We’re debating two different questions here.
The question before the Ferguson, Mo. grand jury was whether sufficient evidence existed to prosecute police officer Darren Wilson for manslaughter or murder in the shooting and killing Michael Brown on August 9.
The question was whether there was probable cause to believe Wilson broke the law. To be more specific, the question was whether it was unreasonable for Wilson to believe “that the use of deadly force was immediately necessary to effect the arrest of the offender.”
The grand jury answered these questions in the negative, and so there was no indictment.
Ferguson erupted at this news. It erupted into tears, into prayers, into chants, and then into violence and flames. It was an outrage that a white cop shooting an unarmed black kid to death in broad daylight wouldn’t even face a trial.
For many of those who cursed the ruling, bigger questions were at hand: Did Michael Brown die an unjust and pointless death? Do cops constantly hassle black youths? Do police more readily shoot at black youths than at whites? Did the police overreact to the summer protests? Is the criminal justice system less fair to blacks than to whites?
These aren’t tough questions if you’re a black person in Ferguson — or almost anywhere else. Yes, the system is rigged. Black people bear the costs. And white people don’t.
But Officer Wilson isn’t the one who rigged the system, and you can’t put a cop on trial for the injustice of society.
Wilson’s case became, in the public imagination, a symbol for everything wrong with our criminal justice system, and for the inequities and depredations minorities and the poor suffer daily. But for the grand jury, this case wasn’t a symbol. It was a very specific potential defendant, a very specific victim, and a very specific body of evidence.
Different sides were asking different questions. I lay this out not so much to defend the grand jury as to prod those who agree with its decision to see what the protestors see, and to address the underlying problems.
President Obama put it well on Monday night after the prosecutor announced Wilson would not stand trial. After praising the progress this country has made on race relations, Obama said, “what is also true is that there are still problems and communities of color aren’t just making these problems up. Separating that from this particular decision, there are issues in which the law too often feels as if it is being applied in a discriminatory fashion.”
Obama was right to separate the underlying issues from the particular case. And he was right that these are real problems. Blacks are about 30 times as likely as whites to be shot by police. Think of it this way: If you’re a white parent, fears about your kid being shot are basically limited to muggings. If you’re an urban black parent, that fear is expanded to include police. “It shouldn’t be dangerous to be a young black male,” read one sign a protestor held in Ferguson this summer.
Another problem highlighted by this case, but not up for indictment: Ferguson’s police, and St. Louis County’s police, is not of Ferguson. The police are almost all white in a town that is mostly black. They arm themselves as if they are an invading army, and they clearly lack positive relationships with the majority of the town. So much is broken here: how police are recruited, trained, and armed; how the people and the local government interact.
One hurdle to indicting Wilson (besides the evidence) was a perverse Missouri law. Missouri law explicitly allows police to use violent force — to shoot people — if they believe they need to shoot in order to arrest someone they believe committed a felony.
In the interpretation of the facts most sympathetic to Brown — he scuffled with Wilson, then ran away while getting shot at — Wilson still probably comes down on the right side of the law as written. But government officials, trained and empowered by the state, should be at least as constrained as private citizens in their lawful use of deadly force.
Darren Wilson’s guilt was the issue at hand for the grand jury. That case is closed. An unjust, dysfunctional, discriminatory regime is the issue at hand for Americans going forward. That case may never be wrapped up, but at least something can be done to make the laws better.
Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Sunday and Wednesday on washingtonexaminer.com.
