Ferguson is breaking my heart. I’m not talking about the grand jury’s decision not to indict Darren Wilson for the murder of Michael Brown. I pretty much expected that.
What’s breaking my heart is the magnitude of the destruction going on during the protests. I paid pretty close attention to the earlier batch of protests, right after Brown was shot, and there was sporadic property damage, some of it severe, but for the most part, the protesters were peaceful. It was neighborhood people out late, milling around, making noise, and occasionally blocking traffic. As a middle-aged white guy, I didn’t see much that would make me feel unsafe to be there.
None of that stopped the racist fuckwads who continued to paint the largely peaceful protesters as looters and and wild animals. And tonight, unfortunately, some of the protesters are doing everything they can to give the racists an “I told you so.”
This time around, the looters are out in force, and a lot of stuff seems to be burning. Just a brief Twitter scan finds mention of a Metro PCS phone store, a Beauty Town beauty supply store, and the outreach office of Alderman Antonio French. Also a New York Grill, a Little Ceasar’s, a Walgreens, a car dealership, an Enterprise car rental, several auto parts stores, a public storage facility, and a church van.
All burning away.
I am reminded of an old joke:
Late at night, a drunk was on his knees beneath a street-light, evidently looking for something. A passer-by, being a good Samaritan, offered to help. “What is it you have lost?” he asked.
”My watch,” replied the drunk. “It fell off when I tripped over the pavement.”
The passer-by joined in the search but after a quarter of an hour, there was still no sign of the watch.
“Where exactly did you trip?” asked the passer-by.
“About half a block up the street,” replied the drunk.
“Then why are you looking for your watch here if you lost it half a block up the street?”
The drunk said: “Because the light’s a lot better here. ”
What we’re seeing in Ferguson is the because-the-light’s-better-here version of sticking-it-to-the-man. The jerks setting fires are angry at the cops and the political institutions they protect, but they know that attacking the establishment is hard. Assaulting the cops and burning down the police station would be one hell of a statement, but the cops are armed and prepared for a fight. Attacking them would require skill and audacity and a willingness to risk getting arrested.
On the other hand, burning down private businesses is much easier. The vandals can tell themselves they’re fighting capitalist oppression or hitting the establishment in pocketbook or whatever, but the truth is that small shops and fast food joints are much softer targets. The light’s a lot better there.
The political leadership of Ferguson, on the other hand, remind me of a (possibly untrue) story I once heard about Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein from the first Gulf War. His forces had invaded Kuwait, and a few months later a coalition lead by the United States counterattacked into eastern Iraq. They moved with breathtaking speed and routed the Iraqi army. Saddam watched the defeat unfold from one of his bunkers, as the coalition forces advanced to a point where they had a clear path to capture Baghdad and Saddam himself.
Before that could happen, however, with Kuwait being freed from Iraqi control, the U.S. declared a unilateral cease-fire. Saddam’s reaction was supposedly a jubilant “We’ve won!” Although twenty thousand Iraqi soldiers had died in the battle, Saddam considered it a victory because he was still standing, and that’s what mattered most.
The police presence available to keep the peace in Ferguson consisted of hundreds of officers, perhaps as many as a thousand according to some sources. The Governor of Missouri declared a state of emergency and dispatched National Guard troops. And yet looters controlled the streets, and a dozen businesses burned out of control for hours. But all the cops are safe and the police station is intact, so I’m guessing they feel they’ve won. Because to the powers-that-be in Ferguson, their safety is what mattered most.
Ah, fuckit. I’m running out of steam here. Maybe it all won’t seem so bad when I wake up in the morning.
Update: Reading back over this, I should point out that even if every fire was started by a different person, which seems unlikely, that’s only a dozen or so arsonists among all those protesters.
I should also add that I’m not saying cops should have taken insane risks with their lives to stop the looting and support a fire suppression effort. On the other hand, police have been comparing themselves to soldiers and saying police work is a battlefield for years, and in response we’ve been equipping them with shields and body armor and armored vehicles. Well, last night the battle came to Ferguson. Did they use all that fine equipment the way we wanted them to?
