Justice Is Blind
The case of dueling DOJ reports on Ferguson, Missouri
Heather Mac Donald
(here are excerpts from the article--it is worth the time to read it in its entirety): http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/justice-blind_892679.html?utm_source=newsletters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=KC+%2353+3_24_15
March 30, 2015, Vol. 20, No. 28
Remember Michael Brown, the 18-year-old whose fatal shooting in Ferguson, Mo., last August triggered two waves of riots, a national protest movement, death threats against the officer who shot Brown, lamentations by college presidents regarding America’s enduring racial injustice, vilification of St. Louis prosecutor Robert McCulloch for not obtaining an indictment against the officer who shot Brown, a campaign to eliminate grand jury proceedings when police officers use deadly force, the assassination of two New York police officers, and a presidential task force to reform policing? The press and public leaders don’t appear to remember Brown, now that a Justice Department report has demolished the narrative that turned him into a martyr to police and prosecutor racism. His shooting is now mentioned in passing only as a prelude to a second Justice report, also released on March 4, that preserves the meme of a racist Ferguson police force, thus providing a substitute rationale for the summer and fall rioting.
Before the Justice Department report on the Brown shooting is consigned to total oblivion, it is worth examining its findings, as well as the strategies used to marginalize them, in some detail. They bear on the ecstatically received second Justice Department report on Ferguson police racism and on the larger discourse about policing and race.
Attorney General Eric Holder was clearly not happy that his own agency had so resoundingly shredded the incendiary story of a pacific Michael Brown gunned down by a trigger-happy cop while trying to surrender. And so he provided the mechanism for sidelining his own department’s report. A few days before its release, he told Politico that he wanted to lower the standard of proof in civil rights cases. The subtext of this announcement: The decision not to pursue civil rights charges against Officer Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown was forced on DOJ by an overly stringent evidentiary standard; under a more realistic standard, Wilson would have been prosecuted. Voilà! The media had their angle. “The Justice Department announced on Wednesday that its investigation did not support federal civil rights charges against Darren Wilson,” the New York Times acknowledged morosely in an editorial, before immediately turning to the good news: “Still, the department found overwhelming evidence of entrenched racism in Ferguson’s police force [emphasis added].” The Huffington Post said that the Justice Department had decided “not to file federal charges against Wilson for fatally shooting Brown last July.”
“Did not support”? Decided “not to file”? Such understatement massively misrepresents the content of the Brown report. This was not a question of evidence “not supporting” high-threshold civil rights charges; it’s a question of evidence eviscerating virtually every aspect of the pro-Brown, anti-Wilson narrative. Under no imaginable standard of proof could Wilson be found guilty of civil rights violations—or, for that matter, murder. As the report states: “Multiple credible witnesses corroborate virtually every material aspect of Wilson’s account and are consistent with the physical evidence.” Those “material aspects” include Wilson’s testimony that Brown punched and grabbed him while Wilson was in his SUV, that Brown tried to seize his gun, and that Brown charged at Wilson after Wilson had exited his car. Wilson had first seen Brown walking in the middle of Canfield Drive with another young man. Wilson suspected that Brown was the thief who had just robbed a convenience store and roughed up its owner a few minutes before, since he saw the stolen boxes of cigarillos in Brown’s hands. Wilson asked Brown to move to the sidewalk. Brown responded: “F— what you have to say.” Wilson called for backup and then tried to block Brown from proceeding. At that point, Brown reached into Wilson’s car and starting pounding him and grabbing his gun. Wilson fired and Brown ran off. Wilson gave chase on foot. Brown then turned and charged towards Wilson. At no point did Wilson fire at Brown when Brown’s back was turned or when he was on the ground. As for the now-iconic “Hands up, don’t shoot” claim—the DOJ report is withering:
There are no credible witness accounts that state that Brown was clearly attempting to surrender when Wilson shot him. As detailed throughout this report, those witnesses who say so have given accounts that could not be relied upon in a prosecution because they are irreconcilable with the physical evidence, inconsistent with the credible accounts of other eyewitnesses, inconsistent with the witness’s own prior statements, or in some instances, because the witnesses have acknowledged that their initial accounts were untrue.
In other words, no prosecutor with any understanding of his professional duties would think of going forward with this case, since there is no evidence to support it. This is not a standard of proof issue, it is an absence-of-any-case-whatsoever issue.
The report also explains why Brown’s body lay on the ground for four hours after he was killed before being taken away by an ambulance, another plank in the “Black Lives Matter” indictment of the allegedly racist treatment of Brown. The crime scene detectives’ efforts to process the scene were continuously interrupted by protesters who were encroaching on their work chanting, “Kill these motherf—ers” and “Kill the police.” What sounded like automatic gunfire was reported in the area, resulting in further suspension of activity until more backup arrived.
