by a
police officer. While the unfolding events continue to disturb
observers around the country, the emerging narrative is familiar.
“We have a kind of script that we often use when dealing with the deaths of young black and brown people at the hand of police,” said Craig Steven Wilder, head of the History Department at MIT, in a conversation with the PBS NewsHour. “When you have young, low-income people dying, we look for the victim to assume the guilt, assuming they were responsible for forcing the police to take aggressive action.”
Wilder appeared on the NewsHour in June to discuss the $40 million settlement made by the city of New York to a group of men known as the Central Park Five, who were wrongly convicted of a brutal rape in Central Park in 1989 and misrepresented in the media as a pack of predatory hoodlums. He explained how the pressure to solve the case put police and prosecutors on a track to resist the facts.
On Thursday we talked to Wilder by phone for his take on how citizens in Ferguson are responding in the streets and on social media, as well as how the events are being portrayed in the media.
NEWSHOUR: From your perspective as a scholar who specializes in urban history, how significant is what is going on in Ferguson, Missouri, right now?
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: I think there are some key issues happening here that people need to think about. We need to think about the social implication of the militarization of local police forces. It’s so compelling and shocking, these can pass as images from Baghdad three or four years ago. This hyper militarization is the consequences of the past decade-and-a-half war on terror and that increasing exploitation on an international and national level.
The criminalization of low-income, non-white people is another issue here and it is what has created, essentially, an excuse for turning our local police into military units. All of this is unfolding right in front of our eyes in Ferguson.
NEWSHOUR: What do you make of these Twitter hashtags (like #IfTheyGunnedMeDown) associated with the events?
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: I think it’s important to hear what they are saying on Twitter – a large part of the population has a legitimate fear of the police forces that are supposed to keep them safe. The ease with which we accept, as a nation, the killing of unarmed black and brown men, it should be frightening to us all. What’s happening is a cry from the street and a protest from the street. It is asking us to take a harsh look at the values of our laws in the context of people of color.
NEWSHOUR: We’ve talked before about media portrayal surrounding the Central Park Five and how that has a lasting impact on how they are remembered. Obviously this is a very different case, but what do you see as being the same?
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: We have a kind of script that we often use when dealing with the deaths of young black and brown people at the hand of police. When you have young, low-income people dying, we look for the victim to assume the guilt, assuming they were responsible for forcing the police to take aggressive action. You can compare that to how we treat white young men accused of mass murder campaigns in the U.S. We almost immediately turn to a script that is one of sympathy for these young men and the assumptions that they are suffering from a pathological disorder.
There is a racialized script that we used and that we turn to with these cases. Immediately after you see the media go out of its way to wait for toxicology reports and things which is a sort of not so coded language to say let’s actually find evidence of guilt that excuses the aggressive action taken by the police. That’s not the way we treat white people when they’re arrested by the police and when they’re the victims of excessive police action.
NEWSHOUR: St. Louis is not dissimilar from other American cities divided by race and income. With the right trigger, could we see this happen anywhere?
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: I think this is a time to reflect on the crisis of inequality and the fact that so much of that manifests in urban areas. The triggers are more easily found and created in urban areas, but I think what this is a time to reflect on is the nature of inequality. The growth of income inequality, the severity of unemployment in low-income communities, we have as a nation for the past 30 years, criminalized the non-white poor, we have incarcerated the unemployed and I think we are seeing all of that come to the surface in Ferguson.
Ferguson police release the name of officer involved in Michael Brown shooting
Police announced Friday morning that Darren Wilson is the officer who is being investigated in the shooting of Michael Brown. In a halting and sometimes disorganized statement, Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson announced that his department was releasing details of a strong-arm robbery that had occurred in the area prior to the shooting of Mr. Brown. Police were responding to a 911 call about the robbery when they encountered Mr. Brown. No details about the officer’s or Mr. Brown’s actions were released during the press conference. Packets containing some information requested by the press through FOIA were distributed at the statement.
Wilson has served on the Ferguson police force for 6 years, the New York Times reports. Wilson is now on paid administrative leave.