Finally, as to the grand jury’s decision, a cop shooting an unarmed black man sounds damned suspicious, but these sorts of incidents are always very fact sensitive, and based on the bits and pieces I’ve heard, I can imagine ways in which the shooting of Mike Brown might have been justified. And that’s true for most of these cop-shoots-unarmed-person shootings: Any one of them might be justified. But they can’t all be justified. There are some cops getting away with some shit.
The situation in Ferguson is at once poignant, scary, and infuriating. I was glued to the internet and the television night after night in August, watching the police riot against overwhelmingly peaceful protesters. This time around, I’ve been checking in on Ferguson only occasionally. I’m quite relieved that the cops seem to be keeping themselves under better control than they did in August. Mob violence by private citizens seems much more passing than mob violence by the police, and as a rule of thumb I’d much rather have unrest at the hands of marginalized non-state actors than at the hands of well-connected state actors such as the police or the military, since the former allows for a much more sincere and effective effort by the civil authorities to restore the peace.
I hope and pray that the citizens of Ferguson find a more effective way to reform their government than what they’ve been attempting recently. The Michael Brown shooting was clearly just a proximate symptom of a much deeper and more destructive disease, one that can’t help but rot the entire country bit by bit. A healthy country simply does not allow any of its police at any level to behave the way municipal police in St. Louis County have been behaving in recent years. I’m disheartened by the inchoate nature of some of the protest memes, especially “no justice, no peace.” No matter how bad Darren Wilson is (and I find some of the more obscure allegations circulating about his official misconduct much worse than his shooting of Michael Brown), merely scapegoating him will do little, if anything, to reform municipal police agencies in St. Louis County and the rotten boroughs commissioning them. Some of the protesters realize this–they’ve been dealing with crooked local cops for years, after all–but the themes and overall tone of the protests seems to miss the most important points about the misconduct of the local police.
I think Ferguson has generally been put under too strong a racial gloss. It’s true that black people are disproportionately abused by bad cops, in St. Louis County and elsewhere, but the root problems in St. Louis County seem to have less to do with race per se than with class, caste (warrior vs. merchant and peasant), bad municipal structures, and poor oversight of corrupt municipal governments. Some of these police abuses look at first blush like purely racist violence and do in fact have provable racist aspects, but at root they seem to be outbursts of warrior-caste violence against poorer, more marginalized castes that happen to be much more heavily black than the warrior caste.
Many people who aren’t familiar with St. Louis County don’t realize that this unrest is happening in a highly racially integrated city, itself part of a highly integrated county, and under the jurisdiction of integrated police forces. The police are much whiter than the citizenry, but race neither keeps bad black recruits from joining troubled police forces nor white citizens safe from bad cops.
I’m white, and I’ve had some very scary encounters with bad cops; some of my friends seem to think I’m a bit of a crank for freely naming and shaming bad cops who’ve done me wrong. Maybe the scariest thing I’m seeing in response to Ferguson is white acquaintances publishing things on Facebook suggesting that they consider the unrest in Ferguson nothing more than racist ghetto violence against put-upon cops. Their worldview is obviously that they themselves will never run afoul of bad cops because there are no bad cops, just good cops who have to do bad things to bad people. This is a dangerous and insane position. As some on the right wing like to say, white privilege isn’t all it’s cracked up to be; they’re just wrong about the reasons why.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. It sounds like you and I are having similar thoughts about all this. I don’t know exactly what happened between Wilson and Brown, but I don’t need to know the details to see there’s something wrong in Ferguson. The aftermath has made that pretty clear. I don’t know if Wilson is the kind of cop who would feel all disrespected by a black guy who fought with him and get pissed off enough to start shooting, but from what I’ve seen in the news since then, that kind of behavior would not be out-of-character for the local police.