People protest a United States grand jury’s decision not to indict Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson in the fatal shooting of unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown, outside the U.S. Consulate in Toronto
Just as President Barack Obama, the nation’s first black chief executive, urged people in a televised broadcast not to throw bottles or smash windows, they did exactly that.
“There are ways of channeling your concerns constructively,” Obama counseled Monday night while protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, began torching police cars, burning down buildings and looting businesses after a St. Louis County prosecutor announced there would be no grand jury indictment of a police officer who killed an unarmed black teenager.
Six years into the Obama presidency, the historic symbolism of a black leader in the White House has collided with the systemic reality of continuing racial divisions aggravated by the economy and violent interactions between the judicial system and young black men.
“It’s a rebellion against a system that is killing our young people and then has no repercussions, nor transparency in their investigations,” said Elizabeth Vega, 48, a St. Louis artist who has been demonstrating in Ferguson since 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot Aug. 9.
Yet the divide is complex and not as clear-cut as it used to be. Two decades ago, the acquittal of former football star O.J. Simpson on murder charges provoked sharp disagreements between blacks and whites, and served as a touchstone on how the two races can view things through
The situation now is more nuanced, said Wendell Worjroh, a 42-year-old African-American IT salesman in Atlanta.
“It depends on the demographics, on where you are,” he said. “You have some Caucasians who live in certain areas who understand what this is about. And you have African-Americans living in affluent areas who are wondering why the community is pushing the limits.”
As the St. Louis suburb erupted into chaos on Nov. 24, supportive protests in other major cities didn’t follow a similar destructive path. In Chicago, where African-Americans and the police have long had a contentious relationship, dozens of protesters promised to hold a 28-hour sit-in yesterday in front of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s office. By evening, after police threatened arrests, the demonstrators left City Hall and marched through downtown.
The Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network had called for a separate protest several blocks away at Chicago’s federal courthouse. It drew no demonstrators.
In New York’s City Hall, 15 black, Hispanic and Asian City Council members walked out of a formal meeting of the 51-member body and gathered in the atrium near its spiral stairwell, in what several described as a response to Ferguson, and began chanting “Black Lives Matter” and “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!”
To be sure, views on Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson’s shooting of Brown are often separated by race. Fifty-four percent of nonwhites – blacks, Latinos and Asians – said Wilson should be charged with murder, while only 23 percent of whites agreed, according to a CNN/ORC poll of 1,045 Americans conducted Nov. 21-23. The margin of error was plus or minus three percentage points.
“In 2008, when Barack Obama was elected, a lot of people held out the idea that America was post-racial,” said Andra Gillespie, associate professor of political science at Emory University in Atlanta. “Race is still very much the subtext of American life and American politics, for all the talk of being post-racial.”
Recent shootings of blacks by police have sharpened the focus on Ferguson. In Cleveland, an officer fatally shot a 12-year-old boy who was wielding a BB gun on Nov. 22. Two days earlier, an unarmed 19-year-old man was killed by a rookie police officer in New York.
Ferguson, a north St. Louis suburb of 21,000 people, embodies what black critics say is wrong with the political and justice systems. The city’s population is two-thirds black yet the government is overwhelmingly white. Blacks hold three positions on the 53-officer police force. The racial imbalance tipped the scales against Michael Brown, said Benjamin Crump, the family’s attorney.
“The process should be indicted. It should be indicted because of continuous systematic results that are yielded by this process,” Crump said in a news conference Tuesday.
At Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, where slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. once preached, pastor Raphael Warnock said the nation’s criminal justice system “is more racially skewed now than it was during Dr. King’s lifetime.”
Among prisoners ages 18 to 19, black males were imprisoned at nine times the rate of white males, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. In 2011, 3 percent of all black males were in prison, compared to 0.5 percent of white males.
“The data shows that the civil rights movement had little to no impact on our criminal justice system,” Warnock said. “The criminal justice system is the very place where deep patterns of racism have been reinscribed in the U.S.” Tim Jones and Margaret Newkirk, Bloomberg
prosecutor faces new criticism over ferguson case
st. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch — whose impartiality has been questioned since soon after Michael Brown was killed by Officer Darren Wilson on Aug. 9 — has come under renewed scrutiny since he appeared before television cameras to announce that the grand jury would not indict Wilson. A defensive McCulloch repeatedly cited what he said were inconsistencies and erroneous witness accounts. He never mentioned that Brown was unarmed. Attorneys for Brown’s family and activists said Tuesday that everything from how evidence was presented to the grand jury to the way McCulloch delivered the news of its decision bolstered their belief that the outcome was predetermined by McCulloch, who has deep family roots and relationships with police. “This grand jury decision, we feel, is a reflection of the sentiment of those that presented the evidence,” Anthony Gray, an attorney for Brown’s family, said at a news conference.
ferguson officer: ‘i know i did my job right’
Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson says he couldn’t have done anything differently in his confrontation with Michael Brown to have prevented the 18-year-old’s shooting death. Wilson made his first public statements Tuesday during an interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos. He told Stephanopoulos he has a clean conscience because “I know I did my job right.” Wilson was placed on leave Aug. 9, the day the white officer fatally shot Brown, who was unarmed and black. Wilson had been with the Ferguson police force for less than three years before the shooting. He told Stephanopoulos that Brown’s shooting marked the first time he had used his gun.
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