The press conference follows a night of reduced tensions between protesters and police officers, that many attributed to a handover of security leadership over to the Missouri State Highway Patrol. Led by Highway Patrol Capt. Ron Johnson, the team of officers engaged directly with protesters on Thursday night, marching with them through the streets of Ferguson, and listening to what they had to say.
Capt.
Ronald Johnson of the Missouri State Highway Patrol, who was appointed
by the governor to take control of security operations in the city of
Ferguson, walks among demonstrators gathered along West Florissant
Avenue on August 14, 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri. Photo by Scott
Olson/Getty Images
After night barrage of gas and grenades, images of Ferguson confrontations resonate around U.S.
A
scene of chaos in Ferguson, Missouri, captured the nation’s attention
when police officers unleashed a barrage of stun grenades and tear gas
to dispel protests over the killing of an African-American teenager.
Police said they used force when protesters started throwing rocks and
firebombs. Judy Woodruff reports on the incident, and the pushback that
followed.
TRANSCRIPT
JUDY WOODRUFF: We return now to the drama that unfolded in the Saint Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri, last night, and dominated conversation across the country today.JUDY WOODRUFF: With that, officers loosed the barrage of grenades and gas, sending the crowd fleeing.
MAN: We just said, “Hands up, don’t shoot.”
MAN: Is that all you were saying?
MAN: That’s all we were saying, “Hands up, don’t shoot.”
MAN: Were you in the front line up there?
MAN: In the front line, yes. And they just started shooting.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Both city and county officers were involved, and today they defended their actions.
Thomas Jackson is chief of the Ferguson police.
THOMAS JACKSON, Chief, Ferguson Police Department: There is gunfire. There are firebombs being thrown at the police. And I understand that what it looks like is not good. The whole situation is not good.
We would like the protesters to stop the violence. We certainly don’t want to have any violence on our part. We want this to be peaceful. If individuals are in a crowd that’s attacking the police, they need to get out of that crowd. We can’t individually go in and say, excuse me, sir, are you peacefully protesting? Are you throwing rocks? Are you throwing a Molotov cocktail? It’s a crowd.
JUDY WOODRUFF: The Saint Louis Post-Dispatch reported 10 people were arrested, among them, Saint Louis City Alderman Antonio French, who’d been chronicling events on social media, including several Vine video posts.
MAN: What do we want?
PROTESTERS: Justice!
JUDY WOODRUFF: French was released this morning.
MAN: Stop videotaping. Let’s grab our stuff and go.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery recorded this exchange with police, as he and a Huffington Post reporter were ordered to clear out of a nearby McDonald’s.
MAN: You don’t have time to ask questions. Let’s go.
The reporters were detained and later released without any charges. Separately, members of an Al-Jazeera America TV crew had to run for it, after police fired tear gas as they prepared for a live report. Today, the police chief denied the media had been deliberately targeted.
But the stark images from last night reverberated far beyond Ferguson. President Obama interrupted his vacation on Martha’s Vineyard.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: There is never an excuse for violence against police or for those who would use this tragedy as a cover for vandalism or looting. There’s also no excuse for police to use excessive force against peaceful protests or to throw protesters in jail for lawfully exercising their First Amendment rights.
And here in the United States of America, police shouldn’t be bullying or arresting journalists who are just trying to do their jobs and report to the American people on what they see on the ground.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Meanwhile, Missouri political leaders spent the day in Ferguson. U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill, speaking after a community gathering, sharply criticized police tactics.
SEN. CLAIRE MCCASKILL, D, Mo.: I think that the police response needs to be demilitarized. I think that the police response has become part of the problem, as opposed — as opposed to being part of the solution.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Police Chief Jackson rejected the criticism.
THOMAS JACKSON: The whole picture is being painted a little bit sideways from what’s really happening. And it’s not military. It’s tactical operations. It’s SWAT teams. That’s who’s out there, police. We’re doing this in blue.
JUDY WOODRUFF: In a statement, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder also voiced concerns about police actions, and said the Justice Department has offered to provide technical assistance with crowd control.
