Fatal Hypocrisy: Ferguson and the Case of Mike Brown | POLITICS

In the past two years, black Americans have been arrested while driving in a car with a white girl at night, waiting for a school bus before a high school basketball game, drinking iced tea in a parking lot, buying designer jewellery in a department store, and forcing their own jammed front doors open. The seemingly endless laundry list of occasions where police officers have deemed the inconsequential actions of innocent black Americans as suspicious enough to warrant arrest suggests that many ‘protectors of the people’ don’t believe that ‘innocent until proven guilty’ extends to individuals with dark skin.

It is no coincidence, therefore, that Mike Brown, the unarmed 18-year-old male who was shot and killed by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri on the 9th August, was black. Up until the evening of the shooting, the heightened suspicion that the police displayed in their treatment of black residents increased as the ratio of black to white residents of Ferguson County grew. In the past year alone, 92% of Ferguson’s searches and 83% of its car stops involved black individuals. Although Ferguson has a 67% black majority, this is nowhere near high enough to allow the number of searches and car stops endured by Ferguson’s black residents to boil down to anything other than racial prejudice. The racial bias that police officers foster does not come from their experiences while on duty, because only one in five of Ferguson’s black residents searched are caught carrying illegal contraband, compared to one in three of Ferguson’s white residents. The death of an unarmed teenager at the hands of a cop has reminded Americans that allowing racial prejudice to survive and thrive is not only unfair – it is unsafe. Signs that protestors carried with the message ‘my blackness is not a weapon’ underline the harmful, even lethal, implications of being black and living in a neighbourhood where police officers see black residents as more of a threat to public safety than their white counterparts.

Although the Ferguson Police Department has yet to publically respond to emergence of the statistics suggesting that its officers view black residents as more prone to criminal activity, Ferguson’s police officers now attach small cameras to their uniforms. It is true that both the police department and Ferguson’s residents have much to benefit from increased transparency, but attaching cameras to police officers does not address the greater underlying issues revolving around the racial prejudices that Ferguson’s police officers have displayed while on duty. This measure has little potential to change the way police officers act because it is not working to alter the way they perceive the residents of Ferguson. Strictly speaking, it is not illegal to conduct more searches on black residents than white, as long as the police officers have reasonable cause for suspicion. Cameras or no cameras, continuing to regard Ferguson’s black residents with automatic, unwarranted suspicion will set the stage for another police officer to make assumptions like Officer Wilson did as he fired six shots into unarmed teenager who was on his way to visit his grandmother.

Having racial biases is not something that can be easily avoided in a society where such prejudices are present, and often promoted, in the media in both obvious and subtle ways. Through first acknowledging the presence of racial prejudice in the Ferguson County police department, the city can begin working to counter it. Actions like putting more black people in powerful positions within the department, for example, have the potential to make an enormous impact: at the moment, only three out of Ferguson’s fifty-three police officers are black.

Ferguson is not the only city in America where the racial demographics of its police department don’t match the citizens of the city it is meant to protect. In hundreds of police departments across the USA, the percentage of white officers on the police force is over 30% higher than the percentage of white residents in the communities they serve. Detroit, one of the most extreme manifestations of this statistic, has three times the number of white people on the police force as in the community. Through resolving to restructure its police department to ensure that the racial demographics of the department better match the demographics of the city itself, the Ferguson Police Department could use its current place in the spotlight to spark greater change within America when it comes to breaking down racial prejudices in law enforcement. According to the FBI’s accounts of ‘justifiable homicide’, white officers across America have used deadly force against a black person on average almost two times a week between 2005 and 2014. This means that nearly 940 black Americans have been killed by white police officers in the past nine years. Although a Ferguson police officer contributed to this statistic, the Ferguson police department now has the opportunity to lead the way in combatting it.

As the streets of Ferguson filled with people of all colours and ages holding signs and demanding justice, a relatively small group of cops and their families gathered at a rally in neighbouring Saint Louis to show solidarity with Officer Wilson, who was given 5 weeks paid leave pending further investigation. These people wore navy blue T-shirts with police badges printed on them and held signs that said ‘innocent until proven guilty’. It is time for Ferguson’s police force to practice what they preach.

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