The Death of Michael Brown

Photo appeared in The Guardian

We may never know exactly what happened in Ferguson, Missouri on August 9th that led to the shooting death of an unarmed eighteen-year-old African-American named Michael Brown. The shooter, a white policeman, says he acted in self-defense and that he would or could have changed nothing. Eyewitnesses and law enforcement experts both support and repudiate these statements.

What we do know is that the grand jury did not return an indictment, that the proceedings of that grand jury were deeply flawed, and that there is an underlying assumption about the actions of young black men that leads to tragic and unnecessary deaths.

From the start with the release of the shoplifting video and the police account of the shooting that erroneously gave the distance of Michael Brown from where the shooter's SUV was parked as 35 feet (later estimated by an independent source to be 148 feet), the judicial and public relations decks were being stacked against Michael Brown. The usual media suspects created a prejudicial atmosphere towards the victim by character assassination.  For some, the story became less about whether the shooting was justified and more about whether Michael Brown was a boy scout or honor student.

The grand jury proceedings were another blow. The non-indictment decision, as Judd Legum explains in a post at ThinkProgress.org, was "the result of a process that turned the purpose of a grand jury on its head." Legum quotes none other than Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia: "It is the grand jury’s function not ‘to enquire … upon what foundation [the charge may be] denied,’ or otherwise to try the suspect’s defenses, but only to examine ‘upon what foundation [the charge] is made’ by the prosecutor. ...neither in this country nor in England has the suspect under investigation by the grand jury ever been thought to have a right to testify or to have exculpatory evidence presented." (United States vs. Williams, 1992) Of course, Prosecutor McCulloch took another course. "McCulloch allowed Wilson to testify for hours before the grand jury and presented them with every scrap of exculpatory evidence available...The only reason one would present such evidence is to reduce the chances that the grand jury would indict Darren Wilson." [ThinkProgress, Nov.26]  

And so we come to the inconsistent testimonies, the differences in accounts between what Officer Darren Wilson said happened and what others said happened. Trying to answer five key questions, Mother Jones summarizes the prosecution's statement and the discrepancies between the statements of Darren Wilson and of Dorian Johnson, a friend of Michael Brown's who was with him at the time the officer approached in an SUV. What happened during Wilson's initial encounter with Brown and Dorian Johnson? How did the situation escalate? What exactly happened during Wilson and Brown's "tussle"? Did Wilson shoot at Brown and Johnson as they ran away? What was Brown doing when Wilson shot him? Read MJ's article for yourself but, to me at least, it appears that if the grand jurors believed the account of Dorian Johnson, they should have indicted - at the very least on "wrongful death".  

And it's not just Johnson's account.  Other eyewitnesses support elements of Johnson's testimony. PBS' Newshour did an exhaustive analysis of the 500 pages of testimony released by the prosecutor's office. Here’s a breakdown of the PBS analysis:

•"More than 50 percent of the witness statements said that Michael Brown held his hands up when Darren Wilson shot him.

•Only five witness statements said that Brown reached toward his waist during the confrontation leading up to Wilson shooting him to death.

•More than half of the witness statements said that Brown was running away from Wilson when the police officer opened fire on the 18-year-old, while fewer than one-fifth of such statements indicated that was not the case.

•There was an even split among witness statements that said whether or not Wilson fired upon Brown when the 18-year-old had already collapsed onto the ground.

•Only six witness statements said that Brown was kneeling when Wilson opened fire on him. More than half of the witness statements did not mention whether or not Brown was kneeling."

Protests against the shooting began in Ferguson where Michael Brown's body lay in the street for four hours.  Protests spread through the US and then "became a global story when local police — outfitted in tactical hardware that made them seem more like an occupying army than a force meant to 'protect and serve' the people — cracked down on protesters and detained journalists. Palestinians tweeted advice to Ferguson protesters about how to deal with tear gas, as Israel launched airstrikes on targets in the Gaza Strip.  Hong Kong protesters, who began their pro-democracy demonstrations more than a month after Brown's killing, adopted the "hands up, don't shoot" as a tactic in homage to the Ferguson protesters." [USA Today, Nov. 25] The grand jury decision last week re-sparked protests from Ferguson to London.  International reaction in the world press was quick in coming. Editorials and op-eds from across Europe to China were replete with negative comments on the grand jury decision and what it has to say about justice in the US, a country that likes to think of itself as a champion of human rights. [BBC News, Nov. 26]

What could have been done to prevent this tragic death of an unarmed teenager? A body camera - which some are saying should be mandatory for police - would have provided an accurate depiction of the actual chain of events and, perhaps, changed the response of the officer. The New York Times interviewed law enforcement experts about the shooting and the experts offered several suggestions:

• Had Darren Wilson been carrying a taser, non-lethal force might have been applied (he preferred not to carry one because it is large and not 'very comfortable.')
• In his testimony, Officer Wilson said he never had any thought to fall back, even if only to make a tactical retreat to reassess and perhaps wait for backup officers...“To back up and maybe follow him until backup arrived, in retrospect it might have been a better choice, but we don’t know that Officer Wilson saw that as a valid option,” [Vincent] Henry,[an expert in the use of force by the police] said.
• For some experts, "the shooting and the events that preceded it raised broader policy questions, particularly about how officers engage with communities they patrol. In his initial encounter with Mr. Brown and his friend in the street, Officer Wilson never exited his vehicle, voicing commands through the window of his cruiser instead. “The notion of riding through neighborhoods yelling, ‘Get up on the curb’ or ‘Get out of the street,’ is not where you want your officers to be,” [Fred] Bealefeld, [a former police officer and commissioner] said.

Darren Wilson resigned on Saturday in light of the continuing protests. He had been on the force three years and recognized that his "continued employment may put the residents and police officers of the City of Ferguson at risk."

The Justice Department has opened has opened two civil rights investigations in Missouri -- one into whether Wilson violated Brown's civil rights, the other into the police department's overall track record with minorities. In a speech in Atlanta that was interrupted by protesters, Attorney General Holder also said he plans to announce "rigorous new standards" for federal law enforcement "to help end racial profiling, once and for all." [CNN International, Dec. 2]


Clarification (12/4):  The original post gave the distance from the shooter to Michael Brown as 148 feet.  148 feet was the distance from Darren Wilson's SUV to the point where Michael Brown had run.