“IT IS not as bad as they say,” insisted Kelly. At the Marley’s Bar & Grill, a place she runs with her husband Martin on South Florissant Road in Ferguson, Missouri, Kelly was quick to claim that media reports had overstated the problems of unrest in her hometown. Moments later Robert McCulloch, St Louis County’s prosecuting attorney, announced that a grand jury had decided not to indict Darren Wilson, a white police officer, who fatally shot Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, in Ferguson last August. A crowd of people could be seen gathering in anticipation at the police station a few blocks away. Most of the bars and shops on South Florissant Road were boarded up in anticipation of protests and looting; Kelly and Martin defiantly stayed open. But as the evening wore on, and as peaceful protests descended into violent outbursts, it became all too plain that Kelly’s optimism was misplaced. The strife in Ferguson was indeed very bad.
The jury’s verdict was not a surprise. Missouri’s governor, Jay Nixon, had declared a state of emergency earlier this week, and several armoured vehicles could be seen driving slowly down South Florissant Road soon after the verdict was made public. “That’s how they want to end violence,” said one man in the bar, shaking his head. Gunshots could be heard in the distance minutes later. Tear gas clouded around the red “Season’s Greetings” banner hung across the road. Helmeted officers ordered people away from the police station. “Move!” they shouted at anyone who seemed to linger.
By the end of the evening more than a dozen buildings and several police cars in Ferguson had been set on fire. Some rioters looted a number of shops, including a branch of Walgreens and a McDonald’s. At least 29 people were arrested.
The unrest was “much worse” than the protests that immediately followed Mr Brown’s death, said Jon Belmar, the head of St Louis County’s police force. “I don’t think we were underprepared,” he added. “But unless we bring 10,000 policemen in here, I don’t think we can prevent folks who really are intent on destroying a community.”
Yet most of the demonstrations—in St Louis and elsewhere—were non-violent acts of civil disobedience. Many marched and chanted in protest against a law-enforcement system that often seems biased against people who are poor and non-white. The troubling way Ferguson’s police handled the Mr Brown’s shooting and its aftermath is symptomatic of larger problems of race, class and law enforcement in the country, says Eugene O’Donnell, a former policeman turned lecturer at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. America’s police officers are often poorly paid and badly trained, and many resort to heavy-handed tactics, often involving racial profiling, in their patrols of city streets. “Police departments are frequently not good at their core function,” says Mr O’Donnell. “Ferguson is not an outlier.”
Several recent incidents grimly reaffirm Mr O’Donnell’s view. On November 20th a policeman in Brooklyn, New York, shot and killed an unarmed black man in the stairway of a housing estate as he was leaving his girlfriend’s apartment. On November 23rd a policeman in Cleveland, Ohio, fatally shot a 12-year old black boy brandishing what turned out to be an air gun. (Police say it bore close resemblance to a semi-automatic pistol.)
“Communities of colour aren’t just making these problems up,” observed President Barack Obama in an unusual late-night briefing yesterday. America has made enormous progress in race relations in recent decades, but “in too many parts of this country, a deep distrust exists between law enforcement and communities of colour,” he said. This is a serious problem, said the president, because nobody needs good policing more than poor communities with high crime rates.