The initial news stories on the Brown killing contained several key elements of Wilson’s by-now-vindicated self-defense, but they were immediately purged from the dominant narrative. They resurfaced periodically: A caller to a local radio show in mid-August, for example, reiterated the essential facts; in October, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that the autopsy and several witnesses corroborated Wilson’s account of the encounter. (A San Francisco pathologist who had seconded the autopsy conclusions for the Post-Dispatch story recanted a day later, after having come under attack for her initial assessment.) None of this had the slightest effect on the anti-Wilson juggernaut.
Eyewitnesses who corroborated Wilson’s account were under a reign of terror not to cooperate with the police. The Canfield Green neighborhood where the shooting occurred was plastered with “Snitches get stitches” signs. A 74-year-old black male who believed that the shooting was justified had told a friend two days after the incident that he “would have f—ing shot that boy, too.” He refused to give formal statements to county or federal authorities, however. He would rather go to jail than testify before the grand jury, he said, so enormous was the community pressure to support a “hands up” surrender narrative. A 53-year-old black male called a police tip line after seeing Brown’s companion lie about the incident on national television. He, too, stated that the shooting was justified, but told authorities that he would deny everything if his phone call were traced. He was served with a grand jury subpoena but refused to honor it. A 27-year-old biracial male said that it appeared that Wilson’s life was in jeopardy, describing Brown as a “threat” moving at a “full charge.” At the scene, as angry crowds were gathering and collecting false narratives about the shooting, two black women asked him to recount what he had seen into their cell phones. When he told them that they would not like what he had to say, they called him a “white motherf—er” and other racial slurs. A 31-year-old black female initially told investigators that she had seen Wilson fire shots into Brown’s back as he lay dead in the street. When challenged with the autopsy findings that revealed no shots to the back, she confessed to making up her story. “You’ve gotta live the life to know it,” she said. In fact, she then admitted, it looked like Wilson’s life was in danger as Brown was charging him. When authorities tried to serve her with a subpoena, however, she blocked her door with a couch.
The Justice Department’s evidence for “intentional discrimination” is even thinner than its statistical analyses. The agency criticizes city officials who used the term “personal responsibility” to explain law enforcement disparities among “certain segments” of the community. The phrase is a code word for “negative stereotypes about African Americans,” the federal lawyers believe. In reality, denouncing any invocation of “personal responsibility” as racist is a code word for liberal blindness to underclass culture.
DOJ’s alleged smoking gun is half a dozen racist jokes emailed by two police supervisors and a court clerk. While juvenile and offensive, the emails are far from establishing that the police department’s law enforcement protocols are intentionally discriminatory.
Justice’s final salvo against Ferguson is the charge that its officials view traffic and misdemeanor enforcement as a revenue generator for the city. The revisionist history of the riots, hastily cobbled together after the collapse of the Brown execution myth, now holds that they were triggered by compounding traffic fines as much as by the shooting. But if Ferguson uses traffic violations for revenue, so do the majority of municipalities across the country. DOJ does not come close to showing that the reason that the city wants to raise money from enforcement is to discriminate against blacks.
To be sure, Ferguson’s system of fees and warrants for failure to pay those fees or to show up in court—like identical systems throughout the country—needs reform to avoid any possibility of punishing people for being poor. Making community service more available for offenders who cannot afford their fines is a good idea. But if those offenders ditch their community assignments, the court system will be back to the same dilemma of how to induce their compliance. Hapless Ferguson officials used the taboo term “personal responsibility” to try to explain to their Washington investigators why some people face an escalating series of fines for repeated failures to attend their court hearings. The DOJ attorneys were scandalized yet again. But this explanation is not unique to “racist” Ferguson. The black mayor of a neighboring town defended similar fees and enforcement methods under his own government. “Everyone is saying, ‘Oh, no, that’s cities just taking advantage of the poor,’ ” he told the New York Times. “When did the poor get the right to commit crimes?”
For the last 20 years, America’s elites have talked feverishly about police racism in order to avoid talking about black crime. The Justice Department’s second Ferguson report is just the latest example of that furious attempt to change the subject.
On March 11—hours before two police officers were shot at protests in Ferguson, either targeted directly or the unintended casualties of a gang dispute—a 6-year-old boy named Marcus Johnson was killed by a stray bullet in a St. Louis park. There have been no protests against his killer; Al Sharpton has not shown up to demand a federal investigation. Marcus Johnson is just one of the 6,000 black homicide victims a year (more than all white and Hispanic homicide victims combined) who receive virtually no attention because their killers are other black civilians.
The police could end all their lethal uses of force tomorrow and it would have almost no effect on the black death-by-homicide rate. Black males between the ages of 14 and 17 die from shootings at more than six times the rate of white and Hispanic male teens combined, thanks to a 10 times higher rate of homicide committed by black teens. Until the black family is reconstituted, the best protection that the law-abiding residents of urban neighborhoods have is the police. They are the government agency most committed to the proposition that “Black Lives Matter.” While police departments must constantly reinforce their duty to treat everyone lawfully and with respect, the relentless effort to demonize them for enforcing the law will leave poor communities vulnerable to anarchy.
Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of Are Cops Racist?
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