United States | The Michael Brown shooting

St Louis blues

Police kill an unarmed teenager, sparking riots

Tears in Missouri
|FERGUSON

MICHAEL BROWN was to start college this week. Instead, his parents are planning his funeral. On August 9th Mr Brown was shot several times and killed by a policeman in Ferguson, a suburb near St Louis, Missouri. The police say the black 18-year-old attacked the officer and tried to grab his gun. A friend who was with Mr Brown says that on the contrary, he was unarmed and had his hands up in the air.

Hundreds of irate Missourians took to the streets, chanting: “Hands up, don’t shoot!”. The protests soon turned violent. Looters and vandals hit local businesses. Quiktrip, a petrol station, was picked clean and burned. The police responded with tear gas, rubber bullets and road blocks. The Federal Aviation Authority declared Ferguson a no-fly zone, after reports of bullets fired at helicopters. On August 13th a man pointed a gun at a police officer, who then shot and injured the gunman. Elsewhere a woman was injured in a drive-by shooting. Jay Nixon, Missouri’s governor, said that Mr Brown’s death “felt like an old wound torn fresh”.

The city asked citizens to restrict their protests to daylight hours. Many defied the de facto curfew, and on the night of August 13th the police erected a wall of armoured cars with snipers on top. When the protesters refused to go home, the police dispersed them with tear gas and flash grenades. A stampede ensued. A protester gave your spluttering correspondent a surgical mask to keep out the tear gas.

Ferguson’s population is more than two-thirds black, but its police force only has three black officers. The town of 21,000 was not previously known for racial tension, but some say it has been bubbling beneath the surface. Young black men feel targeted by police and resent it. Gun sales have spiked locally.

The shooting comes not long after Eric Garner, another black man, was killed during a choke-hold arrest in New York. Last year an unarmed man called Jonathan Ferrell was shot ten times by a North Carolina police officer. “People are asking: ‘Is it open season on us?’,” says Delores Jones-Brown, director of the John Jay College on Race, Crime and Justice.

The number of people shot and killed by the police is hard to track. Nationwide, it has probably fallen since violent crime peaked in the 1990s. In New York, for example, police bullets killed 39 people in 1990 but eight in 2010. But since local police departments are not obliged to keep detailed statistics, it is hard to discern the national picture, says David Klinger of the University of Missouri, St Louis. A 2011 Department of Justice study found that the police kill roughly one person every day. The FBI deemed nearly all of these killings justifiable, but still too many were not. If the police wore body cameras, that might help. Complaints dropped nearly 90% and the use of force fell 60% when officers started wearing them in Rialto, California.

The FBI is investigating the Ferguson shooting, and the Justice Department is looking into the possibility that Mr Brown’s civil rights were violated. But some residents are pessimistic that all the facts will come out. The police have refused to name the officer who pulled the trigger, citing online threats against his life. The autopsy report has not been released either. Tony Rothert of the American Civil Liberties Union says “the lack of transparency is worrying.”

This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline "St Louis blues"

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