Black city, white police, and Brown

The shooting in Ferguson and its violent aftermath shows that policing divorced from the realities of social inequality can be dangerous

August 27, 2014 12:19 am | Updated 12:19 am IST

The shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown, an African-American, by the Ferguson (Missouri) Police in the U.S. on the afternoon of August 9, led to major civilian unrest in the city and its neighbourhood. During the week-long violence, bottles and Molotov cocktails were hurled by mobs. Brown, who received at least six gunshot wounds from a police firearm, was walking down the street with Dorian Johnson, a friend, when the two were accosted by a white policeman. They were possibly admonished for walking on the centre of the road instead of on the pavement. Facts thereafter are fuzzy with rival claims of aggression and an exchange of words. Mr. Johnson, a key witness in the investigation, is categorical that the policeman fired several shots at his unarmed friend without any provocation.

A suggestion initially that Brown was a suspect in a liquor shop theft, and was therefore confronted by the policeman, was flimsy because the video shot of the inside of the shop released by the police did not clearly establish that the person in the clip was in fact Brown. There was also no evidence to prove that the policeman who shot him had knowledge that the man whom he stopped was actually a crime suspect. Even if he had, the revelation that as many as six shots were fired at Brown enraged the community, which did not also take kindly to the fact that his body lay on the street unattended by the police for several hours.

Strangely, there was an initial departmental reluctance for a number of days to reveal the identity of the policeman who was involved. When public indignation reached its crescendo, the Ferguson Police gave in and announced his name as Darren Wilson. The latter has since been suspended. A grand jury investigation (a kind of a preliminary enquiry) has been ordered. Its conclusions will not be in until October. Only thereafter is any possible criminal action against the policeman likely. The Ferguson Police’s refusal to arrest Mr. Wilson has been roundly criticised as one of blatant partisanship.

“The U.S. police have had to balance the demands from the more affluent sections for tougher policing, and the minorities for a more humane enforcement of the law”

Ferguson is a city of some 20,000 people and is situated north of St. Louis. It was predominantly white till a few decades ago but it has a majority African-American population now. Strangely, the city council which has a majority white membership and a white mayor does not reflect this demographic break-up. Also, only three of the 50 Ferguson Police Department officials are African-Americans. The intensity of public protest for several days reveals that emotions are running high against law enforcement personnel in the area. A probe by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (civil rights) was initiated into the alleged police misconduct, and the Attorney-General, Eric Holder, visited Ferguson to oversee the official response and assuage the wounded feelings of the African-American community. (Mr. Holder, a black, recalled how he himself had, in his early years, been humiliated by the police on a few occasions.)

Past episodes The Ferguson happenings are somewhat reminiscent of the public uproar that followed the Rodney King episode of March 1991 and the Trayvon Martin death in Sanford (Florida) in February 2012. King was brutally assaulted in Los Angeles County when his vehicle was intercepted after a long and daring vehicle chase by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). A video clipping of the incident that was broadcast widely led to national outrage and tension in many cities. The acquittal of all four accused police officers in 1992 led to large-scale riots in which more than 50 were killed. The Martin killing was even more outrageous: he was, on mere suspicion, challenged and later fired upon and killed by a part-time policeman, who normally goes by the appellation, Neighbourhood Watch Officer.

In all the three unfortunate episodes, the victim was a black youth and the police officers, except in the Florida incident, were white.

Incidents of this kind bring to the fore the widespread belief in the country that the police is prone to shoot from the hip at the slightest hint that a person intercepted in a public place could be a fugitive or could be one who is preparing to commit a crime. The popular view among minorities is that it is only they who are at the receiving end of police excesses.

The debate on police discriminatory practices goes back decades. In the early 1990s, I was a graduate student in criminal justice at Temple University in Philadelphia — a city with a large African-American population and a black police chief at that time. The Philadelphia Police Department’s reputation then was not great in many aspects of law enforcement, and there was an overwhelming feeling that the force was guilty — not only of corruption but of discriminatory practices too. The unfortunate fact is that the U.S. Police is white-dominated, and the few sincere efforts to push up black representation have yielded only modest success. At present, blacks comprise only about 11 per cent of the police in the country; whites account for 75 per cent. The rest are either Hispanic or Asian/Pacific Islander.

The relatively low black representation in the police is attributed to twin facts: one, there is no substantial dilution in standards of recruitment to encourage more successful black applications and, more importantly, an average black youth feels that once he gets into a police force, he is likely to be harassed by a white supervisor.

Police relations with the community at large are also strained in many cities. The rise in gun violence across the nation is directly responsible for the hiatus. The police have had to balance the demand for tougher policing from the more affluent sections, and the clamour from the minorities for a more humane enforcement of the law and less discrimination on the ground of race. This is why the recent ‘militarisation’ of the police has been counterproductive and actually infuriated the minorities. The latter’s anger is justified somewhat by the fact that there were as many as 400 killings in police shootings in the past year.

Lessons for the police The Ferguson incident highlights the intricacies of policing in the present times, especially in a democracy that has a fractured society. It has lessons for the Indian police as well. Mindless policing divorced from the realities of social inequality can be dangerous. It can tear apart the basic fabric of unity and civilised conduct of citizens in any community. A blending of toughness with the civilised treatment of individuals is the recipe. But then this is just theory, one more easily advocated and expounded than actually possible to practise in a stressful situation that a policemen is often placed in the present day environment.

A misbehaving policeman on the street, who cannot prove any provocation for his erratic conduct, does not at all deserve any sympathy. He is, of course, different from a colleague who uses force only to ward off an aggressor. Even here, the policemen employing force for self-preservation or to protect a member of the public, will have to be viewed with less kindness if it is proved that he had reacted disproportionately, especially when he had the time to apply his mind and disable an aggressor through lesser force. In sum, an assessment of police conduct on any occasion is a matter for judicious scrutiny, whenever required, and it cannot be one dictated by political expediency or other non-professional considerations.

(R.K. Raghavan is a former director of the Central Bureau of Investigation.)

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