Tensions remain heightened in Ferguson, Missouri two weeks after Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown around midday on a Saturday. Rallies have spread to places like New York and Washington DC, with protesters subverting the gesture and speech of surrender – hands raised, 'Don't shoot!' – into a symbol of resistance.
The security response to these protests illuminates the conditions in which Brown was killed. The use of police dogs, land mine-resistant vehicles, rubber bullets, tear gas and sonic weapons in the streets of Ferguson is so disproportionate as to be nearly comical, except that it underlines the hostility that can turn fatal if you were black.
It is a hostility that has been internalised by blacks. In a letter published in the New York Times a week after Brown's death, 'a black mother to a mixed race child' lists the rules that she makes him recite over and over: 'Don't run after dark. Don't put your hood up. Keep your hands visible at all times. Always be scrupulously polite.' These are the rules that she hopes will keep her son safe, like being careful around a stove.
Such sentiments are eerily echoed by a Los Angeles police officer in a Washington Post opinion piece: : 'If you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you.' The onus of restraint, it turns out, does not rest on the man with the gun who is vested with the force of the state.
The specifics of the Ferguson incident are yet to be resolved by federal and St Louis County investigations but there are certain things that cannot be refuted. Brown and his friend were initially stopped for jaywalking. Both were unarmed. Six bullets hit Brown, four in the arm and two in the head. Wilson did not call for medical help. A dead man was left on the street for a few hours in the summer heat.
The lack of restraint on Wilson's part, the indignity that shrouded Brown's body long after his death, the disproportionate force deployed against protestors and journalists in the aftermath – this has become the canvas upon which the long grievance of racialised oppression has found vivid expression.
Inequities in the United States are often magnified by the justice system, just as they are magnified in education, health and housing. A report on Ferguson by the Missouri State General, for instance, found that 86 per cent of traffic stops last year targeted black drivers, though their contraband 'hit rate' (searches with found contraband over total searches) is lower than that of white drivers by 12 percentage points.
National data shows that black people are nearly four times more likely to be arrested for drug possession, though they use drugs at similar rates as white people. Their drug sentences are 13 percent longer. According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), SWAT raids are more likely to occur in 'communities of colour'.
The mentality revealed in LA officer's remarks – that 'in the overwhelming majority of cases it is not the cops, but the people they stop, who can prevent detentions from turning into tragedies' – is alarming in that context. In many of the manslaughter cases in which police officers shot black men to death, victims were unarmed, not resisting arrest or had been mistakenly identified.
The killing of Michael Brown may have thus sharpened a malignant pattern, but the broader conditions that make it more likely for such incidents to occur will remain unless police departments confront the way they have perpetuated injustice rather than enforced order.
What we have seen over the past weeks is an unreconciled history of racial oppression intersecting with more contemporary features such as security theatre and heavily militarised police.
It is worth pondering whether this episode will remain unique to Ferguson and the United States for long.
Fatima Measham is a Melbourne-based social commentator who contributes regularly to Eureka Street. She tweets as @foomeister .
Image under Creative Commons licence via flickr.