She tells a story that may be difficult for many to accept, especially with a convenience store video now in the narrative mix apparently showing an imposing Michael Brown shoving an Asian store owner over a package of Swisher Sweets cigarillos. Complicated events like Ferguson, Missouri make grappling with Alexander's thesis critical if we are to consider ourselves a free nation. Confession: I shoplifted cigarettes as a kid. It's not an excuse for murder.
The other major narrative relevant to the confrontation between the African American community and the Ferguson PD is the increasing militarization of community police. Radley Balko examines this is his book, The Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces. In this narrative, police become less community-oriented and more like a cohesive unit in a war zone. Citizens take on the attributes of the enemy. Camaraderie among cops is like being "battle buddies." It's reinforced in the minds of cops that civilians just can't understand what they have to endure. This dynamic gets really impacted and weird when you add a post-9/11, War On Terror psychology of "first-responders" fighting a dirty war where anything goes and when you you also put such amazing amounts of surplus war weaponry from the invasion and occupation of Iraq into their hands.
This week, live on MSNBC, the little town of Ferguson, Missouri became the living, breathing embodiment of these two intertwining narratives.
The visceral confusion over the door hitting Brown and being swung back and maybe banging into the officer reminds me of the recent case in New York where Cecily McMillan, a young woman activist, was grabbed harshly on her breast from behind by an unseen cop. When she swung around automatically in reaction, she hit the cop with her elbow. She was, then, charged with, and later convicted of, felony assault of a police officer and spent time on Riker's Island. Maybe in the Ferguson case, the cop did get hit by his patrol car door. He may have even been bruised. In the hands of a master attorney, before the right jury such a circumstance could be transformed into a potentially mortal wound and a justifiable provocation.
Missouri Governor Jay Nixon reacted following the wildness of Wednesday night and appointed a black State Trooper raised in the Ferguson area, Captain Ronald Johnson, to take over the town's security problems. The tear gas, rubber bullets and even a few Molotov cocktails of Wednesday night were replaced Thursday night by promenading cars, horns blaring and young black men pumping their arms in the air triumphantly. Captain Johnson was the perfect choice to lower the temperature, though there seemed to be what Chris Hayes called "a Game Of Thrones power struggle" going on among the various local, state and federal jurisdictions.
On Friday, Chief Jackson released the shooter's name: Darren Wilson, a four-year veteran of the department who Jackson said had no record of complaints in his file. There was a sense that the people in the street had won something big. Iraq was a god-awful mess, but the urgency seemed lower. Rachel Maddow emphasized that President Obama had reached the critical 60-day mark in the War Powers Act, meaning Congress was now involved in any military actions in Iraq.
MSNBC's Chris Hayes was now live on the street in Ferguson. He was buoyant as he described the peaceful carnival as "a sense of complete organic relief." A young black man named Rashad Robinson, director of something called Color For Change, spoke of it as "an absolutely new moment." At this point, I flipped over to Fox New and Laura Ingraham was kvetching with a media critic over the cellphone-videotaped arrest of the Washington Post reporter in MacDonalds. The cops were only trying to protect him, she said. But, somehow, it wasn't working. She's smart, and you could sense defeat in her manner. The Fox/Police narrative had lost a major round.
In the end, the decision to go all out on the story was a coup for MSNBC. On the street, the attorney Freeman Bosley, Jr. told Hayes the local prosecutor was now moot in the Brown case; it was now firmly in federal hands. Referring to meetings with Justice Department officials, he said he expected a federal grand jury to act quickly. He thanked Hayes and MSNBC for the live coverage employing all sorts of social media observers. He said it had made a difference; the world was really watching.
"I believe as a result of that we're going to see some changes," said the former black mayor of St Louis.
It would be naà ¯ve to suggest the struggle is over. Antiwar activist friends of mine from Veterans For Peace, which has its headquarter in St Louis, flew from all over the country to be there Thursday. Ferguson, Missouri was suddenly the front line in a larger struggle. Rashad Robinson put it this way to Hayes: "If anything comes of this, I hope people remain vigilant."
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