The more things change; the more they remain the same.
In 2014 a white-skinned cop with a gun can kill an unarmed Black teenager and get away with it. A nearly white Grand Jury believed that the cop was justified. They game him a license to kill. And the cop said in testimony that the area was a gun-saturated neighborhood, that hated cops, gee I wonder why? In his mind this was akin to a killing field. So he and the Grand Jury believed that firing six shots at an unarmed teen was justice that the cop was right to shoot to kill.
On that hot August day in Ferguson, Missouri, population approximately 14,000, the relations between an all-white police department and the Black community was at an all time low. Blacks, a social under-class in Missouri, were suspicious that there could be no justice in a place where the majority of the citizenry is black, African-American, and the city council, police department, and other engines of local power and control are almost 100% white.
The community's worst fears were realized when Ferguson's County Prosecutor, Bob McCulloch, oddly enough released the Grand Jury's decision 9:00 p.m. at night and even odder still delivered a 20-minute rambling de facto defense of the no-indictment. As he stood there arrogantly outlining and canonizing into police sainthood Officer Darren Wilson, the trigger-happy cop who gunned down Michael Brown, and waxing eloquent about the work of his Grand Jury, one got the distinct feeling that he was killing the 18-year old teenager all over again.
But things should never have gotten to this stage. It was a simple thing. Bring a case to the Grand Jury and do the job ALL prosecutors are charges to do -- defend and seek justice for the victim. All that had to be done was to present evidence that there is enough information to bring a case of homicide against the cop. And let a jury decide his guilt or innocence. Not make a Grand Jury try the case.
The involuntary urge to regurgitate might not have been the only reaction on my part as we had to look at and endure a smug County Prosecutor with a checkered reputation for looking the other way when his police kill ordinary citizens, berate eye witnesses, chastise the media, offered no new information and branched out into a condescending lecture on the rule of law and how he wanted society to react to his latest travesty and miscarriage of justice.
And then President Barack Obama did a flash Press Conference telling America that "we're a nation of laws" and that the Ferguson decision was "the grand jury's to make." He appealed for calm acknowledging that the nation has a lot of work to do to heal the racial divide.
As all Black liberal conservatives are wont to do, President Obama said that we should "recognize that the Ferguson situation speaks to broader challenges we face as a nation" and the deep destructive legacy of racial discrimination (the closest Mr. Obama could bring himself to saying "slavery").
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