The night’s events in Ferguson have swept across the Web in a torrent of videos, tweets and retweets. The chant of “Hands up, don’t shoot” had already morphed into a rallying cry on social media. This morning, Howard University in Washington, D.C., posted a photo on its Facebook page, showing scores of students with hands raised and the hashtag #HandsUpDontShoot.
Similar photos from across the country also circulated online.
PROTESTERS: Don’t shoot!
PROTESTERS: Hands up!
PROTESTERS: Don’t shoot!
JUDY WOODRUFF: At the same time, the investigation continued into the incident that started all this, Saturday’s shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown.
The identity of the officer who fired the fatal shot remained a point of contention. Authorities again said they’re not ready to release the name, due partly to death threats. At one point, a Twitter account associated with the activist group Anonymous did publish a name that it said was the officer in question. That was flatly denied by police, and Twitter later suspended the account.
Is Ferguson a bellwether for racial and economic tensions nationwide?
The
killing of Michael Brown -- and the subsequent police response to
protests and riots sparked by the lack of transparency -- has provoked
reflection around the country about some of the deeper social and
economic issues. Gwen Ifill gets reaction from Eric Liu of Citizen
University and Jelani Cobb of the University of Connecticut.
TRANSCRIPT
GWEN IFILL: Today’s pleas for restraint, safety, peaceful protests, and justice rippled far beyond Missouri. As one official put it this afternoon, “The eyes of the world are on us.”Jelani Cobb, I want to pick up from something that the former mayor of Ferguson told Judy a few moments ago, which is, this could happen anywhere.
You have been on the streets of Ferguson for the last few days. Do you agree with that?
JELANI COBB, University of Connecticut: Well, I think recent history shows that not only that it could happen anywhere, that it has happened in several other places.
There are some really terrible overlaps here, one of which is a striking irony that Tracy Martin, the father of Trayvon Martin, who was slain two years ago under circumstances I think we’re all familiar with, he was scheduled to actually be in this area for an event that will take place on August 24 promoting nonviolence called Peace Fest.
And he agreed to attend this program weeks before Michael Brown was killed. He’s now entering — coming here under very different circumstances. So we have seen all these things happen before.
That notwithstanding, I think it’s very troubling to say, in the context of a community that’s grieving, that’s devastated and that certainly feels a great deal of resentment about the way in which it’s being policed, that there is nothing atypical about what’s going on here, that this is just something that could have alighted anywhere, but it just happened to be here.
GWEN IFILL: Eric Liu, I want you to pick up on that. Why would it not be atypical? And does that explain some of the depth of the anger we’re seeing?
ERIC LIU, Co-Author, “The Gardens of Democracy”: Well, I think one of the questions that protesters have been chanting in Ferguson is very simple: What if it was your town?
And I think a lot of people all across the country watching things unfold over the last few days are beginning to really reckon with the fact that this is not only the product of the extraordinarily segregated and charged circumstances that you might find in Ferguson, but that in every town in this country right now, there is alienation.
In every town in this country, there are young people who, because of the color of their skin, are receiving brutal mistreatment by law enforcement. And there are communities all across this country right now where people across lines of race and class simply do not see each other, do not — they may pass each other, but they don’t really see one another.
And I think, in that sense, we’re all reckoning with the possibility or the reality that in every town in the United States right now, the potential for this kind of understanding and this kind of tragedy exists. And part of our responsibility, I think, is to figure out what we can do, whatever town we live in, to ensure that what’s unfolded in Ferguson doesn’t unfold again where we live.
GWEN IFILL: Jelani Cobb, it seems almost like that, in the last 24 to 48 hours, this has gone beyond the simple question of what happened to Michael Brown to something else. It seems to have touched another cord.
And I wonder whether it feels that way to you too, or whether the anger seems very, very focused around that singular event?
JELANI COBB: No, no doubt this became a very different story just even in the 48 hours that I have been here.
Initially, this was very much focused on the circumstances around the death of Michael Brown. But now it’s expanded into, you know, bigger questions about policing, questions about militarization of police, as you talked about in your early segment — earlier segment.
