Ten years after Ferguson, and the police are still here.
Little has changed, and policing still isn’t
working out very well for us.
It is hard to believe that a full decade has passed since
the police killed Mike Brown in Ferguson,
Missouri, and the uprisings and protests that
grew out of that. On Aug. 9, 2014, police
officer Darren Wilson shot and killed the
unarmed 18-year-old Brown. Wilson claimed he
acted in self-defense and did not face
prosecution.
Ferguson, a mostly Black city in St. Louis County, had a
nearly all-white police force and a long
history of institutional racism and the
targeting and exploitation of Black residents.
The U.S.
Justice Department found the Ferguson Police Department and Municipal
Court had a pattern of civil rights violations
against Black people.
Ferguson was an inflection point for America. It was one
of those “teachable moments” and an
opportunity for the country to look itself in
the mirror and see if we would blink. For
Black Lives Matter, Ferguson was a catalyst
that sparked the movement that blew up on
social media and in the street. Young people
got their education that summer and some were
radicalized and mobilized to change the system
that is snuffing, snatching, stacking and
warehousing Black bodies.
The recent police killing of Sonya
Massey - a Black Springfield, Illinois, woman who called
911 for help, only to be shot to death in the
face by a problematic deputy named Sean
Grayson after she rebuked him in the name of
Jesus over a pot of hot water - demonstrates
that the police have not changed a decade
after Ferguson. Grayson, who like other
abusive officers, was recycled
throughout various police departments, is a feature of the system rather than a bug.
Law enforcement is not an example of a few bad apples, but
rather a rotten institution that is performing
as it was designed. Policing in America grew
out of the enslavement and monitoring of
African people on the plantation, the genocide and dislocation of Native
Americans and the brutalization of workers in the name of protecting capital.
Violent and unstable officers, violations of civil rights
and civil liberties, and the heavy-handed
treatment of Black people, communities of
color and those with low income are
fundamental characteristics of policing. This
is why protesters during the George Floyd
summer of 2020 called for a defunding of the
police and diversion of funding to social
services, education, and programs of social
uplift.
Instead of more police reform, we’re getting Cop
Cities - urban warfare training centers popping up
everywhere to teach cops to further brutalize
Black communities, students and activists. Ten
years after Ferguson, and four years after the
death of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd,
nothing has changed about policing, including
the need to defund it.
Sadly, members of the Black elite have promoted the
continued militarized occupation of police in
Black communities and have stood in the way of
change. Consider Rep.
Tim Scott, R-S.C., who helped derail the George Floyd police reform bill in
Congress. Atlanta Black politicos decided to
take the bag and support the $90 million Cop
City facility.
And consider Wesley Bell, the former public defender who
became a Ferguson city councilmember in the
wake of the Ferguson protests and later St.
Louis County prosecuting attorney with
progressive and activist support. Bell
reportedly sold out his community, broke
promises and failed to push reforms around racial justice and
decarceration while in office. Further, Bell
also dropped out of his U.S. Senate race and
took a bag with $9
million in it from AIPAC and Republican anti-abortion and crypto billionaire donors to unseat Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo.
this week during Missouri’s primary. Bush is
the Ferguson activist-turned-Congresswoman and
Squad member who stands for the people.
As Malcolm X once said, “They will pay one of us to kill
one of us, just to say it was one of us.”
Bell had said in 2014 that the real “tragedy” of the
Michael Brown killing was that the prosecutors
failed to share “the officer’s side of the
story,” as Akela Lacy reported in The
Intercept.
“I feel like he lied to us. He never brought charges
against the killer,” said Mike
Brown Sr., father of Michael Brown, about Bell in his role as
prosecutor. “He never walked the streets of
Ferguson with me. He failed to reform the
office.”
“Black faces in high places are not going to save us,” as Ruha
Benjamin of Princeton University told us.
But international solidarity will save us, particularly
when we consider that police violence is a
worldwide phenomenon. Ten years ago,
Palestinians were connecting with Ferguson
activists on Twitter and schooling them on how
to protect themselves from the police tear gas
- the same tear
gas canisters manufactured in Pennsylvania that cops were
deploying against Palestinians in the West
Bank and Black folk in Ferguson.
Ten years later, college student protesters – including Black students - set up encampments and occupied university
buildings to protest the genocide in Gaza and
demand their schools divest from the Israeli
military occupation of the Palestinians. These
peaceful protesters - who moved in the spirit
of the 1960s student antiwar activists and
Martin Luther King, the movement against South
African apartheid and the Movement for Black
Lives - were regarded as criminals and
terrorist sympathizers. The students were
greeted with heavy-handed Gestapo police
tactics, police snipers on the roof, arrests
and suspensions.
Yet, when neo-Nazis and white supremacists march, police
are seldom available to make arrests because …
free speech, and in any case, police can’t
arrest themselves.
When it comes to law enforcement, history repeats itself
and we fail to learn its lessons. The urban
rebellions in Watts, Detroit, Newark and
elsewhere in the 1960s were the result of
police brutality, as were the 1992 Rodney King
uprising, the 2014 Ferguson uprising and the
2020 George Floyd protests. Ten years after
Ferguson, nothing has changed because the
fundamentals of institutional racism and
policing in America have stayed the same.
This commentary is
also posted on
The
Grio