I had a conversation with community activists and people who live in the area where Mr. Brown was killed, and they talked about economic disenfranchisement and a whole array of other things that touch upon what’s really going on in this community.
And, if I can, I will say one thing in addition to this. One of the things that I have heard over and over again when I talked to people out in this community, and I said, you know, what exactly do you want in the short-term, what do you want immediately, what do you think would pacify some of the anger that you see happening in these communities?
And they said, we would like for the officer to be named, and we would like for there to be transparency in the process in which he is being investigated. And I have heard that again and again.
And so I think what the police department may not have recognized or maybe recognized too late was the steadfast insistence that they wouldn’t name the officer was going to fuel another set of problems that, based upon what I have heard, even people who are activists and people who are police officers have all been taken by surprise at the extent to which there has been a kind of durable anger, that people were not satisfied just to go out and protest for one day, but they came out the next day and the next day and the next day, and have pledged to continue to do so for the amount of time the officer remains anonymous.
GWEN IFILL: Let’s talk about this idea of durable anger, Eric Liu.
One of the things that has been making the rounds of social media is pictures of people putting their hands up in the air and saying, “Hands up, don’t shoot.” We heard a gentleman say that in one of our earlier pieces tonight.
Does that speak to people beyond who is in the street, this idea that you can be — say, I cede all my power to you, and still become a victim?
ERIC LIU: I want to be specific.
That image that is circulating on the Internet is of African-Americans with their hands up. “Hands up, don’t shoot.”
And I look at that picture and I am both stirred and shamed. I’m stirred because I feel a deep sense of connection that, in the United States in 2014, this is happening. But I feel shamed as well that we’re not able to have a conversation about this and about the conditions of unequal justice that unfold without it becoming quickly polarized and quickly partisan.
And the reality that’s interesting right now and part of why this has become a national story and a national phenomenon is that, as Jelani Cobb was just saying, the response of the police in Ferguson to the protesters, the ways in they have, in heavy-handed manner, run roughshod over freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, over the right simply of young people to be African-American and out in public has been shocking to the conscience.
And it raises a very simple question of, what country is this? There is something deeply striking about how un-American these images seem. And I think one of the challenges that we face right now is that it’s only un-American if we stand up and do something and say something about it. If we just turn away, avert our gaze and say, wow, that’s something awful that is happening in that part of the country or that weird community, then, in fact, norms set in where we tolerate this.
And I just want to take a moment. That image of people saying, “Hands up, don’t shoot,” today, 50 years after the signing of the Civil Rights Act into law, 49 years after the Voting Rights Act, the fact that this is still happening is an abomination. And I say that, of course, as an American. You don’t have to be an African American to say that, just as an American.
GWEN IFILL: Jelani Cobb, where does — where does political leadership come in, in this? We have waited and saw the governor speak today. The mayor has spoken, the attorney general, the president.
Has it been sufficient, and does it matter?
JELANI COBB: I think, you know, again, I don’t live in this community, but based upon what I have heard from people in the interviews, I have talked to a couple of dozen people at this point, and, you know, the thing that I heard very frequently is that they felt that the political leadership was ineffectual, that people had come too — it had been too little, too late.
There were questions yesterday about whether or not the governor would be involved, whether or not they would bring the National Guard in. There were all kinds of things people were wondering about how this would be handled.
And it also seemed that, you know, on the ground, there was a kind of ad hoc quality. So, out there, people kind of saw the kind of line of defense, where there were lots of officers who were blocking the area where the QuikTrip stood. But what you couldn’t see unless you were up close was that there were officers from different municipalities.
There were state people. There were local people. And it seemed as if there was a kind of overlap. You could kind of wonder what the central command was, who was calling the shots and what the real strategy was.
Now, that said, I think there is another thing to be added, two quick things.
GWEN IFILL: Briefly.
JELANI COBB: One, this has not solely been black. There have been people of — black and white people who have been out there protesting about what happened. And people are very for them — it was very important to them to convey that.
The other is that the people who were in riot gear, I don’t think that was what incensed people. People were — and there were many people in the community who didn’t want to see more rioting. But the idea that there were police officers who were on top of armored vehicles with assault rifles mounted on tripods and pointed at the crowd did nothing to convey that this was a group of people who were interested in preserving law and order. It seemed much more like a group of people who were there to intimidate.
GWEN IFILL: Jelani Cobb and Eric Liu, thank you both for your observations.
JELANI COBB: Thank you.
ERIC LIU: Thank you.
GWEN IFILL: We continue our coverage on Ferguson, Missouri, online.
From Michael Brown to the Central Park Five, race changes how victims are portrayed
Lesley
McSpadden, the mother of slain teenager Michael Brown, showed a
painting of her and her son through her car window. Brown’s death has
provoked a Twitter campaign questioning how young black victims are
portrayed in the media. Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images
“We have a kind of script that we often use when dealing with the deaths of young black and brown people at the hand of police,” said Craig Steven Wilder, head of the History Department at MIT, in a conversation with the PBS NewsHour. “When you have young, low-income people dying, we look for the victim to assume the guilt, assuming they were responsible for forcing the police to take aggressive action.”
Wilder appeared on the NewsHour in June to discuss the $40 million settlement made by the city of New York to a group of men known as the Central Park Five, who were wrongly convicted of a brutal rape in Central Park in 1989 and misrepresented in the media as a pack of predatory hoodlums. He explained how the pressure to solve the case put police and prosecutors on a track to resist the facts.
On Thursday we talked to Wilder by phone for his take on how citizens in Ferguson are responding in the streets and on social media, as well as how the events are being portrayed in the media.
NEWSHOUR: From your perspective as a scholar who specializes in urban history, how significant is what is going on in Ferguson, Missouri, right now?
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: I think there are some key issues happening here that people need to think about. We need to think about the social implication of the militarization of local police forces. It’s so compelling and shocking, these can pass as images from Baghdad three or four years ago. This hyper militarization is the consequences of the past decade-and-a-half war on terror and that increasing exploitation on an international and national level.
The criminalization of low-income, non-white people is another issue here and it is what has created, essentially, an excuse for turning our local police into military units. All of this is unfolding right in front of our eyes in Ferguson.
NEWSHOUR: What do you make of these Twitter hashtags (like #IfTheyGunnedMeDown) associated with the events?
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: I think it’s important to hear what they are saying on Twitter – a large part of the population has a legitimate fear of the police forces that are supposed to keep them safe. The ease with which we accept, as a nation, the killing of unarmed black and brown men, it should be frightening to us all. What’s happening is a cry from the street and a protest from the street. It is asking us to take a harsh look at the values of our laws in the context of people of color.
NEWSHOUR: We’ve talked before about media portrayal surrounding the Central Park Five and how that has a lasting impact on how they are remembered. Obviously this is a very different case, but what do you see as being the same?
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: We have a kind of script that we often use when dealing with the deaths of young black and brown people at the hand of police. When you have young, low-income people dying, we look for the victim to assume the guilt, assuming they were responsible for forcing the police to take aggressive action. You can compare that to how we treat white young men accused of mass murder campaigns in the U.S. We almost immediately turn to a script that is one of sympathy for these young men and the assumptions that they are suffering from a pathological disorder.
There is a racialized script that we used and that we turn to with these cases. Immediately after you see the media go out of its way to wait for toxicology reports and things which is a sort of not so coded language to say let’s actually find evidence of guilt that excuses the aggressive action taken by the police. That’s not the way we treat white people when they’re arrested by the police and when they’re the victims of excessive police action.
NEWSHOUR: St. Louis is not dissimilar from other American cities divided by race and income. With the right trigger, could we see this happen anywhere?
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: I think this is a time to reflect on the crisis of inequality and the fact that so much of that manifests in urban areas. The triggers are more easily found and created in urban areas, but I think what this is a time to reflect on is the nature of inequality. The growth of income inequality, the severity of unemployment in low-income communities, we have as a nation for the past 30 years, criminalized the non-white poor, we have incarcerated the unemployed and I think we are seeing all of that come to the surface in Ferguson.
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